Julian Go
University of Chicago, Department of Sociology, Faculty Member
- Boston University, Sociology, Faculty Memberadd
- Julian Go is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Before Chicago he was a Professor at Boston Univers... moreJulian Go is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Before Chicago he was a Professor at Boston University, an Academy Scholar at the Academy for International and Area Studies of Harvard University, and Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois.edit
Bringing together historical sociologists from Sociology and International Relations, this collection lays out the international, transnational, and global dimensions of social change. The volume outlines the shortcomings of existing... more
Bringing together historical sociologists from Sociology and International Relations, this collection lays out the international, transnational, and global dimensions of social change. The volume outlines the shortcomings of existing scholarship, paying particular attention to transnational and global dynamics as they unfold in and through time. The volume combines theoretical interventions with in-depth case studies. Each chapter moves beyond binaries of “internalism” and “externalism”, offering a relational approach to a particular thematic: the rise of the West, the colonial construction of sexuality, the imperial origins of state formation, the global origins of modern economic theory, the international features of revolutionary struggles, and more. By bringing this sensibility to bear on a wide range of issue-areas, the volume lays out the promise of a truly global historical sociology.
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Sample Intro from Postcolonial Thought & Social Theory (Oxford University Press, 2016)
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A review essay on Aldon Morris' The Scholar Denied, about W.E.B. Du Bois
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A collection of essays, edited by Julian Go and Monika Krause, by various contributors about how to scale-up Bourdieu's field theory for analyzing global and transnational relations based upon a workshop at BU. Book and special issue of... more
A collection of essays, edited by Julian Go and Monika Krause, by various contributors about how to scale-up Bourdieu's field theory for analyzing global and transnational relations based upon a workshop at BU. Book and special issue of the journal Sociological Review.
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Forthcoming Cambridge University Press. Edited collection from scholars in sociology and IR promoting "global historical sociology." Based upon workshops held at the LSE and Yale University.
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fter September 11th, more than a few commentators have claimed that what is needed around the world is a revived colonialism under America's hand. These commentators accordingly urge us to look to the British colonial empire for... more
fter September 11th, more than a few commentators have claimed that what is needed around the world is a revived colonialism under America's hand. These commentators accordingly urge us to look to the British colonial empire for guidance: "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets." Yet such calls for cross-imperial comparison elide America's own past, a past clearly reckoned in Woodrow Wilson's statement on America's novel globalism in the wake of the Spanish-American war. Wilson reminds us that the United States has long been an empire. At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States seized Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, the Philippines, and the Islamic "Moro Province" of the Philippine archipelago. These acquisitions meant that the United States was not simply an "informal" empire but also a "formal"...
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This essay asks why colonialism ended in the mid-twentieth century, effectively excising formal imperialism from the repertoire of global power. Most studies related to this question address why older empires fell and nation-states... more
This essay asks why colonialism ended in the mid-twentieth century, effectively excising formal imperialism from the repertoire of global power. Most studies related to this question address why older empires fell and nation-states emerged. This essay instead asks: why did great powers not colonize or recolonize territory in the mid-twentieth century and afterwards? Using the Anglo-French assault on the Suez Canal in 1956, including the reactions of the United States to it, as an exemplary event, the essay argues that the relational approach embedded in the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu offers a useful lens for arriving at an explanation. It shows that as colonialism generated anticolonial responses in the colonial world – or what Bourdieu would call the " challengers " offering a new " heterodoxy " , the global political field was altered, changing the " rules of the game " by turning anticolonial nationalism into a potentially new form of capital. T...
Would it be an exaggeration to claim that there has been a “global” revolution in the social sciences? Witness, in disciplinary history, the rise of “global history” and “transnational history”. Ever since Akira Iriye’s (1989) call for... more
Would it be an exaggeration to claim that there has been a “global” revolution in the social sciences? Witness, in disciplinary history, the rise of “global history” and “transnational history”. Ever since Akira Iriye’s (1989) call for historians “to search for historical themes and conceptions that are meaningful across national boundaries,” historians have institutionalized transnational history as a prominent subfield, one that can be seen in journals, books, conferences, course offerings, and job lines. Witness, too, the proliferation of “globalization” studies (e.g. Castells 1996; Held et al 1999; Beck 2006; Beck 2012) and the attempt to institutionalize a “global sociology” (Burawoy 2000; Burawoy 2008), moves intended to explore new cosmopolitan identities and trace social processes at transnational and global scales (also see Wallerstein 2001). Consider finally the discipline of International Relations (IR). For much of its disciplinary history, IR has studied the workings of a small part of the world (the West) through a relatively sparse analytical lens (the “states under anarchy” problematique). In recent years, IR scholarship has begun to make clear the ways in which the emergence of the discipline was intimately associated with issues of colonial management (e.g. Vitalis 2010, 2016), the diverse range of polities that constitute the international system (e.g. Phillips and Sharman 2015), and the myriad of social forces, from market exchanges to cultural flows, that make up “the international” (e.g. Hobson, Lawson and Rosenberg 2010). The academy’s most overtly “international” discipline is finally going “global” (Tickner and Blaney eds. 2012).
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It is a great honour for our book to receive such close attention from four stellar commentators. As Angelika Epple notes in her contribution, the project that culminated in Global Historical Socio...
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Historical sociology has not been as global as it might be, instead remaining tied to various forms of state-centrism. This paper explains why and suggests some strategies for redressing the problem. Focusing mostly upon “second wave”... more
Historical sociology has not been as global as it might be, instead remaining tied to various forms of state-centrism. This paper explains why and suggests some strategies for redressing the problem. Focusing mostly upon “second wave” historical sociology, it argues that historical sociology’s occlusion of global and transnational forms, dynamics, and processes lies in its analytic infrastructure which analytically bifurcates social relations across space and emphasizes a variable-based causal scientism. Overcoming the occlusion requires rescaling the objects of study and seeking descriptive assemblages of global and transnational forms, dynamics, and processes.
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3 Modeling States and Sovereignty Postcolonial Constitutions in Asia and Africa Julian Go THE DECOLONIZATION OF Asia and Africa since World War II appears at once as a novel and yet banal historical process. On the one hand, it was an... more
3 Modeling States and Sovereignty Postcolonial Constitutions in Asia and Africa Julian Go THE DECOLONIZATION OF Asia and Africa since World War II appears at once as a novel and yet banal historical process. On the one hand, it was an intensified moment of state-building ...
This chapter explores how the Bourdieusian field theory can be deployed to make sense of global dynamics. It mentions international relations (IR) scholars that have enlisted Bourdieu in their analyses, applied his work to international... more
This chapter explores how the Bourdieusian field theory can be deployed to make sense of global dynamics. It mentions international relations (IR) scholars that have enlisted Bourdieu in their analyses, applied his work to international issues, and taken certain concepts, such as habitus and practice, from his larger theoretical conceptual apparatus. It also focuses on three transformative processes or macro-historical turning points: the expansion of colonial empires during the phase of 'high imperialism', the two world wars, and the post-war end of formal colonial empires that heralded the rise to dominance of the modern nation state. The chapter maps the points of differentiation between field theory approaches and other approaches. It recognizes other key elements of Bourdieusian field theory, such as fields that consist of objective relations between actors and the subjective and cultural forms of those relations.
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In this essay the author assesses the relevance of scholarship on racial capitalism for sociological theory. The author highlights three tensions within the existing literature: (1) whether “race” as opposed to other forms of difference... more
In this essay the author assesses the relevance of scholarship on racial capitalism for sociological theory. The author highlights three tensions within the existing literature: (1) whether “race” as opposed to other forms of difference is the primary mode of differentiation in capitalism, (2) whether deficiencies in existing theory warrant the new concept “racial capitalism,” and (3) whether the connection between race and capitalism is a contingent or logical necessity. Existing discussions of racial capitalism implicitly or explicitly raise these tensions, but they do not adequately resolve them. Nonetheless, they remain important for generating further theory and research.
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This essay analyzes racialized exclusions in sociology through a focus on sociology’s deep epistemic structures. These structures dictate what counts as social scientific knowledge and who can produce it. A historical analysis of their... more
This essay analyzes racialized exclusions in sociology through a focus on sociology’s deep epistemic structures. These structures dictate what counts as social scientific knowledge and who can produce it. A historical analysis of their emergence and persistence reveals their connections to empire. Due to sociology’s initial emergence within the culture of American imperialism, early sociological thought embedded the culture of empire’s exclusionary logics. Sociology’s epistemic structures were inextricably racialized, contributing to exclusionary modes of thought and practice along the lines of race, ethnicity, and social geography that persist into the present. Overcoming this racialized inequality requires problematizing and unsettling these epistemic structures by (1) provincializing the canon to create a transformative epistemic pluralism and (2) reconsidering common conceptions of what counts as “theory” in the first place.
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The author considers what postcolonial theory has to contribute to the sociology of race. Although there are overlaps, postcolonial theory and the sociology of race are not reducible to each other. Postcolonial theory emphasizes the... more
The author considers what postcolonial theory has to contribute to the sociology of race. Although there are overlaps, postcolonial theory and the sociology of race are not reducible to each other. Postcolonial theory emphasizes the global, historical, and therefore colonial dimensions of race relations, including how imperialism has generated racial thought and racial stratification. A postcolonial sociology of race, therefore, would (1) analytically recover empire and colonialism and their legacies, (2) excavate colonial racialization and trace its continuities into the present, (3) reveal the reciprocal constitution of racialized identities that began under empire, and (4) critique the imperial standpoint and seek out the subjugated epistemologies of racialized subjects. Although such a postcolonial sociology of race is a project that has yet to be fully realized, there are a number of existing sociological works that begin the journey and point us in the right direction.
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Nationalism in the modern world began in European metropoles but spread throughout the world system in the form of anticolonial nationalism. While many studies have explored the former, this essay systematically examines the latter. Based... more
Nationalism in the modern world began in European metropoles but spread throughout the world system in the form of anticolonial nationalism. While many studies have explored the former, this essay systematically examines the latter. Based upon an original database of 124 cases, we test multiple theories that might account for the origins and spread of anticolonial nationalism. We adjudicate between cultural-cognitive approaches emphasizing the discursive bases for national imaginings on the one hand and, on the other, theories that emphasize political-economic dynamics and elite conflict. Our time-series regression analysis suggests that while cultural-cognitive approaches best account for the initial wave of anticolonial nationalism, from 1700 to 1878, theories stressing political-economic dynamics and elite conflict explain anticolonial nationalism in the later wave, from 1879 to 1990. The analysis suggests that theories of nationalism need to be attentive to the historical specif...
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This article reviews Andrew Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems. Focusing upon the book’s explanation of the ‘European civilizing process’ in the modern era, it suggests that the account is limited by... more
This article reviews Andrew Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems. Focusing upon the book’s explanation of the ‘European civilizing process’ in the modern era, it suggests that the account is limited by ‘civilizational isolationism’ and ‘metrocentric diffusion’. These analytic operations serve to minimise the agency and contributions of non-Western, colonial, and postcolonial actors to the global civilizing process. The occlusion of such agency and contributions, however, are not specific to this work, but reflect broader limitations in historical sociology writ large.
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While empires and civic-liberal nations have been seen as opposite and even contradictory political forms, this essay argues that they are similar. Both create and depend upon hierarchical differentiation accompanied by exclusion and... more
While empires and civic-liberal nations have been seen as opposite and even contradictory political forms, this essay argues that they are similar. Both create and depend upon hierarchical differentiation accompanied by exclusion and subjugation. Furthermore, they are logically related. The hierarchies typically attributed to empires are inscribed into the very theoretical and institutional core of civic-liberal nationhood. Using the American ‘liberal empire-state’ as the example, the essay uncovers these hierarchies and discusses two logics of imperial differentiation: the subjugation of bodies and of territory. It suggests that exploring the shifting lines and principles of hierarchization offers the most fruitful analytic strategy for examining the history of nations and empires.
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It is hardly disputable there is inequality and marginalization within our discipline along the lines of ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, and socioeconomic status among other vectors. What more can be said about it? For my part, I... more
It is hardly disputable there is inequality and marginalization within our discipline along the lines of ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, and socioeconomic status among other vectors. What more can be said about it? For my part, I would like to pose two issues to consider. The first is the question of epistemic inequality and marginalization. My claim is that confronting social inequality and marginalization within the discipline must also confront inequality and marginalization at the level of social knowledge. We must confront how certain standpoints and knowledges are subjugated by the dominant standpoint of disciplinary sociology. The second is the spatial scale of inequality and marginalization within the discipline. My claim is that confronting social inequality and marginalization within the discipline also should compel us to consider global inequality and marginalization, which in turn requires that we transcend disciplinary sociology’s analytic bifurcations.
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Patricia Owens’s remarkable Economy of Force (2015) traces the counterinsurgency strategies used by the British and US empires from Malaya to Afghanistan. If this were all the book was about, though, it would not be so remarkable. What... more
Patricia Owens’s remarkable Economy of Force (2015) traces the counterinsurgency strategies used by the British and US empires from Malaya to Afghanistan. If this were all the book was about, though, it would not be so remarkable. What makes it remarkable is that, more than a history of postwar counterinsurgencies, Economy of Force directs our attention to two deeper relationships that have gone unnoticed in existing scholarship. The first is the relationship between counterinsurgency campaigns and uniquely social modes of thought. Counterinsurgency campaigns deployed social theory both to explain why insurgents rebelled and in their efforts to prevent it. They identified ‘sociological’ causes of rebellion and sought ‘sociological’ cures (Owens, 2015: 192). Hence Owens’s key claim: counterinsurgency strategies – from depopulating and displacing villages, to labor camps, to outright intimidation and violence – were forms of ‘armed social work’ (2015). The second innovation has to do with the ontology of the social provided in the book. The ‘social realm’, Owens declares, is merely the ‘modern and capitalist form of household rule’: a space wherein populations are ‘governed and domesticated, the space in which they are depoliticized’ (2015: 87). Owens argues that early modern governance was structured around households, but in modern capitalist governance, the social realm stands in for those households. Social space is merely the household scaled upwards, and social thought is just ‘the modern form of oikonomikos, the science of household management’ (2015: 87). In short, the book’s key innovation, if not its signal contribution, is to open our eyes to how the concept of ‘the social’ contains within it but also hides its origins as household management and also, therefore, how ‘the social’ has been a discursive tool and conceptual technology of counterinsurgency. Economy of Force allows us to see how seemingly benign concepts and ideas are in fact imperialistic and violent. This is a worthy intervention, and at times an elegant execution. And though Owens writes from the disciplinary standpoint of international relations, the work is also an important contribution to postcolonial studies. Owens’s analysis of how the ‘social’ is used in
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What is “postcolonial sociology”? While the study of postcoloniality has taken on the form of “postcolonial theory” in the humanities, sociology's approach to postcolonial issues has been comparably muted. This essay considers... more
What is “postcolonial sociology”? While the study of postcoloniality has taken on the form of “postcolonial theory” in the humanities, sociology's approach to postcolonial issues has been comparably muted. This essay considers postcolonial theory in the humanities and its potential utility for reorienting sociological theory and research. After sketching the historical background and context of postcolonial studies, three broad areas of contribution to sociology are highlighted: reconsiderations of agency, the injunction to overcome analytic bifurcations, and a recognition of sociology's imperial standpoint.
Research Interests: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Social Theory, Gender Studies, Globalization, and 15 moreCritical Pedagogy, Migration, Critical Race Theory, South Asian History, Latin American literature, Postcolonial Theory, Latin American social movements, Latin American History, South Asian Literature, Colonial Discourse, Community Education, Postcolonial feminisms, Human Rights and Social Justice, Post Colonialism, and Resistance Formation
Behold! Behold! An Empire rise! – Francis Hopkinson, from an ode distributed on July 4, 1788, Philadelphia [I]t is safe to assume, as a rule, that Americans are actuated by much the same ideas, instincts, motives, and modes of thought as... more
Behold! Behold! An Empire rise! – Francis Hopkinson, from an ode distributed on July 4, 1788, Philadelphia [I]t is safe to assume, as a rule, that Americans are actuated by much the same ideas, instincts, motives, and modes of thought as their fellow-kinsmen in the Old World. – Edward Dicey (1898) Expansion has ever been the instinct of the United States. The very symbol of the Union is an Eagle and the Eagle is a bird that spreads its wings.…Compared with the Eagle the British Lion treads mother earth like a tortoise. And no Eagle has ever flown further afield than the American Eagle. – P. W. Wilson (1925) When the average American thinks of “colonialism”, or of the Colonial Powers, he is apt to confine his thoughts to European “colonialism”.…Not many Americans stop to think that Puerto Rico was conquered from Spain (as the British captured Jamaica); that the Virgin Islands were bought from Denmark…that Alaska was bought from Russia and Louisiana from the French in the same way; that the Panama Canal Zone was acquired in the twentieth century by methods which would have been condemned if indulged by a European Power at a much earlier period. – Sir Alan Burns (1957) The so-called long eighteenth century from 1688 to 1815 was a formative period for Britain. Up to that point, Britain had been a small island monarchy, a minor player on the European scene. The Glorious Revolution in 1688, however, marked a new era. After establishing representative government, the little island slowly shored up its military strength and became increasingly involved in interstate affairs. It defeated its enemies and grew in strength. It expanded its domestic economy and partook of a widening world economic system. It outproduced and outsold its rivals and built its economic infrastructure. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Britain emerged as the world's preeminent power. It became a global hegemon, a foe to be feared or a friend to be flattered. Later, the United States followed a similar path. It began as a comparably small series of settlements on the east coast of North America. After World War II, it became the world's new economic mammoth, taking up the role that Britain had held previously. As the years 1688–1815 for Britain marked the path toward world power, so did the years 1776–1945 for the United States.
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What causes imperialism? Classic explanations of imperialism theorized causes within the imperial metropole, such as nationalist culture or the imperatives of capital accumulation. More recent theories emphasize global pressures. To... more
What causes imperialism? Classic explanations of imperialism theorized causes within the imperial metropole, such as nationalist culture or the imperatives of capital accumulation. More recent theories emphasize global pressures. To assess these longstanding but rarely adjudicated theories, this paper employs original time-series data and qualitative evidence on British imperialism from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The analysis shows that British imperialism was not only a domestically produced process but also a global one. British imperialism was a strategy for meeting the state's imperatives of geopolitical security (containment) and economic growth (capital) in the face of external threats. Those threats were most likely to be perceived when the global system was at its most economically competitive. These findings affirm a “structural competition” approach that builds upon existing global-oriented theories but specifies the structural conditions and causal p...
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Colonialism is successful where the subject people are unsophisticated and acquiescent, as in the case of certain South Pacific islanders. Once the dependent people, even if a small minority of them, acquire a degree of worldly wisdom and... more
Colonialism is successful where the subject people are unsophisticated and acquiescent, as in the case of certain South Pacific islanders. Once the dependent people, even if a small minority of them, acquire a degree of worldly wisdom and personal ambition, complications set in. Discontent, resistance, and political psychoses develop. – U.S. National Security Council 51 (1949) Colonialism is in its twilight hour. – Erasmus Kloman (1958) In what ways has the U.S. imperial formation differed from Britain's? It is not the lack of overseas colonies. Nor is it that the U.S. colonial empire was more benign or liberal, that the U.S. empire was uniquely informal, or that its citizens refused to speak the empire's name. Rather, one important difference remains. Whereas both the U.S. and British imperial formations involved colonies, and whereas both entailed informal modalities of power – cultivating clients, cajoling enemies, and deploying military force – only the British empire mixed informal and formal tactics during its period of hegemony. In the mid-nineteenth century, the British crafted allies, invaded countries, and employed various other informal tactics while also seizing overseas territory as colonial dependencies. The British state did not seize as many colonies during its period of hegemony as it did during its period of hegemonic ascent (a point to be considered later). Yet it did seize some. Alternatively, during its comparable phase of hegemony, the U.S. empire did not seize multiple new colonies. In 1947, it annexed the former Japanese mandates, but afterward the American state relied exclusively on informal imperialism. Whereas the British empire was formal and informal at once after 1815, the United States empire shifted from formal to informal after 1947.
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Postcolonial theory has enjoyed wide influence in the humanities but it has left sociology comparatively unscathed. Does this mean that postcolonial theory is not relevant to sociology? Focusing upon social theory and historical sociology... more
Postcolonial theory has enjoyed wide influence in the humanities but it has left sociology comparatively unscathed. Does this mean that postcolonial theory is not relevant to sociology? Focusing upon social theory and historical sociology in particular, this article considers if and how postcolonial theory in the humanities might be imported into North American sociology. It argues that postcolonial theory offers a substantial critique of sociology because it alerts us to sociology’s tendency to analytically bifurcate social relations. The article also suggests that a postcolonial sociology can overcome these problems by incorporating relational social theories to give new accounts of modernity. Rather than simply studying non-Western postcolonial societies or only examining colonialism, this approach insists upon the interactional constitution of social units, processes, and practices across space. To illustrate, the article draws upon relational theories (actor-network theory and field theory) to offer postcolonial accounts of two conventional research areas in historical sociology: the industrial revolution in England and the French Revolution.
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This article develops a global fields approach for conceptualizing the global arena. The approach builds upon existing approaches to the world system and world society while articulating them with the field theory of Bourdieu and... more
This article develops a global fields approach for conceptualizing the global arena. The approach builds upon existing approaches to the world system and world society while articulating them with the field theory of Bourdieu and organizational sociology. It highlights particular structural configurations (“spaces of relations”) and the specific cultural content (“rules of the game” and “symbolic capital”) of global systems. The utility of the approach is demonstrated through an analysis of the different forms of the two hegemonic empires of the past centuries, Great Britain and the United States. The British state tended toward formal imperialism in the 19th century, characterized by direct territorial rule, while the United States since WWII has tended toward informal imperialism. The essay shows that the difference can be best explained by considering the different historical global fields in which the two empires operated.
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While new scholarship on Pierre Bourdieu has recovered his early work on Algeria, this essay excavates his early thoughts on colonialism. Contrary to received wisdom, Bourdieu did in fact offer a theory of colonialism and a systematic... more
While new scholarship on Pierre Bourdieu has recovered his early work on Algeria, this essay excavates his early thoughts on colonialism. Contrary to received wisdom, Bourdieu did in fact offer a theory of colonialism and a systematic understanding of its effects and logics. Bourdieu portrayed colonialism as a racialized system of domination, backed by force, which restructures social relations and creates hybrid cultures. His theory entailed insights on the limits and promises of colonial reform, anticolonial revolution, and postcolonial liberation. Bourdieu’s early thinking on colonialism drew upon but extended French colonial studies of the time. It also contains the seeds of later concepts like habitus, field, and reflexive sociology while prefiguring more recent disciplinary postcolonial studies. Bourdieusian sociology in this sense originates not just as a study of Algeria but more specifically a critique of colonialism. It can be seen as contributing to the larger project of ...
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Julian Go in ... Thus, unlike liberal social contract theorists such as Hobbes, upon which American democracy was arguably founded, Filipino political philosophers such as Apolinario Mabini (who devised the Malolos government) imagined... more
Julian Go in ... Thus, unlike liberal social contract theorists such as Hobbes, upon which American democracy was arguably founded, Filipino political philosophers such as Apolinario Mabini (who devised the Malolos government) imagined the "state-of-nature" to be "society" itself ...
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Existing accounts of American sociology’s founding years during the early twentieth century assume that the discipline was ‘metrocentric.’ They assume that it was only interested in processes occurring within the United States; that... more
Existing accounts of American sociology’s founding years during the early twentieth century assume that the discipline was ‘metrocentric.’ They assume that it was only interested in processes occurring within the United States; that American sociologists fell prey to state-centrist thought; and that, therefore, contextualizing America sociology’s emergence necessitates understanding relations, events, and processes within the confines of US territorial boundaries. By contrast, this paper shows the imperial and hence global aspects of early American sociological thought. Early American sociologists were interested in imperialism and, therefore, in cross-societal, transnational, and global processes and relations. Implicitly or explicitly they approached imperialism as a process by which social groups, not least ‘races,’ interacted and conflicted. They also saw it as a route towards new global forms. Early American sociology thus articulated a sociological imagination that looked beyo...