Modernity Reconsidered

Slavery, Race, State Power, and the Remaking of the Modern World

At one point, my graduate school mentor David Brion Davis envisioned the final volume of his Problem of Slavery trilogy quite differently from the book he ultimately produced. It was to bear the subtitle Problems of Race and Nation.

It would not simply have traced the destruction of New World slavery. It would have confronted a larger, more unsettling question: what was the relationship between slavery’s abolition, the rise of the modern nation-state, and the emergence of modern racial thought?

We will never know exactly what that book might have looked like. But it is not difficult to see what drew him in that direction. The end of slavery did not mark the end of coerced labor, nor did it dissolve the hierarchies that slavery had helped construct.

Instead, emancipation coincided with the consolidation of a new kind of political order — the modern, centralized, territorially bounded state — and with the hardening of racial ideologies that would shape that order in profound ways.

Here, I take up the question Davis glimpsed and extend it beyond the Atlantic context in which he located it. I ask whether we have misunderstood modernity by treating the abolition of slavery as a moral culmination rather than as part of a broader transformation in how human societies organized power, labor, and difference.

My argument is that emancipation was not the culmination of modernity’s freedom story but a pivot within it — and that the processes Davis identified were not exceptional but variations on a global transformation that remade the conditions of human life across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Standard Story and Its Incompleteness

The standard narrative is familiar. The nineteenth century witnessed a great moral revolution: the delegitimation and eventual destruction of chattel slavery in much of the Atlantic world, linked to the rise of liberal nation-states grounded in citizenship, rights, and the rule of law.

From this perspective, modernity appears as a story of expanding freedom, widening moral concern, and the progressive inclusion of previously excluded peoples.

There is truth in this account. But it is, at best, incomplete.

The same period that saw the abolition of slavery also witnessed the consolidation of new forms of domination. The modern state did not simply liberate individuals; it reorganized populations. It sought to render them legible, governable, taxable, and productive. In doing so, it incorporated some groups as full citizens, subordinated others, and transformed or eliminated still others whose ways of life lay outside its reach.

In the United States, emancipation gave way to new systems of racial control — legal, economic, and social — that confined Black Americans within sharply bounded forms of freedom.

Elsewhere, Indigenous peoples were dispossessed and absorbed into state structures that denied their sovereignty. Across much of the world, populations that had once lived with a degree of autonomy — nomadic peoples, frontier societies, self-governing communities — were brought under increasingly centralized control.

Seen from this angle, the abolition of slavery appears less as an endpoint than as a pivot. It marks not the triumph of freedom over unfreedom, but a transition from one regime of labor and hierarchy to another — from a world in which domination was often explicit and legally codified to one in which it was more diffuse, bureaucratic, and racialized in new ways.

The Nation State’s Logic of Incorporation

The transformation this essay traces was not driven by a single cause or directed by a single hand. It was the product of multiple overlapping processes — capitalist development, state consolidation, imperial expansion, nationalist mobilization — that were not coordinated by any central authority but that nonetheless followed a recognizable structural logic.

Pre-modern states typically governed through intermediaries — local lords, religious authorities, tribal chiefs, village councils — tolerating a wide variety of local arrangements as long as tribute flowed and order was maintained.

As James Scott has argued, these states governed populations that were, in important respects, illegible to them.

The modern state was different. It aspired to make its populations fully visible: to count them, classify them, map their land, standardize their language, conscript their sons, educate their children, and tax their incomes.

This drive for legibility was inseparable from the requirements of capitalist development, which needed mobile labor, alienable property, and standardized legal frameworks, and from the military competition between states, which required populations that could be mobilized at a scale that pre-modern arrangements could not support.

The populations that resisted this drive — that maintained alternative political orders, that preserved forms of life incompatible with the territorial and proprietary logic of the modern state — were not simply left alone. They were identified as obstacles and subjected to techniques designed to dissolve their distinctiveness.

For enslaved people in the American South, emancipation was followed by Black Codes, convict leasing, and sharecropping.

For Indigenous peoples in settler states, the techniques included military defeat, reservation confinement, land allotment, and forced assimilation.

For nomadic peoples, they included fencing, registration, and sedentarization campaigns.

For peasant communities, they included the dissolution of common lands, collectivization, and developmental displacement.

These were not the same process. What they shared was not a common administrator or ideology but a common structural imperative: the need to transform populations that preserved a degree of autonomy from centralized state and market power into populations that were fully legible, governable, and productive.

To understand what was lost requires a richer vocabulary of freedom than the standard account provides.

The liberal tradition has understood freedom primarily as negative liberty — freedom from interference and coercion.

But David Graeber insisted on distinguishing multiple forms: freedom as collective self-determination; freedom as mobility; freedom from humiliation; and freedom rooted in access to communal resources, the ability to meet basic needs outside the full logic of market and state.

Pre-modern and non-modern social forms often embodied significant quantities of these latter freedoms, even while organizing their internal life around hierarchies of their own.

The incorporation process systematically destroyed these forms while extending, for some populations, the formal freedoms of individual rights and civil equality. The result was not a simple expansion of freedom. It was a reorganization of it.

The American Pivot: Emancipation and the Construction of a New Racial Order

No case demonstrates the pivot argument more clearly than the United States between 1863 and 1877 — the clearest instance of how the destruction of one system of domination coincided with the construction of another, how freedom and unfreedom were not successive stages but intertwined processes.

The Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment dissolved the legal property relation that had defined slavery. Four million people who had been legally defined as property became, in law, persons. This was not nothing.

But emancipation did not redistribute the land, did not provide the forty acres whose promise was made and broken, and did not dismantle the racial ideology that would now be reconstructed to justify what replaced slavery. Within a decade, a new system had been assembled that preserved the essential economic function of racial subordination while reorganizing its formal structure.

The Black Codes, enacted by Southern state legislatures within months of the Confederacy’s defeat, reproduced slavery’s economic function while avoiding its formal definition.

Vagrancy laws required Black adults to present proof of employment or face arrest and forced labor.

Contract enforcement laws made breach of a labor contract a criminal rather than a civil matter. When Congress voided the Black Codes through the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the underlying logic survived their formal abolition. Sharecropping and debt peonage replaced them.

Convict leasing — exploiting the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception for those convicted of crimes — leased convicted men to private employers under conditions that were in many respects worse than slavery. Douglas Blackmon’s documentation of this system in Slavery by Another Name demonstrates that it was not an aberration. It was one of the post-emancipation order’s primary labor-supply mechanisms.

What these mechanisms collectively demonstrate is that the failure of Reconstruction was not simply a political failure — the defeat of Radical Republican programs by Southern resistance. It was also the successful construction of a new racial order that accomplished, through legal, economic, and administrative means, what the Black Codes had attempted through more explicit compulsion.

Race as a governing technology does not mean simply that white Southerners were racist. It means that racial classification was deployed as a tool for organizing a population whose labor was economically necessary but whose full political and economic inclusion would have disrupted the distribution of land, wealth, and power that the post-war order was built on.

The New Deal makes the national dimension of this visible. The Social Security Act of 1935 excluded domestic workers and agricultural laborers — the two categories encompassing the majority of Black workers in the South.

The Federal Housing Administration’s mortgage guarantee program explicitly incorporated racial segregation into its underwriting standards, systematically denying to Black families the homeownership that became the primary mechanism of white middle-class wealth accumulation.

The racial wealth gap that persists today — median Black household wealth stands at approximately one-eighth of white household wealth — was not produced by the free market. It was produced, in substantial part, by federal policy.

As Ira Katznelson documented in When Affirmative Action Was White, the New Deal and the GI Bill were administered as affirmative action for white Americans.

The Other Incorporation: Indigenous Peoples and Sovereign Elimination

In the same decades that the American state was reorganizing its racial order over Black Americans, it was pursuing a parallel and in some respects more radical project on its western frontiers.

The destruction of Plains Indian sovereignty, the reservation system, the allotment of communal land, and the boarding school system were not separate policies. They were parallel instruments of the same state project targeting a different population through different techniques.

The distinction between the two projects illuminates how the incorporation logic operated. Black Americans were economically necessary — their labor was what the Southern agricultural economy ran on — and so the governing technology applied to them was incorporation under conditions of subordination.

Indigenous peoples presented a different problem: not the preservation of a labor force but the elimination of political and territorial sovereignty incompatible with the territorial logic of the modern state.

Their land was what was economically necessary. The governing technology applied to them was therefore elimination — not incorporation under conditions of subordination but the dissolution of the social and political forms through which they had organized their collective existence.

Patrick Wolfe’s formulation captures this precisely: settler colonialism is a structure, not an event; its defining logic is elimination.

The General Allotment Act of 1887 — the Dawes Act — illustrates how the incorporation project operated through legal and economic means rather than through simple expropriation. It converted communal land tenure into individual proprietorship, and having converted the land into a form that could be sold, it then created economic conditions that made sale the only available option for many allottees.

Between 1887 and 1934, Indigenous land holdings declined from approximately 138 million acres to 48 million acres — a loss of 90 million acres.

The boarding school system, summarized by its architect Richard Henry Pratt as “Kill the Indian, save the man,” was the cultural instrument of the same project: the elimination of the intergenerational transmission of language, knowledge, ceremony, and kinship through which Indigenous identity and political consciousness were reproduced.

The simultaneity of these two projects within the same national context is the analytically crucial point. The American state in the late nineteenth century was not simply failing to live up to its stated principles. It was actively constructing two distinct systems of racial administration — one designed to preserve a labor force under conditions of subordination, the other designed to dissolve a rival sovereignty and open its territorial base to settlement.

The freedom of the settler and the elimination of the Indigenous sovereign were structurally connected: the one was the condition of the other.

The Global War Against Mobility

The destruction of Plains Indian sovereignty was not an American peculiarity. It was an American instance of a global process. From the Russian steppe to the North African desert, from the Australian interior to the highland borderlands of Southeast Asia, modern states confronted peoples whose ways of life were organized around movement — and systematically worked to end that movement.

Mobile peoples were not simply poor or underdeveloped. They were organized according to principles of land use, political authority, and economic life that were genuinely alternative to those the modern state required. Their mobility was, in many cases, a sophisticated adaptation to specific ecological conditions, a form of resource management that had sustained communities across millennia, and a source of political freedom — the ability to evade, to relocate, to refuse — that settled peoples had largely surrendered.

The Russian Empire’s relationship with the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppe demonstrates this with particular clarity. Kazakh communities organized their economy around seasonal migration across the steppe — a system extraordinarily efficient in those ecological conditions but incompatible with fixed territorial boundaries and private property regimes.

The imperial response was systematic sedentarization: Russian colonists were settled on lands reclassified as “surplus” because nomadic use did not constitute legal occupation — a Russian equivalent of the terra nullius doctrine.

The Soviet collectivization campaign of 1929-30 brought this process to a catastrophic conclusion. The Kazakh famine of 1930-33 — the Asharshylyk — killed between 1.5 and 2.3 million people, roughly a third to a half of the entire Kazakh population.

It has received a fraction of the historical attention given to the contemporaneous Ukrainian Holodomor — a disproportion that reflects the persistence of the assumption that nomadic life was a transitional stage rather than a legitimate and durable form of human social organization.

In Australia, terra nullius — the doctrine that the continent was legally unoccupied at British occupation — denied Indigenous sovereignty from the outset rather than acknowledging and then violating it, as the American treaty system did. Aboriginal Australians had no treaties, no formal legal recognition of prior title, and no institutional framework through which to pursue claims against dispossession.

The confinement to missions and reserves, the pass system, and the removal of children — producing the Stolen Generations — were instruments of the same elimination logic visible in the American context, organized around the interruption of the intergenerational transmission through which Aboriginal identity and political consciousness were reproduced.

Across North Africa and the Middle East, colonial administrations and successor national states alike pursued sedentarization of Bedouin populations.

The Israeli state’s treatment of the Negev Bedouin — Israeli citizens after 1948, whose claims to land based on customary use were rejected, whose villages went unrecognized, and whose communities were subjected to administrative pressure designed to produce settlement in recognized townships — illustrates how the incorporation project’s administrative logic could operate within a formally democratic state committed to equal rights.

What reading these cases together reveals is the structural consistency of the problem that mobile peoples posed to modern states across radically different political, cultural, and ecological contexts — and the specificity of the techniques deployed in response.

Those techniques were not invented by any single administration and transferred to others. They were developed independently because they were responses to the same structural problem. And the land opened to agricultural settlement — in the American West, the Australian interior, the Algerian highlands, the Kazakh steppe — was the precondition for the smallholder freedom that settlement represented for the settlers who occupied it.

The freedom of the settler and the destruction of the nomad were structurally connected: the one was the condition of the other.

The Assault on Rooted Autonomy

If nomadic peoples were too mobile for the modern state, peasant communities presented a different but structurally related problem. They were settled — visible, accessible, taxable — but settled on their own terms, organized around communal institutions, customary arrangements, and subsistence economies that preserved a degree of independence that the modern order found equally intolerable.

The English enclosures — the conversion of common lands into private property accelerating dramatically in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — represent the founding instance.

The commons were not simply unowned land. They were a specific institutional arrangement: a set of customary rights held by specific communities to use specific land for specific purposes.

Karl Polanyi’s analysis in The Great Transformation remains the most powerful account of what enclosure represented: not simply the reorganization of agricultural land but the construction of the market economy itself — the transformation of land, labor, and community from embedded social relations into commodities.

E.P. Thompson’s concept of the moral economy — the set of customary expectations about fair dealing and communal obligation that organized pre-market economic relations — illuminates what was lost beyond the material: the moral framework embedded in the customary institutions that enclosure destroyed along with the land itself.

The Russian case traces the assault on peasant communal autonomy from imperial reform through revolutionary transformation to Stalinist elimination. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 freed approximately 23 million people from personal bondage — and organized that freedom in ways that preserved their economic subordination through redemption payments and commune membership.

The same institution that organized communal self-governance was enrolled in its own suppression.

The collectivization campaign of 1929-33 ended whatever accommodation remained. The Ukrainian Holodomor — killing between 3.5 and 7.5 million people — was the most concentrated expression of collectivization’s human consequences.

Whether deliberately engineered or recklessly produced, it was the product of the state’s determination to dissolve the peasant communal economy and replace it with an agricultural system that was fully legible, controllable, and productive in the terms the state required.

The Chinese Great Leap Forward extends the analysis in a crucial direction: the relationship between the assault on communal autonomy and the assault on peasant knowledge — the accumulated, locally specific, ecologically adapted understanding that peasant communities had developed across centuries.

Mao’s reorganization of the rural population into people’s communes dissolved not only communal property arrangements but the local institutional arrangements through which agricultural knowledge had been organized, practiced, and transmitted.

The imposition of Lysenkoist agricultural techniques — deep plowing and close planting — overrode the local knowledge of farmers who knew these did not work in their specific conditions.

The Great Chinese Famine of 1959-61, killing between 15 and 55 million people, was the largest famine in human history — produced not by a natural catastrophe but by the destruction of the local knowledge and institutional arrangements through which agricultural communities had managed food production for centuries.

The communities and institutions targeted across these cases — the English common, the Russian commune, the Chinese village, the Mexican ejido — were not identical, and the processes that targeted them were ideologically opposed. Capitalist enclosure, socialist collectivization, and developmental displacement operate through different mechanisms and are justified by different frameworks.

What they share is not a common ideology but a common structural effect: the dissolution of communal institutions that had preserved a degree of autonomy from the centralized state and market power.

The assault on rooted autonomy was consistent across such different political contexts not because different traditions shared an explicit goal but because they were all pursuing the same structural objective — the full incorporation of human populations into centralized state and market systems — and the communal institutions of peasant life were obstacles to that objective regardless of the specific ideological form the incorporation project took.

Empire, Nation, and Decolonization

The processes traced above have been examined primarily within national contexts. But they were aspects of a single global transformation, and understanding that transformation requires examining how empire and nation were mutually constitutive — and how decolonization reorganized rather than ended the structural dynamic.

Many of the nation-states that appear as the successors to empire were themselves imperial long before they became post-imperial.

British national power — its administrative capacity, military strength, economic resources, and cultural coherence — was built through imperial processes. The slave trade and slave-produced commodities generated the capital accumulation that financed British industrial development.

The East India Company was a laboratory for techniques of population management subsequently imported into metropolitan governance: census procedures for classifying diverse populations, legal codes distinguishing categories of subjects, administrative techniques for managing large territories through local intermediaries.

The category of the citizen was partly defined by contrast with the category of the colonial subject. Empire was not what these states did after they became nations. It was constitutive of how they became nations.

This means that the standard periodization — nation-states replace empires, then decolonization occurs — is misleading in a way that matters.

Decolonization was a genuine achievement. But it accomplished something simultaneously that the standard narrative consistently underemphasizes: it generalized the nation-state model rather than transcending it.

The new states that achieved independence inherited colonial borders, colonial bureaucracies, colonial administrative structures, and colonial habits of governance.

The development projects they pursued — industrialization, agricultural modernization, linguistic standardization — reproduced the same structural logic of incorporation that colonial states had applied.

Frantz Fanon saw this dynamic most clearly. The Wretched of the Earth‘s final chapter on national consciousness contains a prescient analysis of what Fanon called the pitfall of national consciousness: the tendency of post-colonial nationalist movements to replicate the structures of colonial governance rather than transcending them.

Julius Nyerere’s ujamaa villagization program in Tanzania — which forcibly relocated approximately 5 million rural Tanzanians into planned villages between 1973 and 1977 — illustrates this with unusual clarity.

Nyerere was a genuinely committed humanist whose philosophy explicitly drew on African communal values rather than European developmental models. And yet the specific technique he chose — forcible relocation of dispersed rural populations into nucleated villages — was precisely the sedentarization technique that colonial administrations had applied across Africa, and it produced precisely the disruption of locally adapted agricultural systems and social institutions that this technique had produced in colonial contexts.

The form of the state Nyerere inherited — centralizing, administrative, developmental — carried within it the incorporation logic whether or not its occupants intended to reproduce it.

The end of formal colonial empire did not produce a world of equal sovereign states. It produced a new global order in which sovereignty was formally universal but substantively unequal.

The structural adjustment programs that the IMF imposed on indebted developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s reproduced the essential logic of colonial economic administration: the subordination of domestic economic policy to the requirements of the global financial system.

Trade rules maintained agricultural subsidies in developed countries while demanding that developing countries open their own markets.

The capacity to install or remove governments — exercised in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973 — was a form of informal imperial power that operated through institutional leverage rather than formal administration.

What might be called nested domination captures the structure: states dominate populations; larger states dominate weaker states; global economic institutions discipline all states, but with effects that fall disproportionately on the weakest.

The Balance Sheet and What Remains

It is time to take stock.

I have established, across a range of cases too diverse to be explained by coincidence or cultural diffusion, a structural pattern that the standard narrative consistently obscures.

Modernity was not simply the emancipation of individuals from older hierarchies. It was simultaneously the destruction of rival forms of life — nomadic confederacies, peasant communes, Indigenous political orders, communal land arrangements — and their replacement with a state-centered and market-centered order that distributed freedom very differently across different populations.

These were aspects of the same process of incorporation that produced different outcomes for different populations depending on their position in the political and economic order being built.

I have not argued that modernity is simply domination. The civil and political rights that the modern state extended — freedom from arbitrary violence, freedom of conscience, political participation, equal treatment before the law — are genuine achievements that matter enormously. The material advances of the modern period are real.

Any honest account must acknowledge both what was gained and what was destroyed.

Nor have I argued that the forms of life it destroyed were superior to those that replaced them.

The communal institutions of peasant life were internally hierarchical. Nomadic confederacies organized significant inequalities of gender and lineage within their communities.

My point is not that the old arrangements were better in every way. It is that they were genuine alternatives — that their destruction was not the inevitable triumph of progress but a specific historical process with specific victims and specific beneficiaries.

Modernity substantially extended negative freedom for significant portions of the human population. But it systematically destroyed other forms of freedom in the process.

The freedom of mobility was eliminated for the nomadic peoples whose sedentarization we have traced.

The freedom of collective self-determination was dissolved for the peasant communities whose communal institutions we have examined.

The freedom from complete market dependence was destroyed by the enclosures, the collectivizations, and the developmental displacements.

These losses were the mechanism through which modernity’s gains were produced. The enclosure of the commons created the proletarian labor force that the industrial revolution required. The sedentarization of nomadic peoples opened their territories to agricultural settlement. The elimination of Indigenous sovereignty cleared the ground for the settler national territories within which settler freedom was exercised.

The gains of modernity were concentrated among populations incorporated as full citizens and full proprietors. The losses were concentrated among populations incorporated as subordinate labor, as administrative subjects, or eliminated altogether.

The processes I have traced are historical, but their consequences are not.

Indigenous sovereignty claims in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and across Latin America, Africa, and Asia are not nostalgic demands for the restoration of a pre-modern past. They are assertions of rights that were never legitimately extinguished — treaty rights, territorial rights, rights of self-governance — whose ongoing denial represents a continuing injustice.

The racial wealth gap in the United States is not primarily a legacy of attitudes or cultural differences. It is the direct consequence of specific historical policies: the discriminatory administration of the GI Bill and the FHA mortgage programs, the systematic exclusion from the wealth-building mechanisms of the postwar middle class.

The global economic inequalities that the informal imperial order maintains are the structured outcome of a global economic order whose architecture reflects the interests of its most powerful participants.

What does the recognition of this history demand of those who have inherited both its achievements and its costs?

Not that modernity should be rejected. The forms of life that modernity destroyed cannot be recovered through modernity’s abolition. History is not reversible in that sense, and political programs premised on its reversibility tend to produce their own forms of violence.

What follows is more demanding and more interesting than simple rejection. It is the recognition that the freedoms modernity has extended rest on foundations that include the destruction of other freedoms.

This fact, in turn, generates specific obligations: to acknowledge honestly what was destroyed and who bore the cost; to repair, where repair is possible, the specific injustices whose consequences persist into the present; and to take seriously, in the construction of political institutions and economic arrangements, the forms of freedom that modernity destroyed — collective self-determination, subsistence independence, freedom rooted in communal belonging — as genuine values rather than as obstacles to progress.

Some of what was destroyed can be partially recovered in forms appropriate to present conditions.

Indigenous sovereignty is not fully restorable, but the recognition of treaty rights, the return of specific lands, and the genuine devolution of governance authority to Indigenous communities are real and achievable advances that specific political movements are pursuing with increasing effectiveness.

The commons cannot be unenclosed, but new forms of commons — digital commons, urban commons, cooperative ownership arrangements — can provide some of the functions the original commons served.

The protection of surviving communal land arrangements — the ejidos that NAFTA threatened, the communal forests of South Asia, the pastoral commons of East Africa — is a concrete political goal whose pursuit can slow the ongoing assault on rooted autonomy.

The demand for honest acknowledgment is perhaps most fundamental. The standard narrative of modernity — which presents its dark chapters as deviations from an essentially emancipatory trajectory — is not simply historically inaccurate. It is politically disabling.

It makes it impossible to understand the structural sources of the inequalities that persist in the present, because it attributes them to contingent failures rather than to constitutive features of the modern order.

It makes it impossible to take seriously the claims of populations whose subordination was built into the structure of that order.

And it makes it impossible to imagine alternatives to the current arrangements, because it treats those arrangements as the destination of an emancipatory process rather than as one possible organization of human life among several, constructed at specific historical costs that have been systematically obscured.

My deepest ambition has been to make visible a pattern that the organization of historical knowledge — into national histories, into disciplinary specializations, into ideologically convenient periodizations — has systematically obscured: the pattern by which the modern world was built through the destruction of human diversity, and by which the freedoms it extended to some were purchased at the cost of the freedoms it eliminated for others.

Making that pattern visible does not resolve the political questions it raises. But it is the precondition for engaging those questions honestly.

Honesty, in this as in other domains, is where serious thought has to begin.