Series Editors’ Preface

Summary

The Decolonization and Social Worlds series began at Bristol University Press as a response to the ongoing coloniality of knowledge. The series is co- edited by Syed Farid Alatas, Jairo Funez- Flores, Alana Lentin and Ali Meghji, along with an international advisory board featuring some of the leading figures in the field.

A central aim of the series is to excavate how coloniality works – both historically, and in its contemporary expressions. It is undeniable that the social sciences emerged in the high era of colonial imperialism. Classical social scientists – from Durkheim to Weber, and Giddings to Geddes – were prominent exponents of the politics and epistemologies of European empires. From Weber's Orientalist reduction of the ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’ and ‘Confucian’ worlds, to Durkheim's assertion of Indigenous people as being pre- modern, Geddes’ colonial town planning in India and Palestine, and Giddings’ endorsement of ‘democratic imperialism’, social scientists have had significant relationships to colonial imperialism. We are now at a stage in social science where we know quite well the histories of these relationships between social science and empire – both from the perspective of how social scientists worked in the service of empires (such as Britain's training cadets in sociology to better administer colonial populations), and from the perspective of how social scientists reproduced the epistemologies deployed by empires to legitimize colonialism (such as the idea of the colonized being in need of development and progress). While the Decolonization and Social Worlds series seeks to continue these discussions about social science and colonial imperialism, we also seek to further push the boundaries of social science knowledge by considering alternative histories, theories, movements, and social relations from the borders of the colonial world system.

Within the series, we therefore seek to address multiple areas of social scientific inquiry. To name just some of these areas, we are interested in unearthing the work of forgotten (or denied) scholars, in decolonial and anticolonial social movements and struggles, in new ways of thinking about the historical and contemporary relationships between the metropoles and colonies (or core, semi- peripheries and peripheries of the world system), in social scientific histories of colonial imperialism, in the evolution of empires, in Indigeneity and Indigenous critiques of coloniality, and in the historical and contemporary incarnations of the coloniality of being, knowledge and power.