Kris Manjapra. Colonialism in Global Perspective.

Abstract

Kris Manjapra’s Colonialism in Global Perspective is a book for the current moment, linking today’s social justice discussions to a five-hundred-plus-year history. The book integrates the major themes of colonial and postcolonial historical scholarship into a compelling, approachable global narrative suitable for introductory undergraduate courses. Manjapra argues that global history since the fifteenth century is best understood as the development of what he calls “new colonialism,” which he defines as “the form of colonialism emerging in and through racial capitalism” (7). Across the globe, “colonizers attempted to commodify, extract, and appropriate land and labor surplus from differentially racialized groups” (7). Racial capitalism was the “animating spirit” of colonialism (8). Manjapra tells the reader that the “basic drives” of the new colonialism are capitalist war, “the violent drive to subject peoples … to the accumulationist urges of dominant groups”; racializing rule, “the drive to impose the dominator’s order on the rebellious and unruly domain of colonized social and ecological life”; moral deception, “the psychological impulse of colonizers to disguise and disavow their warring acts and legacies”; and transformative resistance, “the inherent impulse of contradiction and transformation that operates from within system of racial capitalist oppression” (9). The last of these is an important part of the book, as Manjapra argues that resistance to colonialism has been as central to structuring the world as the intents and actions of colonizers. He demonstrates this with numerous photographs, primarily of artistic or practical objects created by people struggling under colonial domination. These illustrations, and his analysis of them, are a valuable teaching tool, introducing method for understanding resistance to colonialism. The argument about the constitutive role of resistance is less convincing. Manjapra details the ways that the first three basic drives produced structures of oppression and, although we see that they never unfolded without resistance, we do not see clearly how that resistance forced changes in the structure of the new colonialism.