Introduction

Scholarly attention to decolonial thought and practice has surged over the past decade. We can read this trend as demonstrating the efficacy of struggles against racism, Eurocentrism, and settler colonial knowledge production in the academy. As such, it is a welcome development, especially given the historical complicity of Western academic institutions in imperialist and settler colonial projects (Smith 2013: 64–65). Yet, as Leon Moosavi (2020) highlights in a review of recent decolonial scholarship, much of this literature remains colored by “Northerncentrism” due to the marginalization of earlier anti-imperialist intellectuals, activists, and militants from the global South.

There are two notable implications arising from this scholarly displacement of earlier “Third World” anti-imperialism. First, as contemporary theorists of decoloniality have turned, instead, to demarcating “alternative epistemic voice,” the result, observes Sujata Patel (2021), has been the “absence, unfortunately, of political economy, and of a discussion of economic development in decoloniality.” Second, decolonial theorizing grounded in the settler colonial experience has not had to confront, argues Mahmood Mamdani (2021), the historical lessons of indirect colonial rule, whereby late nineteenth century colonial ideologues shifted their self-rationalizing from an assimilative “civilizing mission” to a protectionist mandate ostensibly geared to conserving culturally defined native identities threatened by the disruptions of colonial modernity. An understanding of the latter is pertinent because of how a non-Western traditionalism can align with the colonial project—even mask imperial relations—and because the neocolonial arrangement that replaced formal colonialism is itself a variant of indirect rule (Nkrumah 1965; Rodney 1990: 59).

For anthropology, it was under the influence of mid-twentieth century Asian and African national liberation movements that disciplinary anti-imperialism achieved its greatest influence. In 1968, Kathleen Gough published “Anthropology and Imperialism,” wherein she argued that anthropologists had “failed to study Western imperialism as a social system, or even to adequately explore the effects of imperialism on the societies we studied” (Gough 1968: 19). Shortly thereafter, Eric Wolf and Joseph Jorgensen (1970) penned “Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand,” wherein they denounced the participation of professional anthropologists in US counterinsurgency operations. Subsequently, in 1973, Talal Asad published his influential volume, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. A central argument of Asad’s (1973: 13–15) contribution is that, by analyzing tribal units as discrete socio-cultural wholes, British social anthropologists had conceptually erased from their ethnographies the imperial relations undergirding indirect colonial rule. We argue that these precedents remain relevant for not only an anthropology of empire, but an anthropology against empire in the twenty-first century. That is what we call for in today’s imperial present.

Such an anthropology is imperative because the present is indeed marked by a reckless Western imperialism rationalized on humanitarian and emancipatory grounds. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has led many Euro-American “progressives” to endorse the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—an imperialist institution that, a decade prior, carried out its own murderous invasion of Libya for the purpose of regime change (Prashad 2012). In Gaza, unabashed Western support for Israel’s post-October 2023 genocidal violence against Palestinians—disingenuously framed as self-defense—has aimed to consolidate a Euro-American imperialist outpost in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) is militarily active in 38 countries across the African continent, creating a constellation of armed units deployed to secure Euro-American extractive industries (Abdulhamid 2022). And in East and Southeast Asia, the United States has doubled down on its regional militarization to counter an economically ascendant China (Foster 2021). Yet multipolarity presents no automatic defense against the inter-capitalist competition that continues to drive rivalries between, for instance, the US, China, and Russia (Li 2023). States, even when developmental, do not necessarily offer a bulwark against imperialism. They instead often mediate, even intensify, the valorization of capital across time and space (Arboleda 2020). As Lenin (1916) argued, and as remains the case while the US, China, and other powers continue to export over-accumulated capital, inter-capitalist competition shades into inter-imperial rivalry (Hung 2021). Hence, it is not ideological differences between multiple states but rather sharpening antagonisms within the capitalist world system—imperialism’s political economy, in short—that provides our contemporary point of entry.

There has in recent years been renewed interest in theorizing present-day imperialism as an extractive relation (Cope 2019; Katz 2022; Patnaik and Patnaik 2016; Smith 2016; Suwandi 2019). In anthropology, however, notwithstanding a surge in writing on decolonization, a focus on imperialism per se remains minimal (see Price 2016; Lutz 2009; Neveling and Steur 2018; Krupa 2022: 47–55). Moreover, prominent recent anthropological theorizing around imperialism (e.g., Stoler 2016; McGranahan and Collins 2018), has concerned itself with current disciplinary interests—with performativity, governmentality, and affect, for example—while shying away from the imperialist political economy that vexed an earlier generation of “Third World” revolutionaries.

With these concerns in mind, we advocate bringing imperialism, as a specifically capitalist formation, “back in” to contemporary anthropological research and analysis. In conjunction, we call for revisiting “anti-imperialist theory from the South” as a conceptual resource for developing a renewed anthropology of and against empire in the present. The special issue of Dialectical Anthropology that this article introduces advances this political-intellectual project. We argue, in this introductory article, for anthropological engagement with imperialist political economy, and for centering in this endeavor “Southern” anti-imperialist thought. The articles composing the body of this special issue thus put contemporary empirical data in conversation with anti-imperialist “theory from the South”—with the classic critiques of “Third World” anticolonial revolutionaries and/or with more recent radical Southern political economic theorizing.

In what follows, we make a general case for the enduring relevance—in anthropology, specifically—of engaging the political economy of imperialism in the present, and, in doing so, of centering anti-imperialist theory from the South. We proceed by sketching the ways imperialism operates as an economic formation. We then connect this understanding of imperialist political economy to an analysis of neocolonialism as a political formation akin to indirect colonial rule. Finally, we advance a historical materialist justification for a specifically “Southern” perspective on global political economic theorizing. But we note, as well, that “theory from the South” has not always been emancipatory (Raza 2022). Moreover, in an interconnected world, no theory anywhere has developed autonomously; no epistemology is an island. As with social theory more generally, “Southern” anti-imperialist thought has developed in response to particular local conditions, and through critical and creative engagement with exogenous ideas. The result has been manifold dialogic elaborations of critical theory—aimed, in the case at hand, at interrogating the extractive relations and social dynamics of present-day imperialism. “Southern” in our usage thus denotes less a geopolitical location than a relational political perspective.

Imperialism as an economic formation

Imperialism has its political, economic, ideological, and other dimensions, none of which can be adequately understood in isolation. Here, however, we attend to contemporary imperialism as a specifically capitalist formation. For there is, argues Priyamvada Gopal (2021), “no colonization without capitalism”—at least, no colonization in its historical Euro-American manifestations. This understanding informs Gopal’s (2021) assertion that any effective decolonial project requires “taking on the rule of political economy and the rule of capitalism as the fundamental system.” Vijay Prashad states as much succinctly. “The only real decolonization,” he argues, “is anti-imperialism and anticapitalism. You cannot decolonize your mind unless you also decolonize the conditions of social production that reinforce the colonial mentality” (Prashad 2022).

Conversely, however, capitalist political economy has, from the start, been inseparable from the racial ideologies and coercive imperialist practices deployed to sustain it. This constitutive relation between capitalism and imperialism—which Rosa Luxemburg (2003) put at the forefront of Marxist theory and practice—challenges narrowly economistic conceptions of capitalism that treat colonialism and racial violence as epiphenomenal (e.g., Wood 2002). Thus, “capitalism without imperialism,” argue Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik (2016: 85), “is an impossibility.” Here, the Patnaiks diverge from Lenin’s (1916) more well-known formulation: that imperialism is but capitalism’s highest stage. Insofar as this is a debate, we side with the Patnaiks. We side, as well, with Gerald Horne (2018), who locates the enabling conditions of early Euro-American industrial transformation in the mass enslavement of Africans, in the genocide of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, and in colonial plunder more broadly. Or, as Marx (1976: 915) put it,

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.

Such “extra-economic” practices of so-called primitive accumulation have persisted throughout capitalism’s history. Imperialism, consequently, can be defined succinctly as racial capitalism (Gopal 2022)—a definition that helpfully illuminates connections between imperialism at a global level and racialized “internal colonialism” within particular countries. Stated otherwise, the violent social production of racial difference has been essential, historically, to processes of capital accumulation (Roediger and Esch 2012).

Capitalism being so understood requires anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, and the fight against white supremacy and exclusionary border regimes to be central to any effective anti-capitalist politics. For while imperialism as an economic formation entails an unequal transnational transfer of value, such transfers do more than enrich metropolitan capital. They also serve politically to subsidize consumption and to finance social welfare arrangements in imperialist nations, thereby mitigating metropolitan working-class discontent (Smith 2016: 215, 314). Consequently, any metropolitan leftist or working-class movement that aims at merely redistribution in one country remains but a politics of social imperialism and class compromise—the collaborationist pursuit of an exclusionary racist welfare state built on the back of imperialist violence and exploitation elsewhere (Cope 2019: 173). Such metropolitan left nationalism manifests domestically where demands for social welfare and labor protections exclude migrant workers and informal laborers in a de facto racially segmented labor market (Walia 2021: 84, 202).

As mechanisms facilitating the imperialist transfer of value to the metropole, Zak Cope (2019: 2) lists colonial tribute, monopoly rents, and unequal exchange. The first of these—colonial tribute—refers to “classic” colonial plunder. It is such plunder that has, since Marx, earned the moniker of so-called primitive accumulation. It has included the enforced labor of enslaved Africans on “New World” plantations, which financed Western European capitalist industrialization (Williams 1944; Mintz 1985: 66). It has included, as well, coerced Indigenous labor in Latin American mines, such as Potosí, in what is now Bolivia, which served as mercantile Spain’s primary source of silver from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, but which consumed over that same period some eight million Indigenous lives (Galeano 1973: 38–41). It is also seen in France’s enforced levy on Haiti of millions of francs as “reparations” to former enslavers following the latter country’s revolutionary self-emancipation (Méheut 2022). And as a contemporary example, we see such coercive expropriation of resources in military-backed land concessions to transnational corporations, such as those that operate Indonesia’s massive oil palm plantations (Li and Semedi 2022: 2, 7–8).

Samir Amin (2012) defined monopoly rents—the second mechanism of imperialist value transfer—as “the superprofits of multinational corporations,” which are obtained through exploitation of peripheral laborers remunerated with depressed wages. In such arrangements, wage differentials between peripheral and metropolitan workers go beyond differences in the productivity of labor power. The disproportionate depression of peripheral wages results, instead, from repressive Southern labor regimes and the begetting, through depeasantization without absorption into formal employment, of a large reserve army of workers. The effect is to put downward pressure on the wages of peripheral workers who labor in global supply chains and who produce subsidized commodities for metropolitan markets (Smith 2016: 237). The imperialist dynamic here is one of “super-exploitation”—a phenomenon whereby peripheral workers are remunerated below the value of their labor power (Marini 2022: 132). To illustrate, Indonesian sociologist Intan Suwandi (2019: 98–150) highlights the case of low-waged garment workers laboring under restrictive conditions in Indonesia’s export factories—an arrangement enabling metropolitan superprofits under what Suwandi calls “the new economic imperialism.”

Finally, unequal exchange as a mechanism of imperialist value transfer refers to the inequalities embedded in international trade. In his seminal 1973 monograph, The Dialectics of Dependency, Brazilian revolutionary Ruy Mauro Marini (2022: 140) located the conditions of unequal exchange in Latin America’s specialized production of raw materials and foodstuffs for export, alongside its dependence on the import of manufactured goods. Yet, given the subsequent large-scale relocation of industrial manufacturing to sites of depressed wages in the South since the 1970s, Cope (2019: 77) restates, as follows, the concept of unequal exchange in more general terms: “on the world market the poor nations are obliged to sell the product of a relatively large number of hours of labor in order to obtain in exchange from the rich nations the product of a small number of hours of labor.” It is within this relationship that Cope (2019: 47) locates, as well, the contemporary export to poorer nations of the metropole’s “ecological footprints.”

Combined, these mechanisms of imperialist value transfer undermine the possibility of economic convergence between “developing” and “developed” nations. What occurs instead is the “development of underdevelopment” in countries that remain subordinated under relations of political economic dependency (Frank 1967: 145). Walter Rodney (1972: 30) summarized the effects of this dynamic as follows:

Throughout the period that Africa has participated in the capitalist economy, two factors have brought about underdevelopment. In the first place, the wealth created by African labor and from African resources was grabbed by the capitalist countries of Europe; and in the second place, restrictions were placed upon African capacity to make the maximum use of its economic potential, which is what development is all about.

This imperialist transfer of value to the metropole requires enabling political conditions. Yet, the particular political arrangements developed to facilitate such value transfer have shifted historically, primarily in response to national liberation movements and collective struggles by sundry laborers in the subordinated periphery, as we examine in the following section.

Imperialism as a political formation

As an uneven transnational political formation, imperialism entails simultaneous tendencies toward a relatively more expansive hegemony in the metropolitan core (subsidized by imperialist profits), alongside greater constraints on the scope and robustness of any hegemonic compromise in the periphery. A caveat to this is that there are always “peripheries in the core and cores in the periphery” (Buzan and Lawson 2015: 9). The latter fact does not undermine an analytic of imperialism. It instead illuminates one of imperialism’s critical enabling dynamics: incorporation of peripheral elites, alongside hegemonic exclusion of under-privileged segments of the metropolitan working class. This understanding preempts critiques of one-dimensional conceptions of empire.

In a critical intervention on contemporary analyses of imperialism, Al-Bulushi et al. (2022) highlight certain recurring analytical shortcomings. Such analyses, they note, tend to narrowly privilege the agency of US empire. Global South states are then conceptualized “merely as ‘proxies,’ or as passive recipients of ‘global’ designs” (Al-Bulushi et al. 2022: 3). Taking the argument further, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (2022: 38, 180) outright rejects the concept of neocolonialism on the grounds that it neglects the agency of Southern elites—individuals who thus get construed as “dupes” of imperialist machinations. This charge is not new. But neither is the more sophisticated counterargument that the agency of peripheral elites has long been pivotal to reproducing imperialist relations.

Endeavoring, in the 1970s, to avoid a one-sided position in debates over “endogenist” versus “exogenist” accounts of geopolitical inequality, Marini (2022: 152–153) introduced the concept of subimperialism. His aim was to highlight the “autonomous geopolitical role” that the Brazilian ruling class had asserted in striving to project its political and economic power in the region, thereby positioning itself as “a partner, not a puppet, of Washington” (Katz 2022: 64). But even in peripheral states with less geopolitical autonomy, the agency of comprador classes has long been acknowledged. A caveat, however, is that comprador elites and peripheral ruling classes have themselves been cultivated by imperialist powers. What is especially significant is that this cultivation has been a countermeasure to anti-imperialist movements by popular classes in the periphery.

Following his 1965 ouster from Ghana’s presidency in a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-backed coup, Kwame Nkrumah penned an incisive account of the emergence of comprador classes across the African continent. Confronting mass movements against a dying colonialism, European powers, explained Nkrumah (1970: 56), responded by grooming “a new African elite, closely linked with foreign capital.” Such individuals saw their personal interests served through continued foreign investment under the exploitative geopolitical arrangement that followed formal independence. Frantz Fanon (1963: 163, 155) likewise decried this comprador complicity. And Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o took up Nkrumah’s and Fanon’s arguments in his repudiation of African intellectuals who reproduced neocolonial ideology on the continent. The African “petty bourgeoisie born of the colonial schools and universities,” Ngũgĩ (1986: 20) wrote, “looked forward to a permanent alliance with imperialism in which it played the role of an intermediary between the bourgeoisie of the Western metropolis and the people of the colonies.”

More generally, neocolonialism, Nkrumah (1965: 227) argued, is a geopolitical configuration in which metropolitan states employ political, economic, military, or other means to enforce—against the interests of another, nominally independent, country’s citizenry—unequal transnational relations of value extraction. Such means include direct and indirect military interventions, like the coup that ousted Nkrumah; targeted killings, like the 1961 US- and Belgian-orchestrated assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba; and campaigns of mass murder, like the 1965–66 US-sponsored anti-communist genocide in Indonesia. But they also entail, insisted Burkinabé President Thomas Sankara (1988: 65–66, 119–123), conditional loans and donor-driven aid that reproduce relations of political economic dependency. Ultimately, quipped Rodney (1990: 59), neocolonialism was a means to “Africanize exploitation” by propping up client states amenable to metropolitan capital.

So understood, neocolonialism operates as a form of indirect rule through a “native” ruling class. The parallels with the historical emergence of indirect colonial rule are instructive (Campbell 2024). For as with neocolonialism in Nkrumah’s analysis, indirect colonial rule was likewise a reaction to mass anticolonial struggle—most critically, to the 1857 revolt of over 130,000 sepoys in colonial India. The revolt laid bare, to the self-assured, if briefly bewildered, British, that something was amiss in the colonial logic. For Scottish jurist Henry Maine, it was a moment of epiphany, as Mahmood Mamdani (2012: 6–42) has argued at length. The British error, Maine contended at the time, lay not in the imperial project per se, but in the assimilative “civilizing mission”—a misguided attempt to assert “universal civilization” over “local custom” in the colonies (Mamdani 2012: 6). In so arguing, Maine established the conceptual basis for indirect colonial rule and shaped British colonial administration for decades to come.

But the introduction of indirect rule was not, Mamdani (1996) argues elsewhere, due to some ethical turn in the imperial conscience. It was on the one hand a concession to insurrection in the colonies meant to hedge against further revolt. But in that way, it was also a recuperation of anticolonial desires within a spurious autonomy. That is to say, direct and indirect rules were not, for European powers, distinct political alternatives. They were instead “complementary ways of native control” whose divergent patterns of property relations accorded with the disparate interests of, in the case of direct rule, agrarian capital, and, in the case of indirect rule, mining, finance, and commerce (Mamdani 1996: 18) Where, for example, colonial rulers demarcated inalienable native reserves, the resulting semi-proletarian conditions functioned to subsidize migrant wage labor (Wolpe 1972).

Interwar anthropologists seeking to forestall cultural change among colonized populations likewise endorsed a shift to indirect rule through “traditional” elites, rather than an abolition of imperialism per se. For having conceptualized “tribes” as discrete units of analysis, British anthropologists, like Malinowski, saw colonial-era African socio-cultural transformation as but a process of cultural “disintegration,” for which the “cure” was “re-integration”—the restoration of an authentic precolonial unity (Feuchtwang 1973: 96). Yet indirect rule was also, for Malinowski and other like-minded European anthropologists, a means to undercut the more revolutionary of anticolonial movements (James 1973: 54). For “the object” of indirect rule, Malinowski proposed, “is to create in Native authority a devoted and dependable ally, controlled, but strong, wealthy and satisfied” (quoted in Feuchtwang 1973: 92). Under this indirect arrangement, “non-Western tradition” marked not a site outside coloniality, but instead an alternative modality of colonial rule (Mamdani 1996: 18).

It was upon recognizing the limits of formal independence under enduring, if indirect, imperialist relations, that “Third World” radicals demanded a more revolutionary decolonization—one that would abolish neocolonial political economy and its enabling class structure. Thus argued Rodney (2022: 297) in the 1970s:

One has to give a social content, an ideological content to the program for decolonization. Whereas decolonization was, some years ago, understood as Africanization, one now has to talk about socialism as an integral part—not a later stage—of the very process of decolonization itself. Without speaking about reorganizing the class relations within Africa, one is not in fact addressing oneself to cutting the reproduction of capitalism as it has reproduced itself in Africa over the last five decades or more.

A comprador class is thus neocolonialism’s political condition of possibility in the periphery. In the metropole, meanwhile, the political formation enabling imperialism is a more expansive hegemony—a collaborationist class compromise between metropolitan capital and the more privileged segments of the metropolitan working class.

Theorizing imperialism from the periphery of an uneven world-system

Critical of the “elitist paternalism” of Latin American studies coming out of the United States, Marini proposed, as a corrective, privileging a view “from the periphery” (cited in Katz 2022: 66). It was a position he justified on historical materialist grounds, as global political economic unevenness fostered divergent tendencies in regional knowledge production. Brazilian dependency theorist Theotônio dos Santos adopted similar reasoning when seeking to re-theorize imperialism from the specificity of the Latin American experience (ibid.). As revolutionary socialists, Marini and dos Santos were not advocating an ideologically ambivalent “theory from the South.” They were instead calling for historical materialist theorizing that attends seriously to the particularity of peripheralized nations. For the periphery offers a critical vantage point from which to scrutinize the workings of imperialist political economy.

In contemporary scholarship, the concept of the Global South has largely displaced that of the periphery. As a corrective to the political economic flattening that came with post-Cold War globalization boosterism, the language of Global South and North has helped to maintain a focus on enduring global inequality (Al-Bulushi, Grewal, and Ghosh 2022: 2). Where we employ herein the term “Global South,” we imply a conceptual overlap with “periphery.” But we note that this overlap is imperfect, as talk of the “South” excludes peripheries in the North, such as much of eastern Europe (Kojanić 2020). And certain Southern polities, like Singapore, though once formally colonized, are now centers of global capital accumulation in their own right. “Southern” in our usage thus denotes less a geopolitical location than a relational political perspective.

Centering the specificity of peripheralized nations challenges a Eurocentric Marxism that presumes metropolitan political economy and “free” wage workers to be axiomatic of capitalism in general (e.g., Chibber 2013; Teschke 2003: 141, 256). But such theorizing from the periphery is not a parochial fetishism of the particular. Nor is it a blanket rejection of “universal” political projects. It is rather a necessary step in the dialogic construction of a more “worldly” historical materialism (Ali and Raza 2022).

In his 1977 monograph, The Myth of the Lazy Native, Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas centered the particularity of Southeast Asian colonial political economy to theorize, drawing on Marx, a novel conception of “colonial capitalism.” Given extensive agrarian smallholdings among the Southeast Asian peasantry, and thus their limited market dependence, colonial plantation owners, mine operators, and administrators were frustrated in their attempts to mobilize “free” native wage labor. They therefore mobilized labor, instead, under assorted coerced, indentured, or otherwise “semi-free” arrangements (Alatas 1977: 2). But this coercive mobilization of labor for capitalist production was at odds with the ideology of “freedom” used within Europe to legitimate the exploitation of “free” wage workers. The “myth of the lazy native” was therefore introduced to assuage metropolitan colonial guilt—“to justify [to a European audience] compulsion and unjust practices in the mobilization of labour in the colonies” (Alatas 1977: 20). In this way, the myth of native laziness kept unsullied the metropolitan ideology that capitalism demarcated a realm of freedom, or at least of freedom of contract.

Alatas wrote of a specifically colonial form of capitalism. But this was not a discrete unit of analysis. For capitalism in the colonies and capitalism in the metropole were mutually constituted. Atlantic slavery, for instance, was integral to the financing of European industrialization, as C.L.R. James (1989 [1963]: 8) and Eric Williams (1944) both recognized. Sidney Mintz (1985: 51–52) added that the regimentation of enslaved labor on Caribbean plantations served as the organizational model for industrial labor regimes in European factories. Lisa Lowe (2015: 3) has gone further in arguing that the unfreedoms of racialized slavery and indenture in the colonies subsidized and thus enabled hegemonic liberalism in the metropole. Despotic colonial labor regimes were thus a constitutive condition of possibility for the emergence of a Euro-American liberal labor compact, which underwrote metropolitan working-class collaboration with the imperialist bourgeoisie. This argument has a notable precedent. “The veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe,” wrote Marx (1976: 925), “needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.”

The political economic particularity of the periphery is not limited to the historical unfreedoms of slavery and indenture. Notably, the prevalence in Republican China of the peasantry over the urban, industrial working-class informed Mao Zedong’s tactical emphasis on peasant mobilization (Wang 2010: 63). And in the contemporary Global South, we find, along with an enduring peasantry, forms of (often racialized and gendered) petty commodity production, debt bondage, disguised wage labor, human trafficking, coerced child labor, and sundry other informal arrangements, all of which diverge from the so-called standard employment relationship (Campbell 2022). Indeed, across the Global South, the so-called standard employment relationship has never in fact been standard (Breman 2013; Munck 2013). “The very term ‘working class’,” reflected Rodney (1990: 1) on his native Guyana, “has to be liberally or creatively interpreted in our own situation. We have very few workers directly in production in the kind of way that is implied by the Marxist model.”

The South’s importance obviously goes beyond its political economic particularity. And every anti-imperialist struggle is a priority in itself. But where “peripheral” exploitation and expropriation subsidize metropolitan bourgeois hegemony, such struggles take on added global significance. National liberation struggles that break the imperial relation weaken the enemy of anti-imperialist struggles elsewhere. They undermine, as well, the material basis of the metropolitan hegemonic compromise. Thus wrote C.L.R. James (2012: 106) on the world-historical implications of revolutionary Pan-Africanism: “The African bruises and breaks himself against his bars in the interest of freedoms wider than his own.” By contrast, metropolitan leftist or working-class movements that aim at merely redistribution in one country have repeatedly fallen into a politics of social imperialism, whereby welfarist demands are predicated on enduring imperialist violence and exploitation elsewhere. Recognizing the universal ramifications of “particular” anti-imperialist struggles upends the Eurocentric claim that workers in “advanced” countries are the critical protagonists of world revolution. Even as estimable a leftist as Mike Davis fell into this misguided view. “Revolutions of the poor in backward countries can reach for the stars,” wrote Davis (2020:146), “but only the proletariat in advanced countries can actually grasp the future.” Such claims neglect the fact that every twentieth century revolution occurred, not in core hegemonized imperialist nations, but in the periphery—“in the regions encumbered by the most acute capitalist imbalances” (Katz 2022: 141). It remains for the relatively privileged segments of the metropolitan working class to recognize that their own emancipation must pass through the revolutionary national liberation movements of others.

Southern militants have, moreover, effectively drawn on endogenous radical traditions to advance revolutionary projects—traditions not limited to the emergent habitus of an urban industrial proletariat. It is a misplaced Eurocentric orthodoxy that dismisses such a move as atavistic (e.g., Táíwò 2022: 87), or which posits an essential dichotomy between “modern” and “backward-looking” elements in a revolutionary movement (Fick 1991: 250). For whatever the role of French republican discourse in the Haitian revolution (Scott 2018: 75), the “agricultural egalitarianism” that energized the aspirations of those who emancipated themselves from slavery was informed, primarily, by their repudiation of the plantation system, “their own African origins and the desire to define their lives through their relationship to the land” (Fick 1991: 250). The outcome was a novel universalism conceptualized around the post-revolutionary establishment of an autonomous smallholding peasantry (Getachew 2016). Meanwhile, leftist Guinean President Ahmed Sékou Touré drew much from Marx. But he also urged his compatriots to “go down to the grassroots of our culture, not to remain there, not to be isolated there, but to draw strength and substance there from, and with whatever additional sources of strength and material we acquire, proceed to set up a new form of society raised to the level of human progress” (quoted in Amoah 1989: 37). Along similar lines, early twentieth century Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui abjured his contemporaries’ restrictive orthodox privileging of an urban industrial working class—a strategic focus that missed the critical political vitality of Indigenous people’s ongoing struggles for liberation in the country. “The hope of the Indian,” wrote Mariátegui (2022: 47), “is absolutely revolutionary.” Such an embrace of endogenous radical traditions is not, in itself, atavistic. Taking such traditions seriously is, moreover, a critical step in theorizing imperialism “from the periphery” as a dynamic social formation.

From erasures of imperialism to an anthropology against empire

Disciplinary anthropology is a child of imperialism. That is, European colonization was from the start both a stimulus and condition of possibility for ethnographic research by professional European anthropologists. Yet, prior to the formal independence of countries across Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, anthropologists rarely scrutinized the workings of colonialism in their published ethnographies (but see Gluckman 1940 for an important exception). Instead, particular populations living under colonial rule were theorized as discrete units of analysis (as “tribes,” for example), conceptually independent of colonial violence, capitalist relations, supra-local population dynamics, and world history more generally (Wolf 1982: 4, 13–14).

Among the most egregious examples of such anthropological erasures is E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s 1940 ethnography, The Nuer. Evans-Pritchard, to his credit, was open about his political partisanship. “My study of the Nuer,” Evans-Pritchard (1940: vii) acknowledged, “was undertaken at the request of, and was mainly financed by, the [British colonial] Government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, which also contributed generously towards the publication of its results.” That colonial violence was a matter of concern to the Nuer is a fact the author also made clear. Writes Evans-Pritchard (1940: 11): the “recent defeat [of the Nuer] by [colonial] Government forces and the measures taken to ensure their final submission had occasioned deep resentment… When I entered a cattle camp it was not only as a stranger but as an enemy, and they seldom tried to conceal their disgust at my presence, refusing to answer my greetings and even turning away when I addressed them.” Yet, having briefly noted the central fact of imperialist violence, Evans-Pritchard excludes it as a constitutive dimension in the lives of the Nuer—that is, as a phenomenon worthy of anthropological inquiry.

With the formal independence of most colonized countries, few anthropologists would openly defend colonial rule. Yet, David Price (2016) makes clear in Cold War Anthropology that anthropologists continued to be enrolled in the service of empire, albeit an empire now structured around neocolonialism. The case of Clifford Geertz is illustrative. Price (2016: 96–98, 128–130, 378) documents how the CIA funded, as part of a broader anti-communist strategy, Geertz’s fieldwork in newly independent Indonesia, the results of which Geertz published in his 1963 monograph, Agricultural Involution. The book is a Rostovian critique of Sukarno’s socialist policies, in which Geertz blamed the country’s poverty on collectivist ideology, downplayed the impact of colonial plunder and Cold War “relations of dependency,” and called “for Western administrators to interrupt the Javanese involuted economic stagnation” (Price 2016: 97; see Geertz 1963: 80, 153). Two years after the book’s publication, the US-backed Indonesian army ousted Sukarno, massacred up to a million Indonesians, and installed General Suharto as a US client (Bevins 2020: 155). Geertz later claimed he was unaware the CIA had funded his research (Price 2016: 96).

Geertz may have indeed been unaware of the origins of his fieldwork funding. But he was being consistent with disciplinary anthropology’s willful obliviousness to the imperialist context of ethnographic research (Roseberry 1982). This is a pattern of ethnographic myopia to which Orin Starn called attention in his critique of the romantically inclined Andean anthropology that preceded the 1980 eruption of the Shining Path insurrection in Peru. “Most anthropologists,” writes Starn (1991: 64), “were remarkably unattuned to the conditions which made possible the rise of Sendero.” Peruvian general Francisco Morales Bermúdez had, in 1975, seized power in a coup, and then steered the country into closer alignment with US foreign policy and away from his predecessor’s progressive social and economic reforms. The ensuing deterioration of economic conditions for peasants and the working class catalyzed mass street protests and a nationwide general strike (Walker 2020). Facing this opposition, Bermúdez declared a state of emergency, criminalized strikes, and signed on to Operation Condor—a US-backed campaign of terrorist repression that murdered or disappeared tens of thousands of leftists and social activists across South America in the 1970s and 80s. Yet, through it all, anthropologists, writes Starn (1991: 64), “largely overlooked the climate of sharp unrest across [Peru’s] impoverished countryside,” while portraying “contemporary highland peasants as outside the flow of modern history.” Anthropologists, in short, were “missing the revolution” (Starn 1991: 63).

To be sure, there has over the past decade-plus been a surge in anthropological writing on decolonization (see Gupta and Stoolman 2022 for an overview). There have also been important anthropological interventions centering imperialism as a specifically political economic formation (Krupa 2022: 47–55; Neveling and Steur 2018). Yet, the latter interventions remain overshadowed by an emphasis on decolonization as an epistemological project (Patel 2021) and by an enduring disciplinary emphasis on cultural forms disconnected from the imperialist political economy with which they are dialectically imbricated. Consequently, “decolonization” in anthropology risks is being reduced to a synonym for cultural relativism (Gupta and Stoolman 2022: 781), while imperialism’s political economic structures go unchallenged.

What we see, then, throughout anthropology’s disciplinary history, is a recurring erasure of imperialism as a constitutive dimension in the lives of individuals being researched. It is, in a way, to invoke Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995), a silencing of the past. But it is a silencing unfolding simultaneously with the historical process in question. To erase imperialism from anthropological analysis is to be complicit with imperialist denial. It is also to hinder a broader public understanding of the socio-political dynamics that connect readers to the lives of those about whom they read, especially in cases of metropolitan audiences reading of those impacted by imperialist violence. A pressing example is the malicious mischaracterization of increased migration and asylum applications to Northern states as being indicative of a “migrant crisis” rather than as (correctly) a “displacement crisis” (Walia 2022)—a displacement crisis fueled by prior and ongoing imperialist interventions. Thus writes Harsha Walia (2021: 3) regarding population movements to and across the Mexico-US border:

A long arc of dirty colonial coups, capitalist trade agreements extracting land and labor, climate change, and enforced oppression is the primary driver of displacement from Mexico and Central America. Migration is a predictable consequence of these displacements, yet today the US is fortifying its border against the very people impacted by its own policies.

The articles included in this special issue challenge such erasures of imperialism. They foreground the political and economic dimensions of empire across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They trace histories of imperialist violence and extraction. And they attend to the critical theorizing of empire by Southern revolutionaries who have confronted imperialist aggression. In his article on “just transition” loans to promote decarbonization in South Africa, Thomas McNamara points out that both climate change and the neoliberal responses proposed to address it have been driven by the interests of established imperialist powers. This unequal relationship has prompted opposition within South Africa to decarbonization and has undermined efforts to tackle climate change at a global level. Geoffrey Rathgeb Aung and Stephen Campbell, in their article, review a tradition of radical thought and practice in Myanmar from the colonial period to the present. The country’s radical politics, they argue, have developed historically in relation to a reactive and reactionary imperial world order. Emma Banks then turns in her article to recent “community consultations” over extractive industries in Colombia—specifically, regarding environmental harms from the Cerrejón coal mine, which is jointly owned by Glencore (Swiss), BHP (Australian), and AngloAmerican (British). Banks finds that the technocratic constraints placed on these “consultations”—set by transnational organizations like the World Bank—have enabled foreign corporations, like those that own Cerrejón, to co-opt the consultative process and ride rough shod over the concerns of local Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups harmed by extractive industries, like coal mining. Lastly, Steve Striffler closes off this collection with a Coda in which he reflects on the contributed articles and on the enduring relevance of anti-imperialist analysis and politics within the discipline of anthropology. In sum, the articles collected in this special issue advance an anthropology not simply of empire, but against it—a project that seeks not just to interpret imperialism, but to aid in its abolition.