Fiscal redistribution recreates democratic despotism – their project is a feel-good moment that actually makes imperial violence inevitable. Only an organizational form that breaks up the kinds of racialized attachments which facilitate counterinsurgency against capitalism can solve.

The most important feature of the modern world order, arguably, has been its imperial structure of racialized, capitalist hierarchy. The contours of this hierarchy of wealth, political power and legal standing have changed significantly since its inauguration in the fifteenth century, but its continuity as a basic fact and its implications for the world since so-called decolonization should remain at the center of our description and analysis. The pervasive nature of these imperial dynamics means that the tasks for postcolonial political theory are vast. The very categories that have structured the discipline of political science since the end of the Second World War contribute to the challenge. Political theory was conceived in the postwar period largely as the study of the state and of politics within states, alongside a discipline of International Relations that took itself to be the study of the relations among states, with an implicit understanding that the states in question were post-imperial and disavowing its own prewar past as a discipline preoccupied with the management of colonial and racial hierarchy. Postcolonial theory, in contrast, refers not to a time after the end of empire, a condition that we are nowhere near achieving, but rather after the inauguration of the modern imperial world order (Seth, 2013, p. 1). Twentieth-century anticolonial thought offered precisely such an ‘expansive account of empire that situated alien rule within international structures of unequal integration and racial hierarchy’ (Getachew, 2019, p. 2). as well as resourceful political responses to that condition, now just beginning to be tapped by disciplinary political theory. As I’ll suggest below, W.E.B. Du Bois’s writings on the global order, beginning during the First World War, remain one potent source of empirical analysis of and theoretical insight into this phenomenon. Indeed, the continuing resonance of his account of the imperial global order underscores how much persists, despite changes as seemingly significant as formal decolonization and the onset and then the end of the Cold War. The tenacity of this imperial formation is due in part to the flexibility, and the attractions, of some of its key legitimating discourses, including liberalism and international law. In Boundaries of the International, I studied the relation between imperial structure and discursive scaffolding by exploring the mutual constitution of international law and the imperial global order. I stressed the politics of international law’s conceptual frames: the ways in which an image of the world as an international community of free and independent states was used to justify European imperial domination, and sometimes to criticize it, but especially to occlude it. The state system itself, that is, as an ideology and as a set of legal institutions and political practices, entrenched imperial hierarchies while simultaneously obscuring them with the appearance of formal equality, as it continues to do. As a conceptual frame, or ‘language of disclosure’, the notion of an international community of states has thus obscured or distorted much of global politics since it was invented, and as it was entrenched over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Tully, 2008, vol. 2, p. 127). It follows that any discussion of the politics of territorial states, or of the world as a system of such states, must take place alongside a recognition of more fundamental imperial structures. Given the extent of the task of taking stock of the persistence of global hierarchy, I hesitate to write prescriptively about what political theorists concerned with empire should be considering. Since we were invited to take Boundaries as a point of departure, though, I can begin by noting some of the ways I had hoped it would be engaged and taken up, as well as some of the questions and dynamics that the book does not address and lines of approach that I hope to follow in future work. I am only too aware of the limitations of the approach I took in Boundaries, particularly that it privileges discursive contexts over material dynamics and that its objects are mainly European thinkers, as Vasko, Ince and Nichols observe below. Among the book’s key preoccupations are the epistemic pitfalls and political limitations of the dominant conceptual framework that we have for talking about global politics, as a community of independent territorial states. Boundaries addresses the historical development of this framework and its occlusions but says less about their implications for contemporary normative theory. To place imperial structures at the heart of our critical descriptions of the global order may be to challenge quite fundamentally both the ideal of an international community of free and equal nations and the cosmopolitan ideal that has constituted its main rival within normative international theory. The notion of such a community of states that respect one another’s autonomy, while offering assistance when needed, is in many ways a compelling normative vision. But it has always also been, as is commonly the case in international law, an aspiration couched as a description, a conflation that has generated two different but related problems. First, to the extent that the aspiration has been used as a working description, it has masked the imperial nature of European states (as in Rawls, 1999). Second, to the extent that the aspiration has been shaped by empirical assumptions – for instance, as to what forms of prosperity or solidarity are possible in the modern nation-state – it has presupposed conditions that came about through imperialism and in many instances remain dependent on global hierarchies. This is one reason among many to relinquish ‘liberal-democratic’ states of the global north as normative models. Du Bois’s critique of what he called ‘democratic despotism’ illuminates these two intertwined but distinct problems. As I only began to suggest in Boundaries, Du Bois’s First World War essays offer a profound contrast with the views of the European international lawyers and political theorists of whom my study is a critique. Du Bois saw the modern world order not as an expanding community of states but as a global economic and political system shaped above all by the dynamics of imperial domination. His early efforts to make sense of the industrial imperialism of his present involved a longue durée global history linking conquest, commerce, and race, and showing that the key political developments on which modern Europeans prided themselves – advancing freedom and equality under democracy, the increasing prosperity of their populations – were parasitic on imperial exploitation. His critique bore on the interaction of ideas and material forces: white supremacy and European ideas of civilization together with the operations of global capital. The ideology and the legal and institutional structure of the international system facilitated the exploitation inevitable under capitalism by placing it in imperial and racialized spaces outside the bounds of ‘international’ concern. And because European democratization itself relied on imperial exploitation, empire had morphed into a distinct and novel phenomenon: ‘democratic despotism’. The sharing of imperial spoils eased social conflict within Europe, simultaneously reconciling the ruling ‘captains of industry’ to increased power-sharing at home as long as they had continued impunity in the colonies, and mitigating the poverty and political agitation of the European masses through colonial profits and consumer goods (Du Bois, 1915, p. 709). Despite the fact that the white working classes themselves suffered under imperial capitalism, white socialists and their labor supporters failed to acknowledge or to combat the dynamics of global domination because they were also its beneficiaries: ‘in this crime white labor is particeps criminis with white capital’ (Du Bois, 1921, p. 7). They had been seduced into demanding a greater share of imperial profits, rather than recognizing that ultimately their own liberation depended on their working to end the even more extreme exploitation of non-whites around the world. On Du Bois’s account, the modern nation – and therefore the international system – was not, as other critics such as J.A. Hobson were arguing, perverted by imperialism, but in fact created by it. The Euro-American nation-state system emerged as an idealization perched atop structures of global empire. A wealth of recent scholarship on empire, settler colonialism, and their contemporary instantiations, develops these Du Boisian insights, drawing the connections between racial and imperial domination ‘within’ societies and between them, tracing the connections between democracy or popular sovereignty and imperial subjugation, elucidating the dynamics of racial capitalism, and attending to the resources in anticolonial thought and action, especially in political solidarities across the global south. As Aziz Rana argued in Two Faces of American Freedom, freedom and equality among whites in the North American colonies, and then the United States, depended materially and symbolically on the exploitation and expropriation of subject communities: ‘settler empire was the servant of a unique and robust view of self-rule, seen by many as crucial to the fulfillment of emancipatory ambitions’ (2010, p. 3). Settlers’ ongoing insistence on interpreting Indigenous claims for land and political autonomy in their own terms, moreover – as claims for property rights and cultural freedoms – renders them impervious to the radical challenge such claims pose to the settler-colonial model of development, capital accumulation by means of dispossession, and the political practices that depend on them (Coulthard, 2014). These pathologies are closely bound to the broader dynamics of democratic despotism identified by Du Bois – to democratization in non-settler imperial states – in ways that bear on both democratic theory and the study of settler-colonial societies. The economic and political life of European metropolitan citizens was similarly premised on imperial domination and expropriation: the industrial productivity enabled by the opening of agricultural land in the western hemisphere to European economies; the fueling of the European working class by sugar calories made cheap by the use of slave labor; the sense of political inclusion of the working class generated by a shared colonial project. Class conflict in Europe was mitigated, democratic communities forged, and welfare states inaugurated on the back of imperial expropriation, white supremacy, and, as Inés Valdez has shown, racialized imperial labor control. Valdez’s account of the immigration policies of contemporary nation-states as ‘imperial remnants rather than legitimate attributes of sovereignty’ (2019, p. 22) sheds light on contemporary right-wing populism and exposes the limits of left positions on migration that seek to protect only domestic labor while leaving capital’s global exploitation of labor unchallenged. Thanks to the global hegemony of the United States, the constellation of distinct but connected forms of imperial domination that has characterized American history – slavery, settler colonialism, and conquest of both adjacent and more distant territory – has ramified around the world. As the sociologist Matthew Desmond (2019) has argued, America’s ‘low-road capitalism’ – characterized by depressed wages, extreme inequality, racism, union-busting, the punitive disciplining of workers, lax regulation of labor standards, and ‘normalized insecurity’ – can be traced to slavery. If that low-road capitalism is not typical of wealthy countries, on Desmond’s account, its centrality to the world’s largest economy intensifies the imprint of empire on the contemporary world economy, while the exploitation by global capital of labor in more vulnerable states amounts to the exportation of low-road practices outside the political boundaries, but not the economies, of other wealthy states. Just as Du Bois had demonstrated the continuities between empires and European nation-states as their chief modern agents, he also showed that postcolonial states suffered new iterations of imperial domination obscured by international law. Anticipating the idea of neo-colonialism developed by Kwame Nkrumah and others in the 1950s, Du Bois argued in 1925 that Liberia, one of the few formally independent African states at the time, was wrongly ‘looked upon as a self-steered craft, master of her own fate instead of being, as she has always been, a canoe tossed on raging economic currents which eddied out of the slave trade of the eighteenth-century into the swirl of the World War in the twentieth century’ (Du Bois, 1925, p. 327). As it was for Liberia in Du Bois’s time, debt remains a major mechanism of neo-colonial control, now enforced by a rigid ‘statist’ norm of repayment that states in the global north did not abide by before the 1930s, when they were the major borrowers and defaults were common. This norm, widely considered to be both apolitical and indispensable to the functioning of international finance, is neither. It imposes extraordinary costs on the populations of postcolonial states, while encouraging speculators and investors to make indiscriminate loans, confident that, however illegitimate, predatory or transitory a given regime or loan package, the population is on the hook for repayment (Lienau, 2014; Roos, 2019). In this way, international law and norms, and a flawed, tendentious understanding of their history, discipline postcolonial states to adhere to unprecedentedly onerous repayment terms and further entrench their subjugated international standing. In Boundaries I followed Martti Koskenniemi in treating law as a set of discursive and institutional resources mobilized by ‘people with projects’, asking what sort of political work these resources did for those who deployed them (Kennedy, 2000; Koskenniemi, 2002; Marks and Lang, 2013). The focus of the book’s analysis and critique is liberal ideology as it appeared in the discourses of the law of nations and international law. I recognized the importance of profit motives and commercial agents to this history, but capitalism was not a central category of analysis. Still, given that modern empires and capitalism developed jointly, and must be understood in relation to one other, it would have been useful to address more explicitly the relationship between liberalism and capitalism, as does recent Marxian work in the history of international law that has sought to capture the ‘systemic logics at work’ in international legal hierarchies (Marks, 2008, p. 302) and the literatures on racial capitalism and colonialism that Ince flags below. Where my emphasis in Boundaries tended to be on the persistent violation of international law’s avowed norms of freedom and equality, and the obfuscations of that violation that the articulation of the norms has performed, this scholarship tracks more explicitly liberal international law’s work in service to imperatives of capitalism: the domination performed by the norms themselves rather than by their violation. International law, as these accounts show, created the conditions necessary for capitalism by ‘reconstructing the world in the image of a particular kind of “free” and “equal” or “sovereign” legal subject’, one with individual rights, especially freedom of religion and conscience, and rights of property and freedom to trade (Parfitt, 2019, p. 57). The democratic nation-state as it emerged in Europe, then, was both a creature and an agent of imperial capitalism, though in its self-conception it was the antithesis of empire and its successor in a historical progression toward a more just and equal world. Just as the capitalist corporation is sometimes described as an ‘externality machine’ – a structure designed to internalize profits while offloading costs onto others – the western democratic nation has never been self-sustaining, but rather took the form that it did only by imposing devastating costs elsewhere. I have alluded to the attractions of some liberal and democratic norms and of the ideal of an international community of nations treating one another with mutual respect as independent and as equals; the same can be said of the concern for the dignity and moral equality of every individual that underlies cosmopolitan projects in political theory. Du Bois himself saw ‘but one adequate method of salvation – the giving of democratic weapons of self-defense to the defenseless’ (at other times he might have said the taking of such weapons by the defenseless) (Du Bois, 1915, p. 712). If these values are to serve as the basis for critique or constructive political projects we must continue to reckon as he did with their imperial entanglements past and present.