Week 5 Summary

RELATION TO WHITE INSECURITY AND FRAGILITY

This lecture exposes colonialism as a structural response to three forms of European insecurity that could not be resolved internally. Each form of expansion addressed a specific fragility.

The legitimacy crisis following Westphalia revealed that European sovereignty had no stable foundation once theological justification collapsed. The colony provided a space where absolute sovereignty could be performed without requiring justification—where fragility about political authority could be masked through unrestricted domination of populations defined as incapable of self-rule. The social contract theories of Hobbes and Locke appear as universal philosophy, but function as reassurance: sovereignty is legitimate here because it remains absolute there.

The surplus absorption crisis reveals economic fragility. Capital accumulation outpaced profitable domestic investment. Populations could not be productively employed. Rather than restructure internal distribution, European powers externalized the problem. Infrastructure projects in colonies absorbed excess capital while appearing as civilizational gifts. The railway becomes simultaneously a material solution to European economic instability and proof of European superiority. Smith theorizes market expansion as economic necessity—a theoretical domestication of the anxiety that European capitalism cannot stabilize itself.

The moral coherence crisis is the most diagnostic. Once Christian universalism collapsed, Europeans required new grounds for hierarchy. Race and civilizational development provided secular substitutes, but these required continuous empirical demonstration. The colony became the permanent proof—populations perpetually requiring guidance, perpetually incapable of self-governance, perpetually confirming European necessity. Hegel and Mill do not argue for racial hierarchy from confidence. They construct philosophical systems that make European dominance ontologically required, that transform political domination into historical necessity.

What the lecture identifies as structural problem-solving is, from another angle, systematic anxiety management. Colonialism solved European crises, but it did so by creating permanent external theaters where European legitimacy, economic viability, and moral superiority could be continuously demonstrated to Europeans themselves. The administrative technologies developed were not neutral tools. They were instruments for producing the reassurance that European modernity required but could not generate internally.

The colony was the space where European fragility became non-European subjection.