What Is Colonialism? The Dual Claims of a Twentieth-Century Political Category

Although a master category of contemporary social and political thought, the conceptual import of colonialism has long been contested. Turning to the political thought of Jawaharlal Nehru, this article reconstructs the surprising, and often surreptitious, intellectual transformations that rendered colonialism into a generic name for European rule over Asia and Africa. It demonstrates how the dual claims of colonialism—a historical reference for the global event of European expansion and a threadbare analytical definition for a particular form of rule—generated a powerful framework in the anticolonial age. While the expanded juridical uses of colonialism in the Cold War era undermined its historical claims, the priority would reverse with its postcolonial re-signification as a shorthand for studying the paradoxes of global modernity. Reframing these debates, this article argues that reflexive navigation between the dual claims of colonialism is key to a capacious appreciation of its historical and normative contentions.