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，但英国殖民地的臣民被排除在这些权利之外。英国公民、政治和社会权利的形成，是在英国殖民者在加勒比地区建立奴隶帝国、在四大洲实施强制劳动制度、控制移民的时候发生的。目的是了解种族排斥的政治。这项研究试图找出民族国家对移民和难民的敌意的历史根源。分析英国民族国家建设过程中涉及的帝国遗产，旨在揭示将欧洲与其前殖民地联系在一起的根深蒂固的种族政治。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内生的，“民族”与“帝国”之间的空间断裂已经渗透到社会学的分析框架中。该项目解决了这一分析缺陷，并考察了现代英国与英属西印度群岛殖民地的相互作用。它的问题是：英国民族国家是如何在殖民帝国的背景下形成的？具体而言，研究集中在大都市和殖民地英国政治的三个历史时刻：在定居者权利要求和奴隶制废除中形成公民权利；帝国契约劳工制度下工人阶级政治权利的形成以及殖民地移民时期社会权利的形成。这项研究利用了政府档案文件、殖民地办公室通讯和报纸，它有两个目标：首先，它试图解释英国大都市政治体是如何以及为什么被定义为与殖民地人口不同的，并创造了一个被想象为白人的公民群体，使肤色界限正常化。其次，随着民族国家的巩固，它旨在展示移民的殖民地主体如何挑战国家建设项目，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.