Historicizing State Sovereignty: Inequality and the Form of Equivalence

The overarching argument of this paper is not a new one; others have made it in various forms. The argument suggests, in Bernard Cohn's simple formulation, that metropole and colony should be treated in a unified field of analysis. Reconstituting the analytical frame in the manner Cohn suggests has a range of implications not only for the study of colonialism but also, and perhaps more importantly, for understanding current geopolitical conjunctures. The suggestion diverges from the conventional analytical approach that divides and demarcates the world into separable entities—whether they be described as the mutually exclusive categories of metropole and colony, Europe and its Others, a set of distinct nations, first and third world, or indeed of areas and regions—and studies these distinct entities in isolation from, or in comparison with, each other. In contrast, Cohn's proposition asks for an analysis of how such demarcations are produced and of how, rather than being discrete entities with autochthonous formations, they are co-produced through a complex array of related and relational historical events. It is a call, in other words, to shift the analytical framework from one that functions, implicitly or explicitly, on the basis of comparison, to one that operates on the basis of co-production. Such an approach, this essay demonstrates, is especially necessary for a thoroughly historicized understanding of nation-state formation, particularly since the nation-state constitutes a preeminent category of and for comparative analysis.