Part I - Imperial Popular Sovereignty

1 Empire, Popular Sovereignty, and the Problem of Self-and-Other-Determination

When W. E. B. Du Bois tackled the problem of democracy and empire in 1915, this debate was well-threaded but had yet to grapple with this couplet in his proposed terms.¹ The theme of despotic rule by democratic polities over other countries appears multiple times in the history of political thought. Athenians, for one, often thought of their democracy in terms of tyranny, referring nonpejoratively to the authority of the dēmos as “tyrannical and despotic,” both vis-à-vis politicians who aimed to rule over it and with respect to other polities.² Nineteenth-century liberalism also grappled with these relationships, with Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, arguing that imperial projects could supply the virtue and glory that would ignite republican public-spiritedness.³ John Stuart Mill and other reformist British liberals, in contrast, enlisted the self-evident backwardness of British colonial subjects as a standard against which to evaluate whether domestic groups deserved the extension of the franchise.⁴ As noted in the Introduction, J. A. Hobson and Leonard T. Hobhouse’s interest in the confluence of democratic and imperial forms of government was associated with their concern with the British polity’s decay due to its sprawling empire, which they contrasted with the representative democratic promise of settler colonies. Unlike his predecessors, Du Bois focused on the despotic linkage that western polities established with their colonies and internal others and its racial and material motivations, and argued for the reconceptualization of popular sovereignty and self-determination because of how this transformed the meaning and workings of democracy in the metropole. I recover Du Bois’s notion of democratic despotism to conceptualize popular sovereignty, self-determination, and their interrelationship in the context of imperial and postcolonial racial capitalism – a central building block of this book’s critical project.

I contextualize my reading of Du Bois in the discourses that prevailed among turn-of-the-century mass movements of labor enfranchisement in the west. These took place in the context of empire and thus infused popular sovereignty with affective attachments that supported and required the capitalist expropriation of the land and labor of imperial possessions. Because of this, I claim that it is analytically more accurate to understand the dominant iteration of western popular sovereignty as entailing self-and-other-determination, given its emergence in the context of imperial and racialized processes of enfranchisement.⁵ Critical work has so far not scrutinized this feature of self-determination, because of its focus on postcolonial countries’ deficits rather than on core countries’ excessive self-determination. Yet the proposed analysis is potentially more productive to understanding continuing global domination as well as the rise of right-wing populism and its resentful global attachments at a time when peoples in wealthy countries are losing their imperial entitlements.

This chapter first contextualizes my account within the recent literature on empire. Then, I examine Du Bois’s notion of democratic despotism in the context of evolving labor politics in the early twentieth century. After that, I conceptualize self-and-other-determination as an institutional form entangled with racism and capitalism and facilitated by racial affect. Fourth, I build on the work of Saidiya Hartman and Frantz Fanon to theorize how racial affective attachments that circulate and organize western democratic polities’ relationship to the global mutate but persist after decolonization and into the neoliberal era. Lastly, I discuss implications for the literature on self-determination and the contemporary rise of right-wing populism.

1.1 Popular Sovereignty, Self-Determination, and Empire

Critical engagement with popular sovereignty in the literature on empire has predominantly – and importantly – attended to projects in the postcolonial world.⁶ These scholars note that the Westphalian frame and its attendant view of decolonization as the incorporation of newly independent states into an international society leave much to be desired. This model overlooks projects of sovereignty that were decidedly anti-imperial, yet not necessarily national or statist.⁷ It also leaves out the radical break in the thought of postcolonial statesmen with the Eurocentric society of states.⁸ These accounts confirm that a Westphalian understanding of sovereignty disregards how, in an unjust world, background conditions are lacking for genuine self-determination.⁹

Yet these accounts of subaltern popular sovereignty and self-determination limit their criticism to the international system and omit theorizing specifically how the global hierarchies and injustices they identify are grounded in the democratic European and settler polities that sustained the imperial order and remain dominant today. In other words, a notion of imperial popular sovereignty is needed that encompasses a will to self-government entwined with an entitlement to govern others abroad. It is this facet of popular sovereignty and self-determination that co-constitutes the hierarchical international system and makes the claim of an expansion of the society of states in equal terms truly absurd. To the extent that western states’ self-determination involves a claim both to govern themselves and dominate others, its very expansion is an inconsistent project; that is, a world of equally outwardly dominating states is impossible.¹⁰ From the start, the relative equality of western states among each other sanctioned in Westphalia coexisted with their internal organization as democratic despotisms (i.e., domination of non-European states that was popularly embraced). This means that the political forms that brought western citizens together behind this despotic project must be critiqued and transformed if decolonization is to result in the end of domination. This is because wealthy polities’ unreformed orientations and material sustenance continue to depend upon racial capitalist accumulation, which in turn requires the imperial organization of the globe.

The entwined character of the US polity, on the one hand, and settler colonialism and external imperial aggression, on the other, has been more thoroughly addressed. Critical readings of figures ranging from J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Louis Hartz show that democracy and citizenship were shaped and dependent on imperial projects, cast the people as an agent of settler colonialism,¹¹ and required expanding slavery and expropriating Indigenous groups.¹² Moreover, the citizen subjects and the forms of belonging that emerged out of Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” were shaped by the materialities and legalities of slavery and empire.¹³ These engagements with texts, legal documents, and policy, however, still fall short of exposing the material base of popular sovereignty as a political form – that is, how popular sovereignty both depends on and disavows racial capitalist processes of accumulation reliant on empire. This chapter and the next tackle this very problem by revealing the seams joining together democracy, racial capitalism, and empire.¹⁴

In this reconstruction, I single out the role of affective attachments in facilitating the embrace by the white working-class of narratives of imperial exploitation and the demands of this class for the distribution of this wealth among themselves. This embrace shaped popular sovereignty and produced an excessive form of self-determination, which I call “self-and-other-determination.” To make sense of the material dimensions of this concept, the chapter explores the articulation between capitalism and racism. Scholars have argued that capitalism offered moderate concessions to white waged workers while more intensively exploiting and expropriating the labor, property, and bodies of racialized workers, who lacked the political resources available to citizen-workers.¹⁵ I specify how these dynamics operated vis-à-vis external others and tainted popular sovereignty by turning white citizen-workers into beneficiaries of the imperial regime of outward despotism and preventing radical challenges to imperial capitalism. This is not to argue for an exclusively economistic notion of self-and-other-determination, in which racial capitalism is the primary and determinant force. Racial capitalism and European and white settler nationalisms were articulated transnationally, in the sense that domestic struggles for enfranchisement relied on transnational networks and beliefs in the racial superiority and global domination of “Anglo-Saxons” that were still prominent at the turn of the century.¹⁶ Portable racial identifications created solidarity among transnationally located white populations but took particular local shapes.¹⁷ Western polities’ claims of popular sovereignty and their relation to the outside through claims of self-determination absorbed these transnational logics and embedded them in domestic political and economic regimes. In other words, it examines how racial ideas contained in the “ideological cement” of empire¹⁸ became contingently entwined with ideas of self-governance and self-determination and articulated with capitalism.

1.2 Du Bois, Democratic Despotism, and Labor Politics

Du Bois’s writings on imperialism during and after World War I introduce and develop the notion of “democratic despotism.”¹⁹ This concept describes how the color line and the particular affective attachments that “festered” alongside it were central for the development and consolidation of western democracies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead of optimistically expecting the racially oppressive relations within the United States and between colonial countries and the colonized to be eventually taken over by the “irresistible tide” of democracy, Du Bois theorizes democratic despotism as a proper political form that operates alongside racial capitalism, whose existence depends on imperialism as a form of outward domination. This type of regime depends on collective attachments to the wealth extracted through imperial rule, which shows a despotic face toward colonial dominions.

Du Bois’s essay “The African Roots of War,” published in 1915 in The Atlantic Monthly, locates the European struggle for Africa at the core of the rivalries and jealousies that caused World War I. This intervention also clarifies the meaning of nationhood and popular sovereignty in the imperial age and the attachments that sustain a racial democracy. He opens the essay with the well-rehearsed progressive narrative of democratization and socialization:

Slowly, the divine right of the few to determine economic income and distribute the goods and services of the world has been questioned and curtailed. We called the process Revolution in the eighteenth century, advancing Democracy in the nineteenth, and Socialization of Wealth in the twentieth. But whatever we call it, the movement is the same: the dipping of more and grimier hands into the wealth-bag of the nation, until to-day only the ultra stubborn fail to see that democracy in determining income is the next inevitable step to Democracy in political power.²⁰

Yet, this “tide of democracy” is not as irresistible as it seems, and the remaining realms of despotism in the west’s imperial possessions or the race hatred and racial brutality in the United States are far from paradoxical. Du Bois terms this disjuncture “democratic despotism” and finds it easy to explain: “The white working man has been asked to share the spoil of exploiting ‘ch**ks and n*****s.’ It is no longer simply the merchant prince, or the aristocratic monopoly, or even the employing class that is exploiting the world: it is the nation; a new democratic nation composed of united capital and labor.”²¹

Du Bois states that western democracies claim a right to dominion over the rest of the world that is facilitated by racism, and he implicates white labor as an actor that, while demanding incorporation into the people, does so with “a worldview that casts that-which-is-not-white (persons, lands, resources) as personal possessions that rightfully belong to those marked ‘white.’”²² Du Bois’s interest in white dominion as an accessory to emancipation is not new. This form of thinking and acting in accordance “with the conviction that racialized others are their property” appears already in an 1890 essay on Jefferson Davis.²³ There he reflects on the Civil War as an instance of “a people fighting to be free in order that another people should not be free” and globalizes this trend by noting that western civilization represents “the advance of part of the world at the expense of the whole.”²⁴ What interests me, however, is how in 1915 Du Bois takes aim at central concepts of political theory and argues for their attunement to the practice of western imperial democracies. Du Bois, in other words, counters the deflection that characterizes canonical accounts of popular sovereignty and self-determination and casts them as imperial and excessive. This is because democratic despotism presupposes particular claims of popular sovereignty, which depend on excessive forms of self-determination that operate within imperial capitalism, whose operation and modes of exploitation/expropriation are filtered by racial hierarchy. Accordingly, material ambitions for violently extracted resources infuse the ties of solidarity among citizens in the metropole: “Such nations it is that rule the modern world. Their national bond is no mere sentimental patriotism, loyalty, or ancestor worship. It is the increased wealth, power, and luxury for all classes on a scale the world never saw before.”²⁵

Thus, wealth and luxury, as well as power over dominions abroad, are constitutive of the national bond or imagined community that holds western polities together. These polities are democratic – that is, “all classes” are bonded together and partake of the national wealth – but also rule beyond the confines of their territory. Moreover, the bond of those polities is not exclusively inward looking but depends on the pursuit of foreign dominions and the unprecedented levels of wealth and luxury that follow from it. In this sense, popular sovereignty and the determination of the fates of other peoples that imperial countries exploit become fused.

Du Bois’s critique of material attachments reappears a decade later in his essay “Criteria of Negro Art,” which claims that Americans possess a sense of “strength and accomplishment” but lack a conception of beauty.²⁶ For Du Bois, American goals are “tawdry and flamboyant,” embodied in acquiring “the most powerful motor car,” wearing the “most striking clothes,” and giving “the richest dinners,” rather than a world where “men create, … realize themselves [and] … enjoy life.”²⁷ Du Bois was tapping into a general transformation in culture that enticed Americans into the pleasures of consumption and indulgence and away from work as the path to happiness.²⁸ The myth of plenty that had characterized the United States was being transformed by the early 1900s into a focus on “personal satisfaction” and on places of pleasure such as department stores, theaters, restaurants, dance halls, and amusement parks, keeping pace with urbanization, commercialization, and secularization.²⁹ Pursuing material goods was the means to all that was “good” and to “personal salvation,” even when, in the context of concentrated wealth, this pursuit was most often mere desire.³⁰ Criticisms of wealth accumulation as the occupation that absorbed the American people and of its unequal distribution were also voiced by others, including the progressive thinker Herbert Croly.³¹

This shift in culture was tightly connected to the transformation of discourses of labor enfranchisement in the late nineteenth century. In contrast to an earlier focus on producerism and cooperativism that identified wage labor as inherently exploitative, new labor narratives highlighted that wage work was not essentially problematic if it allowed for a high standard of living.³² Rather than aiming to transform the social order, consumerist ideologies demanded higher wages, thus seeking to extract more resources while leaving the existing order intact. In the words of labor leader Samuel Gompers, “The conflict between the laborers and the capitalists is as to the quantity, the amount, of the wages the laborer shall receive for his part in production and the residue of profit which shall go to the capitalist.”³³

Wages were no longer the badge of slavery they represented within producerist republicanism but – according to George Gunton, an eight-hour pamphleteer – a “continual part of social progress.”³⁴ These wages were supposed to lift the American worker beyond the standards of the “Irish Tenant farmer or the Russian serf, and could be determined only according to a level of consumption appropriate to the “American Standard of Living,” which went beyond food and clothing to include “taxes, school books, furniture, papers, doctors’ bills, [religious] contributions,” as well as “vacations, recreational opportunities, [and] home ownership.”³⁵ This trend followed from the expansion of imperialism and the rise in Europe and the United States of the bourgeois housewife, a figure who contributed to creating a family culture of consumption and luxury needs, which would be subsequently mimicked by the white working class.³⁶

Du Bois’s framework throws into relief that the desire to achieve the American Standard of Living that fueled demands for enfranchisement by white workers depended on the exploitation of faraway peoples,³⁷ and that rather than a simple add-on, it was a constitutive aspect of the collective bond. It was constitutive because the great wealth amassed by states was entangled with both democratic impulses and despotic ones. It was “democratic” both because this wealth was being shared among newly enfranchised groups and because the high standard of living avowedly served to preserve republican institutions and safeguard liberty and virtue, and maintained the physical, mental, and moral foundations of the masses that grounded institutions.³⁸ In this account, virtue was mistakenly equated with well-being, an equation that Black people “had excellent reasons for doubting,” as James Baldwin would note decades later.³⁹ Those virtues, “preached but not practiced,” were merely additional means to subject Black groups and, Du Bois added, imperial subjects abroad.⁴⁰ In other words, the extraction of wealth distributed democratically among white citizens required despotic rule over nonwhite subjects.

1.3 Self-and-Other-Determination

In the proposed model, popular sovereignty is a collective right not exhausted by self-government but dependent on rule over avowedly inferior peoples, whose self-determination is denied and who are subject to expropriative working conditions within and outside the polity.⁴¹ Thus popular sovereignty and self-determination are co-implicated. While external self-determination obtains (as western polities refuse to be ruled by outsiders) and internally popular sovereignty prevails (given the collective claims for inclusion and self-rule entailed in the working class demands described earlier), the rule of this collective also exceeds these boundaries. This excess encroaches on the self-determination of others by declaring a right to impose an external collective will over peoples; namely, self-and-other-determination. In other words, popular sovereignty for western countries means the “ownership of the earth for ever and ever;”⁴² that is, the appropriation of others’ resources, subject only to the demands of other western states.⁴³ Importantly, this claim to mastery, according to which a polity asserts its right to rule others, depends centrally on claims of racial superiority. The co-implication of despotic rule and racism is clear in Black Reconstruction:

The dark and vast sea of human labor in China and India, the South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies and Central American and in the United States—that great majority of mankind, on whose industry and broken backs rest today the founding stones of modern industry—shares a common destiny; it is despised and rejected by race and color; paid a wage below the level of decent living; driven, beaten, poisoned and enslaved in all but name.⁴⁴

These are the subjects who

spawn the world’s raw material and luxury—cotton, wool, coffee, tea, cocoa, palm oil, fibers, spices, rubber, silks, lumber, copper, gold, diamonds, leather— how shall we end the list and where? All these are gathered up at prices lowest of the low, manufactured, transformed, and transported at fabulous gain; and the resultant wealth is distributed and displayed and made the basis of world power and universal dominion, and armed arrogance in London, Paris, Berlin and Rome, New York and Rio de Janeiro.⁴⁵

The association between wealth, luxury, and power is not trivial. Rather, it implicates collective processes of decision making that dictate whom such power and wealth will benefit.⁴⁶ It is, according to Du Bois, “white labor” that insists on making “the majority of the world’s laborers … the basis of a system of industry which ruined democracy.”⁴⁷ Collective processes, moreover, rely on mutual identification and “shared” rule within western publics that perceive the world as bounty. Affect, in particular, plays a central role in organizing the circulation of feeling differentially across groups and thus stabilizing democratic despotism. I define affect as emotional attachments and self-conceptions melded with ways of seeing the colonized other in relation to the self – in ways that both justify and facilitate dominion.⁴⁸ Affective attachments have long been recognized as important in nation-building and democratic life, but Du Bois’s conceptualization adds to standard notions an account of affect partitioned along racial lines, because it links citizens not only reciprocally to each other but also (nonreciprocally) to subjects in faraway lands in ways that are entwined with possessiveness enabled by imperial capitalism. Thus, collective affect contains a desire for material goods and, in the extreme, luxury – a gratification that is dependent on a racially-based lack of reciprocity and dehumanization of the colonized other, whose exploitation enables western consumption. These components make up Du Bois’s account of the mechanics of democratic/global attachments within racial capitalism, in which love of humanity is precluded by nations’ love of luxury that depends on the extreme exploitation of human beings who they regard as inhuman.⁴⁹

Du Bois juxtaposes the love of humanity with the love of luxury and posits that the latter is incompatible with the former if desires for luxurious consumption and wealth are fulfilled by capitalist and imperial systems of expropriation supported by racial hatred. He restates this claim later by positing that the desire for the “American way of life” drives these political impulses. Such a way of life entails a comfortable home, enough suitable clothing and nourishment, and vacations and education for children, an ideal to which only about one-third of Americans have access and to which the rest aspire.⁵⁰ Desire for goods, luxurious or not, remains the motivating factor, alongside the “knowledge or fear” of those who enjoy these comforts that their standards will suffer if “social and industrial organization” were to change.⁵¹ Politically, racial hatred allows for and rationalizes the coexistence of democratic feeling toward a smaller community and oppression internally and externally along racial/imperial lines. This hatred is not based on rational belief but is trained through world campaigns that comprise the slave trade and the attribution of every bestiality to Black people, because such feelings allow for profitable exploitation of these groups. This campaign

has unconsciously trained millions of honest, modern men into the belief that black folk are sub-human. This belief is not based on science, else it would be held as a postulate of the most tentative kind, ready at any time to be withdrawn in the face of facts; the belief is not based on history, for it is absolutely contradicted by Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Arabian experience; nor is the belief based on any careful survey of the social development of men of Negro blood to-day in Africa and America. It is simply passionate, deep-seated heritage, and as such can be moved by neither argument nor fact. Only faith in humanity will lead the world to rise above its present color prejudice.⁵²

Thus, deep-seated passions, enabled by the history of dehumanizing exploitation and inherited by subsequent generations, underlie color prejudice. Du Bois traces the education of affect that creates a tragically narrow community to novelists and poets and the “uncanny welter of romance,” alongside “the half knowledge of scientists, the pseudoscience of statesmen,” which put white workers fully at the mercy of their beliefs and prejudices.⁵³ This curious and childish propaganda dominates the public sphere, such that millions of men who are otherwise good, earnest, and even intelligent believe almost religiously that white people are a peculiar and chosen people, whose great accomplishment of civilization “must be protected from the rest of the world by cheating, stealing, lying, and murder.”⁵⁴

Thus, racism truncates reciprocity and humanitarian feeling to allow for “cheating, stealing, lying, and murder” with the goal of satisfying deep-seated desires for luxury, wealth, and dominion. But not any humanitarianism will do, for western humanitarians and peace activists were notably reluctant to discuss colonial violence, making their humanitarianism either platitudinous or outright deceitful and complicit in sustaining racist narratives.⁵⁵ Du Bois singled out the religious hypocrisy of these groups for particular criticism, offering the example of their condemnation of the “‘Blood-thirsty’ Mwanga of Uganda,” who had killed an English bishop due to their fear that his arrival meant English domination. This, Du Bois added, was very much what his coming meant, as the world and the bishop knew well, yet “the world was ‘horrified’!”⁵⁶

These excerpts reveal Du Bois’s keen understanding of the involvement of the west in producing the very barbaric Black subject it intends to dominate. It does so both through narratives of humanitarianism that cover up the aims of domination behind religious missions and through violent interventions:

The Congo Free State … differed only in degree and concentration from the tale of all Africa in this rape of a continent already furiously mangled by the slave trade. That sinister traffic, on which the British Empire and the American Republic were largely built, cost black Africa no less than 100,000,000 souls, the wreckage of its political and social life, and left the continent in precisely that state of helplessness which invites aggression and exploitation. “Color” became in the world’s thought synonymous with inferiority, “Negro” lost its capitalization, and Africa was another name for bestiality and barbarism.⁵⁷

The very violence that characterized the slave trade established the conditions that would then be cited as “barbaric” to justify the western project of civilization via colonialism. For Du Bois, capitalism is never far away from racism; the world, he argues, invests in “color prejudice” because the color line pays dividends.⁵⁸ A similar assessment is present in Fanon, who claims that racism is preceded, made possible, and legitimized by military and economic oppression. In other words, while racism is a disposition of the mind, it is not merely a “psychological flaw”: it is the “emotional, affective and sometimes intellectual unfolding” of the inferiorization required by economic domination and appears in the potentialities and latencies of the psychoaffective life that underlie economic relations under racial capitalism.⁵⁹ Therefore, it is “normal” for countries that live and draw their substance from peoples who are different to “inferiorize” these peoples. Even in his largely psychological works, Fanon is always clear that a primarily economic process is behind inferiorization, which is then “epidermalized” and internalized psychologically.⁶⁰ These psychoaffective relations pervert forms of political attention that may otherwise accompany exchanges between individuals or groups, and they prevent the establishment of solidarity, as Ange-Marie Hancock notes regarding the politics of disgust. Reciprocity and solidarity are replaced by hostility, which mediates political (non)relations that are monologic and based on dispositional (rather than contextualized or situational) judgments about members of the targeted group.⁶¹

These affective attachments also contain a thwarted view of others’ emancipation. This view explains how aggressive western imperialism came paradoxically to be accompanied by the fear of violent colonial rebellions and, in the interwar era, a deep anxiety about the west’s military and political supremacy. This is because vast returns “seduce the conscience” so that even resistance to oppression provokes surprise and indignation in “the best people.”⁶² In other words, given the forms of attachment outlined earlier, emancipatory efforts are seen as revanchist threats that confirm the barbarism of colonial others, rather than as an intelligible claim to self-determination. Because of how jealousies and hatreds continuously fester along the color line, laborers feel the need to fight the Chinese to prevent them from taking our bread and butter, and “keep Negroes in their places,” lest they take our jobs. In other words, the expectation is that, without white men throttling colored men; China, India, and Africa “will do to Europe what Europe has done and seeks to do to them.”⁶³

Differently put, the western right to wealth attained through the dominion-cum-expropriation-cum-“civilization” of racially inferior peoples makes subaltern emancipatory claims against the status quo either unintelligible (because they are inconsistent with racist accounts of colonial peoples) or threatening (because, when taken as equivalent to western claims, they suggest dominion and plunder). Not only is love of humanity out of the question when love of luxury – obtained through expropriation – prevails but luxury also contains a desire for excessive, superfluous wealth, a form of unending accumulation that cannot make sense of notions of mutuality, reciprocity, and distribution of resources across the color line.

In sum, racism and capitalism are closely entwined, and not just because racism degrades certain groups and makes them available for exploitation and expropriation, as the racial capitalism literature notes. Du Bois further grounds the entwinement between racism and capitalism in politics proper; that is, the result of political subjects’ materialist attachments to comfort and luxury is despotic rule accompanied by hostility and nonreciprocity toward those whose expropriation makes access to these goods possible.

Notably, these despotic dynamics are pictured neither as antithetical nor separable from processes of democratization in western countries in the early twentieth century. Instead, claims of popular sovereignty, which demanded political and socioeconomic enfranchisement of the white working class, were molded to partake democratically of the wealth and luxury made possible by empire, which despotically determined other peoples’ fates. Du Bois theorizes the democratic bargain of the white working class of imperial countries and the racialized imagined community thus brought into existence to sustain these arrangements. The self-determination implied in this structure allowed the metropole to determine both its own affairs and set expropriative conditions abroad: self-and-other-determination. The “other” in this construction represents three conceptual features of this political relationship. In the first place, “other” conveys excess; a collective determines not only itself – as per ideal standard accounts of self-determination – but also external others. Second, “other” conveys that the excessive rule by this collective is based on racist affective attachments that other those ruled. Finally, the inclusion of “other” alongside the “self” of self-determination refers to the need for the toil of these others to produce the wealth that is held in common and distributed, making possible a self-determining community.

The notion of self-and-other-determination puts in question standard divisions of labor in political theory between democratic theory and global justice by theorizing the entanglements between popular sovereignty and racial capitalist accumulation enabled by empire. Moreover, the possessive and affective character of the attachments that sustain this entanglement suggests that the mere fact of decolonization cannot have singlehandedly transformed the entanglement between the national bond and global affective attachments of western polities, a point I examine next.

1.4 Excess and the Question of Self-Determination in Postcolonial Times

If, as argued earlier, western polities were constituted alongside the racial capitalist dynamics that organized that imperial world, the formal granting of sovereignty to postcolonial countries cannot, by the stroke of a pen, erase the affective inclinations of western citizens toward wealth and luxury and their disregard of the means for obtaining them. If these attachments remain in place – which, in the absence of public acknowledgment, the transformation of western imagined communities, and changes in production and consumption patterns, they should – we can expect the political economic formations at the international level that link and relink former empires and formerly colonized countries to each other to transform, rather than overcome, past hierarchies. Fanon’s work is particularly perceptive about moments of transition, noting that racism survives and thrives despite seemingly epochal transformations that partially liberate men and allow groups to circulate.⁶⁴ For Fanon, the survival of racism does require an adjustment to work along “perfected means of production” rather than brutal exploitation. For this reason racism must take on shades and change physiognomy, and work through camouflaged techniques for exploiting men, thus following the fate of the cultural whole that inspired it.⁶⁵ Just like racism, the colonial structures of extraction that racism legitimates are neither immutable, ahistorical structures nor abstract entities but mutate in complex ways, inventing “frontiers and intervals, zones of passage and … spaces of transit.”⁶⁶ This mutations follow what Fanon calls “partial liberation,” in which racism can no longer show itself undisguised in the metropole; instead, it must be denied frequently, because citizens are “haunted by a bad conscience.” In this case, racism emerges, if at all, only through the passions, as in certain psychoses.⁶⁷ Fanon’s account echoes Du Bois’s interest in the survival of racial affect after the waning of particular institutional formations of domination such as colonialism, whereas domination finds its place in seemingly novel arrangements such as free enterprise, which is further sustained through “false ideals and misleading fears.”⁶⁸

The continuity of affect despite legal changes is also central in Saidiya Hartman’s analysis of slave emancipation in the United States and her skepticism about the ability of formal change to lead to political emancipation in the absence of genuine liberation in society.⁶⁹ The salience of formal emancipation, she notes, deviates attention from “the violence and domination perpetuated in the name of slavery’s reversal.”⁷⁰ Hartman’s strong and paradoxical claim that violence and domination are “perpetuated in the name of slavery’s reversal” captures the complex interplay between past and present and law and practice. Absent the legal institution of slavery, subjection must rely on a new language – of freedom, property, labor, vagrancy, and crime, among others. The new language assumes formal freedom and thus acknowledges and depends on new terms consistent with legal emancipation, but it is nonetheless put into the service of a subjection that is continuous with the past. Thus, legal change transforms institutions without necessarily overcoming subjection. This is not to say that no change whatsoever emerges from legal reform, but to note that an attentive scrutiny of new institutions is warranted to detect if and how racism recirculates and justifies new forms of oppression.

These transformed institutions and forms of subjectivity are what I am interested in tracking in western societies as they leave behind colonial dependencies and reengage and produce the burdened free states, newly responsible yet encumbered, to use Hartman’s language and her attention to the plasticity of race.⁷¹ The ability of race to take on new meanings works alongside new forms of domination that continue western well-being’s dependence on the extraction of other peoples’ land and labor. We know that, for decolonized countries, “independence” means incorporation into a regime that re-creates dependency through the need to take debt in foreign currency while specializing in volatile agricultural exports, their dependence on foreign ownership of natural resources, and their limited space of maneuver given western countries’ control of financial institutions and stewardship of their multinational corporations. In Fanonian terms, these are the new relationships that are reconstructed while maintaining racism’s “morphological equation.”⁷²

But how do white western citizens make sense of and adapt to postcolonial forms of international oppression and eventually neoliberalism? Hartman’s focus on societal conditions, attitudes, and sentiments provides guidance for answering this question.⁷³ The novel forms of affect that organize western peoples’ attachment to wealth must fit with postcolonial institutions and conditions of extraction and democratic decision making, which I explore by engaging the contemporary literature on global commodity chains. My claim in this section, however, is not that the transformations of affect in western countries embedded in a world economic order shifting toward neoliberalism are equivalent to the shifts outlined by Hartman or Fanon. Instead, my claim is that, conceptually, Hartman and Fanon’s frameworks are helpful to understanding how the formal independence of nonwestern countries during the present neoliberal era similarly requires new economies of feeling that reproduce domination without straying from the new structures of governance.

I define neoliberalism simply as the theory of political economy that takes entrepreneurial freedoms operating in the context of strong property rights, free markets, and free trade to be the most conducive road to human well-being.⁷⁴ This theory has underpinned a political turn since the 1970s toward deregulation, privatization, and the withdrawal of the state from social provision.⁷⁵ A neoliberal state apparatus is one whose “fundamental mission [is] to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital.”⁷⁶ The safeguarding of capital, according to neoliberal globalists, needs to be accomplished through the embedding of states in an international institutional order insulated from democratic decision making to replace the organizing role of waning empires.⁷⁷

While the system of rule imposed by neoliberalism seems looser and harder to assess than empire, political theorists interested in justice and responsibility have focused on the unjust relations of production, trade, and consumption structured through the global commodity chains that accompanied the turn to free trade.⁷⁸ But, rather than seeming singularly neoliberal and detached from coercive rule, commodity chains can be seen to work in tandem with self-and-other-determination, as updated structures that cater to privileged western consumers still rely on racialized schemes of dominion and expropriation (e.g., through off-shore export-processing zones and exceptional regimes of labor and taxation). In other words, the vicious colonial linkages described by Du Bois, which enable the right to imperial dominion and expropriation for the sake of wealth and luxury in the metropoles, reappear and find in commodity chains apt mechanisms to link together sites of expropriation enabled by western corporations’ search for profit, western-backed free trade agreements, and willing elites in formerly colonial states.⁷⁹ Critical logistics scholars highlight these very affinities when they argue that global logistics is constituted by “violent and contested human relations,” including “land grabs, military actions, and dispossessions” to make space for the exchange infrastructure.⁸⁰ Their claim is that, despite paradigmatic shifts, the architecture of contemporary trade “marks the continuation of centuries-old processes of imperial circulation and colonization.”⁸¹

Yet the possessive popular sovereignty tied up with self-and-other-determination must mutate in parallel with the freeing of trade and investment flows and the new terms of exchange. Even though they remain racialized, the affects must be reoriented toward new languages and legal linkages to fit this new and complex architecture.⁸² Whereas explicitly racial discourses of barbarism and civilization were associated with formal empire; notions of governance, human rights, and liberal or decent versus outlaw, burdened societies or failed states dominate the debate today.⁸³ Affective attachments follow suit; the shift toward “responsibility, will, liberty, contract, and sentiment” that Hartman shows justified Black oppression post-emancipation⁸⁴ has a parallel in discourses of responsible government and its implied association with free markets that justify substantial societal transformations toward export-led economic development, “poverty-lifting” programs of minimally taxed off-shore production, and reduced state intervention, which supposedly weakens economic growth. These new terms are tied to new affective attachments that circulate dynamically through reconstructed psychoaffective and economic relations that modify racism and how it operates vis-à-vis domination. Racialized constructions of corrupt governments, civil conflict, black markets, and informality complete the affective picture of degraded subjects, one that warrants punitive stabilization and structural reform projects packed with conditionalities to steer economies toward global trade priorities, rather than their own well-being. Thus understood, technocratic interventions that supposedly assist developing countries reveal their affinities with the affective constructions of the nonwest as disordered; these interventions resubordinate and expropriate, ensuring continued access to cheap raw materials and mass-produced consumer and luxury goods.⁸⁵

These affective orientations are at play in Leif Wenar’s policy-engaged work Blood Oil, which recommends action by western citizens against unjust regimes in the Global South. There is much to praise in Wenar’s account: he shows that global supply chains are “tainted” by their reliance on violent forms of extraction of raw materials, which are key to keeping the west’s high-tech way of life going. Wenar declares that, ultimately, “We [in the west] all own stolen goods” because the “rip[ping] … out from the ground” of raw materials for supply chains has disastrous results for those nearby.⁸⁶ Moreover, he highlights the obfuscation built into commodity chains and insists we reenvision our daily lives and the products we use every day by considering where their component parts came from and how they were extracted.⁸⁷ At the center of Wenar’s approach are also a powerful defense of popular resource sovereignty and a clear-eyed acknowledgment that “the choices of [western] governments … decide the rules that run the world” and allow for the authoritarian plundering of natural resources in violation of the former principle.⁸⁸

Yet Wenar’s critical claims about the global supply chain apply exclusively to those goods that depend on raw materials that are extracted by authoritarian leaders variously described as tyrannical, bloody, cruel, and murderous.⁸⁹ Once these leaders are replaced by democratic governments, Wenar argues, the western way of life could be sustained without violence. He explicitly acknowledges the anxieties about consumption that I posited as core to self-and-other determination but assures readers that the comfort of western citizens that depends on natural resources that enrich bloody authoritarian regimes will not suffer by the proposed reforms.⁹⁰

Moreover – despite the acknowledgment of the western role sustaining the global legal structure that allows for trade in tainted products – Wenar repeatedly returns to authoritarian regimes as the initiating agents in the problem that occupies him. These authoritarian leaders, he argues, have greatly affected the west, whose crises, conflicts, and threats from abroad radiate from “resource-disordered states.”⁹¹ Western citizens, in contrast, are unambiguously on the “right side” and only need to be made aware of the disturbing violence entailed in the production of their latest gadgets to press their own governments to break ties with these strongmen, thereby righting the trajectory of global trade.⁹²

Thus, when I take issue with Wenar, it is not out of disagreement with his diagnosis of the violent character of the global supply chain or the principle of popular sovereignty of natural resources. Instead, I take issue with the assumptions that authoritarian strongmen are the main source of these problems, that we should only be concerned with these extreme cases of violence, and that western citizens are ready to intervene against this violence once they are made aware of their mistaken reliance on “blood oil.”⁹³ These assumptions reveal two broader problems. First, Wenar’s narrative reaffirms the racialized figures of authoritarian leaders as violent others as the core problem behind tainted goods, and western citizens as the benevolent agents righting these wrongs, rather than scrutinizing the capitalist extraction of raw materials more generally as a source of violence and injustice that underlies western well-being.⁹⁴ By focusing on extreme violence and obvious benevolence, Wenar falls into the narrative of “savages-victims-saviors” that scholars find entwined with human rights discourse and that often justifies economic and military intervention.⁹⁵ Starting with the blood-soaked hands on the book’s cover, Wenar aims to spur action through a shared feeling of horror, which Sinja Graf associates with a minimal and hegemonic form of inclusion because it incorporates certain nonwestern countries only as law breakers or criminals against humanity.⁹⁶ Du Bois’s critique of humanitarian discourses noted earlier also applies here, as does his reaction to the equalization of Africa with “bestiality and barbarism,” which he saw as contributing to the racialization that facilitated domination.

Although Wenar’s support for the popular ownership of natural resources is the opposite of the domination or intervention that Du Bois condemned, the framing of Wenar’s critique works against this recognition and, importantly, relativizes western responsibility for these ills. This relates to the second problem in Wenar’s framing: the presumption that acceptance of popular sovereignty in western polities directly translates into acceptance of popular sovereignty for others on whose work their well-being depends.⁹⁷ Wenar specifically claims that the “[f]ight for people’s rights has been fought and mostly won,” making the principle of popular sovereignty widely accepted and western societies’ “belief in their own innate racial superiority” a thing of the past.⁹⁸ In this picture, the only surprise for western citizens is “how much [they] contribute to the violation of people’s rights,”⁹⁹ because Wenar assumes that as soon as western citizens notice this, they will not “doubt which side is right.”¹⁰⁰ This is the very point that Du Bois argues against, noting that racialized forms of affect allow western citizens to both govern themselves democratically and accept the domination of others whose exploitation enables their wealth. The racialized affect associated with humanitarianism is one example of this trend, notably the focus on child soldiers (which figure prominently in Wenar’s account), which entails the mistrust of the moral and political capacity of adults in those countries, weakening the right to self-determination and leading to a more unequal international system.¹⁰¹ Thus the affective attachments that Wenar elicits by focusing on bloody conflict (outraged disgust and humanitarian pity toward violent statesmen and their victims, respectively) works at cross-purposes with his commitment to recognizing the popular sovereignty of natural resources. Such forms of affect also fit with technocratic prescriptions of responsible government and neoliberal measures of labor, trade, and capital liberalization, taken to be the opposites of disordered, corrupt, and authoritarian regimes. Again, Wenar advocates popular sovereignty rather than neoliberal reforms, but his singling out of the cruelty of resource-owning nonwestern authoritarian leaders as the core defect of commodity chains and the assumption that western access to goods will be undisrupted if extreme instances of violence at the source of commodity chains are addressed have a certain affinity with property rights’ discourses of neoliberalism. This stance appears to suggest that violent others need to learn to play by market rules and puts western peoples at ease with their lives of abundance, which are viable with the “correct” functioning of markets.

Rather than soothing western citizens’ anxiety about material possessions by assuring them that genuine popular sovereignty can coexist with capitalist extraction, the account I propose exposes the problematic (because excessive) modes of self-determination in the west that underlie global injustice. It requires the self-determination scholarship to engage critically with the problem of self-and-other-determination and the affective attachments that jointly enable the political, economic, and racial rearticulations of postcolonial regimes of extraction.

1.5 Self-Determination: From Lack to Excess, from Settler to Deterritorialized Domination

A dynamic critical literature has addressed the question of self-determination. Joseph Massad’s work, for example, tracks the trajectory of self-determination from its progressive origins toward a right of conquest in the post–World War II era.¹⁰² In this period, a right that had been narrowly applicable to European nations was briefly expanded and acquired emancipatory potential during Bandung, only to be reclaimed by settler states. The ultimate co-optation of self-determination by world powers was epitomized by Woodrow Wilson’s adoption of the term in response to Russian support of a progressive and anticolonial instantiation of this concept.¹⁰³ The co-optation of self-determination by empires transformed it into a tool for “securing and maintaining colonial claims and gains, especially in settler-colonies,” where this principle was granted to the colonists rather than the colonized.¹⁰⁴ Given Massad’s interest in settler colonies, he understandably focuses on the 1970s restriction of the right to self-determination to the government of peoples who represent “the whole peoples of the territory,” a fatal clause for peoples who are dispossessed of their land.¹⁰⁵ Yet Massad understands self-determination as contained in the legal documents and practices that sanctioned this principle as a tool to legitimize settler colonialism. In contrast, I am interested in conceptualizing how western peoples – not just settler ones – effectively determine other countries’ fates by appropriating resources from abroad – not just from the populations living within their territory whose land they occupy – and treating these resources as part of the commonwealth they collectively adjudicate among themselves.

Iris Marion Young’s critique of self-determination understood as non-interference is also partly motivated by Indigenous peoples’ claims.¹⁰⁶ She criticizes the understanding of self-determination as the ability of a political unit to claim “final authority over the regulation of all activities within a territory” because it does not acknowledge the interdependence of peoples, their common embeddedness in relations and institutions, and the possibility of domination.¹⁰⁷ Young’s relational nondomination account implies that powerful states’ actions over others give the latter “a legitimate right to make claims” on the former when these actions are harmful.¹⁰⁸ She rightly diagnoses the problem that motivates this chapter: that powerful states can interfere arbitrarily with and dominate formally self-governing peoples while being absolved of responsibility to “support these countries.”¹⁰⁹ But she quickly refocuses attention on the dominated peoples, who have no public forum or authority to “press claims of such wrongful domination against a nation-state” and who therefore cannot be said to be self-determining.¹¹⁰ In response to this problem, Young proposes to regulate international relations to create such forums and prevent domination.¹¹¹

Adom Getachew further develops a nondominating relational account of self-determination by drawing on the writings of postcolonial statesmen and thinkers.¹¹² This tradition recast sovereign equality as world making, as a global anticolonial project that would “undo the hierarchies that facilitated domination.” The world that these thinkers sought to transform entailed the unequal integration of newly independent countries – that is, membership with onerous obligations and limited rights – and racial hierarchy.¹¹³ In contrast, anticolonial statesmen sought to bring into being a radically transformed world order with enhanced bargaining power for postcolonial states, democratized decision making, and international wealth redistribution.¹¹⁴

Thus, whereas Massad is concerned with uses of self-determination that enable domination in settler–native situations, Young and Getachew focus on dominated countries embedded in an unequal international system and propose global democratization measures to enable the self-determination of these groups. Thus their critique only reaches the international system, and leaves unexamined the inner workings of dominating states and how they depend on and infuse practices of self-rule through which democratic collectives appropriate outside wealth. This is the contribution of the present chapter: to spell out the excessive self-determination of western countries and its entanglement with western peoples themselves, whose collective projects of self-government are tied to this excess by affective attachments to possessions, whose appropriation is facilitated by a racial capitalist global order enabled by empire. These affective attachments and the popular politics they infuse, moreover, do not end with formal decolonization but transform themselves while continuing to rely on racialized sentiment, presently operating within the neoliberal world order.

This story holds even if the gains of global neoliberalism are no longer appropriated as equally within the west as during the golden age of welfare capitalism. This is because an aspirational, popularly felt possessiveness remains and shapes the politics of resistance to neoliberalism, channeling it toward right-wing populism. The empirical literature that examines support for Trump, for example, notes that rather than actual hardship, or in addition to it, it was the perception by high-status groups that their standing was threatened by domestic racial others and potential global challenges to US power that motivated these voters.¹¹⁵ The proposed genealogy of global attachments illuminates why “the global” in the form of migration, refugee flows, trade, and regional integration emerged as central sites of affective engagement for right-wing populist movements. These resentful reactions target racialized others who are seen as rightly deployed for low-cost production and as victims of failed governments, but who are not supposed to trespass western borders or demand better conditions of exchange. When migrating or exiting the role of victims or exploited workers, these actors are seen as unduly taking what is not theirs. Thus, the threat, for many western citizens, is that of equality, which clashes with the hierarchical orderings associated with self-and-other-determination.

In other words, even if western democracy suffers under neoliberalism, the possessive popular sovereignty and dynamics of self-and-other-determination reappear in the resistance to neoliberalism. Such collective forms of identification and the desire to continue appropriating resources extracted from abroad constitute a popular imaginary worth analyzing, whether they appear under the guise of left-protectionist nationalism or right-wing antiglobalism. Just as an anticapitalist imaginary at the turn of the twentieth century demanded the distribution among democratic white publics of violently obtained wealth, a reaction to neoliberalism’s drastic effects on western peoples may elicit an equally narrow democratic imaginary. This imaginary demands the continued exemption of the west from the ravages of neoliberalism (variously personified by the European Union, Chinese manufacturing prowess, or free trade agreements), rather than the transformation of the system away from racism and capitalism. In so doing, this imaginary reveals an indebtedness to the world of imperial self-and-other-determination that I describe and remains tethered to possessive attachments and extraction abroad.

The proposed theorization is necessary to scrutinize contemporary writings and political responses to neoliberalism and the right-wing reaction to it. A salient strategy is to focus on the how neoliberalism economizes all aspects of existence and damages basic elements of democracy, including practices of rule and democratic imaginaries.¹¹⁶ Scholars have also shown that global neoliberal thought and institutions strive to keep markets “safe from mass demands for social justice and redistributive equality.”¹¹⁷ These critiques work against an assumed past in which the demos was able to rule over the economic realm, but disregard the fact that before these peoples were negatively affected by neoliberalism, they claimed to rule themselves partly based on resources appropriated from others. As this chapter reconstructs, these lived practices of rule were important in founding moments and did not so much contest capitalist logics of extraction as racialized them, making sure that a white sub-group could access goods and wealth well beyond their territory by dominating racial others. Critiques of neoliberalism’s de-democratizing effects misrecognize this past and thus mourn a form of popular politics that both lacked a radical critique of capitalism and related despotically to racial others. In so doing, they also cannot capture why racialized possessive attachments still hold popular appeal as part of discourses that oppose neoliberal forms of global extraction. The proposed framework instead shines a critical light on the genesis of the racialized welfare capitalist states that were dismantled by Thatcher and Reagan, to inform a future-oriented popular politics that does not relate despotically to the global and sheds its entanglements with racial capitalism, which the third part of Democracy and Empire develops.

In other words, western publics oriented toward self-and-other-determination are ill prepared to judge their relation to the global without devolving into resentment at the loss of their right to dominion and exploitation. Their reactions target racialized others in the Global South or within the west and assert, rather than contest, the economic structures and unequal wealth distribution that were central to their past prosperity. The proposed framework shows that these orientations are not exceptional or foreign to democracy; indeed, they were internal to the expansion of popular sovereignty in western imperial countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Within this frame, western citizens cannot see the relative decline in their living standards – when applicable – as part and parcel of the new neoliberal shape of capitalism that must be opposed or discover commonalities between their grievances and the historical and present vulnerability of the Global South, and demand instead the reinstatement of their right to rule others and appropriate their resources. By reconnecting western polities (rather than states or the international system) to the institutionalization and maintenance of domination, two important theoretical implications follow. First, it becomes clear that we cannot unreflectively assume that in the absence of a radical transformation in their consciousness and practices of consumption, western citizens or polities themselves will lead the struggle for global justice, as does much of the liberal literature.¹¹⁸ Second, the thoroughly transnational dimensions of contemporary right-wing populism emerge clearly, highlighting that the hostile global attachments that characterize this movement contain an entitlement to global wealth obtained via racial domination, wealth that neoliberalism is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands.

In this framework, the vulgar racism that has accompanied the growth of right-wing populism must be taken seriously, i.e., in Fanon’s words: “it is racists who are right.”¹¹⁹ Overt racism clues us into important political dynamics of racial capitalism that need theorizing and contesting. In other words, the outward expressions of racism are more telling about the current crisis than the constitutional principles invoked against these outbursts or the “facts” adduced to counter lies. If these outbursts used to be only episodic, it is because the solidity of the overall system of domination made daily assertions of superiority superfluous, and more subtle and “cultivated” forms of racism could prevail.¹²⁰

Yet the increased regularity of outbursts at the time of writing indicates that the quid pro quo through which “the state … maintained [white groups’] privilege in implicit return for their support of capitalism” is in crisis.¹²¹ This is because of both economic deterioration and challenges to white and male privilege by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, women’s, immigrant, and anti-neoliberal movements around the world.¹²² Thus understood, the reactive targeting of racial others (both foreign and domestic) reveals that energies are still directed to repairing self-and-other-determination, rather than contesting the dehumanization and exploitation of racial capitalism.

In addition to eschewing nostalgia toward historical moments of enfranchisement, critiques of neoliberalism must resist demands of isolationism, protectionism, or closed borders as motivated by normatively defensible white grievances, as commentators in the United States and leftist leaders in Europe have done.¹²³ Chapter 2 expands on this question, by exploring how racist systems of immigration control were also foundational to the imperial mode popular sovereignty theorized here, because they served to organize the distribution of resources in ways that catered to white settler priorities while governing racialized immigration flows to ensure access to controllable labor.

2 Socialism and Empire Labor Mobility, Popular Sovereignty, and the Genesis of Racial Regimes

This chapter further clarifies the entanglements between popular and imperial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century by focusing on the writings of labor leaders and activists, elite world historical writings, and documents from the British imperial bureaucracy. I show that popular discourses embraced by white labor in the United States and the British settler colonies borrowed from imperial scripts to mark nonwhite workers as a threat. This discourse was thus both imperial and popular, because it enlisted the working class throughout the European and the settler colonial world to defend imperial logics of labor control and settlement while demanding their own enfranchisement. Moreover, while finding channels and institutionalization in emerging national states, white labor enfranchisement demands were part of a transnational emancipatory imagination. These institutional formations emerged from the encounter between capitalists interested in facilitating the mobility of racialized laboring subjects around the globe, elite projects invested in sheltering settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition by excluding exploitable nonwhite workers. Ultimately, white labor’s embrace of racial prejudice and the exclusion of workers of color created segregated labor spaces that fit neatly with both capitalist goals of labor control and settler logics.

In developing the entanglement between empire and popular sovereignty mediated by racial capitalism, this chapter highlights the centrality of migration for prompting the negotiation of tensions in a way that responded to racialized priorities of capitalism and infused popular sovereignty with imperial hierarchies. This makes migration a world historical event, that is, an event with large-scale historical consequences, in this case its prompting of the negotiation and definition of dominant narratives of popular will and self-government. In the process of negotiating tensions between white and nonwhite migrants to the settler colonies and priorities of labor control, ideas of settler self-government consolidated around demands of emancipation grounded in racial hierarchies and redirected anticapitalist critiques in reformist directions. The value of this analysis is to capture a moment of flux in which mobile racialized and white labor reached settler colonies to fulfill different roles within a division of labor dictated by capitalist drives for accumulation. This encounter prompted thinkers, workers, and the British imperial bureaucracy to consider questions of race and democracy, self-government, and profit in ways that shaped the meaning of popular sovereignty and structured the struggles of enfranchisement by white labor. As such, this study makes salient the dynamic and contingent political arrangements that “solve” tensions between capitalist, racial, and democratic logics, as they find new modes of mutual articulation.

Methodologically, the chapter weaves together texts, archives, and regions that are usually approached separately, and grounds the textual analyses in the varied imperial mobilities of the era and the political formations that emerged from these encounters. This historical contextualization illuminates how political practices infuse central political concepts with meaning. The account proposed does not mean to encompass the wide expanse of progressive imperial thought that circulated in this period but it does illustrate the affinities of discourses by imperial bureaucratic elites and working-class intellectuals, on the one hand, and capitalist interests, on the other.

In the rest of the chapter, I first specify how the novel methodological framework of the chapter facilitates the theorization of the dynamic articulation between racism and capitalism, whose existence depends on imperialism and whose shape is partly determined by and underpins popular sovereignty. Then, I analyze writings on labor and world history, which I read jointly with narratives of the British imperial bureaucracy that made sense of the circulation of labor and its curtailment. I connect this conversation to labor politics in England and its white settler colonies or former colonies, and read these events through the prism of popular sovereignty. Having shown the central role of immigration in shaping the intersecting forces of empire, racial capitalism, and popular sovereignty, and how it was also shaped by these forces, I conclude by calling for its historicized reconceptualization within critical theory.

2.1 Method, Migration, and Mobility within Empire

This chapter theorizes the imperial origins of popular sovereignty in British settler colonies and the metropole by focusing on the actual political exchanges, bureaucratic practices, and economic imperatives that shaped moments of enfranchisement. These are “material practices,” by which I mean those actions – including political claims and institutional changes as well as economic and extractive capitalist endeavors – through which empire took shape on the ground and affected the lived meaning of political concepts whose nature concerns political theorists. Even if the existing scholarship reveals that the inherited canon of political thought obscures or disavows a dynamic realm of imperial hierarchies, its focus on absence cannot possibly illuminate this realm, a scrutiny that requires centering material practices to understand how they infused the social and political world in those times, and how they transformed its meaning and trajectory. The entanglement between popular sovereignty and empire means that popular claims were made over the wealth obtained through racial capitalist modes of accumulation enabled by overseas domination. In other words, the material practices of empire and the capitalist wealth it enabled were an integral part of the political world that political theorists interested in empire and popular sovereignty must grapple with.

Onur Ulas Ince’s work on empire and racial capitalism is a partial exception to this trend in that it explicitly takes a “material” approach that centers capitalism conceptually.¹ Yet the exclusive focus on textual resources – in particular, the theory of colonization of Edward Gibbon Wakefield – directs Ince’s attention to the schemes of governance that Wakefield devised for the emigrating British working class, without following this group into the settler colonies, where they would adopt imperial discourse in their own racialized demands for enfranchisement, which had no place for nonwhite workers arriving on these shores at the same time.²

In sum, attention to practice is not simply about applying theory but about correcting the formulation of central political theoretic concepts to account for their (racialized) operation and their entanglement with imperial capitalism. To do this, the chapter jointly analyzes archives, regions, and groups that are traditionally studied in isolation.³ By “read[ing] across separate repositories organized by office, task, and function,”⁴ the chapter co-implicates distinct geographical areas and seemingly separate preoccupations and reconstructs a genuinely transnational phenomenon of racially regulated labor mobility and its political ramifications. This reading is organized around mobility as a central feature of empire and an entry point to understanding the political process by which settler colonies recruited labor and enfranchised/excluded it depending on racial markers. In this way, imperial policies of labor control dictated by capitalist needs for labor impacted self-governing colonies and were shaped by (foreign and native) white working classes, who demanded their enfranchisement while rejecting the incorporation of racialized others. Transit, displacement, and groundedness led to entanglements with theoretical implications for how we theorize popular sovereignty but are missed in exclusively textual engagements with these concepts.⁵

By focusing on practices of violence, capitalist labor exploitation, and clashes between different political forces underpinned by ideas about race and labor, this approach necessarily broadens our view spatially and temporally. Spatially, this move refocuses attention onto transnational imperial currents that shape politics in the metropole and self-governing settler colonies who negotiated political demands with imperial capitalist priorities and, in so doing, determined the fate of racialized others. Temporally, this move relativizes the break between empire and self-governing democratic politics, because it shows that the popular movements that spearheaded democratizing trends in the metropoles and the settler colonies were committed to maintaining the subjection of nonwhite subjects and the imperial capabilities of extraction, differing only in the distribution of the gains between capital and white labor. Importantly, this exploration recasts western democracies as imperial products that internalize hierarchical understandings of belonging that fit with racialized capitalist exploitation, on which they depend for their well-being.

With this framework in place, I expand on Chapter 1’s focus on moments of transition and changing forms of subjection and further complicate these processes by theorizing the role of mobility in spearheading instabilities that prompt the negotiation of existing political formations and give shape to new institutions. White workers – transnationally linked through common discourses and networks of solidarity – claimed a right to move and settle, while objecting to the mobility of nonwhite labor, which they saw as threatening. These claims of self-government and demands for a racial regulation of mobility were made at the state level in both settler colonies and the metropole, but converged to create gradated spaces of exploitation globally and within territorial borders. In settler colonies, these struggles cemented the role of the state as the arbiter of working-class struggles and as the gatekeeper of the land, naturalizing its expropriation from Indigenous peoples.⁶

These processes were not independent of the experience of the emancipation of Black slaves in the United States, which was understood as a “failed” incorporation into a white polity and loomed large in how elite writings and demands for white enfranchisement dealt with nonwhite newcomers in Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States. As shown later, these connections and separations resorted to notions of “popular sovereignty” to create what is known today as “immigration control,” but can more accurately be characterized as imperial labor control in the service of racial capitalism. It is in these interconnections and transitions that I continue to track the imperial character of our present institutions.

Attending to mobility and emerging tensions shows that the global British imaginary and common culture that scholars have reconstructed developed neither just at the elite level nor in isolation from the native and nonwhite groups it excluded,⁷ but very much through the encounters and the actions, negotiation, and arguments about these exclusions. The expansive view proposed here shows that differently racialized groups in transit shaped each other and were shaped jointly by capitalist imperatives, elite priorities, and grassroots movements for white labor enfranchisement, three parties that often found themselves at odds. While capitalists were invested in facilitating labor control by moving laboring subjects around the globe and curtailing their mobility upon arrival, elite projects were invested in sheltering settler spaces, a concern echoed by white workers invested in protecting their own labor from the competition of exploitable nonwhite workers. Ultimately, white labor’s embrace of racial prejudice and the exclusion of nonwhite migrants cemented subject constructions and segregated labor spaces that fit neatly with racial capitalist goals of labor control through differentiation and separation.

All three actors – imperial capitalists, intellectual elites, and white workers – relied on racial arguments about the ability to perform disciplined, self-directed work and/or partake of self-governing, civilized societies, even if they did not always pull in the same direction. While white workers’ demands were for local state-based restrictions on the entry of nonwhite foreigners, their narratives were part of global imperial narratives and operated in transnational solidarity with other white workers. The state institutions that emerged imitated the imperial racial regulation of mobility while materializing them through self-governing rules, which eventually congealed and hid their imperial and transnational origins.

2.2 Racial Capitalism and Mobility within Empire

In his Inaugural Address to the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, Marx argued:

In all countries of Europe it has now become a truth … only denied by those whose interest it is to hedge other people in a fool’s paradise, that no improvement of machinery, no appliance of science to production, no contrivances of communication, no new colonies, no emigration, no opening of markets, no free trade, nor all these things put together, will do away with the miseries of the industrious masses; but that, on the present false base, every fresh development of the productive powers of labour must … deepen social contrasts and point social antagonisms.⁸

Here, Marx notes two transnational dimensions of capitalism. First, capitalist exploitation and dispossession reached abroad through the acquisition of colonies. Second, it required the expulsion (via emigration) of redundant sections of the population,⁹ which in turn populated British settler colonies in North America, Oceania, and South Africa. Moreover, Marx notes that capitalism has no national loyalties; imperial exploits, along with other techniques to increase productivity, did not aim to relieve the miseries of European workers, and did not in fact do so. Thus, as Marx notes in closing, before demanding proletarians of all countries to unite, the success of the working classes will come out of “combination and knowledge” and from standing “firmly by each other.” Failing that, any efforts must collapse due to the “common discomfiture of their incoherent efforts.”¹⁰

The story that this chapter tells is one of discomfiture and incoherent efforts, organized along axes of race that Marx did not examine, but that would prove determinant for the failure of projects that could oppose imperial capitalism in its transnational form. Even in his limited internationalism, Marx’s hopes that the early signs of British working-class internationalism – at play in its support for Lincoln and the struggle of Poland against Russia – would prevail were unwarranted.¹¹ This internationalism, which had thrived during Chartism’s cooperative work among British and Irish workers and would be sustained by radical artisan groups who actively debated imperial questions, would wane as the century progressed.¹² It would give way to a tamer trade unionism, the depoliticization of workers’ social activities, and, ultimately, an embrace of imperial successes, represented by the euphoria around the end of the siege of Mafeking, in the Second Boer War (1899–1902), which radical workingmen’s clubs joined in 1900.¹³ The war had split the socialist Fabian Society, between those behind S. G. Hobson and Sidney Olivier and a branch that followed George Bernard Shaw. The former maintained that the aim of the Boer War was to establish supremacy over the natives and that imperialism as a whole detracted the British government from worthy domestic purposes, such as the establishment of an “industrial democracy.” Shaw, on the other hand, was invested in the protection of British miners and the transfer of mining to public control to support an imperialism for the public interest. The Society ultimately did not take a position on the war, though most of its members sanctioned some form of imperialism.¹⁴

These evident divisions among progressives by the end of the century are predicted by Marx’s increased pessimism about the unity of the working class, expressed only six years after the 1864 address, in his comments about the divisions between Irish and British workers. He criticized the latter’s self-conception as members of the “ruling nation,” one fueled by “the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, … [i.e.,] the means at the disposal of the ruling classes.”¹⁵ These imperial alignments turned the British worker into “a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself.”¹⁶

Marx points to the important – and still pressing – problem of working classes’ cooptation by imperial capitalist projects, but he also misses the point that alongside white emigrants, Indian and Chinese subjects had circulated within and beyond the British Empire since the early nineteenth century and had joined freed slaves and native labor within the empire.¹⁷ This does not mean that differentiations among white workers were inconsequential – as Marx’s discussion of Irish labor shows – or that these differences were not racialized. There is a long trajectory of European racialism, comprising enslavement regimes (of Slavs, Greeks, Russians, among others), the devaluation of European peoples identified with the “Orient,” the drawing of the European bourgeoisie and proletarians “from particular ethnic and cultural groups,” and the racialization of white workers through slave analogies.¹⁸ In the United States, white workers’ skills and wage differences were exploited by employers for the purposes of labor control, with Eastern European migrants conscripted to break strikes or counter unions’ threat to take management control.¹⁹ Ethnic differences, moreover, were often exploited to lower labor clout, by creating competition among different ethnic groups or mixing ethnicities on the shop floor. These maneuvers interacted with technological change and allowed for workers to be replaced by unskilled labor, predominantly from Eastern Europe. For example, 80 percent of “common laboring jobs” at the former Carnegie Mills in Allegheny County were filled by Eastern Europeans by 1907.²⁰ Further illustration of the distinct character of white ethnic gradations vis-à-vis the white/nonwhite divide appears in South African debates about Chinese indenture. Debates about mining acknowledged the alternative of relying on “mean” or “hardy” whites such as Swedes, Italians, Lithuanians, or Russians, but took these groups to be undesirable in comparison to the acknowledged equality of the Dutch and English “races.”²¹

Yet the competition of these groups, while “unwanted,” was threatening precisely because, unlike Chinese indentured migrants, other white workers could and would demand salaries closer to those earned by Dutch and English workers and could not be disciplined or segregated like the Indian and the Chinese were. Thus, the subtle hierarchies within whites do not diminish the qualitative and quantitative break of transatlantic slavery in this genealogy. Similarly, while an array of distinctions among different white ethnicities were discussed by eugenicists and exploited by employers in the United States and the settler world, the racial distinctions, practices of separation, and intensity of exploitation between whites and nonwhites were starker and more persistent, and merit particular attention. Notably, while ethnic whites in the United States were allowed to fill low skilled positions in factories that incorporated new machinery, nonwhite workers were confined to strenuous bodily work in the fields, mining, or railway construction, pointing to the stricter labor segregation and exclusions affecting these groups. This was at play in occupations like crane operation, which was an easily learned skill but it “long survive[d] as a craft job preserved for white workers.”²²

Nonwhite labor flowed into the settler colonies via indenture programs that became prominent after the gradual abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. Labor imports, regulated by the Court of Directors of the East India Company and the British Parliament, were sought to control newly freed African laborers in the Caribbean.²³ While indentured labor – recruited predominantly from British India – was defined as “free” labor, all recruited individuals traveled as a group, contracted some form of debt, and/or were attached to an employer upon arrival.²⁴ Moreover, while regulations existed to protect the emigrants, reports abounded of recruitment through “fraud, deception, and kidnapping.”²⁵ Finally, findings from official investigations indicated that indentured workers were subject to high death rates and corporal punishment if they tried to escape.²⁶ Attesting to employers’ motivations, many proposed schemes were rejected for containing conditions considered “even less equitable than [those] of slavery itself.”²⁷ In the face of loud protests from the Indian Colonial Office and anti-slavery activists, the program was suspended only a year after its official sanctioning; it was allowed again in 1843 with conditions less favorable to planters and shorter contracts, which were expanded to five years only in 1860.²⁸ Even after reforms and the establishment of offices to protect workers and control employers, reports noted the abundance of disease in waiting camps and vessels carrying indentured laborers, poor living conditions, and the use of criminal prosecution and hard labor as punishment for labor disputes.²⁹

While labor imports from India were banned, colonial secretary Lord Stanley expressed no reservations about Caribbean planters recruiting from Chinese territories under British control. He noted that “emigration was … routine among some Chinese communities,” making protocols addressing fraud and abuse unnecessary.³⁰ Thus, throughout the nineteenth century, imperial authorities scrambled to “solve” the post-emancipation problem of labor control by transporting laborers from around the empire to provide planters, mining interests, and infrastructure developments with a submissive workforce. In the process they deployed racial discourses that assigned to different groups particular propensities to work, obedience, and adaptability to “free” contracting. Just as arguments about the laziness of freed slaves and their inability to honor contracts had been deployed to justify importing Indian labor to the Caribbean in the 1830s, planters – likely in the face of desertions, strikes, and the lodging of complaints by indentured labor – turned to argue that Indians, while steadier workers than Afro-Caribbeans, were also “avaricious, jealous, less robust, and given to killing their women, not to mention dishonest, idolatrous, [and] filthy.”³¹ In comparison, recruiter James T. White reported from China that Chinese workers were alive to the needs of authority and generally “tractable and manageable,” strong, tough, and “not averse to foreigners.’”³² Halfway through the nineteenth century, Chinese laborers started reaching North America and Australia in greater numbers, fleeing the opium war and political instability in China, and spurred by the discovery of gold in California in 1849, in New South Wales in 1851, and in British Columbia in 1858.³³ The construction of the intercontinental railways in the United States and Canada brought more Chinese laborers from Guangdong and Hong Kong, respectively, who arrived with pre-paid contracts and free passage and the official imprimatur of the Burlingame Treaty for temporary migration, signed in1868 by the United States and China.³⁴ In the second half of the nineteenth century, Australia received significant numbers of Chinese migrants and arranged with the India Office to recruit indentured workers from India.³⁵ South African colonies similarly resorted to labor recruitment programs that brought Indians to work in sugar plantations in Natal, and, later, Chinese in mining in the Transvaal.³⁶

Different forms of labor mobility and immobility awaited white workers. Liberal intellectuals such as Edward Gibbon Wakefield were concerned with excess labor in the metropole (which brought risks of unemployment, poverty, and labor militancy) and the dispersal of capital and labor in the settler colonies, and saw emigration from the metropole as a solution to both problems.³⁷ Accordingly, the New Poor Law Act of 1834 allowed parishes to raise or borrow money to support the emigration of its willing members, who joined earlier programs of child emigration, convict labor, and voluntary migrants from England and elsewhere in Europe. Altogether, upwards of 55 million migrants left Europe for the Americas between 1846 and 1940, while others left for Australia, in various capacities, starting in the eighteenth century and picking up pace in the second half of the nineteenth century.³⁸

By the end of the nineteenth century a backlash against nonwhite migrants had set in. In 1893, Charles H. Pearson – an Oxford-educated historian, King’s College professor, and recent emigrant to Australia – published National Life and Character: A Forecast, which prophesied the decline of western civilization in parallel to the advance of Asia, in particular China.³⁹ The work was inspired by two realizations. First, Pearson noted, “America was filling up,” making less plausible the use of British emigration as an escape valve for working class organization and fueling a tendency toward state socialism in the west.⁴⁰ Second, Pearson noted the breakthrough of nonwhite peoples onto the world stage. This was not merely hypothetical for Pearson, who witnessed the Chinese empire’s exchanges and demands regarding its subjects in Australia.⁴¹ Pearson contested prevalent conceptions of world history by acknowledging nonEuropean countries’ political agency, even as he reproduced a number of dictates of racial science, such as the inadaptability of the white race to tropical climates, the barbarism of certain peoples, and/or the inferiority of Indigenous Central Americans.⁴² It was the latter, among others, that he foresaw being ruled by the Chinese, an estimation informed by both the difficulty of white settlement beyond temperate zones, and the experience of Chinese settlement in other countries. He cited the Straits Settlements as an example of the spread of the Chinese, noting that they amounted to half of the population in Singapore and Perak (Malaysia), and that the Malay could not hold their own against them.⁴³

Moreover, Pearson continued, the Chinese were “tolerably certain” to gain the upper hand in the long run, given their superiority in numbers vis-à-vis the Malays (“sixteen to one”), and their superior industriousness and organization in precluding competition. If in fifty years China had become one of the great world powers, he inquires, would “the larger part of Borneo … still be a dependency of the Netherlands?” or would this island “have passed, by arms or diplomacy, into the possession of China?”⁴⁴ If the Chinese had not become a power in the Australian continent despite their growing numbers in Victoria, Pearson explains, it would only be because of the “vigilant opposition of the Australian democracies.”⁴⁵ Pearson saw whole areas of Central and South America “north of Uruguay” (where the aboriginal race – decimated by misrule and the half caste – “is fit for nothing but servitude”⁴⁶) as open to the control of “Chinamen” with a footing in Peru, or by “coolies … working profitably in British Guiana.”⁴⁷ Pearson thus concludes that a strong presumption exists for a people of such enormous natural resources as the Chinese, that they will eventually “overflow their borders, and spread over new territory, and submerge weaker races.”⁴⁸

Pearson’s book caused a stir in academia and political circles. Theodore Roosevelt reported directly to Pearson of the “great effect” his work was having in the United States, and Prime Minister Gladstone was reportedly “full of Pearson’s book.”⁴⁹ The National Character influenced nativist American tracts such as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), and The Rising Tide of Color (1920), by Lothrop Stoddard, who characterized Pearson’s book as “epoch-making.”⁵⁰ Pearson’s book transformed the victorious Teuton marching triumphant through world history into a narrative of the white man under siege, one that would justify a host of exclusionary immigration and domestic measures securing “white countries” around the globe.⁵¹

2.3 Empire, Settlement, and the People

Elite discourses of threat had a popular counterpart in the anti-immigrant claims by workers in the British colonies who refused to compete with “free” workers of color.⁵² Australia and most colonies in South Africa, for example, already mandated nonwhite guest workers to return at the end of their contracts and subjected them to tight restrictions while in the country. These racialized discourses were also prominent in the metropole, as the British general election of 1906 illustrates, with the historic defeat of the Tory government of Arthur Balfour in an election that revolved around the Second Boer War. In this election, the recruitment of Chinese indentured workers by mining companies in the war’s aftermath figured prominently, a phenomenon dubbed “Chinese slavery” by abolitionists and humanitarian activists.

The buildup to the Second Boer War mobilized British ethnic feeling both in the South African colonies and the metropole by highlighting the vulnerable position of British subjects in South Africa.⁵³ The diamond and gold wealth discovered in the 1860s and 1880s in Kimberley and the Witwatersrand had renewed Britain’s hopes of turning South Africa into a destination for English emigration. Such a project envisioned its gradual transformation into a unified self-governing colony in the style of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.⁵⁴ Through the promise of wealth through emigration-cum-settlement, political elites implicated the British working class in the war and the policies toward Chinese migration. The victory of the Liberals in the 1906 election and the historic Tory upset were based on a campaign that tied Toryism with a “South Africa for the Chinese” policy, a platform shared with the Labour Representation Committee (later the British Labour Party)⁵⁵ (Figure 2.1). In particular, British trade unionists relied on anti-slavery rhetoric to condemn the conditions of Chinese labor. Yet, in this condemnation, those enslaved received no sympathy, which instead went to “British and South African white workers,” whose rights to welfare and employment were threatened by Chinese competition.⁵⁶

Figure 2.1 Artist Unknown. Poster produced by the Liberal Party for the 1906 General Election campaign: “Ten years of Toryism.”

LSE Libraries COLL MISC 0519/98.

The tensions between race, mobility, capitalist profit, and the settler project came into relief in turn-of-the-century South Africa. The discovery of gold had turned this colony from a strategic port on the way to India into a crucial source of the precious metal needed to maintain the supremacy of British sterling.⁵⁷ But the strategic importance of gold, and the urgent need to secure the labor to extract it, had to be reconciled with the goals of white settlement, which entailed establishing British dominance in relation to Boer settlers and attending to the anti-Chinese demands of white workers in the metropole and the colony.

According to a report that circulated among British imperial bureaucrats, opposition to Chinese labor imports in the Transvaal was associated with the fear that they would “swarm over the whole country in enormous numbers, invading every trade and acquiring a permanent hold of the land.”⁵⁸ A communication from South African leaders to Viscount Alfred Milner (British governor of the colonies of Orange and Transvaal), including soon-to-be Prime Ministers Louis Botha and Jan Christian Smuts, put a popular spin on this objection. They claimed that introducing “Asiatic” labor without consent would be fatal and looked upon as “a public calamity of the first magnitude,” because it would “prevent this from ever becoming a white man’s country” and exclude the native population from participation in the development of industry.⁵⁹

Interestingly, those who favored the importation of Chinese labor to the Transvaal in no way departed from basic settler assumptions. For proponents of Chinese labor, the dignity and superior racial status of whites required the temporary importation of indentured laborers, who would be repatriated after fulfilling unskilled mining work or until native labor could be relied upon again.

The strenuous work that whites could not perform for either “climatic and physical reasons,” the simple taboo on performing demeaning work, or the fact that their wages made their employment in unskilled positions unprofitable, was required to return the mining industry to health and fuel economic activity that would benefit white workers.⁶⁰ Thus, the settler logic relegated African natives to physically intense jobs without which gold extraction could not be made profitable; for this, they relied on taxes that pushed natives into selling their labor and, failing this, enlisted Chinese indentured migrants to be returned at the expiry of their contracts. White settler jobs were thus cordoned off, just as the land they settled was protected by the creation of native reserves, pass laws, and ordinances that separated African, Indian, and Chinese laborers from whites’ places of residence. Indentured work “failed” only when nonwhite migrants remained in the territory and accessed “certain classes of white trades” and political rights, as happened in Natal.⁶¹ The established division of labor, assigning “brain work” to whites and “brawn and spade work” to “black or some coloured race,” reinforced racial theories that established the superior status of the white race over all others, and required a wage to match “the higher scale of civilization and standard of living” that laboring Englishmen, however despised at home, achieved by merely landing in South Africa.⁶² Restrictions applied to nonwhite arrivals and nonwhite residents curtailed this same upward mobility and political enfranchisement for everyone else. The connection between wage and stage of civilization was by no means a new or isolated claim; Marx himself casually tied together the “necessary requirements” of workers with the level of civilization in his discussion of the sale and purchase of labor power.⁶³ This feature of labor power – which sets it apart from other commodities – is what Marx calls the “historical and moral element” in the determination of its value,⁶⁴ and reappears racialized in the debates reproduced here to justify the racialized threat that nonwhite arrivals posed to white settlers-qua-workers. This metamorphosis of the “historical and moral” into the racial is clear in how white workers could leave behind their wretched conditions in Europe, while racialized immigrants remained tethered to their supposedly inferior “scale of civilization” indefinitely. The grounds of this dispute were, in turn, the land dispossession of Indigenous peoples, whose “civilization” made them unfit to control land, given their inability to work it in the destructively productive manner sanctioned as proper by European modernity.

The division of labor which required the physical exploitation of Black and brown workers was entwined with the production of racial difference and the protection of white settlers, who appropriated the most valuable jobs in the mining industry, in addition to the most valuable land. But the exclusionary impetus among white workers had to be modulated by the interest of British capital, which depended on South African mining, leading a member of Parliament to claim that taking away Chinese labor from the Rand gold mines would be “an act of treachery to the Empire itself.”⁶⁵ Thus, the racist construction of the Chinese as ready for harsh and poorly paid labor served to prop up South African mining cheaply after the war, a position solidified by the popular mobilization of white workers against them; this mobilization failed to exclude them altogether, but demanded and embraced measures to enforce these workers’ precarious, exploitable position and their residential and labor segregation.

A similar privileging of white workers’ well-being and an implicit settler orientation characterizes the writings on Chinese emigration by prominent British labor leader and intellectual Henry Mayers Hyndman, credited with building “what there was of a Marxist movement” in England, including founding and dominating the first 1880s Marxist organization (the Social Democratic Federation), the forerunner of the Communist Party.⁶⁶ In his volume The Awakening of Asia, Hyndman devotes a full chapter to the question of Chinese emigration. He acknowledges the racial motivations of anti-Asian feeling in the United States and Australia, but considers wage competition an acceptable ground for restricting their settlement in countries “already partially peopled, not by Malays or other Asiatics, but by men of European Race.”⁶⁷ This is because he thinks that it is beyond dispute that “under capitalism, competitive wagedom and production for profit, the European and American workers cannot hold their own against the Mongolian toilers.”⁶⁸ Hyndman explains that the transition toward the “general organisation of industry upon the basis of co-operation instead of competition” cannot advance fast enough to handle the problem of Asian labor competition with white workers before “it is forced upon the world on a vast scale.”⁶⁹

Hyndman was frustrated with discussions of Chinese migration in international socialist fora and in Special Commissions on which he served. Hyndman thought the majority exhibited great ignorance about the matter and were not inclined to “look facts in the face” when they conflicted with “universal humanitarian theories,” making the reports presented practically valueless. The facts, according to Hyndman, were that European workers were not yet competent to handle “the whole of this immigration problem” and that American and Australasian workers were, mostly, bitterly prejudiced.⁷⁰

Thus, Hyndman acknowledges and implicitly condemns racial prejudice (with some equivocation on whether it is justified against the Chinese rather than the civilized Japanese).⁷¹ However, he demands that the facts of Asian superior toil and the difficulty of addressing the competition for labor in a society that falls short of cooperativism take precedence over universal principles. In fact, he does not even specify these universal principles, socialist or otherwise. Hence, as in the South African case, the discussion is centered on the grievances that befall white workers as a consequence of Asian labor, rather than on those that affect Asian workers, including the unpacking of assumptions regarding their work ethics, surely due to vulnerable legal status, discrimination, and exploitation rather than a natural propensity toward toilsome work.⁷²

The world historical conceptions of Asian threat, the Chinese slavery debate, and white labor’s discourse about nonwhite workers reveal that race, space, and capital figured prominently in turn-of-the-century global discourse. This discourse was clearly imperial, but it was also popular, because it reached and enlisted the white working class throughout the United States, England, and white settler colonies, and became part of their emancipatory imagination, binding them together “into an imperial working class.”⁷³ This transnational working class linked British trade unionists and socialists with white workers in South Africa and “crisscrossed the western U.S.-Canadian frontiers to engage in riots, lobby for immigration restriction, and establish anti-Asiatic organizations,” animated by a broader pattern of racialization drawing from linkages between racist proletarian movements in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the British metropole.⁷⁴ Labor organizers echoed the language of competition that displaced the injustice of capitalist arrangements and instead centered their critique on capitalists’ recruitment of Chinese labor. This was expressed crisply by British Columbian M. A. Beach, who, speaking at the Washington Federation of Labor gathering in the United States, celebrated working class successes, such as increasing the Chinese head tax from $50 and $500, but encouraged his comrades not to rest until “we get total prohibition of the yellow evil.”⁷⁵

While the multiple acts restricting and ultimately banning Asian migration to the United States that emerged in this political climate are relatively well known, the Canadian efforts at restricting Indian migration and taxing Chinese entrants are less so. Yet even if during this period their common belonging to the British Empire prevented an outright ban, Canada creatively restricted Indian migration.⁷⁶ Debates between 1906 and 1915 culminated in the creation of a passport system for the British empire and made embarking on a journey in any British India port without a such a document a crime, breaking with the principle of free movement and equal subjecthood within the empire.⁷⁷ Thus, settler and former settler colonies were of one mind with US eugenicist Stoddard, who remarked that what concerned the Japanese in California also held “for all types of Asiatic [elsewhere in] our Union, in Canada, in Australia, in South Africa and in every other region of white settlement where the man of color attempts to penetrate.” This, “a true world-problem,” he argued, “must be considered in this broad way.”⁷⁸

The language of self-government and democracy figured prominently as the British bureaucracy coordinated and made sense of the demand for immigration restrictions within the empire. In a letter to the secretary of state for the colonies, responding to a complaint by Sikh groups about restrictions on entry to Western Australia and curtailed access to work permits, the governor of that colony argued that, regardless of the views of the government, it could not “retain its position in this Democratic Country, and advocate an equality of rights to coloured people.”⁷⁹ The “democratic” conception of rule is clearly distinguished here from a substantive commitment to equality. The letter then states that Western Australian voters do not take into consideration “what the obligations of the Mother Country may be to the Indian Subjects,” but “the competition of a Race or Races who can and will, owing to their different conditions of living and frugality, undersell them in production and labor.”⁸⁰ The latter argument connects the popular will to the well-being of white workers, who are entitled to demand that the polity excludes those who are exploited, for they offer a competition that less “frugal” workers cannot beat. As with other instances of narratives of threat, these claims run counter to the fact that the measures defended – like banning nonwhites from certain trades – in fact produced the frugal workers that would then be deemed threatening.

However, the opposition between the self-governing colonies and the imperial government’s “obligation” to protect Indian subjects is not so pronounced as the exchange suggests. In a later exchange regarding the Union of South Africa, the Earl of Crewe (secretary of state for India) states the point to Viscount Gladstone (governor of the General Union of South Africa) by acknowledging that while His Majesty’s Government raises strong objections to “the prescription … of the inhabitants of one part of the Empire by another,” it also fully recognizes “the right of a self-governing community such as the Union to choose the elements of which it shall be constituted.” He concludes by noting that it is not their desire to press the government to admit immigrants whom the people of South Africa are resolved to exclude.⁸¹ Here, the British crown relies confidently on the language of constitution of a people as having to do with its (racial) “elements” and acknowledges this as a legitimate feature of white self-governing polities, even though it contradicts the formal principle of equal subjecthood.

In these debates, which are formally concerned with immigration, the distinctions cited in favor of exclusion by intellectuals, labor, and the imperial bureaucracy were strictly about race, rather than foreignness. Claims by labor groups followed not from longstanding membership in the polity but from whiteness. These claims, moreover, were made in dialogue or solidarity with white working classes in other colonies and the metropole, who saw emigration and settlement as a path to upward mobility. Understandably, then, restrictions on Asian migration co-existed with incentives and desires to foster European white migration (Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 N.H. Hawkins’ cartoon in the Saturday Sunset, August 24, 1907: “The same act which excludes orientals should open the portals of British Columbia to white immigration.”

Vancouver Public Library, Special Collections, VPL 39046.

The salience of race, rather than membership, in motivating labor hostility was evident in the United States, where racial animosity also pitted white workers against Mexican-American and Black workers who were citizens. Du Bois’s critique of Democrats in Reconstruction reflects this when he notes that California and Washington state opposed the franchise of Black, Indian, and Chinese groups in 1868.⁸² Moreover, immigrants from Mexico, while foreign, were exempted from the quotas established by the anti-Asian laws in order to provide the labor needed after the ban on Asian migration led to a shortfall.⁸³ Despite this exemption, this group was the subject of widespread racism and targeted by border policing and other forms of surveillance in ways that their foreign white counterparts were not.⁸⁴

It follows that the control of nonwhite immigration was simply one among many mechanisms of labor regulation and dispossession of racialized others that privileged the well-being of white groups and their access to land. In the countries under study, land dispossession and/or racial labor regulation targeted African natives in South African colonies, Indians in Natal, Indigenous, Black, and Mexican-American groups in the United States, and Indigenous groups in Australia and New Zealand, all groups whose subjection could not be ensured through migration control. These internal racial exclusions were also supported by white groups, and the reasons for the avowedly threatening character of these racialized groups were continuous with those to restrict migration. A racial capitalism approach, which takes the differential and more intense exploitation of racial others as typical of capitalist forms of reproduction through the exaggeration and racialization of difference,⁸⁵ clarifies that migration control constitutes no realm of its own but a racial technology akin to many others.

Not only was race the overarching axis of exclusion across many domains, but the racialized discourses were also continuous throughout imperial republics, self-governing units, and the British metropole and sought to order all races, not just Indians and Chinese. Indeed, much of the debate on the threat of Asian migration in the settler world was inspired by the historiography of the “failed experiment” with racial equality in the post–Civil War United States.⁸⁶ This question also figured in the discussions about white emigration from Britain, leading Wakefield to judge British emigration an incalculable gain for Americans, who were “cursed with slavery.”⁸⁷ This “curse” was also discussed in US labor circles. Samuel Gompers, the English-born US union leader and founder of the American Federation of Labor, argued that the association of manual labor with “those who were formerly slaves,” who were placed below white workers in terms of worth and dignity, operated against efforts “to secure social justice” by law or labor organizing.⁸⁸ David Roediger captures this dynamic when he identifies whiteness as the identity that allowed US white workers to respond to fears of dependency on wage labor and to the discipline of capitalist wage work, but I show that these dynamics are neither strictly national nor limited to anti-black racism.⁸⁹ In fact, Gompers moves on to discuss labor competition in relation to the annexation of the Philippines, which would have “the Chinese, the Negritos and the Malays coming to our country,” or “Chinese coolies” from the Philippines swarming “the United States engulfing our people and our civilization.”⁹⁰

In sum, the paths carved by mobile colonial subjects, and the popular, discursive, and administrative justifications for restricting nonwhite migrants fueled a conception of proper global mobility, newly regulated by self-governing colonies and sovereign states that absorbed rather than abandoned imperial logics of mobility and white settlement. The very view of settler colonies as more advanced democratically and socially progressive coexisted without contradiction with their presumed right to govern inferior others, a position publicly endorsed by Roosevelt, Alfred Deakin, and many others.⁹¹ In this sense, the control of nonwhite migration was at once imperial, colonial, and popular, in that it presumed a collective agreement to displace Indigenous peoples and populate these areas with white European subjects while conscripting nonwhite labor for strenuous jobs, or excluding them altogether when they attempted to enter the territory.⁹² Racial discourses of labor competition grounded the popular justification for exclusion and the performance of settler self-government that so enthused nineteenth-century liberals.⁹³ Throughout the settler world, the regulation of mobility and establishment of sovereign border controls was less about foreignness and more about finding institutional proxies through which to racially shape population inflows and enforce a profitably precarious status for racialized others, while protecting the well-being of white subjects in “white countries.”

In this sense, the “present everydayness” character of settler colonialism revealed itself as not only the continued occupation of Indigenous land and expansion of its oppressive logics to other subaltern subjects that Chikasaw scholar Jodi Byrd recovers,⁹⁴ but also the continued recruitment of settler subjects (European migrants) into the project. Following Byrd’s warning about how struggles for hegemony within and outside institutions may make us lose sight of underlying structures of settler colonialism,⁹⁵ my focus is not on the exclusion of racialized others from a normalized settler-citizen status, but on how white subjects arriving from Europe enthusiastically joined the settler project and called it democracy. These enthusiastic joiners solidified the territorial character of settler dominions, cordoned off nonwhites from the area through land dispossession, and sustained white life through the forced labor of workers of color, facilitated through the strategic establishment of different governmental technologies that produced subjection and vulnerability.

Overlaying and hiding this structure, discourses and actions by the white working class successfully posited a “people” that encompassed foreign and native whites and enacted a particular shape and content of popular sovereignty, while constituting their demands as “the people’s will.”⁹⁶ Although the democratic legitimacy of such a declaration is dubious, it is nonetheless a popular claim to authority, an attempt at “racialized people making” that provided closure in moments when the boundaries of the polity were contested.⁹⁷

The instance of people-making depicted in this chapter, however, indexes the notion of popular sovereignty in two further ways. First, it highlights the transnational affinities of movements that enlisted states as protectors of white well-being – an early instance of “think global, act local.” Second, it illustrates that popular sovereignty in self-governing white spaces was entangled with empire, in the sense that it continued the imperial mode of governance of labor mobility, this time through immigration regulations that protected and solidified settler colonialism. This brand of popular sovereignty relied on selective modes of sharing and concentrating power, and was built on differentiation and selective inclusion and exclusion in modes typical of empire and its racial capitalist mode of extraction.⁹⁸ In this sense, popular movements demanding enfranchisement in the early twentieth century should be seen less as self-determining units differentiating themselves against other units than as processes of decentralization of imperial governance through its absorption by settler states. The same can be said of the immigration regimes that ensued from these emancipatory struggles, which were imperial institutions through and through, and whose goal was to exclude racialized others.

In this equation, people-making and critique of white workers’ exploitation, on the one hand, and the element of racism, on the other, were inextricably entangled.⁹⁹ This undermined the democratizing and anticapitalist credentials of this activism. Yet it would be incorrect to consider the demands of white labor as necessarily contradicting the priorities of imperial labor control, because the differential commodification of labor needed not erode the standing of privileged wage labor and may have even safeguarded the well-being of this group.¹⁰⁰ Tragically, this development displaced more structural challenges to capitalism and its reliance on racially gradated regimes of exploitation.

2.4 Critical Theory, Migration, and the Question of Empire

The proposed account suggests that imperial mobility was organized to differentially govern subjects in order to create a racially exclusive people that relegated other groups to the margins, thus facilitating more intensive accumulation, which enabled the expansion of well-being among white groups. In contemporary political theory, mobility is theorized under the category of “immigration,” which is studied either as a realm of its own by political philosophers or in an ad-hoc manner prompted by worrying political developments by critical theorists. In the former case, which I analyze at greater length elsewhere,¹⁰¹ migrants are taken to be outsiders whose treatment ought to be assessed via a variety of normative principles, including territorial rights, freedom of movement, or national culture. But in considering immigration control a legitimate attribute of (popular) sovereignty or contesting this legitimacy, these accounts fall for the disappearing act performed by the transfer of the functions of imperial labor control to white, self-governing, settler colonial states. As such, they debate imperial remnants that racially segregate and control labor as an ahistorical realm that we can judge via ethical principles while avoiding engaging with its genealogy. In the latter case, migration has been addressed by those interested in the growth of support for right wing, xenophobic leaders and the democratic erosion that sometimes accompanies this trend. Yet critical theorists seldom make migration itself a topic worth theorizing on its own, assuming instead that it is either one of the “flows” characteristic of globalization, or the target of anxiety provoked by the precarization of increasing portions of the white working class.

Wendy Brown, for example, takes “immigrant flows” alongside capital flows, digital networks, and supply chains as evidence that “the world has invaded the nation,” weakened its borders, and transformed the existential conditions of populations.¹⁰² Brown ties white men’s affirmation of supremacy and entitlement to the threat that neoliberalism poses to their status, and their racialized reaction to the fact that they hold “politicians … responsible for allowing [new immigrants] into the West.”¹⁰³ This framework superimposes “immigration as source of anxiety” over the complex role of mobility and migration in the founding of western democracies. From European migration populating settler colonies and easing excess labor problems in the metropoles to the Indian and Chinese indentured migration that facilitated continued labor control post-abolition and emancipation described in this chapter,¹⁰⁴ and the Mexican labor that made up for the eventual exclusion of Chinese and Indian labor, analyzed in the next chapter, migration appears as a world historical force that allows for the negotiation of shifting regimes of domination and capitalist accumulation on a world scale. Naturally, the salience of migration is intensified in moments of crisis, but the phenomenon itself is nested in and indicative of imperial labor control, which is missed when it is theorized simply as an external flow associated with globalization and neoliberalism. In this sense, migration control was and remains an essential governmental tool to racially filter foreigners and locate them on distinct paths in terms of access to land, political enfranchisement, and labor conditions vis-à-vis privileged whites. This racial filtering operates in tandem with historical declarations of the people that found and refound the settler polity. This explains its salience as a realm of governance when white status achieved through the historical marginalization, exclusion, and expropriation of nonwhite workers is in crisis. Without this background, the naming of the “backlash” against migrants prompted by neoliberalism simply begs the question of why this group is being targeted and problematically cast migrants as an external – rather than the group with and against whom white polities were founded. As this chapter shows, migration control functioned historically and still functions continuously with other racial capitalist arrangements domestically and globally, which are being reshaped by neoliberalism, rather than being outcomes brought about by this economic logic. In other words, this chapter’s proposed conceptualization of migration and its control transforms immigration from an external flow that prompts the authoritarian backlash into an imperial field whose evolution grounded and shaped the western polities that today reward anti-immigrant political agendas. This means that the xenophobic agendas that garner support at the time of writing are not an “inversion of values … [that closes] out three centuries of modern experiments with democracy,”¹⁰⁵ but a component part of how democratic regimes in the west took shape, and a core marker of the historically continuous racial exclusions of these polities.¹⁰⁶

Another displacement of the question of racial subjection generally and migration in particular is at work in Nancy Fraser’s comprehensive appraisal of capitalist crisis. Migrants appear in three instances in Fraser’s system: as the group of women of color who take up care work when state-managed capitalism is dismantled in the west; as part of the group of workers that are expropriated rather than exploited by capitalism historically; and – similarly to Brown – as the group that is targeted by white voters in their backlash against neoliberalism. To start with the third aspect, Fraser suggests that the fear of immigrants could be expressing the understandable anxiety “that things are out of control.”¹⁰⁷ This statement begs the question of why is it that the feeling “that things are out of control” does not result in solidarity with migrants, who, after all, come from countries where things have been “out of control” more regularly and for longer periods of time.¹⁰⁸ Fraser asserts further that disgruntled voters with real grievances react with racial hostility because they lack access to left-wing alternatives that can provide anticapitalist and anti-imperialist diagnoses of the crisis.¹⁰⁹ This problem, she adds, is compounded by the cooptation by neoliberalism of certain forces of emancipation, further reducing their appeal among industrial workers and rural communities.¹¹⁰ What this account leaves out is that, as this chapter reconstructs, socialist and social democratic narratives were historically connected not only to capitalism, but also to imperial narratives of racial hierarchy and entitlement to rule, making contemporary reactions not a misunderstanding of emancipation, but the channeling of particular racialized threads of popular narratives that still hold currency and emotional appeal in Europe and the white settler world today.

In other words, the problem of the left is not just its cooptation by neoliberalism, but its equally worrying internalization of the racialized logics that characterize capitalism. Hillary Clinton’s advice to European leaders that they should get a handle on migration, because it “lit the flame” of right-wing populism, falls into this problem.¹¹¹ This line echoes a generation of left-wing politicians in Germany, France, and England, including Jeremy Corbyn, Mette Frederiksen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Sahra Wagenknecht, who avoid, equivocate, or are skeptical about migration while embracing left-wing social policy.¹¹² This vision protects domestic white labor while evading addressing western global corporate practices that today, as in the past, benefit from the manageability of labor, including its global segregation and the vulnerability induced by tough migration policies. As in the past, too, this strategy deflects the transnational modes of imperial extraction operating now through neoliberalism that shelters western workers through the exclusion of migrants and mild wealth socialization. These measures are misguided even when judged by the goal of protecting the domestic working class, because privileging domestic struggles allows capitalist elites freer play worldwide, strengthening their power at home.¹¹³ Most importantly, it displaces from left-wing agendas the politicization of business elites’ responsibility in global and domestic oppression, and the distinct but entangled conditions of workers around the world.

Thus, the contemporary reaction against migrant and refugee flows on the right and left, which perceive them, respectively, as unduly trespassing borders or as competing for social gains that rightfully belong to the native working class, needs to be understood in the context of the proposed genealogy of the imperial and popular roots of immigration control, that is, how white collectives aimed to appropriate territory and wealth while reaping the benefits of racial regimes of exploitation. The fact that the share of the wealth being distributed at the time of writing is increasingly paltry even in wealthy countries likely increases possessive anxieties among downwardly mobile white groups, who, like a century ago, tragically direct their anger to precarious nonwhite workers and migrants. This account also offers lessons for the US left, which does not explicitly oppose immigration but avoids contesting the right’s political economy framing of immigration as an economic threat. Here, the neoliberal cooptation of the left is operative because it prevents it from properly articulating and contesting capitalist labor control as implemented via the contemporary immigration regime of surveilled undocumented labor, thus leaving it to focus on humanitarianism and immigrant rights discursively, while departing only marginally from the right-wing focus on the militarized surveillance of borders and interior control in practice.¹¹⁴

Fraser goes some way toward addressing this point in her account of capitalism by including immigrants in the group of workers subject to “expropriation,” that is, accumulation by other means that dispenses with contractual relations of wage labor to instead confiscate capacities and resources into capital’s self-expansion in violent ways or through veiled means of commerce and debt.¹¹⁵ Here expropriated labor is facilitated by a political order that denies certain subjects the status of free citizens, whose subjection is a condition of possibility for the freedom of merely exploited workers. This chapter – and the book as a whole – goes further by showing both the complexities of the political order that facilitates the co-existence of diverse forms of subjection within expropriation, and the intimate connection between white democratic politics and the creation of these realms, which expropriation as a blanket term falls short of capturing. Rather than blanket expropriation, then, capitalism depends on a heterogeneous and dynamic field of action sustained by a popularly supported racial hierarchy that targets different racial groups with varied institutional tools and reacts to resistance and emancipation efforts by re-arranging these conditions in order to maintain workers’ docility.

To understand these entangled conditions, the first part of the book theorized the entanglements between racial capitalism, popular sovereignty, and empire. The second part, to which I now turn, attends to social reproduction and nature, realms that constitute two of Fraser’s hidden abodes, but whose emergence from the combination of racial capitalist priorities, technological developments, and “democratic” moments of enfranchisement in wealthy countries remains undertheorized. Social reproduction is also the realm in which Fraser addresses migration as a fix to the capitalist crisis of social reproduction. But the political aspects and historical pedigree of this fix remain undertheorized. It remains unsaid how longstanding democratic and family formations enacted and policed via collective rule entail ruling over racialized others whose labor and expropriated land provide the rulers’ conditions of possibility. In this vein, Chapter 3 theorizes the racial dynamics of social reproduction. In particular, it shows that diverse institutional formations such as conquest, guest work, and irregular migration, traditionally studied as separate phenomena, served, throughout history, the very same purpose of securing strenuous bodily work from Mexico at minimal cost. These formations both preceded and were intensified when the supply of Asian labor ended with the 1924 US immigration quota law and were/are facilitated by the unequal relation between the United States and Mexico. Chapter 4 extends this analysis to consider how the forced conscription of racialized labor occurs in tandem with the exploitation of nature, with both manual labor and nature being devalued through ideologies of techno-racism that disavow privileged subjects’ dependence on this couplet.