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Presented By: LSA Development, Marketing & Communications

Sociology and Colonialism in the British and French Empires, 1940s-1960s: A Postcolonial History of Social Science since WWII

George Steinmetz, Charles H Tilly Collegiate Professor of Sociology and Germanic Languages and Literatures

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Colonial research represented an important part of the renascent academic discipline of sociology after 1945 in Britain and France. This article begins by establishing the existence of networks of colonial sociologists and charting their size, composition, and relations to neighboring academic disciplines, especially anthropology. A careful reconstruction of the two sociological fields finds that colonies became a key object, terrain of investigation, and employment site for sociologists, engaging 33-55% of the British and French sociology fields between 1945 and 1960. Colonial developmentalism created a demand for new forms of social scientific expertise, including Sociology. Sociologists became favored partners of colonial governments, resulting in novel forms of applied sociology focused on urbanization, detribalization, labor migration, industrialization, poverty, and resettlement. Colonial sociologists also made a number of theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that, while largely forgotten, shaped the subsequent discipline in unacknowledged ways and foreshadowed more recent work on race relations, transnational and global history, and “southern” and postcolonial theory.
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