For too long, questions of racism and colonialism have not been part of historical sociology’s understanding of modernity. Yet, a new generation of scholars has begun to address this, placing racism and empire at the center of their inquiries. This new generation looks to previously marginalized scholars for guidelines and inspiration. In line with this shift in historical sociology, this paper brings the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and other writers in the Black Radical Tradition to bear on longer-standing analytic and methodological debates: How do these authors allow us to think about theory-building and comparison? What is the goal of explanation? How should we approach archives and sources? Building on these insights, this paper explains how the work of Du Bois and the Black Radical Tradition provides a model for a new historical sociology, and a framework that allows us to see the connections between racism, colonialism, and modernity.

In this article, we investigate the reasons behind the puzzling enthusiastic reception of a book about Finland’s national development by Turkish nationalist intellectuals in the early Republic of Turkey. Published in Turkish in 1928, the developmental model laid out in Petrov’s The Country of White Lilies resonated with the Turkish intelligentsia and has remained a popular book in Turkey throughout the twentieth century, and even today. First, we compare the fictionalized developmental model presented by Petrov in his book with Finnish development under the Russian Empire, before its independence in 1917. Second, we show that this reception was largely based on a comparison of Turkey and Finland’s geopolitical positions in global imperial politics, and a constructed racial affinity between the two nations in the minds of Turkish readers. Third, we argue that this national developmental model served three ideological purposes; distancing the Turkish Republic from the Ottoman Empire, showing the developmental capacity of nations outside the linear and paternalistic developmental model proposed by Western European empires, and last, presenting a model that glosses over Ottoman-Turkish state violence and ethnic cleansing, as well as democratic processes, as irrelevant to considerations of progress and development. Finally, we discuss the implications of our study for re-evaluating the sociological literature on nation formation, largely taking its “model cases” (Krause 2021) from the Western European experience, through a more encompassing inter-imperial approach (Doyle 2014).

This article reconstructs and analyses the conceptual history of “the people” [Folket] in modern Danish history. It applies qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze new data and archival materials and provides a detailed study of the construction, development and central role of populist conceptions of “the people” in the constitutional struggles between 1830 and 1920 that transformed Denmark from an absolute monarchy into a parliamentary democracy. I argue that these populist conceptualizations of “the people” shaped and fostered the emergence of the ideas and practices of parliamentary democracy as “the people’s rule” [Folkestyre]. This case study thereby challenges contemporary assumptions about an inherently adversarial relationship between populism and democracy. Moreover, it makes a number of empirical and analytical contributions to the existing historiography, as well as the literature on the construction of “the people,” democracy and populism.

This article examines and further develops the relationship between the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD), recently taken up by International Relations (IR) scholars to furnish a social theory of ‘the international’, and the Gramscian concept of ‘passive revolution’, which refers to a molecular process of top-down revolution and state formation that preserves ruling-class power by transforming its social base. To this end, the paper: (1) advances a productive distinction between ‘societal’ and ‘(geo)political’ multiplicity, increasing the transdisciplinary potential of UCD and challenging dominant state-centric approaches to IR; (2) demonstrates that UCD is central to creating the conditions for passive revolution; and, (3) argues that UCD illuminates the distinct spatial dimensions of passive revolution, for which the succession of ‘classes’ in time requires the expansion of capitalist social relations in space. To illustrate these claims, the article demonstrates how the American Civil War is best understood as an inter-societal conflict, exacerbated by the coexistence of two social formations within a single state, leading to war. It then shows how, upon victory, the North’s abolition of enslaved labour and the subsequent attempt to re-subsume the South within a single sovereign polity constituted a radical instance of passive revolution.

What happens at the point of interchange between scholarly communities? We examine this question by investigating the case of growing ties between historical sociology and ethnography, two social scientific methods that once seemed to have little in common. Drawing on methodological writings by ethnographers and original interviews with practicing historical sociologists, we argue that these ties have been shaped by structural and methodological homologies between the two disciplines. Structurally, ethnography and historical sociology are similarly positioned in sociology more broadly, as enterprises with sometimes-tense relationships with dominant assumptions of the social sciences. Methodologically, both ethnographers and historical sociologists face the challenges of bounding the research process, navigating access to data, analyzing and retaining data while “in the field,” and overcoming cultural distance between themselves and the worlds they are studying. Taken together, these findings extend work in the sociology of science and knowledge and suggest some key conditions for intellectual efflorescence.

In recent years, scholars of international legal history have demonstrated much newfound interest in C.H. Alexandrowicz, a Polish jurist renowned for his anti-Eurocentric revisionist account of Asian and African agency within the meta-narrative of international law. Building on efforts to link his Polish origins with his studies of the Afro-Asian world, especially on matters of imperialism and state personality, my purpose in this Article is to explore these connections through a materially grounded historical sociology of international legal thought. Centering the issue of whether sovereignty is divisible, I situate the historic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—extinguished by a series of Partitions in 1772, 1793, and 1795—as a unique divided sovereignty-based polity that provided a basis for Alexandrowicz’s study of the juridical status of non-European sovereigns. This analogy united his overarching critique of nineteenth-century international legal positivism as an unjustifiable denial of both Polish and Afro-Asian sovereignty. In deciphering the materiality of Alexandrowicz’s imagination against this presumption, I build a narrative of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the evolution of its distinct approach to sovereign divisibility. Through analysis of the interplay between internal and external factors, I account for the Commonwealth’s medieval origins, its development in opposition to the consolidating indivisible sovereignty of its absolutist neighbors, its attempts to maintain independence in the face of Partition, and the continued assertions of its variegated legacies following its destruction. This, I argue, provides a novel means of assessing Alexandrowicz’s theory, and the materiality of international law more generally.

La délégation de la violence en contexte de guerre civile est souvent lue comme une érosion de l’État au profit d'acteurs non-étatiques incontrôlables. Nous soulignons ici les limites de cette lecture à partir d'une analyse du conflit afghan, en particulier de l'arbitrage qui a eu lieu sous l'administration Karzai entre l'accroissement des effectifs militaires pro-gouvernementaux et leur contrôle. Nous montrons non seulement que la présence de troupes internationales a considérablement affecté cet arbitrage, mais aussi que, contrairement aux interprétations dominantes, celui-ci révèle une volonté d'appropriation du processus de formation de l’État par ses élites plus qu'un recul de l’État lui-même.

In March 1974, trade union leader and Chairman of the Socialist Party of India, George Fernandes, formed a new independent trade union of railway workers and then led a massive nation-wide strike lasting about a month. Two years later—March 1976—Fernandes was arrested as the principal accused in the Baroda Dynamite Conspiracy Case, a plot to bomb strategic targets in New Delhi in resistance to Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian rule. How did George Fernandes’ political work change over these two years—from engaging in traditional trade union movement tactics during the Railway Workers’ Strike in 1974 to being the ringleader of a plan to bomb strategic targets in resistance to the postcolonial state? Why would an activist who advocated non-violent social movement tactics change strategies and end up leading a movement that primarily uses violent tactics? I argue that in its violent repression of the Railway Workers’ Strike and its illegal imprisonment of the strike’s leaders, Indira Gandhi’s administration demonstrated to Fernandes and other opposition party leaders that there was no room for a peaceful solution to the ever increasing social conflict of early 1970s India. Therefore, when Gandhi instated herself as dictator, longstanding advocates of satyagraha believed that symbolic violence against the state was the tactic most likely to lead to the restoration of democracy in India.