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This article develops a global fields approach for conceptualizing the global arena. The approach builds upon existing approaches to the world system and world society while articulating them with the field theory of Bourdieu and organizational sociology. It highlights particular structural configurations ("spaces of relations") and the specific cultural content ("rules of the game" and "symbolic capital") of global systems. The utility of the approach is demonstrated through an analysis of the different forms of the two hegemonic empires of the past centuries, Great Britain and the United States. The British state tended toward formal imperialism in the 19th century, characterized by direct territorial rule, while the United States since WWII has tended toward informal imperialism. The essay shows that the difference can be best explained by considering the different historical global fields in which the two empires operated.

This essay analyzes racialized exclusions in sociology through a focus on sociology’s deep epistemic structures. These structures dictate what counts as social scientific knowledge and who can produce it. A historical analysis of their emergence and persistence reveals their connections to empire. Due to sociology’s initial emergence within the culture of American imperialism, early sociological thought embedded the culture of empire’s exclusionary logics. Sociology’s epistemic structures were inextricably racialized, contributing to exclusionary modes of thought and practice along the lines of race, ethnicity, and social geography that persist into the present. Overcoming this racialized inequality requires problematizing and unsettling these epistemic structures by (1) provincializing the canon to create a transformative epistemic pluralism and (2) reconsidering common conceptions of what counts as “theory” in the first place.

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In this essay the author assesses the relevance of scholarship on racial capitalism for sociological theory. The author highlights three tensions within the existing literature: (1) whether “race” as opposed to other forms of difference is the primary mode of differentiation in capitalism, (2) whether deficiencies in existing theory warrant the new concept “racial capitalism,” and (3) whether the connection between race and capitalism is a contingent or logical necessity. Existing discussions of racial capitalism implicitly or explicitly raise these tensions, but they do not adequately resolve them. Nonetheless, they remain important for generating further theory and research.

The author considers what postcolonial theory has to contribute to the sociology of race. Although there are overlaps, postcolonial theory and the sociology of race are not reducible to each other. Postcolonial theory emphasizes the global, historical, and therefore colonial dimensions of race relations, including how imperialism has generated racial thought and racial stratification. A postcolonial sociology of race, therefore, would (1) analytically recover empire and colonialism and their legacies, (2) excavate colonial racialization and trace its continuities into the present, (3) reveal the reciprocal constitution of racialized identities that began under empire, and (4) critique the imperial standpoint and seek out the subjugated epistemologies of racialized subjects. Although such a postcolonial sociology of race is a project that has yet to be fully realized, there are a number of existing sociological works that begin the journey and point us in the right direction.