Michael Hechter - Internal Colonialism

1. MAPS
2. FIGURES

Great Britain and Ireland

THE research for this book began in 1968, while I was a graduate student at Columbia University. The year 1968 is an auspicious date in Columbia's history. During that year a massive student strike virtually closed down the university for much of the spring semester. The strike was directed against the university's imperial disposition toward the adjacent African-American community in Harlem, and its purported complicity in the Vietnam War. The element that united these otherwise disparate concerns was racism, both domestic and international. As one of the many sociology graduate students arrested in that strike, I was very much caught up in the temper of the times. It was difficult not to be. The Columbia strike was followed in swift succession by similar events at other major American university campuses, by massive student-worker strikes in Paris, and by the Soviet invasion that brought an abrupt end to the Prague spring. That summer, the Democratic Party convention in Chicago erupted in a melee. Political assassinations and inner city race riots were nearly becoming routine events. This was the high water mark for the generation gap; figures like Abbie Hoffman loomed large in the cultural landscape. To appreciate how much times have changed, rent a copy of the movie Hair at the local video store.

This book is very much a product of its time. It too is about the problem of integration, about the persistence of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh nationalism in the oldest industrial society. It takes issue with the prevailing view that efficient markets and industrialization will level all ethnic and racial differences and bring about cultural unity.

The concept of internal colonialism dates from the late nineteenth century and has two somewhat different connotations. Initially coined by Russian populists to describe the exploitation of peasants by urban classes, it was later adopted by Gramsci, Lenin, Preobrazhensky, and Bukharin to characterize the persisting economic underdevelopment of certain Russian and Italian regions. In this conception internal colonialism refers to a process of unequal exchange between the territories of a given state that occurs either as a result of the free play of market forces, or of economic policies of the central state that have intended or unintended distributional consequences for regions. Since the 1960s, however, the term has been largely reserved for regions that are simultaneously economically disadvantaged and culturally distinctive from the core regions of the host state.

Internal Colonialism has an unusual mix of ingredients. Although its title has a decidedly radical pedigree, the book was also one of the first historical studies in sociology to propose operational models and rely on multivariate statistical analysis to assess them. Its implicit message is that the best radical social thought has analytical rigor and deserves to be subjected to serious empirical tests. The idea that historical analysis should be carried out with the aid of theories and methods drawn from mainstream social science was controversial when this book first appeared. Ruth Dudley Edwards was one of the rare historians who deemed the enterprise worthwhile: "In a subject where emotionalism is too often employed, and where many of the historical arguments are well-worn, a scientific approach is welcome" ( Irish Independent , August 11, 1975). Most historians, however, reacted as did the editor of the British Studies Monitor (VI, 3, Summer 1976): "One has a strong suspicion that the conclusions were reached before the study started and that one is dealing with a case where historical data is manipulated to fit a pre-established sociological thesis.... Though the book has some novel things to say, historians can only be disappointed by it." If anything, the utility of social scientific approaches in history is probably more controversial now than it was then.

Fundamentally, the book proposes two separate arguments. The first is couched at the level of regions. This argument holds that the lack of sovereignty characteristic of internal colonies fostered a dependent kind of development which limited their economic welfare and threatened their cultural integrity: "Policies determining the administration of these territories were subsequently to be decided in a larger political arena, one in which the Celts were destined to play only a minor role. The peripheral population, therefore, lost the privilege of determining its own fate" (p. 119). The lack of sovereignty had different economic consequences in Ireland than in Scotland and Wales. In Ireland, it encouraged agricultural specialization; in Wales and Scotland, however, it promoted economic stagnation.

This claim that the absence of sovereignty had deleterious effects in the periphery was controversial, English reviewers gave little credence to the notion that the Celtic regions could be usefully compared to colonies:

We have all got used to being called colonialists but in this book the English are repeatedly accused of racism, both personal and institutionalized, towards the Scots, Welsh and Irish. The position of the latter in an English-dominated state is compared with the position of black Americans in a white-dominated state. It is said that one of the manifestations of this kind of racism is a definition of certain favoured roles and positions in such a way as to exclude people from the inferior cultures, and that another is the control of the economic system by the dominant race so as to ensure that the minorities are kept in a position of relative poverty. Now it is not obvious that the evidence entirely justifies this. In the present century Britain has had one Welsh and four Scottish Prime Ministers; Scotsmen seem to be at a relative advantage in the top-status professions; the recently-retired Governor of the Bank of England bears the name of O'Brien and the recently retired Head of the Diplomatic Service bears that of O'Neill. There may be English racism of the kind Mr. Hechter suggests but it is not immediately obvious and he does not produce any evidence to establish it.