Historical sociology, international relations and connected histories

Abstract

This article addresses three recent developments in historical sociology: (1) neo-Weberian historical sociology within International Relations; (2) the ‘civilizational analysis’ approach utilized by scholars of ‘multiple modernities’; and (3) the ‘third wave’ cultural turn in US historical sociology. These developments are responses to problems identified within earlier forms of historical sociology, but it is suggested each fails to resolve them precisely because each remains contained within the methodological framework of historical sociology as initially conceived. It is argued that their common problem lies in the utilization of ‘ideal types’ as the basis for sociohistorical analysis. This necessarily has the effect of abstracting a set of particular relations from their wider connections and has the further effect of suggesting sui generis endogenous processes as integral to these relations. In this way, each of the three developments continues the Eurocentrism typical of earlier approaches. The article concludes with a call for ‘connected histories’ to provide a more adequate methodological and substantive basis for an historical sociology appropriate to calls for a properly global historical sociology.

Notes

¹ I shall be addressing the specific issues of Marxist historiography and its relation to historical sociology in a forthcoming paper, ‘Modernity in global context: historical sociology and the Marxist problematique’.

² It was not until the emergence of the Subaltern Studies collective in the 1980s, however, that the priority given to the labour movements of advanced capitalist countries was significantly challenged. See, for example, Guha (1982; 1983) and Arnold (1984).

³ Although historical sociologists within sociology generally term the work of Skocpol, Tilly and Mann and others as constituting ‘second wave historical sociology’, the convention within IR is to term it, ‘first wave Weberian historical sociology’. This is as a consequence of it being regarded as the first wave of historical sociology within IR, the ostensible focus of their engagement and critique.

⁴ See, for example, the special issue of International Sociology on ‘Rethinking civilizational analysis’ (2001). There has also been a turn in IR to an international historical sociological approach (Hobson and Lawson 2008), which engages with recent developments in ‘world history’ (see, for example, Buzan and Little 2001; Hall and Jackson 2007).

⁵ See, for example, the two special issues of Daedalus on ‘Early modernities’ (1998) and ‘Multiple modernities’ (2000).

⁶ In this way, ‘the cultural turn’ is argued to be one of a number of related, but sometimes opposed, developments that have each displaced the dominant (structuralist) approach to historical sociology. In what follows, I concentrate on those aspects specifically associated with the cultural turn.

⁷ Despite the differences of emphasis and interpretation allowed to the various aspects of the ‘transition’ to capitalism, for example, the overarching singularity of the process described—the expansion globally from an initial core that is European—is agreed upon in both standard accounts of industrialization as well the different Marxist ones (see, for example, Wallerstein 1979; Wood 2002). Any logic of industrialism or capitalism that can be isolated has been demonstrated to have existed in other places and at other times and so can never be regarded as unique or causal in itself. The question is not one of the efficiency of, for example, Indian manufacture, but the colonial squeeze applied to it in order to privilege British interests. The one aspect that is missing from hegemonic explanations, then, is that of the relationship between any industrializing impulse and the ability to use ‘force’ both in terms of establishing forms of ‘unfree’ labour as well as expanding the reach of the market for one's goods. Colonialism was integral to both (for further details, see Bhambra 2007a; on the issue of ‘force’, see Barkawi 2004, 158).

⁸ See Hobson (2007b) for a discussion of the ways in which even critical IR theory is implicated in particular Eurocentric constructions.