Doctoral Dissertation Research: Nation-Making and the Politics of Difference

这个项目在种族政治的背景下分析了英国民族国家的形成。虽然目前的学者认为这段历史是一场争取权利的斗争，但英国殖民统治下的臣民被排除在享有这些权利之外。英国国内公民、政治和社会权利的形成发生在英国殖民者在加勒比海建立奴隶帝国、在四大洲实施强迫劳动制度并控制移民的时期。其目的是理解种族排斥的政治。这项研究试图找到这个民族国家对移民和难民怀有敌意的历史根源。分析帝国在英国民族国家建设中的遗产，旨在揭示连接欧洲及其前殖民国家的深层次种族政治。尽管历史社会学长期以来一直在研究现代民族国家的形成，但现有的解释机制在很大程度上是欧洲的内生解释机制，“民族”和“帝国”之间的空间断裂已渗透到社会学分析框架中。该项目解决了这一分析缺陷，并通过与殖民时期的英属西印度群岛的互动来研究现代英国的形成。它问：英国民族国家是如何在殖民帝国的背景下形成的？具体地说，研究集中在英国大都市和殖民地政治的三个历史时刻：移民权利诉求和奴隶制废除中的民权形成；帝国契约劳动制度中工人阶级政治权利的形成；以及殖民移民时代社会权利的形成。这项研究利用了政府档案文件、殖民时期的办公室通讯和报纸，它有两个目的：首先，它试图解释英国大都会政治机构是如何以及为什么被定义为反对殖民人口的，并创造了一个被想象为白人的公民，使肤色界限正常化。其次，随着民族国家的巩固，它旨在展示移民殖民主体如何挑战国家建设计划，以及对差异的斗争如何威胁到人、种族和国家之间的同构。

This project analyses the formation of the British nation state within the context of racial politics. While current scholarship views this history as a struggle for rights, British colonial subjects were being excluded from holding these rights. The formation of civil, political and social rights within Britain took place at a time when British settlers built a slave-empire in the Caribbean, implemented forced labor regimes across four continents, and controlled immigration. The purpose is to understand the politics of racial exclusion. The study seeks to find the historical roots of the nation state's hostility towards immigrants and refugees. Analyzing the legacies of empire involved in the construction of the British nation state aims to shine a light on the deep-seated racial politics linking Europe and its former colonial others.Even though historical sociology has long studied the formation of the modern nation state, existing explanatory mechanisms are largely endogenous to Europe and a spatial break between "the nation" and "the empire" has seeped into sociological analytical frameworks. The project addresses this analytical shortcoming and examines the making of modern Britain in interaction with the colonial British West Indies. It asks: How did the British nation state form amidst a context of colonial empire? Specifically, research focuses on three historical moments in metropolitan and colonial British politics: The formation of civil rights amidst settler rights claims and slavery abolition; the formation of working class political rights amidst indentured labor regimes in the empire; and the formation of social rights during a time of colonial immigration. The study draws on government archival documents, colonial office communications and newspapers, and it has two objectives: First, it seeks to explain how and why the British metropolitan body politic came to be defined against colonial populations and created a citizenry that was imagined as white, normalizing the color line. Second, following the consolidation of the nation state, it aims to show how immigrating colonial subjects challenged the nation-building project and how a struggle over difference came to threaten the isomorphism between people, race and nation.