Search

This paper takes within its scope the broad disciplines of Development Studies and International Relations both of which, I argue are predicated upon an implicit narrative of history that takes the state form as the locus of enunciation. That is within both broad realms of study, a narrative of history as the history of the state form, history as the history of the nation state, informs and motivates the methodologies, assumptions and categories of analysis of both disciplines. However, utilizing the arguments made within the field of postcolonial studies, this paper argues that both disciplines within the broader human sciences are also predicated upon an elision or writing out of European colonial history. Thus, from this perspective, it is the writing out of colonial history that makes each discipline and their implicit narrative of history organised around the state form possible. Recent developments within politics and sociology around the incidence of globalisation and the recent flurry of academic and popular writing around the existence of a ‘new’ form of imperialism have produced a discursive tug of war over the relevance and viability of the state form under neo-liberal globalisation. This paper argues that the confused nature of these debates stems in part from the absence of colonial history and an absence of theorisation about empire as a form of politics within the discipline of politics and IR (Hardt and NEgri notwithstanding). Subsequently, I argue that in order to yoke together within the same analytical field both European colonialism and the practice and politics of development in the Twentieth Century, a new theory of history is required, one that places colonial history and the form of empire squarely in the centre of our consideration of global politics, one that explores the connections between empire and the state form, one that theorises the history of capital together with the history of the European colonial project, one that teases out the axes of continuity between the 20th Century trajectory of development and the 19th Century colonial project. Yoking development together with colonialism in the same analytic field needs to be fore grounded by a methodology of inquiry that theorises historical continuity rather than narrative rupture. [364 words] ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]