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Labour History and the Case against Colonialism
International Review of Social History ( IF 0.700 ) Pub Date : 2019-03-28 , DOI: 10.1017/s0020859019000063
Pepijn Brandon , Aditya Sarkar

The controversy around Bruce Gilley's article “The Case for Colonialism” has drawn global attention to a stream of revisionist claims and visions on the history of colonialism that has emerged in academia and in the media in recent years. Authors such as Nigel Biggar in the UK, Niall Ferguson in the USA, and Pieter Emmer in the Netherlands, have all published similarly revisionist claims about colonialism, arguing that postcolonial guilt and political correctness blind the majority of their colleagues to the positive side of the colonial project. Their argument chimes with wider societal trends, transforming the revisionist defenders of empire into heroes of a reinvigorated nationalist right within and beyond academia. The public influence attained by these approaches to colonialism requires historians to expose the deep methodological flaws, misreading of historical facts, and misrepresentations of prior scholarship that characterize the writings of this emerging revisionist trend. It is for this reason that the Editorial Committee of theInternational Review of Social History(IRSH) has decided to devote its first ever Virtual Special Issue to labour history's case against colonialism. This article, also an introduction to the Virtual Special Issue, sifts through the logical implications of the claims made by Gilley and like-minded scholars, providing both a contextualization and a rebuttal of their arguments. After assessing the long absence of colonial labour relations from the field of interest of labour historians and the pages of theIRSHitself, this article shows the centrality of a critique of colonialism to labour history's global turn in the 1990s. Using a selection of articles on colonial labour history from theIRSH's own archive, the article not only reconstructs “labour history's case against colonialism”, but also shows why labour history's critical insights into the nature of colonialism should be deepened and extended, not discarded.

中文翻译:

劳工史与反殖民主义案例

围绕布鲁斯·吉莱 (Bruce Gilley) 的文章“殖民主义案例”引起的争议已引起全球关注,近年来学术界和媒体中出现了一系列修正主义主张和对殖民主义历史的看法。英国的奈杰尔·比格 (Nigel Biggar)、美国的尼尔·弗格森 (Niall Ferguson) 和荷兰的彼得·埃默 (Pieter Emmer) 等作家都发表了类似的关于殖民主义的修正主义主张,认为后殖民主义的罪恶感和政治正确性使他们的大多数同事对殖民主义的积极一面视而不见。殖民项目。他们的论点与更广泛的社会趋势相吻合,将帝国的修正主义捍卫者转变为学术界内外复兴的民族主义权利的英雄。这些殖民主义方法所获得的公众影响力要求历史学家揭露深刻的方法论缺陷,对历史事实的误读,以及对先前学术的歪曲,这些都是这种新兴修正主义趋势的著作的特征。正因如此,本刊编辑委员会国际社会史评论(IRSH) 已决定将其第一个虚拟特刊专门用于劳工史反对殖民主义的案例。这篇文章也是对虚拟特刊的介绍,筛选了 Gilley 和志同道合的学者提出的主张的逻辑含义,提供了背景化和反驳他们的论点。在评估了劳工历史学家感兴趣的领域长期缺乏殖民劳工关系之后,IRSH就其本身而言,这篇文章表明了对殖民主义的批判对于 1990 年代劳工史的全球转向的核心作用。使用精选的关于殖民劳工历史的文章IRSH在自己的档案中,这篇文章不仅重构了“劳动史反对殖民主义的案例”,还说明了为什么劳动史对殖民主义本质的批判性见解应该被深化和扩展,而不是被抛弃。
更新日期:2019-03-28
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