The Re-Appearance of Race and Ethnicity

Abstract

lessons learned from postcolonial studies’’ (p. 252). Sociology and Empire should be seen as an important intervention in a longstanding trend whereby sociologists have charted a new course for the future by rewriting the history of the past. As Gurminder Bhambra pointed out in her reflection on ‘‘The Possibilities of, and for, Global Sociology,’’ our only hope of being able to ‘‘understand and address the necessarily postcolonial (and decolonial) present of ‘global sociology’’’ lies in ‘‘reconstruct[ing] backwards’’ our ‘‘historical understandings of modernity and the emergence of sociology’’ (Bhambra 2013:296–297). For at least two decades sociologists have worried about their declining prestige in the academic marketplace. The questions that sociologists have been pondering relating to their ‘‘value’’ in the marketplace have now hit the social sciences and the humanities as a whole. At the same time, the world has grown ever more complex and interdependent and politicians and lay people alike ponder everything from terrorism to ‘‘post-racialism.’’ A century ago sociology emerged in the context of the ‘‘political difficulties’’ and contradictions created by the co-existence of imperialism and liberalism (Connell 1997:1530). Sociology’s theories and models of the world ‘‘offered a resolution’’ (ibid.). Today we find ourselves in a similar position. Sociology stands poised, once again, to provide a level of analysis desperately needed by policymakers and the educated public. As Steinmetz points out in his preface, ‘‘today we are confronting two crises that are often experienced as separate but are actually interwoven: ‘the crisis of the universities’ and the ‘crisis of empire’’’ (p. xiii). With the benefit of hindsight, such as provided by Parts I and III of Sociology and Empire, we can avoid making the mistakes we did in the past. The questions, problems, and theories for understanding the world today, such as provided in Part II, open up the exciting possibility that we can chart a different course for the future.