Provincializing Modernity: Empires and People-Polities in a Comparative and Historical Perspective

• In Event: Reconceptualizing Political Community: Legitimacy, Boundaries, and the State Across Time

Abstract

This paper seeks to provincialize modernity by giving pre-modern societies a more central conceptual and historical space in our accounts of modernity. While our contemporary age is certainly characterized by distinctive and historically unprecedented phenomena, it is also marked by both traditional (in the sense of historically enduring) ideas and practices as well as disparate hybrid and liminal phenomena that cannot be easily characterized as either traditional or modern. On the flip side, the pre-modern world consists of myriad phenomena that have typically been situated in modernity. While there are important exceptions, historical sociological and postcolonial accounts often assume more profound differences and ruptures among pre-modern and modern periods than the historical record allows. Because the aim of such accounts is precisely to identify and explain the distinctive features of modernity, historical continuities simply do not have any relevance. This paper addresses the shortcomings of this approach by contending with a specific issue: how to historicize societal variations across the modern/pre-modern and West/non-West divides with respect to the sovereign imperative of claiming legitimacy for rule. In this vein, I first propose a number of analytical typologies to characterize the diversity of pre-modern polities, paying particular attention to the distinction between people-polities (wherein rulers seek sovereignty through invoking the chosenness of the people over who they rule) and empires (wherein rulers seek sovereignty over a diverse assemblage of people). Next, I propose a theory of modern nation-state as a historically specific form of a people-polity constituted by various antinomies and aporias that are specific to a global capitalist modernity. Finally, the paper makes a case for theoretical and methodological pluralism in order to capture the multiplicity of pre-modern societies and their distinct transitions to modernity.

Author

• Sadia Saeed, University of San Francisco