This conference aims to rethink the history of political thought by “provincializing” its Eurocentric canon. We invite contributions that rethink the (re-)formation of modern political concepts, particularly in relation to race and division of labor, during a dynamic 19th century. Drawing on global history and the history from below, the conference will focus on the worldwide metamorphosis of European empires and the U.S. beginning with the Haitian Revolution (1791) until the abolition of slavery in Brazil (1888).

The ideological innovations and political transformations brought by the “Age of Revolutions” pushed global empires to reformulate the authority/obedience relationship within a new conceptual framework of formal liberty and equality among citizens. On the one hand, the first abolition of slavery achieved by enslaved Africans in Haiti compelled European powers to rethink the division of labor. On the other hand, the notion of “race” emerged as a historically specific lens through which empires rearticulated conceptions of “liberty”, “equality”, “citizenship”, and “humanity” and laid the foundations of European theories of sovereignty. Calling into question the binary opposition between European rule of law and its colonial exception, as well as examining the liberal myth of violence as a mere “colonial” technique of government, the conference welcomes contributions focused on norms acting both within and outside the metropoles of globally extensive empires, and investigate the ways in which a racial division of labor worked on a global scale with varying modes of operation in specific contexts.

The conference also aims to highlight conflict and change, and explore emergent political challenges from below that forced administrative authorities and emerging political subjects to reformulate political concepts at a time of political transformation.

Moving from the colonial interplay between racialization and division of labor, we intend to host a dialogue on the theoretical relevance of “imperial history” and “global labor history” for a critical theory of modern political concepts. History of political concepts still appears detached from the material dimension implied in the concrete practices of imperial administration as well as from innovative discourses on freedom developed by emergent and oppositional political subjects of this period of history. The roots of such an intellectual operation should rely on a dialogue between scholarly efforts and non- academic “subaltern” historiographies, carried out by political movements and traditions such as Latin American Marxism, the black radical tradition, and other anti-imperialist discourses.