Connected Sociologies

Front matter

THEORY FOR A GLOBAL AGE

Gurminder K. Bhambra

THEORY FOR A GLOBAL AGE

Part 1 Sociological Theory and Historical Sociology 1 Modernization Theory, Underdevelopment and Multiple Modernities

Part 2 Social Sciences and Questions of Epistemology 3 Opening the Social Sciences to Cosmopolitanism? 4 Global Sociology: Indigenous, Subversive, Autonomous?

Part 3 Connected Sociologies 6 Postcolonial and Decolonial Reconstructions 7 Sociology for an ‘Always-Already’ Global Age

Bibliography Index viii

Series Foreword

As the first volume in this series, Gurminder K. Bhambra’s Connected Sociologies bears a special responsibility in providing the intellectual compass for the series as a whole. She does this in a challenging and engaging way. Her starting point is that, despite its ambitions, sociology has remained a fragmented discipline. She sees comparative and historical sociology, and more recent attempts to adumbrate a global sociology, as partial and incomplete. Despite meetings of the International Sociological Association in India, Mexico and South Africa and notwithstanding the growth of the discipline all over the world, there is still a sense in which western sociology has remained hegemonic and continues to be indifferent to dissident and peripheral voices. Sociologists from the rest of the world are simply not connecting with colleagues in the west as equal epistemic communities.

Bhambra makes a convincing case that one root of this problem lies in the abject failure of sociology and anthropology to engage seriously with each other. As she affirms, it is no longer possible to separate out the subject domains of these two cognate disciplines. Indeed, their initial separation is illustrative of the problem. If the very heart of modernity was mercantile capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, to side-line empire from the subject of sociology was a significant and far-reaching historical distortion. Such a distortion was later magnified, so I understand her argument, in Marx’s notion of successive modes of production, by Rostow’s ‘stages theory, and in the dominant versions of ‘civilizational analysis. The normative direction of movement was nearly always from them (the peripheral, marginal, backward, primitive, poor, underdeveloped) to us (enjoying the opposite conditions).

For Bhambra, the ‘us’ is Europe or Europe transplanted to the USA, and even when universal values and the cosmopolitan spirit are evoked, the ‘us’ remains largely inviolate. In this respect it is notable

Series Foreword ix that Habermas and Beck find their embryonic cosmopolitanism in the European Union. This is self-limiting in Bhambras view and, incidentally, also rather over-optimistic in the light of the rabid forms of nationalism rearing their ugly heads in so many European countries. She accepts that Wallerstein (in his world system and other writings) and Mann (in his ambitious extension of Weber) made major attempts to define a globally-based sociology, but neither escapes Bhambra's critique that they are working from the inner ring to the outer circle and using a method (delineating ideal-types) which, she argues, is unsatisfactory.

What then is Gurminder K. Bhambras way forward? Here I must encourage you to read the full argument for I can only summarize. She advocates a pluralism of voices, but is clear that allowing alternative voices alone is insufficient if that results merely in cacophony or a more subtle form of hegemonic tolerance. By contrast, relativism and enhanced boundary control lead merely to isolation from the mainstream. The different voices have, in short, to connect — to relate, to overlap, perhaps partially to converge, certainly to learn from each other in an open and respectful way. We should be grateful to her in starting us on this journey of mutual discovery.

Robin Cohen University of Oxford

Preface and Acknowledgements

This book is an attempt to make good on questions raised by my father, questions that others with my social and cultural background may recognize from their own diasporic experiences. My father was a man who, enjoying the freedoms that independence from colonial rule brought, journeyed across India by train reading newspapers, consuming literature, talking to the peoples he encountered and arguing with them. Arguing, always arguing, against those who lamented the departure of the British, against those who expressed forms of dependency, whether intellectual or other, against those who saw the British Empire as a force for good in the world. Instead, he spoke to them about exploitation, about appropriation, about dispossession, and about the profound injustices and injuries of over two centuries of colonization. Much later he would question my own bland assertions drawn from a standard British schooling that drew attention to the horrors of Stalinism, but had nothing to say about the genocides of native peoples in the lands that came to be known as the Americas, as New Zealand, as Australia and as South Africa. He questioned the assertion that there was no democracy in countries such as Cuba by asking what I knew of the problems that any democracy might face that challenged Western hegemony. What did I know of the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende, of the murder of Lumumba, of countless other instances by way of which the Third World project was undermined? In his refusal to accept as truth the stated truths of the colonizer, he was the first to teach me to question, to ask ‘is that really so?

Writing this book has coincided with the systematic dismantling of public higher education in England where the very processes of knowledge production are also at stake. The mass, or public, university did not only open its doors to a more diverse demographic - that is, to women, the working-classes, black and minority ethnic people - but

Preface and Acknowledgements xi there was also an opening up of the curriculum and what (and whose) knowledge was validated. It is no accident that the government that is closing down the spaces for public higher education is also the government that wants the history curriculum for schools, for example, to be organized around a narrow interpretation of Our Island Story; a history book for children written by Henrietta Marshall in 1905 where British history was understood only in terms of the events that took place within the territorial bounds of the nation. What this misses, however, is that from its very inception as a nation, Britain has also been imperial and therefore its history has always been more extensive than the narrow parochialism now being promoted. How we represent the past is central to the politics of the present and it should be no surprise, then, that with the promotion of narrow and exclusive histories come narrow-minded policies in their wake - the ‘Go Home’ campaign in the summer of 2013 is one such example. Defending the public university is about defending the processes of democratization that have begun to open up knowledge production for all - knowledge is power, and if we don't reverse these current changes, we are facing a future in which power will, more explicitly, be knowledge.

This book is written in the hope that a more adequate address of our past within sociological considerations of the present will enable the opening up of different, and better, futures.

My deepest thanks go to those with whom I share the intellectual and political project to which this book is a contribution. While we have different responses and arguments, the questions we are seeking to explore provide a common ground for intellectual engagement and scholarship. For being part of this conversation and for all that you contribute to the making possible of other worlds, I would like to thank Ipek Demir, Peo Hansen, John Holmwood, Stefan Jonsson, Vicky Margree, Lucy Mayblin, John Narayan and Robbie Shilliam. I would also like to thank Vicky Margree and Robbie Shilliam for providing constructive comments on various chapters and Alice Mah and John Holmwood who provided excellent feedback across the whole book.

John, in particular, read this manuscript many more times than any xii Preface and Acknowledgements individual should have to and it is far better as a consequence of his engagement than it otherwise would have been.

This book has been ‘in process’ for a number of years and I thank, in particular, my publishers, Bloomsbury Academic, for their patience. Emily Drewe initially approached me with a request to write a book and somehow I found myself having agreed not only to write a book, but also to edit a series. Caroline Wintersgill took over from Emily and has been consistently supportive and immensely helpful across both my roles, as editor and author — I thank them both for their professionalism and collegiality. The University of Warwick has provided an intellectual home during the process of writing and I thank my colleagues in Sociology, History, Politics and Classics for their interdisciplinary commitments and scholarly engagements that have enabled the space for the articulation of the arguments made here. I would like to acknowledge the interactions, conversations and debates with the many Warwick students who have taken my modules on Global Historical Sociology, Global Sociology, Sociology and Postcolonialism, and Global Modernities, where various arguments made within the book were first tried out.

I have also presented these arguments at a number of conferences and seminars and I thank the organizers for the invitations that enabled me to discuss these issues with diverse audiences: Engin Isin, Deorientalizing Citizenship? Oecumene: Citizenship After Orientalism, Open University; Sandra Ponzanesi, Postcolonial Europe Network, Utrecht University; Rainer Forst, Philosophy and Social Science conference, Prague; Alf Nilsen, Bergen University; Esperança Bielsa, Symposium on Cosmopolitan Connections, Faculty of Philosophy, Universitat de Barcelona; Stefan Jonsson, Austere Histories of Europe Symposium, Linkóping University, Norrkóping; Zdenek Kavan, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex; Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vázquez, Decolonial summer school, Roosevelt Academy and Utrecht University; Wiebke Keim, International Conference on Circulating Social Science Knowledge, Institute of Sociology, University of Freiburg; Rodrigo Cordero, Faculty of Social Sciences and History,

Preface and Acknowledgements xiii

Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago; Mauro di Meglio, University LOrientale, Naples; Neera Chandhoke, Developing Countries Research Centre, University of Delhi. During 2013, I was a visiting academic, at the invitation of Gunlóg Fur, at the Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies Centre, Linnaeus University, Växjö and, at the invitation of Marcelo Rosa, at the Department of Sociology, University of Brasilia. I would like to thank them both for enabling me to spend time at their institutions and for the thoughtful and productive interactions with colleagues in both places.

Much as I see scholarship as a collective project and should like to share any responsibilities for errors and weaknesses the book might contain, they are, of course, my own.

Introduction

Connected Sociologies is about the disciplinary formation of sociology and its understandings of the global world. It addresses the historical narratives that inform sociological conceptions of the contemporary world order and argues for the necessity of their revision and, therefore, of the revision of sociology itself. This conclusion is arrived at in the light of sustained critiques from a variety of positions contesting the narratives that continue to structure sociological imaginations. As such, the book is an argument for the reconstruction of sociology that works backwards, to bring to the surface other historical understandings, and then forwards, to think about how we might configure sociology differently. The fundamental issue at the heart of this book is the ways in which the global has been understood in a variety of sociological approaches and an examination of how these understandings go on to inform wider sociology. Alongside the epistemological argument, this book also makes a methodological argument against the dominance of a comparative historical sociology based on ideal types, making the case instead for ‘connected sociologies’ as a more productive approach.

Sociology is not just one discipline among other social sciences. It frequently claims, as Habermas (1988) argues, to be central to their organization and, in particular, to the specification of the relationships among the disciplines. For example, it differentiates politics and economics as disciplines concerned with the system and the rational individual and leaves for itself, that is, for sociology, the realm of the social and the cultural, as well as the overarching account of these distinctions (see Holmwood 2000a). This division — between what Habermas calls the processes of system and social integration - however, is posited alongside a more profound division, and one not remarked upon by him. This is the division between sociology and anthropology; or, in other words, between the social sciences, whose remit is the modern world, and anthropology, whose remit is the traditional. Significantly, anthropology has not been able to avoid direct reflection on the geopolitical circumstances of colonialism and empire that made other societies objects of inquiry for Europeans (see Trouillot 2003).* However, the very separation of anthropology and sociology has facilitated sociology’s self-understanding as brought about in the European production of modernity distinct from its colonial entanglements. This demarcation, I suggest, is central to the maintenance of particular conceptions of how the history of modernity ought to be understood. This is because the disciplinary divide also maps onto a division of the world which is itself based upon particular (racialized) hierarchies. My argument is that understandings of modernity, as a largely European and/or Western phenomenon at its inception, are predicated on a deficient epistemology that is in urgent need of displacement.

This continues and extends the argument of my previous book, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination, where I took issue with the historical narratives at the heart of sociological understandings of modernity, that is, with the standard histories of the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution that are generally regarded as core to the emergence of modernity in Europe. I drew upon the global and postcolonial histories that have been missing from standard sociological accounts to show how they require us to rethink those accounts and the conceptual

' Of course, these are not the only subject areas at issue. Geography, like anthropology, is a subject strongly formed by colonialism (see Driver 1992). However, in terms of representations of disciplinary knowledges, most arguments are associated with ‘analytic disciplines (economics, sociology and political science) and their interrelations. It is in the relation of anthropology to sociology that the construction of knowledges in these terms is most clearly seen (see Asad 1979).

frameworks based upon them. In deconstructing the histories of modernity that are placed at the core of the sociological endeavour, I hoped to open up space to think about sociology differently through an acknowledgement of other histories and experiences as well as to enable a reconsideration of the relations between disciplines. In this way, Rethinking Modernity pointed to the reconstruction that was necessary if we were to establish a sociology in the present that was different from the sociology of the past and, indeed, enable us to put that earlier sociology into the past.

Connected Sociologies seeks to deliver upon that call for reconstruction. It extends the earlier arguments to offer an alternative way forward, both in terms of the substance of what is recognized as sociology’s past and a consideration of how this would alter the way in which we think about sociology in the present and the future. It points to the historical connections generated by processes of colonialism, enslavement, dispossession and appropriation, that were previously elided in mainstream sociology in favour of narrower understandings, as well as to the use of ‘connections’ as a way of recuperating these alternative histories, and, therefore, sociologies. If Rethinking Modernity addressed the parochial character of the histories at the heart of sociology's understanding of the emergence of the modern world, Connected Sociologies takes issue with the ways in which the global has come to be reconceptualized, across a variety of sociological traditions and perspectives, after a ‘global turn’ in the wake of a perceived recent phase of globalization. The past and its sociological forms of misrecognition, I argue, continue to constrain our ability to imagine different futures.

The perspective of ‘connected sociologies, from which the book proceeds, starts from a recognition that events are constituted by processes that are always broader than the selections that bound events as particular and specific to their theoretical constructs. It is inspired by the call, by historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam (1997, 2005a, 2005b), for ‘connected histories’ which, he argues, do not derive from a singular standpoint, whether that be a putatively universal standpoint - which postcolonial theorists have demonstrated as being in fact a particular standpoint linked to colonialism - or a standpoint of the generalized subaltern. Indeed, both a particular standpoint and a universal standpoint in historical sociology tend to be strongly associated with a methodology of ideal types whose constructions are derived from particular value-relevant selections. Their disagreement is over the values deemed relevant, not over the form of the theoretical constructs to which they give rise. To understand events in terms of ideal types is to argue that they are knowable in terms of processes represented as internal to the type. Connected sociologies, in contrast, seek to reconstruct theoretical categories — their relations and objects - to create new understandings that incorporate and transform previous ones.

While knowledge can never be total, the selections we make have consequences for its ordering. That ordering is always open to challenge in the light of different selections and re-orderings. In the standard accounts of ideal types, the consequence is a plurality of processes that are disconnected precisely because the function of ideal types is to separate some events and ‘entities’ from others and to represent their internal relationships, thereby making other entities and events mere contingencies from the perspective of those relations. The approach of connected sociologies is different. It recognizes a plurality of possible interpretations and selections, not as a ‘description, but as an opportunity for reconsidering what we previously thought we had known. Mere contingencies from one perspective become central features in another. This is not an argument for relativism (that is already implicit in standard ideal type methodology), but an argument for the reconstruction of concepts and the reinterpretation of histories in the light of that reconstruction.

The different sociologies in need of connection are themselves located in time and space, including the time and space of colonialism, empire and (post)colonialism. They will frequently arise as discordant and challenging voices and may even be resisted on that basis (a resistance made easier by the geo-spatial stratification of the academy). If some scholars experience their cherished sociological approaches to be under attack by new forms of particularism and localism, it is no response to assert a hegemonic particularism, now represented as ‘our tradition. The consequence of different perspectives must be to open up examination of events and processes such that they are understood differently in light of that engagement. Put another way, engaging with different voices must move us beyond simple pluralism to make a difference to what was initially thought; not so that we come to think the same, but that we think differently from how we had previously thought.

This is the push to reconstruction central to my conception of ‘connected sociologies, whereby understandings are reconstructed as a consequence of the significant new connections identified. To put it most strongly, there is no connection where there is no reconstruction; and no understanding remains unchanged by connection. To understand events through their connections is to acknowledge from the outset that addressing particular sets of connections leads to particular understandings which are put in question through choosing other sets of connections. This is not a choice guided by whim, but through an argument for why certain connections were initially chosen and why choosing others could lead to more adequate explanations.

It is perhaps understandable that those challenging dominant positions are most clear about what they bring to the epistemological encounter, while those experiencing themselves under challenge often experience it only as loss of meaning and not the gain of an interlocutor. However, as has frequently been pointed out by postcolonial writers, those who encounter a hegemonic position are formed by it at the same time as they challenge it. What is unrecognized by those who are challenged is the asymmetry of recognition that this involves. So, while this is explicitly a book of critique, in the light of connected sociologies, it is nonetheless a work of sociological reconstruction formed by the positions it criticizes as well as by the critiques it mobilizes.

II

From its inception, classical sociology was less interested in the delineation of understandings of the global than in examining what were understood to be the European origins of global processes. Both Karl Marx (1976 [1867]) and Max Weber (1905), for example, sought to outline the peculiar conditions of Europe vis-a-vis the rest of the world that they believed to have given rise to the world-historical processes of capitalism (for discussion, see Bhambra 2011a). Indeed, as Eisenstadt puts it, the main issue of the comparative historical sociology that classical sociology inaugurated was to understand ‘the peculiar “qualitative” and “descriptive” characteristics of pre-modern European and non-European societies in relation to, and especially in contrast with, modern (initially European) societies’ (1974: 225). Classical sociologists, then, may have differed in significant aspects of their approaches, but they shared a common core emphasis on the European origins of capitalist modernity.

For Marx (1976 [1867]), capitalism was to be understood in terms of the specific changes in the ‘local’ social relations of small-scale production (so-called ‘primitive accumulation’) that contributed to the emergence of industrial societies in Western Europe, later to spread across the rest of the world. The same topic was approached by Weber (1905) through a comparative historical sociology of world religions that sought to identify a specifically European develo-pment, the Protestant Reformation, which gave rise to the ‘spirit’ of capitalism. This unique economic motivation, together with other favourable material conditions, was seen to have brought about the development of a capitalist world order. For both Marx and Weber, the global was something that came into being as a consequence of the diffusion of ideas and practices whose origins could be identified in Europe. Their starting point of what has been called ‘European exceptionalism’ led them to examine social and economic processes in other parts of the world in terms of their differences from Europe and as obstacles to the development of capitalism locally - for example, as in the Asiatic mode of production for Marx, or Chinese cultural constraints for Weber. Further, there was little to no consideration of how the already existing historical connections between parts of the world might be implicated in developments that were perceived as endogenous and independent processes exported to other parts of the world. Broader connections were discussed only as consequent to the future diffusion, spread and entanglement of the processes separately identified.

The ‘global; insofar as it can be inferred from the writings of Marx and Weber, was the space in which processes initiated in Europe came to play out as ‘world-historical. There was little discussion of how the global might be understood in terms of processes not directly identified as capitalist but nonetheless contributing to modernity (for example, colonial settlement, dispossession, enslavement and other forms of appropriation). Their attention was, very firmly, on understanding developments of social relations within Europe, where the rest of the world served as a foil to such understandings, and working out the consequences for global others as they became ‘world-historical. The failure to recognize prior global connections, or to regard them as significant for capitalism, can be attributed, in part at least, to the elision of colonialism and empire to capitalism within their approaches. This was an elision that saw colonialism as not integral to the emergence and development of capitalist modernity, but as a distortion of it, similar, perhaps, to the obstacles identified with pre-capitalist modernity, while empire was barely addressed as a geopolitical form. The consequence of this for the classical tradition in sociology is that what needed to be explained were the particular conditions within Europe that had enabled its dominance upon the world. Once dominant, the rest of the world could simply be subsumed within Europe, or more properly, within European understandings which were thereby universalized.

Given the presumption of European exceptionalism and actual European dominance, it was held within classical sociology that, while there might be historically interesting societal and cultural variations, there was not anything to be learnt from the rest of the world, at least not contemporaneously. Slavery, for example, was allowed to appear as a significant topic in terms of its empirical manifestation in Atlantic societies, but it was not generally understood to be sociologically interesting from the perspective of the construction of the core categories of modernity. The leading post-classical theorist, Talcott Parsons (1966, 1971), for example, did not make any reference to slavery in his account of modern societies notwithstanding its role in the very society he deemed to be the new ‘lead’ society of modernity. Indeed, in common with social and political theorists who had lived contemporaneously with chattel slavery, slavery, when discussed conceptually, was an issue of pre-modern, ‘ancient, societies not central to the emergence of modern ones. This is in contrast to the work of W. E. B. DuBois (1935) - and other largely unrecognized African American pioneers of US sociology such as Oliver Cromwell Cox and E. Franklin Frazier (see Saint-Arnaud (2009) - where chattel slavery is made central to the understanding of the modern US and to modernity more generally. The failure to acknowledge this tradition of scholarship as central to the self-understanding of sociology is a displacement both of the specifically African American contribution to sociology and of the processes of enslavement and colonization from modernity.’

Colonialism, then, had both created an effective global space and an elision of its continued role in the determination of social processes within that space. European hegemony, not being in question, would lead the way either to a global iron cage of modernization or, eventually, to contradiction, transformation and world Communism. Even if there

2 A more thorough-going discussion of the implications and consequences of this displacement, for sociology in general, is given in Bhambra (2014).

was critique of specific colonial practices and sympathy for those subject to it, at least in the writings of Marx, there was nonetheless a justification of colonialism as hastening the development and spread of modern capitalism en route to the subsequent stage of world history and human emancipation. As a ‘stages’ theory of history was dominant, “progress” was believed to be uni-directional and irreversible so the focus on Europe was further justified as it was to show the way for the rest of the world. While colonial expansion had constituted the global, it was not regarded by Marx or Weber as significant to the key relationships integral to the historical development of modern European societies or their subsequent (successful) trajectories. For example, while the expansion of the market was crucial to the development of capitalism and was driven along the tracks of colonial expansion, it was the relationships held to be intrinsic to the market that were the focus of attention, not the conditions under which it was expanded. With colonial expansion displaced from the construction of the core sociological accounts of modernity, it was also deemed to be of little relevance to the subsequent development of sociology. With modernity and modernization (whether capitalist or post-capitalist) as the only possibility, the rest ofthe world was to be drawn into the worlds created by Europe and Europeans and was to be understood in those terms.

MI

The dominance of Europe, then, contributed to the invisibility of the global as subsumed under Europe, where Europe and modernity were one. Of course, the empirical reality of colonialism could not be denied despite its bland representation as resolved through processes of ‘normal’ development. The societies that were addressed via modernization theory were societies subject to colonial domination, even if that domination and resistance to it was not a major feature of sociological accounts. It was not until the global order constituted by colonialism visibly fractured that these other societies came into (European and North American) view in their own right. The convulsions in the early-to-mid twentieth century of the two world wars and, in particular, the emergence of the competing regimes of fascism (defeated) and Communism (resurgent), together with the movements of decolonization, dramatically reconfigured the world. The beginnings of a decline of western European hegemony and the shift in the landscape of the global, from being organized in colonial terms to being organized around (the desire for) nation states, necessitated developments within sociology in order to address the limitations of post-classical accounts of modernity (see Eisenstadt 1974).

Whereas previously an easy division had been made between modern, industrial societies and traditional, agrarian ones, this division was now perceived to be complicated for a number of reasons. In part, this was a consequence of traditional societies now being located within their own national states as opposed to within the ambit of broader colonial regimes (and the self-understandings of their implicit developmental teleologies). Given the similarity of political form, the nation state, this also blurred the boundaries between commonly accepted understandings of the traditional and modern. National elites within traditional societies, for example, were commonly seen as ‘modernizing elites’ and so new problems related to the relationship between modern states, modernizing elites and traditional societies (masses) were posed for the social sciences. Further, the explicit ideological break among what were understood as modern societies that became embodied in the Cold War division between the Communist Soviet Union and the capitalist United States meant that there was no longer simply one acknowledged route to modernization. Modernizing elites, in what came to be called the Third World, were faced with a choice of pre-established routes. Or they could choose to articulate their own visions for development as many of the countries signing up to the Non-Aligned Movement sought to do (see Prashad 2007). Decolonization and the establishment of independent nation states had not only brought the unevenness of development across the globe into sharp relief, but also pointed to the different routes to modernity that might be available to “traditional societies.

Modernization theory was one attempt to address these issues, but, given the political situation, it was closely followed by underdevelopment and dependency theory reflecting a more critical approach to alternatives. This was so, not simply within the Western academy but also in terms of the emergence of theorists of decolonization and then postcolonialism located in, and addressing, a variety of other contexts. Even if ‘currently existing’ Communism was identified by few scholars as the true alternative to capitalism that Marx had envisaged, its very presence as an alternative created the space for thinking of different alternatives. It also acted as a ‘goad’ to liberal democracies in terms of indicating the necessity of addressing issues of inequality, including racial inequality, exclusion and civil rights. As Dudziak argues, in the context of the US, the international focus on racial segregation and the political, social and economic subordination of African Americans contradicted the espousal of American democracy as enlightened and egalitarian - that is, as modern - and hampered ‘their ability to sell [their version of] democracy to the Third World’ (1988: 62-3). Notwithstanding any limitations attributed to modernization theory's view of convergence as a process of modernity, then, convergence did at least also imply the further modification of the societies associated with the exemplary form. In this way, not only was modernity understood to be differentiated, but its ‘exemplary form was regarded as unfinished and, in principle, reformable. The meaning of modernity was at stake and ‘Eurocentric? accounts did not seem to hold all the cards.