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In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois had striven to enrich the critique of capitalism and bourgeois society that had merged into the dominant strains of Western radicalism. He had no choice if he was to comprehend the crises of war and depression that devastated the world system in his lifetime, and th…

The terms of his analysis were quite important to Du Bois. They were a part of his beginning of the transformation of the historiography of American civilization—the naming of things. In the changing of the names of things, he sought to provide the basis for a new conceptualization of their relatio…

he was able to make this ferocious attack upon Western civilization because he knew it inside out…. He had spent some twenty years studying it

As it had been for Cesaire, so it was for all of them. They would all pass through the prepossessing claims of bourgeois ideology for Western cultural …

[...] Most significant, however, were the attitudes colonial administrators developed toward the activities of the missions. The construction of Black Europeans was overly ambitious in their eyes. In 1938, Arthur Mayhew would advise an Oxford University summer session for colonial administrators th…

In other words, those peoples who had in the most early era of the colony’s development as a plantation and mining economy served as the source of labor were seen as pliable and naturally agrarian; those whose recruitment coincided with the region’s beginning of urbanization and secondary manufactu…