The Connected Sociologies Podcast

Global Supply Chains and Unfree Labour - Prof Genevieve LeBaron

Global supply chains today depend on and reinforce relations of unfree labour, including forced, child, and trafficked labour. These coercive labour relations are often described as a ‘new slavery’, and are understood to be driven by criminality, cultural backwardness, corruption and poverty in the contemporary economy. Yet, dominant narratives about ‘new slavery’ gloss over the historic and ongoing dynamics of colonial capitalism in predictably giving rise to unfree labour in supply chains. These dynamics include: dispossession and expropriation; colonial histories of unfree labour and how these continue to shape the lives of contemporary workers and communities; the role of wealthy states and corporations in engineering global supply chains that yield unequal wealth and value distribution and result in endemic exploitation, violence, and coercion. A deeper analysis reveals that contemporary unfree labour relations are anchored in the legacies and ongoing dynamics of colonial capitalism. In this session, we consider the significance of colonial capitalism in giving rise to unfree labour in global supply chains, and focus on an example of India’s tea industry to ground our discussion.

Readings

• LeBaron, Genevieve. 2018. The Global Business of Forced Labour: Report of Findings. University of Sheffield.
• Behal, Rana. P. One Hundred Years of Servitude: Political Economy of Tea Plantations in Colonial Assam. New York: Columbia University Press.
• LeBaron, Genevieve, Howard, Neil, Thibos, Cameron, and Kyritsis, Penelope (2018) Confronting Root Causes: Forced Labour in Global Supply Chains. London: openDemocracy.
• Sharma, Nandita. 2020. ‘States and Human Immobilization: Bridging the Conceptual Separation of Slavery, Immigration Controls, and Mass Incarceration.’ Citizenship Studies (online first).
• Beautin, Lyndsey P. 2017. ‘Black Suffering for/from Anti-Trafficking Advocacy.’ Anti-Trafficking Review (9): 14-30.

Resources

• Beyond Trafficking and Slavery –openDemocracy.net platform featuring articles by activists and academics
• Slavery and its Legacies- Yale University Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition podcasts
• Whitewashing Abolition: Race, Displacement, and Combating Human Trafficking – Brown University conference proceedings website
• Forced Labor and Workers Rights- 10 minute film about forced labour in global supply chains featuring the research of Genevieve LeBaron

Questions for discussion

• What does the ‘New Slavery’ framing of unfree labour reveal and conceal about colonial capitalism? Does it constitute whitewashing?
• What is the role of states and corporations in engineering contemporary dynamics of unfree labour in global supply chains? How have their roles evolved throughout history?
• Using the example of the contemporary tea supply chain, how do current dynamics of wealth accumulation, inequality, and exploitation relate to histories of colonial plunder and expropriation?
• What does the prevalence of unfree labour in contemporary global supply chains tell us about how colonial capitalism works?

Colonial Policing - Dr Adam Elliot-Cooper

Standard discussions of police racism in Britain, present it as being a consequence of Britain becoming multicultural, as African, Caribbean and Asian people migrated to Britain in significant numbers after World War 2. These migrants are seen as disrupting a peaceful, united monocultural Britain. But historically, most of Britain’s policing hasn’t taken place on British soil – it has been deployed in its colonies. Millions of colonial subjects, exploited and controlled for the enrichment of Britain for centuries, required policing. British colonial policing was far more militarised and violent than policing on the British mainland. The racial hierarchy of the British Empire – the racism of colonialism – is what justified the violence and exploitation Britain imposed on the Africans, Asians and Caribbean people it colonised.

Readings

• Nijjar, J (2018) Echoes of Empire: Excavating the Colonial Roots of Britain's "War on Gangs", Social justice 45(2/3):147-161.
• Moore, J.M. (2016) Built for inequality in a diverse world: The historic origins of criminal justice, Papers from the British Criminology Conference.
• French, D (2012) Nasty not nice: British counterinsurgency doctrine and practice, 1945–1967, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23:4-5, pp . 744-761.

Resources

• BBC Documentary - Kenya: White Terror
• BBC Four - Racism: A History

Questions for Discussion

Below are two short film clips and questions for discussion:

• Pathe British Colonial Films - Mau Mau Disorders In Kenya (1952)
• Pathe British Colonial Films - The Mark Of The Mau Mau - Exclusive (1953)

1. What is the relationship between the police and military during the ‘Kenya Emergency’?
2. Which tactics appear to be familiar with policing today?
3. What role does the court system play in how the Emergency is portrayed to both Kenyans, the British and the wider world?
4. Which tactics appear to be more commonly associated with military operations?

General Discussion Questions:

1. Why was violence and control such an important part of colonial rule?
2. Is the violence and control of colonialism something which is well-remembered in Britain? If not, why not?
3. How has colonialism’s legacies shaped racism today?

Gendering Modernity: Postcolonial and Decolonial Perspectives - Prof Anne Phillips

From (at least) the eighteenth century onwards, European philosophers and historians have represented the status of women as a crucial marker of a society’s level of civilisation, and have seen modernity as the era when women came to be accepted as individuals in their own right. In this framing of distinctions between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, it became one of the justifications for colonialism that it supposedly rescued women from precolonial abuses. The contrast is however highly contentious, and particularly so when ‘modernity’ so often maintained and intensified gender difference. Ideas about the superior treatment of women in modern societies continue to shape political discourse today.

 

Readings

• Amadiume, Ifi ‘Gender, Political Systems and Social Movements: a West African Experience’ pp35-68 in Mahmood Mamdani and Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba (eds) African Studies in Social Movement and Democracy (Senegal, CODESRIA, 1995)
• Chakrabarty Dipesh, “The Muddle of Modernity”, The American Historical Review 116/3, 2011, 663-675
• Fanon, Frantz The Wretched of the Earth (Penguin, 1967)
• Farrar, Tarikhu ‘The Queenmother, Matriarchy, and the Question of Female Political Authority in Precolonial West African Monarchy’. Journal of Black Studies. 27(5), 1997:579-597.
• Hall, Catherine ‘Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century’ in Philippa Levine (ed) Gender and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2004)
• Lugones, María 2011. ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism,’ Hypatia 25 (4): 742-59
• Mamdani, Mahmood Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton University Press, 1996)
• Phillips, Anne ‘Gender and Modernity’ Political Theory 46 /6, 2018

Resources

 

Maria Lugones, Global Social Theory

Gayatri Spivak, Global Social Theory

Postcolonialism, Global Social Theory

Decoloniality, Global Social Theory

Questions

• In what ways does the status of women figure in notions of modernity?
• How have these contributed to justifications of colonialism?
• How do contrasts between ’modern’ and ‘traditional’, and ideas about the superior treatment of women in modern societies, continue to play out in political discourse in contemporary Europe?

Legacies of British Slave Ownership - Prof Catherine Hall

For too long the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and slavery in the British colonies in the Americas in 1833 have dominated the ways in which Britons have (mis)remembered slavery. The Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at UCL set out to re-think the history of Britain’s long involvement with the slavery business across the Atlantic through exploring British slave-owners. When slavery was abolished, £20 million was paid in compensation to the owners for the loss of what was defined as their property. Almost half this money came to Britons. We followed the money, establishing who got it and, in so far as has been possible, what did they do with it and with the power they derived from it? Was it invested in railways and banking, or spent on country houses, or used to buy art works? How significant is this history to the establishment of racial hierarchies both in Britain and the Caribbean? Compensation was our starting point, but in exploring the longer histories of British ownership of land and people in the Caribbean the deep entanglements between metropole and colony have been excavated.

Readings

• Eric Williams Capitalism and Slavery available here.
• Nicholas Draper, ‘ “Possessing Slaves”: ownership, compensation and metropolitan society in Britain at the time of emancipation 1834-40’ History Workshop Journal 64 (Autumn 2007) 74-102.
• Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington and Rachel Lang, Legacies of British Slave-ownership. Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain Cambridge (2014).
• Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann (eds) Slavery and the Country House London (2013).
• Michael Taylor, The Interest. How the British Establishment resisted the abolition of slavery London (2020).

Resources

Legacies of British Slave-ownership.

Runaway Slaves in Britain.

Remembering 1807.

Questions for Discussion

• How should the history of slavery be remembered in Britain?
• What is meant by the term ‘the slavery business’?
• What evidence can you find both of slave-owners and abolitionists where you live?

Gendering Modernity: Black Feminist Perspectives

In the making of modernity, questions of gender and sexuality constitute the very structures of power by which modernity is produced, organised and understood. Equally, it is not possible to talk about the gendering of modernity without also showing how these structures of power are inherently racialised. To illustrate these points, this session will examine the social category of ‘womanhood’ through Sojourner Truth's speech, ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ in order to trace the figure of the enslaved African woman and her labour within the making of the modern world. Hortense Spillers’ concept of the ‘ungendering’ of African women under conditions of enslavement will be engaged along with Oyèrónkè Oyěwúmi’s arguments on the imposition of colonial western gender categories in Yorubaland. The aim here is to provide some illustrations of the ways gender and racialisation are explicitly bound to colonial world making in ways that continue to have an imprint onto the contemporary lives of Black women.

 

 

Readings:

• Crenshaw, Kimberle (1989) Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989, Article 8.
• hooks, bell, (2015). Ain't I a woman: Black women and feminism. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
• Lewis, G. (2017) Questions of presence. Feminist Review 117 (1)
• Lugones, M. (2008).The Coloniality of Gender. Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise, 2 (Spring), 1-17.
• Noble, D. (2020) Decolonising and Feminizing Freedom: A Caribbean Genealogy. London. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Oyěwúmi, O. (1997) The Invention of Woman: Making Sense of Western Gender Discourse
• Spillers, H. (1997) Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book. Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 65-81.
• Truth, S. (1851)‘Ain’t I a woman’.

Questions

• Examine the significance of racial categories and processes of racialisation to our understanding of gender and modernity?
• How does Hortense Spillers’ concept of ‘ungendering’ help us to critique universal and historical categories of gender and womanhood?
• To what extent do historical and colonial processes of gendering and racialization continue to impact the contemporary lives of Black women in the context of the #SayHerName movement?
• Consider Oyèrónkè Oyěwúmi's argument that womanhood is a colonial construct in order to explore the possibilities of refusing gender categories?

Decolonisation - Dr Meera Sabaratnam

In the modern world, the main type of formal political organisation has gone from being ‘empires’ to ‘nation-states’. But how did this happen, what was left behind and what does it mean? More importantly, why do people still talk about decolonisation today? This session maps out how and where decolonisation unfolded with a particular emphasis on the twentieth century. It looks at the different ideas of liberation that underpinned it, how people organised themselves, how this was met by imperial powers and what the results were in different contexts. The session also examines why struggles for ‘decolonisation’ are ongoing and spreading to the former centres of empire. It concludes by thinking about the dynamics of decolonisation as a significant force shaping the modern world.

 

This lecture is part of the Connected Sociologies module on The Making of the Modern World: https://connectedsociologies.org/curriculum/mmw/

Reading

• Betts, R. F. (2012). Decolonization: A brief history of the word. In E. Bogaerts & R. Raben (Eds.), Beyond Empire and Nation (pp. 23–38). Brill.
• Duara, P. (Ed.). (2004). Decolonization: Perspectives from now and then. Routledge.
• Fanon, F. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. Penguin.
• Jansen, J. C., & Osterhammel, J. (2019). Decolonization: A Short History (Reprint edition). Princeton University Press. Introduction
• Sabaratnam, M. (2011). IR in Dialogue … but Can We Change the Subjects? A Typology of Decolonising Strategies for the Study of World Politics. Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 39(3), 781–803.

Resources

• CrashCourse. (2012, October 26). Decolonization and Nationalism Triumphant: Crash Course World History #40. [TW: contains descriptions of violence].
• CrashCourse. (2020, May 19). Decolonization: Crash Course European History #43. [TW: contains descriptions of violence].
• Global Social Theory: Frantz Fanon.

Questions for Discussion

1. Why did decolonisation accelerate in the twentieth century?
2. Did decolonisation simply expand the numbers of states in the international system, or did it transform that system itself?
3. Can decolonisation ever be a finished process?

Colonial Dispossession and Extraction - Dr Su-ming Khoo

The historical development of the modern, capitalist world economy systematically bound colonisers and colonised into unequal relationships of extraction, colonisation and dispossession over the past 500 years and more. Material realities are central to understanding what we mean by ‘colonisation’ - of materials, life and labour. Colonialism occupied land and turned people and nature into human and natural resources for a singular aim – the accumulation of capital. Historical processes of extraction, dispossession, replacement and extinction drove colonisation and ecological imperialism as structural imperatives of modern capitalism. Land-grabbing, wars and slavery connect with the extensive spread of commercial monocultures as economic structures displacing and threatening much of the world’s human biological and cultural life with extinction. Law and conservation have colluded in these colonising processes – ‘emptying’ lands and displacing or dispossessing indigenous nature and people, in order that material resources can continue to be extracted, monetised and mobilised for the accumulation of capital.

 

 

 

Readings

• Acuna-Soto et al (2002) Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico Emerging Infectious Disease 8(4): 360–362.
• Clark, Brett; Foster, John B (2009) Ecological Imperialism and the Global Metabolic Rift Unequal Exchange and the Guano/Nitrates Trade, International Journal of Comparative Sociology Vol 50(3–4): 311–334.
• Fields, S (2008 ) Pestilence and headcolds: encountering illness in colonial Mexico.
• Guha, R et al (2012)Deeper Roots of Historical Injustice: Trends and Challenges in the Forests of India, Rights and Resources Initiative.
• Hickel, J (2020) Quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown: an equality-based attribution approach for carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary Lancet Planetary Health 2020; 4: e399–404. For a 10-tweet summary.
• Kampmann, U (nd) The impact of silver from the New World.
• Moore, Jason (2007). Silver, Ecology, and the Origins of the Modern World, 1450-1640. In Rethinking Environmental History: World System History and Global Environmental Change, J.R. McNeill, Joan Martinez-Alier, and Alf Hornborg, eds. Berkeley: AltaMira Press, pp 123-142.
• Moore Jason W. (2009) Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the "First" Sixteenth Century: Part I: From "Island of Timber" to Sugar Revolution, 1420–1506 Review (Fernand Braudel Center) Vol. 32, No. 4 (2009), 345-390.
• Pateman, C (2007) The settler contract, in Pateman C and Mills, C., Contract and Domination, pp 35-78 .
• Pringle, Heather (2010)Sugar Masters in the New World Smithsonian Magazine 12 January 2010.
• Short, Damien (2016) Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide. Zed Press.

Resources

• Materialism, Global Social Theory.
• Settler Colonialism, Global Social Theory
• Vandana Shiva, Global Social Theory
• Patrick Wolfe , Global Social Theory

Questions for discussion

• Examine the problem of colonialism (or neo-colonialism) from the perspective of the ‘development’ of a selected natural resource.
• To what extent might it be said that the histories of empire and colonialism depend on the displacement and dispossession of indigenous communities and the erasure of their prior access to the environment?
• Explore and discuss the ‘colonial’ origins of environmental resource use in the world today, using one specific example er: land, forest, mineral ore, fossil fuel, a particular a crop or type of livestock, or the ‘atmospheric commons’
• What environmental factors are relevant in accounting for historical processes of imperial and colonial extraction and accumulation?

What is the Colonial Global Economy? Dr Paul Robert Gilbert

It is increasingly common for claims to be made about the incompatibility between capitalist ‘progress’ and the institution of slavery, and to frame colonisation as economically advantageous for the colonised. Yet this overlooks the considerable scholarship, primarily from the ‘Global South’, which shows that industrial capitalism in Europe (and the UK in particular) would have been unaffordable without slavery, and that transfers of wealth from the colonies to colonial powers continue to shape contemporary inequalities. In this sense, the global economy can be understood as a colonial global economy, shaped not only by the legacies of our colonial past, but by colonially-instituted arrangements and relationships which persist into the present. This session will examine the colonial global economy as one which operates through racialized forms of exploitation, extraction and perverse inclusion, from the heights of international economic law, down to labour regimes in global supply chains.

 

Readings

• Anghie, Antony. 2012. Imperialism, Sovereignty & the Making of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2020. Colonial global economy: towards a theoretical reorientation of political economy. Review of International Political Economy.
• Goswami, Manu. 2018. Crisis economics: Keynes and the End of Empire. Constellations 25: 18-34.
• Koddenbrock, Kai & Sylla, Ndongo Samba. 2019. Towards a political economy of monetary dependency; the case of the CFA franc in West Africa. MaxPo Discussion Paper, No. 19/2.
• Neptune, H. Reuben. 2019. Throwin’ scholarly shade: Eric Williams in the New Histories of Capitalism & Slavery. Journal of the Early Republic, 39(2): 299-326.
• Tilley, Lisa. 2020.“A Strange Industrial Order:” Indonesia’s racialized plantation ecologies and anticolonial estate worker rebellions.History of the Present 10 (1)

Resources

Accounting for British History – blog by Gurminder K Bhambra

How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean – blog by Peter James Hudson

 

Questions for discussion

• How are contemporary wealth transfers and inequalities shaped by colonial relationships in the present?
• What does it mean to understand the global economy as a colonial global economy?
• Why might dominant frameworks for understanding economic crises in the global economy neglect its colonial foundations?

The Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair - Prof John Holmwood

In early 2014, the media was full of stories of a ‘plot to Islamicise schools’ in Birmingham, Bradford and Oldham. Various official investigations claimed to find evidence of extremism, but when misconduct cases were brought against teachers in September 2015, the only charges were ‘undue religious influence’. The cases collapsed in May 2017 because of ‘impropriety’ on the part of lawyers acting for the government. Nonetheless, the affair led to important changes in policy – a new emphasis within Prevent on safeguarding children from non-violent extremism, and a requirement on schools to teach ‘fundamental British values’. Most recently, the latter has spilled over into arguments that ‘British values’ be taught using the Equality Act 2010 and its protected characteristics. This session will address the background to the affair in Government attacks on multiculturalism, the ‘authoritarian’ governance of schools under the academies programme, as well as secular liberal criticisms of the role of religion in schools.

 

John Holmwood was an expert witness for the defence in the professional misconduct case brought against senior teachers at Park View Education Trust.

Reading

• John Holmwood and Therese O’Toole (2018) Countering Extremism in British Schools: The Truth about the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair, Policy Press. Free access to the Introduction here.
• John Holmwood (14 July 2020) ‘A Postcolonial Conservative Defence of Multicultural Equality’, Reset Dialogues on Civilizations.
• Fahid Qurashi (2018) ‘The Prevent strategy and the UK “war on terror”: embedding infrastructures of surveillance in Muslim communities. Palgrave Communications 4, 17
• Sara Cannizzaro and Reza Gholami (2018) ‘The devil is not in the detail: representational absence and stereotyping in the “Trojan Horse” news story’, Race Ethnicity and Education, 21:1, 15-29. Authors’ preprint available here:
• Clayton, Matthew, Andrew Mason, Adam Swift, and Ruth Wareham. 2018. ‘How to Regulate Faith Schools’ Impact (25): 1–49.
• Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2018) The Parekh Report: The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, Runneymede Trust.

Resources

Many of the media stories are behind paywalls, but see:

• A comprehensive resource page on the Trojan Horse affair is available here.
• Andrew Gilligan (June 15 2014) ‘Trojan Horse: how we revealed the truth behind the plot’ The Telegraph.
• Chris Cook (28 April 2014 ‘Inside the Trojan Horse’ Chris Cook BBC Newsnight
• Key speeches by prime minister, David Cameron:
• David Cameron (5 February 2011) ‘PM’s Speech at the Munich Security Conference’
• David Cameron (14 February 2011) ‘PM’s Speech on Big Society’

Resources

• Do liberal citizenship and multiculturalism conflict?
• Is there a problem of democratic governance in schools in England?
• Should schools be secular spaces?

From Windrush to Grenfell - Dr Luke de Noronha

Both the Windrush scandal and the Grenfell fire raise urgent questions for sociologists, and for people concerned about tackling racism more broadly. Both remind us that racism is not just about individuals being intolerant, prejudiced, or bigoted, but about the social and institutional structures that organise who is entitled to what. In this lecture, I invite us to ask some questions about racism, rights and exclusion – particularly in relation to the history and contemporary dynamics of immigration control. It is by asking who is a member of the nation, who is excluded, how this changes over time, and what can be done to those denied membership, that we can develop critical methodologies for studying racism in anti-immigrant times.

Reading

• Anderson, Bridget 2013. Us and Them? The dangerous politics of immigration control (Oxford: OUP).
• Back, Les, and S. Sinha. 2016. “Multicultural Conviviality in the Midst of Racism’s Ruins.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 37 (5): 517–532.
• Bulley, Dan, J. Edkins, N. El-Enany 2019. After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response. London: Pluto Press
• De Genova, Nicholas 2017. ‘The “migrant crisis” as racial crisis: do black lives matter in Europe?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 41 no. 10.
• de Noronha, Luke 2019: Deportation, racism and multi-status Britain: immigration control and the production of race in the present, Ethnic and Racial Studies.
• de Noronha, Luke 2020. Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of deportation to Jamaica (Manchester: MUP).
• Lentin, Alana 2014. “Postracial Silences: The Othering of Race in Europe.” In Racism and Sociology, edited by W. Hund, and A. Lentin, 69–104. Berlin: Lit Verlag.
• Yuval-Davis, Nira, G. Wemyss, and K. Cassidy. 2017. “Everyday Bordering, Belonging and the Reorientation of British Immigration Legislation.” Sociology 52 (2): 228–244.

Resources

• Our Migration Story – Runnymede Trust
• Deporting Black Britons – Website
• Bhambra, G. K. 2016. ‘Brexit, the Commonwealth, and exclusionary citizenship’. Open Democracy:

Questions for discussion

• How is the history of British immigration and nationality law implicated in the reproduction of racism?
• How do the Windrush Scandal and the Grenfell fire reveal the dynamic between ‘race’, class, migration status and deservingness?
• What are some of the dangers with arguments for rights on the basis of ‘contribution’?