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GILROY: NEITHER BLACK NOR ATLANTIC

which persistently references only slavery and colonialism as distinct from
contemporary imperialism as the basis for contemporary racism is one
of the major weaknesses of Gilroy’s work. As the work of MacMaster
and others have pointed out, the transformation in the substance and
basis of both anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century and into the twentieth century is absolutely crucial
for the understanding of these two scourges. 14
Indeed, Gilroy does not use the concept of imperialism as a critical
analytical tool. Instead he relies on the concept ‘modernity’ which elides
different stages of capitalist development, thereby aggregating precisely
what needs to be disaggregated. He fails to see that the issue since the
end of the ninteenth century is not capitalism in general or ‘modernity’
in general. It is a matter of a very specific stage of capitalism – monopoly
capitalism dominated by the export of finance capital and wars of impe-
rialist conquest – and the growth of a very specific resistance to it in the
form of the socialist movements in Europe and the anti-colonial wars
then beginning in China, Ireland, India, Egypt and elsewhere at the start
of the twentieth century. As is well known, this imperialism, sensu strictu,
and the anti-imperialism it engendered, mark a qualitative development
from the earlier colonialism and the Free Trade period which preceded
it. This is the whole point of the work of Hobson, Hilferding, Kautsky,
Bukharin, Luxemburg, Lenin and, for that matter, Max Weber with its
emphasis on ‘bureaucracy’, rationality and the ‘iron cage’. But this fun-
damental point eludes Gilroy. He therefore does not grasp that it is this
new imperialism and all its requirements and consequences which lie at
the root of contemporary racism and necessarily shape the character of
the resistance to it, making this resistance also a global one.
The obvious connection between the post-World War II and especially
post-Suez loss of these very tangible material and long-enjoyed privileges
of Empire and the resurgence of British racism, especially in the police
force, is not raised nor discussed by Gilroy. Racism is presented simply
as an ideological – a social-psychological and cultural – phenomenon. It
is a process wherein certain ‘structural phenomena’ are ‘misrecognized’.
Therefore, in The Empire Strikes Back we are confronted with the strange
phenomenon of a book on the consequences of Empire which has no
theory of imperialism. If one roots British racism largely in past economic
phenomena such as colonialism and slavery or in police ‘attitudes’ or the
inadequacy of the British educational curriculum (history, literature) or in
the narrow nationalism of English cultural studies, then one, in effect, cuts
this nationalism and racism loose from its contemporary material roots –
unmoors it as it were. In that case, racism can have no contemporary,

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