Drawing upon a career of scholarship extending from studies of labor, citizenship, and the state in Africa to explorations of global empire, colonialism, and globalization, three-time CASBS fellow Frederick Cooper – in conversation with 2022-23 fellows Jean Beaman and Martin Williams – gives a master class on how critical and relational thinking serve historical inquiries that advance our understandings.
Drawing upon a career of scholarship extending from studies of labor, citizenship, and the state in Africa to explorations of global empire, colonialism, and globalization, three-time CASBS fellow Frederick Cooper – in conversation with 2022-23 fellows Jean Beaman and Martin Williams – gives a master class on how critical and relational thinking serve historical inquiries that advance our understandings.
Frederick Cooper, CASBS fellow 1990-91, 1995-96, 2002-03
NYU faculty page
Wikipedia page
Fred Cooper books
Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives (2018)
Citizenship Between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (2014)
Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (2010)
Cooper Books in CASBS's Ralph W. Tyler Collection:
Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005)
Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (1996)
Fred Cooper article referenced in the episode
"What is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An African Historian's Perspective" (2001)
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University
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Follow the CASBS webcast series,Social Science for a World in Crisis
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
Today on Human Centered, interrogating history with renowned social and political economic historian Frederick Cooper. Now a professor emeritus of history at New York University, as well as a three-time CASBS fellow, Cooper is a towering figure in his profession, established through a capacious body of work in the fields of global history, colonial imperialism, African history and post-colonial theory. In this episode, we'll hear him in conversation with two 2022 to 23 CASBS fellows whose work he has influenced.
Jean Beaman, an Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara, who studies race, ethnicity and identity in the context of nations and citizenship, including a current book project on ethno-racial minorities in France with respect to its post-colonial history. And Martin Williams, an Associate Professor of Public Management at Oxford University, who works at the intersection of comparative politics, public policy and public sector organizational performance and is currently writing a book on the challenges of civil service reforms in Africa. Thanks to their studied engagement with his work, Cooper delivers a master class on some of the big themes and lessons that have emerged throughout his career, including questioning taken for granted concepts such as identity, modernity, globalization and empire, the importance of following multiple historical sequences rather than abstracting from moments in time, and in service of building solidarity among peoples, thinking relationally rather than through constructions of fixed categories.
Let's listen in.
Jean Beaman: Okay, wonderful. Well, thank you, Fred, Martin and I are really excited about this conversation. So let's just start here.
So your scholarship started out focusing on African labor history, moved on to citizenship and the state in Africa, that explore the connections between France and colonial Africa. And some of your more recent books are global explorations and histories of big abstract questions such as empire. Can you say a little bit about the genealogy of this interest as it relates to your overall trajectory?
Frederick Cooper: Well, we're talking about a 50 plus year trajectory since I started out in this business. When I went to graduate school in 1969, I think the common thread across this half century is that I've addressed some big topics about inequality, about exploitation, about power relations. And I've done so while questioning taken for granted concepts.
My earliest work, including my PhD dissertation, was about slavery in coastal East Africa. And that was talking about slavery, which in the 1960s was already a big topic in relationship, particularly the Americas. But I was talking about outside of the American plantation complex.
And so it was exploring relationships between a concept that has general implications and a particular instance. I went on to work about what happened after slavery, both in agricultural and urban labor, in a situation where the big issue was how do you think about capitalism in a situation where you don't have the generalization of proletarianization, where you have different forms of economic exploitation without the monopoly of land by a single capitalist class and the reduction of everybody else to proletarian status. And the question was, what do different people on the top and bottom of the social ladder make of all of this?
While studying this question, it became clear to me that a big actor in this whole story about capitalism in coastal East Africa, urban and rural, was the colonial state. And so from there, I went on to be thinking about how one can conceptualize a power relationship that is not a totalizing one. For colonial states, in some places were very strong, in other cases very weak, including the one that my original research had been on.
So how do you think about asymmetrical power relationships without falling into the dichotomy of everybody's on the same level or absolute domination? From there, I went on to look beyond forms of empire that were specifically colonial to other forms of empire going back in time as far as the Roman and Chinese empires in the millennium before the current era. In other words, thinking about empire in a deep historical concept.
And my most recent work is about citizenship, but it's about citizenship that does not assume a priori that you're talking about national citizenship. Citizenship as we acquired the word and as a lot of our political thinking has followed this goes back to the Roman Empire, whereas decidedly not a national citizenship that is in question. So I was working, my research work was on a much more recent period the 1940s, 1950s, where it still is in question about what is the unit of citizenship, national, imperial, or maybe even something else.
So there's a scalar question involved here, as indeed there is in all the cases that I've talked about. In every one of these instances, it's dealing with the history of a place but in relationship to other places in a world in which relationships are very important, but not symmetrical or equal and have varying degrees of intensity. So I think in that sense, there is a common thread that goes across the work that I began in graduate school at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s to what I've been doing most recently.
Martin Williams: Thanks, Fred. And I think that common thread that you highlighted of the idea of questioning taken for granted concepts and doing so with respect to big questions in ways that can really change the way that people think is one of the things that certainly I most admire about your work and that I think is really characteristic of it. So I guess my question is, as a scholar, how have you approached doing that kind of work that does call these big concepts into question?
Because it's very easy to do badly or do unconvincingly, and you've managed to do it very thoughtfully and persuasively. So what are your secrets or your tricks or the things that you've learned about how to approach that?
We need concepts. We can't just plunge into empirical work without them. And if we think we're doing that, we're actually just kidding ourselves.
It means we're using a concept without looking at it critically. But my view about concepts is that they are good to think with rather than to think in. And my critique of concepts like globalization, but also identity and modernity, and one can add to the list, is that these concepts are problematic, largely because they tend to imply an answer before asking the question.
So the question is how to think about the work that a concept does and whether it gets in the way or adds to the sophistication and the perspicacity of the questions that one is asking. And now in my book, which I wrote much of at CASBS when I was a fellow in 2002-2003, Colonialism in Question has a section which talks about globalization as well as identity and modernity. And this section of the book has earned me the title of concept cop.
Now, I don't have the authority to arrest anybody, so it's not an entirely appropriate designation, but it does reflect my tendency to think critically about concepts and ask the question of does it illuminate more than it obscures? Now, people often question me about the concepts that I do use. Empire, for example, which is a very capacious concept.
It can run from Genghis Khan to the Asante Empire of the 18th century in Africa to the British Empire in the 20th century to Putin's Russian Federation now. And that's a lot to put under one title. So the question which strikes me as entirely legitimate is does this concept illuminate more than it conceals?
I think that one can make a case that it does illuminate more than it conceals, that there is a basis for looking both at the common features and the distinctions that apply within the category, and particularly that once you pose the question of empire, you're posing it in relationship to other kinds of political forms. And it becomes most illuminating at the boundaries. The ambiguity becomes the most interesting part of it.
You can discuss the temptation of any kind of political system of monarchy or national entity to build an empire. And at the same time, because the definition of empire entails both the creation and the reproduction of difference within the polity, it helps us understand the tendency of empires to fall apart. So you can look at the tendencies to come together and to come apart relationally.
So it strikes me as a useful concept. But I think it should be critiqued the same way I critique globalization. And so my argument is that I think this concept can withstand the critique, while the article that you cite suggests that globalization basically cannot.
When I wrote that article, globalization was being talked about as a phenomenon of the 1980s and 1990s, very much a post something or other, although it wasn't altogether clear what it was post. Well, then you have people coming along, oh, they say the era of globalization was actually the 16th century when Spain and Portugal started to extend their networks around the world. And then the others say, no, that's a little early, but it's really the 19th century when you have rapid communication with the steamboat, the telegraph, et cetera.
Well, a concept that you can date plus or minus 300 years is not a very useful concept. It is a concept that conceals more than it reveals. So let us instead ask, what are we really talking about?
And there probably is no one word that's going to describe it the way globalization attempted to do, but that strikes me as the line we should follow. One can make very similar arguments about identity and about modernity, that those concepts, I think, get in the way of the useful work that we need to do, which is to understand what do historical actors in the present or in the past mean when they say identity or when they say we want to be modern. Those are important questions to ask.
Anybody past or present uses the concept modern. We want to know what they mean and how that fits into wider patterns. Getting a really good definition of modernity doesn't seem to me to advance that cause.
Martin Williams: I want to pick up on that question that you posed of what do these, historically, what have people meant when they say identity and modernity and what is it that they themselves are thinking. Because I think that's another thing that both Jean and I admire about your research is that you do a really amazing job of putting yourself in the shoes and the headspace of the historical actors that you're studying and trying to understand what they were doing, not through a framework or unfolding of history that we know and see and inhabit in the 21st century, but what they thought they were doing and what they understood as the world and its possibilities and their goals and constraints. And I think it kind of sounds obvious when you say it like that, that yes, that is something that historians and social scientists should do, but so many people don't do it or don't do it well.
And so again, I wanted to ask, what have you learned over your career about how to do that kind of work well?
Frederick Cooper: In some ways, it comes easy to me as an historian, rather than as a social scientist studying the present. Because historians, we basically study dead people and we're not dead. We're practically by definition putting ourselves in the place of somebody living in a very different context.
So the question then becomes, can we understand that? Now, of course, historians make similar errors to other social scientists, and they think that a category from the 21st century is going to apply in the 18th. But as long as you're doing serious historical work, you're likely to find it's more complicated than that.
So in some ways, I think what this implies for research strategy is actually very hard to put your finger on because there's not a formula. You have to figure stuff out. And the importance, it seems to me, for historians doing research in archives, and this could be an oral archive as well as a documentary one, the important thing is to let yourself be surprised.
If you go to an archive and look for something, you may very well find it. The question is, are you going to see things that you didn't expect to find? And that to me is really crucial to doing historical research well.
And I think one can apply that to other social sciences. If you're too tightly bound to a framework of expectations, you're likely to confirm them. You have to be open to not only to disconfirming an hypothesis, but to figuring out that the question you asked in the first place wasn't a particularly good one.
That somebody out there whom you're interviewing or whose accounts you're reading has a better idea about how an issue, the kind of issue that they were facing. That seems to me the important point. Now, we all know at the same time that we ourselves are coming from a particular position and that we need to be aware of that so that we can look beyond it.
So in a sense, all history does start at the present, the historians present, but the task is to go back in time and start over again, to start with the conceptual place in which people find themselves. Now, this is not always easy, and one of the big arguments I've had in my recent work is, how do you deal with the politics about questions of citizenship in an imperial or national context when we know that most empires failed and people eventually became citizens of different national states? Do you start with that presumption and work backwards?
Then what do you do about the problem of people 50 years ago or 100 years ago who didn't know how the story was going to end? So in a way, I think if we're to study questions over time, whether we're doing it as card-carrying historians or as historical sociologists or historically minded political scientists, the question is how do you go back to a point at which multiple possibilities are in play and figure out how and why certain ones prevailed over others. But if you assume the endpoint, then you can't do that.
And you can't actually study the historical process that ended up in the place where you think things did end up.
Jean Beaman: Okay, so sticking with this concept of taking for granted concepts and leaping forward a bit sort of temporally, in recent years we've seen a resurgence of anxiety, quote unquote, in French academia and the public sphere around the sort of importation of so-called US ideas such as critical race theory, the sort of move around Islamogociswa. How would you characterize this present move?
Frederick Cooper: Well, that particular argument I think is a red herring. Concepts about race, including critical race theory, is either good or it's not. Whether it's American or not is not a very interesting question.
Yet it is something that a number of French politicians and some academics get hooked on. And that has to do with the particular kind of present mind in this that you see in France, where both on the right and the left, American has become a symbol of things that are bad. And it's just not a very helpful way of thinking about it.
One could, of course, do the same thing in reverse and say, look at all these Americans who are quoting Derrida and Foucault. Is the problem with Derrida and Foucault that they're French? Or can we see the usefulness and the limitations of the kind of theoretical current that Derrida and Foucault or Bourdieu or many other French intellectuals have represented?
So the Americanness of this concept seems to me to be a completely unnecessary and distracting argument and nothing more. That doesn't mean that comparisons about how people think about race within the political life of France and the political life of the United States are not understood. Those are in fact quite interesting questions and there is a lot of room for thinking comparatively.
But when we do that comparative thinking, whose conceptual frameworks are we going to use? And I don't think the frameworks that we want to use to think about differences and similarities in how race questions are posed in France and the United States. That conceptual apparatus shouldn't be labeled French or American.
Jean Beaman: So your work has been instrumental in delineating the different ways that French colonial history is actively suppressed and marginalized and understanding both French history and its present. And I think that speaks to some of what's happening in France presently. How do you see the suppression present today?
And then relatedly, you discuss the important distinction between nation state and empire state in terms of understanding modern French, as well as other societies. Can you sort of elaborate on that?
Frederick Cooper: Well, this question begins where my response to your last question ends up. I think there are real, there are really interesting questions here. Now, to my mind, here is why it's important to think about historical sequences and not just to look for, say, the characteristic of France or Africa or the United States and say, here's an explanation that we want to do that will work across time and across space.
For sequences is really important. And I think when the debates about race in France, including about colonialism in France, including circumstances and times when questions are posed and not posed is really important. After France lost the Algerian War in 1962 and Algeria becomes independent, there was a period of a good 20, 25 years in which most French scholars and intellectuals and political activists tended to avoid the colonial question altogether.
There was a kind of a gap. And by the 1990s, I think a generation had passed and people came back to it. But one thing that people were looking for when they came back to it was does colonial racism explain current racism in France?
And some people on the critical edge of things, especially on the left, said, yes, you can explain race tensions in France on the basis of colonialism. On the conservative end of the spectrum, people were saying, well, no, you don't explain it by colonialism, you can explain it by the character of African people or of Muslims in general, that the problem is cultural, it's what they bring to the present. But if you look at the problem historically, it becomes much more complicated than that.
Neither African culture nor Islamic society is independent of time. The changes on circumstances and where people are and so on. So the life of somebody from African immigration is not the same as those of that person's relatives who were in Mali or Burkina Faso.
And with French colonial history, you've got to be careful about time as well. Certainly up until World War II, the distinction between who was a citizen and who was a subject was highly racialized. Legally, it was not an actual fact.
The way it operated was racially. It was not just a status distinction. But then this period between the end of World War II and the end of colonial domination, 1960 in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1962 in the case of Algeria, where the French government was trying to hold the thing together, very much aware that the power of France had been much diminished after the war and that the challenge of political movements in the colonies was becoming acute.
Their strategy was to try to move towards what you might call an inclusive imperialism, the key point of which was abolishing the distinction between subject and citizen that had been enshrined in French law and practice. So everybody became a citizen with in theory equal rights. Now, this didn't operate the way in practice, the way it did on paper.
There's plenty of discrimination, plenty of prejudice, plenty of exploitation that continued. But the terms of the debate have changed. And for 15 years you have an argument about whether imperial citizenship can actually become a meaningful category, useful for people in Africa as well as for France.
And it was not because people's hearts and minds had suddenly changed. It was from the point of view of the French government. These were reasons of state.
If they wanted to maintain France as something bigger than a small country in Western Eurasia, they had to shift how colonial rule was practiced. In fact, they had to try to make the argument that it was no longer colonial, but it would remain French. So that really opened up a possibility for people coming from Africa, coming from the Maghreb, to make claims on the basis of equality.
See, this whole talking about equality among people who are juridically French. And it's a tremendously important debate. One of the things that happened during that period was what was known as le droit de libre circulation, the right of free movement.
People from French territories overseas had the legal right to come to European France or any other part of the empire. They no longer call it the empire, but we can leave that in advance. They had the legal right to come there not just as immigrants, but as rights-bearing citizens.
They were not immigrants, in fact, because they came with their citizenship that they had since 1946 or in the case of West Indians since 1848. You have this period which is absolutely crucial because that's where the current non-white population of France comes from, from this period of enhanced circulation that then goes on after independence on the basis of treaties that were negotiated that preserved the right of free movement for a period of about 10 to 15 years after most of African territories became independent. So why don't we think about race questions in France after this period as being shaped by this opening?
And from the point of view of Africans, this is of people of African descent in France or people of Algerian descent or Moroccan or Tunisian descent. This is terribly important because they saw themselves as having a basis in France as citizens that was then being threatened by a reaction that occurs afterward. So France, after the loss of its overseas territories, becomes much more national and much more European.
But it's got a population within its current borders within continental Europe that is much more mixed than it had been. And I think it's important to see the race question in France in those terms, both from the point of view of people who had seen themselves as the masters of a colonial system, which they then tried to compromise and then lost, and people who entrenched themselves within France under a situation of opening that they were then trying to make something of. And to make something of was at all times a struggle, but it was a struggle that was being conducted on the basis of French citizenship in a certain period.
And for people of African or Maghrebian origin who acquired citizenship or legal status, they are making the struggle from that point of view. And that's quite a different one from the position of the colonial subject. So we need to look at this whole question in dynamic terms, which is hard to do both for people defending a point of view of a French population, that's Franco-Francais, that traces its inheritance to Clovis or Joan of Arc and whatever, and for people who are saying that the primary issue that we're facing is the heritage of colonial racism.
These are real points of view, but the actual trajectory is one that shapes the terms of the debate in very important ways.
Martin Williams: I want to ask as well, Fred, I think empire and colonialism and its legacies are very present in academia right now. They're very present in political discourse, from everything from decolonizing curriculums to debates over statues, as well as immigration and racial politics and in many areas of our societies. I should say most of those debates are sort of happening with respect to the legacies of the kind of 18th, 19th, 20th century European empires that you mentioned earlier as a kind of subset of empires.
Is there anything that, you know, when you see these debates happening, is there anything that you as a historian of empires and colonialism, that subset as well as more broadly, wish that people understood or wish that people framed differently?
Frederick Cooper: Well, my first one would be the point that I made early in response to Jean's question, which is basically the importance of looking at trajectories and not just abstracting from colonial empire one thing and making that the point. I'm not against drawing a lesson. And if people want to say you have very good and actually rather simple reasons why you want to tear down a stature of Cecil Rhodes, well, he was an evil character.
And there's an argument that you're making, which is good basis in historical fact. But if you're trying to understand how racialization works over time, well, you need to look not just at the fact of colonialism, but at colonial history and evolving patterns. You need to look at that with some sensibility about how people are shaped by the history and not just by the fact of colonialism.
But in that regard, I'd actually go beyond the point you were making in your question about these controversies being limited to the colonial empires of Western European powers. Look at what's going on right now in Ukraine and in Russia, the Russian Federation more generally. You had a process of empire dissolution, particularly 1989, 1991, and you have a process of empire recreation, and not an empire French style or British style, but one that Putin himself sees as rooted in the pre-1917 Russia.
So in that regard, the issue of a non-Western form of empire is very much part of current events, and an unusually explicit way in that Putin and the ideologues he follows like Alexander Dugan are making a specific case about the importance of the tradition of Russian empire going back to 1917, and in fact leapfrogging over 1917 to 1991, because they're not defending empire on the basis of communism or Leninist ideology, and in fact Putin is quite critical of Lenin. So there is an actuality we talk about. In fact, Jane and I are publishing a book that deals with some of these questions called Post-Imperial Possibilities, Your Asia, your Africa, Afro-Asia.
Martin Williams: One of the things that I've found really surprising about reading your work on empire is your point that we think of empires, I'd say we as scholars and sort of people politically left on in the US or UK at the moment, tend to think of empire through the lens of all of the horrible, horrible, horrible things that empire did and oppression and that kind of thing. One of the things that I think is interesting from your books is that while you don't dispute that at all, you're certainly not sort of making apologies for any of those things that empire did. You also point out that empire sometimes provided a framework within which people could imagine identities more broadly and kind of beyond nation states and in which surprising types of solidarity sometimes emerged.
And we live in a period when it feels like borders are hardening and identities are getting smaller and narrower and more rigid. Does your thinking about post-imperial possibilities have any lessons for how we might think about broadening identities and solidarities in our world going forward?
Frederick Cooper: Well, I would say that one of the things that we can do is to step back in time. And it wasn't so clear that forms of identification would be narrowing, that you'd have an attempt to erect fences and boundaries, rigid boundaries and police crossing of them in an intense way, and see what possibilities were emerging. And that is very much the theme of Jane and my book, keeping in mind that the outcomes are not necessarily positive ones.
Clearly, the example of Putin's recreation of empire is a warning against any kind of romanticism about what imperial inclusion can bring you, but it certainly isn't unique. But the question you posed was directly posed by some of the actors that I've written about in my writing on French Africa, and which will be addressed in a somewhat different way in our book. And Leopold Seydar of Senghorpe made the point very directly in the 1950s and saying, if we want to talk about independence, we have to do it in relationship to interdependence.
And the world that he was thinking about in the 1950s was a world of connections, unequal connections in many regards, both colonial and other kinds of economic relations, but connections nonetheless. So Senghorpe's plea was to think about differences in culture in relationships, the connections across culture. And he very much saw that humanity consisted of multiple civilizations, and the idea was not to wall oneself in any one of them, but to build upon a sense of collectivity and go beyond it and look at relationships with other people who had different notions of what collective life was all about, but see the relationship among them and not antagonism between them.
So these are very important thoughts. It's important to think of them as being posed in the very era, in the 1940s and 1950s, when the colonial empire was being demolished. One had to think in different ways about interconnections, not just about national autonomy.
Some of Senghor's ideas about a Franco-African confederation or about Euro-Africa were along those lines. In a very different way, so was the Afro-Asian political movements, the Bandung Conference of 1955, the non-aligned movement that began with the Belgrade Conference of 1961. These were also attempts in a quite different way to form connections.
In the case of Euro-Africa, you could argue that these were vertical connections. Afro-Asia was an attempt at horizontal connections. Now, in both cases, they had to confront not only the power of existing states, but also the power of capitalism as a set of global structures.
I think one has to see their fate in relationship to both of them. But the question of interdependence has been very much posed in a period when independence was also in question. So in answer to your question about the present, it seems to me that we have to be very clear about the relationship of the two.
I think we should be supporting Ukraine in fighting against imperialist aggression. But we also can't, we don't want to become trapped into assuming that the only answer to that is that each state should be defending its own integrity and nothing else. They should be defending principles.
I think Ukraine is doing that as well, defending democratic principles that cross, so you need to cross those lines as well as defend them. So I think we need to think positively about how we operate in terms of connections. It's much more complicated than just saying, oh, globalization is happening, isn't everything happening on a global scale, which it clearly is not.
We clearly have seen at the same time that you have interdependence in certain respects and you have flows of capital and movement of ideas at the same time that you have barriers against human movement being erected and barriers against the movement of thought being erected at the same time as you're having that, you have to deal with both at the same time. So you can't just romantically say, oh, everything's going to happen on a global scale. That clearly has not been the case.
It is not going to be the case. So we need to think dialectically about issues of integrity and issues of connectivity. And that there is a lesson of the past and relationship to the present, it seems to me, it's that one, which doesn't turn out to be a recipe. It turns out to be a framework for how we can think about things.
Jean Beaman: Yeah. So building off of that a little bit, I read your recent citizenship studies article on colonialism and post-colonialism controversies in France. And so I would like to hear your thoughts about kind of, you know, what is currently exciting to you about contemporary scholarship on colonialism and citizenship and kind of where you see, where you hope the field does go and what is sort of needed at this juncture, kind of riffing a bit off of where you just ended.
Frederick Coooper: **MWell, it's going in many directions and I think that's a good thing. I don't want to be considered the founder of a school of thought. I think schools of thought are dangerous phenomena.
One of the encouraging trends that you see with scholarship that's emerging is to blur the line between what could be called African history and imperial history. One could say the same thing about Asian history and imperial history. Even in relatively recent times, a lot of what became known as the new imperial history really grew out of either English history or French history.
It was saying, well, you can't just talk about France, we have to talk about greater France, and that France defined itself in relationship to other places. But it was largely conducted by people who did research in French archives and were thinking about France in relationship to the other side of the world, other parts of the world, but very much from Paris. Whereas African historians, we cut our eye teeth in doing the reverse and saying we don't want to be thinking in terms of an imperial point of view, we want to see things from the point of view of Africans and do it in African terms.
Well, is it possible for those two tendencies to meet and to think about colonial history as an interactive process, an unequal process, an asymmetrical process, but one in which unequal relationships are nonetheless relationships? I think some of the recent work about how empire actually works on the ground does exactly that. And neither falls into old style imperial history, nor my generation's concept of a very African African history, but takes the insights of both, is aware of differences of language, differences of framing of issues, and sees what happens on the ground.
To my mind, it's some of the most encouraging scholarship. But I think it's fair to say that we don't want to see scholarship follow too closely any one trend. For example, in the 1990s, there was a big trend towards cultural history.
And political economy got shunted aside, and people who tried to keep doing it were some of my friends and colleagues, looked down their noses at people who were still talking about class in the 1990s. Well, one should have been talking about class in the 1990s, which doesn't mean one shouldn't have been talking about cinema or art or any other dimension of cultural history. And there's been a kind of revival of political economy in some quarters.
That's a good thing. But in a way, what was misleadingly called the cultural turn should not have been a turn at all. It should have been a complementary trajectory.
And I don't particularly like to see scholarship drifting from one turn to another turn. It should take into account there are multiple ways of thinking about history and multiple scales of thinking small, thinking big. And the dichotomy of global and national or global or even global and local is always a false dichotomy.
Most of history occurs in between the two. You have connections that exist and have their limitations. Even Empire, which obviously exists on a planetary scale and did so from a very early time, since Magellan at the very least, we're talking early 1600s.
The lines of connection were very thin. They were long but thin. And colonial power thickened in many instances, but it never thickened infinitely.
And one of the lessons of studying the early colonial period in African history was just how limited it was and the kinds of ways in which African elites, and in some cases very ordinary people, could manipulate the limitations of it and find niches within a power structure and eventually pry those niches wider. So although the efforts to look in the middle of relationships, of power relationships, of spatial relationships, seems to me an important and quite positive trend in scholarship.
Martin Williams: Building off of that, maybe one final question to ask you, is what advice you have for scholars who want to do work that as you've done throughout your career, scholarship that tries to open up and expand our understandings of the world and the possibilities for people in it and our futures. And in particular ways in which humans can see ourselves and each other and build solidarities and find better ways to live and coexist together.
Frederick Cooper: Be curious, I think is one of the most important ways of approaching those kind of values that you're talking about. I think it's important to study people other than the communities you come from. It's fine to study communities you do come from, but not exclusively.
And to the extent to which you remain convinced that the categories that you fall into yourself are the most important ones, you may not even be able to understand yourself very well. It's very important to be able to think relationally. So I would hope that people do look far and wide to the kinds of things they want to study and that when they do so, that they do so with whatever ideas they come to, but with a critical sense of those various ideas and openness, defining things that are quite different from what they had initially expected.
For those reasons, I think if you try to think about it institutionally, it's very important for people to be encouraging study abroad, and particularly scholarship abroad, whether it's in an area framework or not. During the 1990s, there was, I think, an entirely false debate about area studies. The basic point is that it's important to know something about some place.
To stay confined to an area is problematic to think in bounded terms, but to think about the importance of deep study of particular places, is extremely important. On a discouraging note, the fact that the Social Science Research Council dropped its program of fellowships for scholarship abroad was an extremely noxious decision. It opens the place for privileging scholarship that has particular ends in mind, rather than leaving it to the imagination of younger students to go and find a topic and then convincing other people that this is a topic worthy of support.
And I certainly hope that younger scholars will continue to strive and move beyond these kinds of obstacles towards finding ways to study more places, more time periods, and to deepen studies of their own communities or other people's communities. What we need is a proliferation of these kinds of studies. And one of the more encouraging things would be to see more Africans studying European and American history.
Just as we see Americans studying African history, this should be a two-way street. And I think you'll get a lot of insights the more open it is to people looking beyond their own perspectives towards other people's perspectives on the present and on the past and the future.
Jean Beaman: Yeah, I really appreciate what you just said, especially your point about study abroad, because both Martin and I have had experience study abroad. It was very formative to ask the scholars.
Martin Williams: Wholeheartedly agree. And Fred, this was absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for your time today and your scholarship over this past half century.
Frederick Cooper: Well, thank you for the perceptive questions you've asked and for your interest in the same kinds of subjects that I'm interested in.
Jean Beaman: Yeah, and thank you again for all of your work that's been really influential for ours.
Frederick Cooper: Well, thank you for saying that.
Narrator: That was Frederick Cooper in conversation with Jean Beaman and Martin Williams. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the Center's people, projects and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu.
Until next time, from everyone at CASBUS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.