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Colonial Exchanges: Political Theory and the Agency of the Colonized. Edited by Hendrix Burke A. and Baumgold Deborah. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. 288p. $120.00 cloth, $36.50 paper.
In recent years, the global turn in the history of political thought and intellectual history has called attention to the ways in which ideas travel across time and space and are, as a result, taken up, translated, and repurposed in different contexts. Such histories of the global circulation of ideas often assume a background condition of interconnection and at least a nascent form of “globalization” that provides pathways for the movement of ideas. Indeed, as Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori note, the emphasis on circulation in global intellectual history tends to “skew [the field] toward modern histories, that is, toward a period in which patterns of interconnectedness have deepened enough to be deemed global” (“Approaches to Global Intellectual History,” in Moyn and Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History, 2013, p. 16). This modernist tilt should ensure that European colonialism holds a central place in the field of global intellectual history, for insofar as global networks of circulation exist, they are largely the products of imperial expansion, which integrated the world and produced the first iterations of what we now call the global and globalization.
Burke Hendrix and Deborah Baumgold’s edited volume, Colonial Exchanges, intervenes in the debate over the contours and stakes of global intellectual history at precisely this conjuncture. As Hendrix and Baumgold indicate in their introductory essay, the colonial channels by which “European bodies, products, and social institutions” traveled were also the vectors through which political arguments and ideas circulated. “European colonialism,” the editors argue, “altered the world political and intellectually” (p. 1). In reformulating a global history of ideas as colonial exchanges, the essays in the volume center the ways that imperial formations created the material conditions for ideas to travel. However, these exchanges are not figured as unidirectional processes where ideas with a metropolitan origin radiate out to the colonial periphery. Unlike David Armitage’s global history of the Declaration of Independence or Lynn Hunt’s history of human rights, where naturalistic metaphors of contagion and cascades are mobilized to characterize the movement of ideas, these essays seek to capture the ways that colonized...