Frederick Cooper. Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives.

Abstract

Frederick Cooper’s sophisticated, stimulating, and accessible new book, Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives, presents an eminently historical conceptualization of citizenship. Diverging from theorists in other disciplines, Cooper declines to delineate sharply between citizenship and subjectship, jus soli and jus sanguinis, civic and ethnic citizenship, or thick and thin citizenship. Instead, he conceives of citizenship as a framework within which individuals make claims upon states. Cooper is keenly attuned to inequality and difference, terms he includes in his title, but he does not think they are fundamentally incompatible with citizenship. For him, citizenship is a framework, not an ideal. The bulk of Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference explores how state calculations and popular demands have configured citizenship in different historical contexts. The book encompasses a range of examples yet is masterfully concise, belying its origins as a series of lectures. Cooper capitalizes on his own research on French Africa and his collaborations with Jane Burbank on empire, while also covering states from the Ottoman Empire to postcolonial India, generously citing other scholars along the way.