Introduction - Theorizing Global Colonial Modernity

This special issue focuses on the elaboration of categories for historical sociology that allow either rethinking modernity in its original global character and its constitutive colonial nature, or unthinking modernity as space of ideological tension between competing civilizational ethno-centrisms, such as Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism. Contributions gathered contest a particular rhetoric of globalization that reduces the ‘global’ to a stage in the process of modernization driven by technological change as well as the ‘colonial’ in terms of the anthropological locus where the transition from traditional to advanced forms of societal organization occurs. Contributors propose alternative concepts and terminologies to sociologically conceptualize long term/large scale historical processes, claiming connected, non-ethnocentric ways towards political re-appropriations of definitional protocols for colonial and postcolonial conditions, as well as new theoretical tools to critically assess longue durée transformations in global regimes of inequalities production.