A feature of the Western ‘war on terror’ that seems to come out of fable rather than reality is an inability to see the enemy. In fact, it is an inability to define the enemy. In the Sahel, the French state has settled on ‘Islamist terrorists’, a sequence of adjectives that denote elusive subjects surging out of horizons of pure violence. The inability is compounded by the fact that terrorists must be picked out in terrains unknowable to the West, because the West has long considered them—still considers them—to be outside of history: Afghanistan, a redoubt against empires, those makers of history; the Sahel, a land somewhere in the continent that Hegel banished from history.

From this perspective, a people may be assimilated, as were many western Jews, or absorbed, like German and Italian immigrants to America, or divided—typically by religion—like the Irish, intermingled like the Brazilians, semi-forged from subordinate nations, like Spaniards or British, or newly minted, like Australians and Israelis. ‘Classes’, entailing a division of labour and of property, are shaped by the development of both. They may mutate, like the English landed gentry, or be expropriated, like the Prussian Junkers, rendered redundant, like the Rustbelt industrial proletariat, or brought into being, like China’s Sunbelt working class. One great advantage of the ‘people-class’ concept over that of ‘caste’, then, is that its double lens can capture a historically developing social reality that is both dynamic and uneven; in which the making and unmaking of social identities and economic functions proceed at different speeds, varying within the turbulent, fast-changing political economy of the us as a whole.