Disavowing history

Abstract

If the secession of formerly colonized countries from large imperial units is a story of political hope, the central actors in Quinn Slobodian’s story perceive the opportunities provided by the proliferation of new jurisdictions following decolonization very differently. According to the “market radicals” of the late 20th and 21st centuries, the break-up of empire is not a story of the potential for the democratization of politics and history-writing. Their ideas do however offer critiques of modernity. In this commentary, I convene critics of modernity – anticolonial leaders, historians of decolonization and the aftermath of empire, Indigenous and tribal peoples and their historians, and decolonial thinkers – in conversation with the capitalist adventurers of Slobodian’s tale, via an exploration of the limits and possibilities of history-writing and the politics of historicist discourse.

Decolonization made the “world the stage of history” wrote the historian Duara (2003: 1). The mobilization of millions of people against their colonial oppressors, the raising of non-cooperation movements, rolling labor strikes, and violent wars of liberation, all demonstrated that colonized peoples could stand up against empire, and win. Former colonial subjects – those so often denied a history and relegated to the mystical world of tradition – were in fact historical agents. They were actors on a global political stage that, in the second half of the 20th century, had to make room for hundreds of leaders of the independent states formed in empire’s wake. This story of liberation from colonialism, of formerly oppressed peoples making their own history, of occupying and transforming political spaces not designed for them, is powerful and captivating. And, furthermore, it has inspired a democratizing of what we mean by “history” and its making.

If the secession of formerly colonized countries from large imperial units is a story of political hope in Duara’s account, the central actors in Quinn Slobodian’s story perceive the opportunities provided by the proliferation of new jurisdictions following decolonization very differently. According to the “market radicals” of the late 20th and 21st centuries in Slobodian’s account, the break-up of empire is not a story of the potential for the democratization of politics and history-writing. Dreaming of a world without democracy, these actors privilege fragmentation over integration, and seek the perforation of state sovereignty by economic “zones.” Those business-friendly extraterritorial jurisdictions offer wild opportunities for the capitalist adventurers of Slobodian’s tale: men ready not only to take an economic risk in far-flung regions (coastal Somalia, Honduras or even the virtual world of the metaverse) but desirous of playgrounds where they can experiment with “micro-ordering.” The term refers to a practice of power that entails identifying and enhancing the best rules for securing commercial contracts; in other words, it is a coldly legalistic approach to economic “order” that benefits investors and the ultra-wealthy who inhabit glossy worlds in zones created for them.

Slobodian thus provides a slyly critical account of capitalist adventurers who have interpreted – and then acted on – the world after empire very differently from anticolonial political leaders and the scholars who have written about them. Significantly, Slobodian draws on historical techniques to work against the logic of those market radicals. This is in contrast to scholars of anticolonial movements, who have tended to enlarge upon the politics of those actors in their scholarship, rather than work against them, or advance thinking about the democratization of political action and history-writing even further, for instance by examining “subaltern” pasts that are not easily representable in the terms of historicist discourse. What these various actors and scholars share is a critical stance toward modernity. In this commentary, I convene critics of modernity – anticolonial leaders, historians of decolonization and the aftermath of empire, Indigenous and tribal peoples and their historians, and decolonial thinkers – in conversation with the capitalist adventurers of Slobodian’s tale, via an exploration of the limits and possibilities of history-writing and the politics of historicist discourse.

The capitalist adventurers in Slobodian’s story seek to side-step political modernity by making use of the economic possibilities that the shattering of large-scale political order has enabled. The “micro-ordering” that they seek to undertake in the context of “crack-up capitalism” is not a process of making new citizens and enlarging the stage on which they act. It is one of enabling very large profits in ever more contained spaces that can be easily and directly regulated, beyond or outside the reach of the state. “Crack-up capitalism” is the name Slobodian gives to this economic power that seeks to break-down political units rather than build them up. It is a story of elite action after empire in which the formerly colonized do not become agents in their own history but are further objectified by (mainly) Western libertarians and anarcho-capitalists seeking to maximize profit without incurring the costs of social responsibility.

The “zone” protects its wealthy inhabitants from moral confrontation. As Slobodian regularly reminds us, the ’zone’ is also a particular kind of built environment: recognizable in the stratospheric high-rises of Dubai, or the reclaimed land of Singapore. Both these places were central trading ports in the British empire, and came under different kinds of British protection or rule but are now self-governing. They are places that seal off their inhabitants from criticism and the effects of political pressures mounted by the masses toiling around them. Zones are also are workstations that are quarantined from the public square where key issues of the day might be hotly debated. They are homes, pools, and gyms that are sequestered away from porous common spaces where social differences might be encountered and reflected upon. Further, the built spaces of crack-up capitalism’s zones are disconnected from their own conditions of environmental and historical possibility. They appear as places without limits. Dubai, as Slobodian puts it, “the gilded home of the world’s tallest hotel, the world’s only ski slope in a desert, and the world’s highest tennis court” has made a “dizzying ascent from a gold-smuggling outpost with houses built of coral and sand” (Slobodian, 2023: 169).

By pointing out just how out-of-place these wealthy enclaves are and emphasizing the imperial histories that have made them possible, Slobodian explicitly works against the logic of the anarcho-capitalists who seek to de-historicize such locations. He does this by explaining how the “zones” made use of by the cynical actors in this story do have recoverable pasts. Contemporary market radicals take advantage of what the legal historian Benton (2010) conceptualizes as the lumpy and uneven legal geographies of empire that persist into the present (a continuity that also throws into doubt how much of empire decolonization was actually able to undo). Treaty-port Hong Kong is the key example, one that recurs throughout the book for it serves as a model for market radicals of the colossal enrichment possible in certain kinds of legal enclaves.

In so doing, Slobodian’s subtle critique does not quite make explicit the political assumptions underwriting historicist discourse, but that are clearly antithetical to the imaginaries of the anarcho-capitalists. A second, admittedly more implicit, meaning in Duara’s claim that decolonization made the world the “stage” of history is that, in achieving political independence, the formerly colonized had “caught up” with Europe. Even if Duara did not subscribe to a 19th-century version of stages of development, the long afterlife of progressive historicism has shaped how historians of colonialism and decolonization have situated their subjects in time – a time of anti-colonial mobilization, of national development, of political and social becoming. This notion of progressive historicism is not entirely unilinear – it has been pluralized into “alternative modernities” as the idea of Europe-as-model itself became anachronistic in a postcolonial world. Further, new postcolonial states are not simply imitations of European ones. Nonetheless, a progressive account still underpins the democratic award of historical agency in histories of decolonization, as they recognize a much wider array of peoples involved in the making of history.

Moreover, awarding historical agency to a more diverse list of actors – that is, the gesture by which the world becomes the stage of history – is itself perceived to be of moral value, in this way of thinking. Recognizing that all peoples can be considered historical actors and that their histories can be uncovered is a good thing – it proffers a kind of epistemological justice as the making of history becomes a much less Eurocentric and much more plural enterprise. And it is also considered a good thing because history-making then becomes less a tool of oppressors and more an instrument of self-determination. A diverse, self-determining collection of actors can thereby achieve co-evalness: they share the same space and time with Western actors, at least on the global political stage.

In contrast, by disjoining capitalism from responsibilities of wider social development, market radicals liberate themselves from developmentalist trajectories and their progressive normative horizons. It is neither here nor there as to whether the history of capitalism is a good or bad thing, whether it increases or reduces freedom, and whether it could or should be harnessed for social-political ends. While they take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the legacies of legal spaces that were earlier carved out for colonial exploitation, the market radicals themselves appear to have exited history as a story of development and democratization. And the zone as built environment is a physical manifestations of the free-market radicals’ conceptual and moral exit strategy.

Significantly, but perhaps not unsurprisingly, in this anti- or non-historicist thinking of free-floating market radicals, tribal peoples serve as exemplars for how worlds without large states – and particularly democratic states – might flourish. An American anthropologist, Spencer MacCallum, a “first-class anarcho-capitalist fantasist” (Slobodian, 2023: 161), turns to examples of stateless societies as models for the stripped-down version of collective life suited to contractual choice that he wants to bring into being. Slobodian explains how MacCallum searched for

a political environment that set politics aside. Collective life would be reduced to a problem of administration. You entered if the terms of the contract were to your liking and left if they did not. Vague ideas of the demos and “the people” would have no place. (Slobodian, 2023: 161)

MacCallum and his co-conspirator Michael Van Notten, a Dutch libertarian found what they were looking for among Somali clans whose customary law served the idea of personal and bureaucracy-free justice that the market radicals prefer. MacCallum and Van Notten embark on a project: the making of a business “clan,” an idea that Van Notten claimed actually originated with a group of Somali elders. ““If the new clan prospers,”” the elders tell him, ““the existing clans will not lose a moment in adopting its superior business environment as their own custom”” (Slobodian, 2023: 157). The idea of a “free-port” clan is born.

In European philosophy of the 19th-century, tribes were often viewed as peoples without history. In Hegel’s account, Native Americans inevitably “vanished” as the more “effective population” from Europe created value from the “virgin soil” in the New World (Hegel, 1991 [1840]: 81–82). The market radicals reprise a sense of this history-less-ness, but for a different purpose. Rather than discounting tribal peoples from the unfolding story of world spirit, as Hegel did, they re-center tribalism in a non-progressive account of co-evalness. Van Notten and his Somali interlocutors conspire in crafting the idea of a “business clan” not because they both orient their projects to a democratic horizon in a decolonizing world. Rather, they appear to share a non-progressive, yet creative sense of the opportunities available to them now – ones which can be best enhanced by through cooperation beyond or outside of the lumbering state apparatus. The do not so much deny co-evalness as deny Indigenous peoples’ historicity. (On the “denial of co-evalness,” see Fabian, 1983.)

Slobodian observes how the interpretations of tribal law and practice made by MacCallum and others invert romantic stereotypes of native life. Instead of being represented as one with nature – a common trope in contemporary environmentalism – tribal people are, in the account of the free market-radicals, the inventors of property and contract. An inversion of a common stereotype does not lead us to a more complex truth about any of these communities and their political and social realities or aspirations. In fact, simplistic characterizations of Indigenous people for the purpose of making a self-serving political claim is not unusual: both left and right (if these political designations mean anything anymore) are prone to de-historicizing Indigenous people for their own ends.

Yet over the last half-century or more, historians have strived to put Indigenous peoples back into history. This has entailed considerable revisioning of historical knowledge and its production. Dedicated fields such as ethnohistory have developed creative approaches to non-textual sources, scholars have built relationships with Indigenous communities, and museums and archives have aimed to reconnect tribal members with collections that include images, writings, and sounds of their ancestors. Those scholarly efforts are often normatively justified under the political and cultural sign of self-determination – which Indigenous activists and lawyers have themselves mobilized around (see e.g. Johnson, 2021). Furthermore, scholars have demonstrated how much the idea and practice of tribal law and custom has been shaped and reshaped in relation to engagements with colonial modernity (see e.g. Yannakakis, 2023). In the same way that modern Dubai disavows its colonial history in its ultra-modern built environment, the way that MacCallum and others refer to tribal law (or medieval justice, in another example) disavows the contingent in and the constructed-ness of tribal custom.

It is important, I think, to underline the stakes of that disavowal of historicity, both for democratic politics and for scholarship. As a critique of modernity, the market radicals’ approach to a non-progressive co-evalness subverts the work of progressivist history-making of the kind associated with the writing of more democratic histories of the postcolonial world. As I have been suggesting, the relationship between writing the agency of the formerly oppressed into historical accounts is itself often valued as a democratic act. The anti-historicist approach of MacCallum and others is also anti-democratic in this sense. As the free-market radicals seek out both physical and intellectual spaces in which they can be free of statist demands and expectations, which they perceive to be limiting their freedoms, they also deny their co-eval interlocutors their own histories. It is not surprising that they cultivate relationships with communities commonly defined as non-modern, in terms that continue to de-historicize them. But this denial of historicism has real political implications. On what grounds might the “free-port” clan develop a critique of exploitation by the free-marketeers?

The approach of the free-market radicals echoes eerily with another theoretical endeavor, though this one is associated with the left. Certain threads in contemporary decolonial theory also reject historicist thinking and aim to de-couple enduring Indigenous life-worlds from the determinations and legacies of colonialism. Decolonial theory, which primarily emerged in Latin America, is itself a response both to colonial modernity and the failures of decolonization. As anarchic capitalism in Latin American postcolonial states has made the lives of those living in its wake ever more precarious, particularly through extractivism, scholars who question the undelivered promise of progressivist trajectories have developed theories that might offer hope in other forms of alterity. Mignolo (2011), among others, proposes decolonial theory as a response to social fragmentation in which agency is dispersed and disunity has become an accepted anti-norm. Like the anti-state position of the market radicals, decolonial theorists too offer an account of centralizing power as largely repressive. Such repressive power needs to be conceptually bracketed, they argue, in order for properly decolonial Indigenous self-understandings to become manifest.

Pheng Cheah has critiqued Mignolo’s work for this reliance on an account of power as repressive. Such an analysis is misdirected, Cheah points out, for it cannot explain the productive ways that globalization operates, not only by excluding or marginalizing but also by integrating and assimilating “every being into the circuit of the international division of labor” (Cheah, 2006: online). The web of entanglements, initiated by European imperialism, not only limits human endeavor; it also propels it, for better and worse. However, we can only critique such a system from a position within it. Our moral authority to point out inequity derives from our complicity within such a system. The exit strategy – getting out of “history” – is not a critique of the status quo, and nor does it invite such critique. It is an avoidance strategy, a disavowal of what it is that makes us want to exit in the first place. Reflexively speaking, neither decolonial theory nor the ideas of the free-market radicals are able to account for their appeal, which has something to do with a desire not to be so entangled. This desire in the first instance emerges from the difficulties that arise from the material, cultural, and social entanglements of living in a globalized world. Those conditions can be deeply oppressive and curtailing but they also enable cultural interaction and wide-scale political mobilizing. In other words, a significant problem with anti-modernist, de-historicizing approaches is that they fail to account for their own conditions of possibility.

No doubt, for free-market radicals, as for decolonial theorists, what seems like a serious epistemological and moral limitation from the perspective of a scholar like Slobodian, or myself, committed to the work of historicizing is of little consequence. Perhaps the best a scholar working within a modernist framework can aim for is to acknowledge and analyze disciplinary limits, as we try to wrest meaning back from the shade thrown by those such as the free-marketers. Conceptual thinking about “subaltern pasts” – including Indigenous ones – is essential in this regard, for it has demonstrated how such pasts are only partially recoverable at the limits of historicism (Chakrabarty, 1998). Thinking with and at such limits is not to completely disavow the value of historicizing. In fact, doing so may invite a pluralizing of the conception of historicity in terms that take seriously Indigenous understandings and phenomenologies of time (see e.g. Ballard, 2014), rather than forcing the latter into European frameworks, as decolonial theorists also underline. Ultimately, however, approaches that take account of the contextual and the contingent remain of critical importance. Slobodian’s book demonstrates this value in gripping detail. Such approaches challenge the disavowal of history by those who fantasize that they can exit the environmental and historical conditions that make their vast enrichment possible at profound cost to the rest of the human and more-than-human world.