In recent years, the global turn in the history of political thought and intellectual history has called attention to the ways in which ideas travel across time and space and are, as a result, taken up, translated, and repurposed in different contexts. Such histories of the global circulation of ideas often assume a background condition of interconnection and at least a nascent form of “globalization” that provides pathways for the movement of ideas. Indeed, as Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori note, the emphasis on circulation in global intellectual history tends to “skew [the field] toward modern histories, that is, toward a period in which patterns of interconnectedness have deepened enough to be deemed global” (“Approaches to Global Intellectual History,” in Moyn and Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History, 2013, p. 16). This modernist tilt should ensure that European colonialism holds a central place in the field of global intellectual history, for insofar as global networks of circulation exist, they are largely the products of imperial expansion, which integrated the world and produced the first iterations of what we now call the global and globalization.

Burke Hendrix and Deborah Baumgold’s edited volume, Colonial Exchanges, intervenes in the debate over the contours and stakes of global intellectual history at precisely this conjuncture. As Hendrix and Baumgold indicate in their introductory essay, the colonial channels by which “European bodies, products, and social institutions” traveled were also the vectors through which political arguments and ideas circulated. “European colonialism,” the editors argue, “altered the world political and intellectually” (p. 1). In reformulating a global history of ideas as colonial exchanges, the essays in the volume center the ways that imperial formations created the material conditions for ideas to travel. However, these exchanges are not figured as unidirectional processes where ideas with a metropolitan origin radiate out to the colonial periphery. Unlike David Armitage’s global history of the Declaration of Independence or Lynn Hunt’s history of human rights, where naturalistic metaphors of contagion and cascades are mobilized to characterize the movement of ideas, these essays seek to capture the ways that colonized intellectuals and elites adapt and repurpose received concepts. Far from passive recipients of already globalizing ideas, the central figures examined in the volume selectively and strategically deploy ideas for a variety of political ends.

In directing attention toward strategic appropriation rather than circulation, the essays illuminate the ways that colonial exchanges exceed the specific networks of one imperial power. For instance, Megan Thomas’ essay on the ways that Filipino intellectual Pedro Paterno deployed French Lamarckianism illustrates that while Paterno received his formal education in Spain, his intellectual context was not limited to the Spanish empire. As Thomas notes, “Paterno’s writings and those of his compatriots demonstrate that intellectual travel in the colonial world does not always follow the line of colonial rule” (p. 158). Here and elsewhere, the colonial exchange is framed less around the specific circuits of travel that tie a metropole and its colony and, instead, charts how colonized intellectuals negotiate their imposed but inescapable relationship to European modernity.

If the colonial condition is characterized by a certain kind of conscription to the intellectual traditions of the West, these essays seek to illustrate how colonized intellectuals reckon with their conscription and in the process remake those inherited traditions in contexts far removed from their origins, and for purposes for which they were not initially intended. In Tim Rowse’s essay on nineteenth-century indigenous intellectuals in North America and Oceania and their appropriation of liberal historicism, and in Yasmeen Daifallah’s examination of Marxist historicism in the work of Moroccan historian Abdullah Laroui, we encounter the ways that a central ideological handmaiden of European imperialism gets repurposed to critique and eventually overcome empire. For Rowse, the indigenous invocation of liberal historicism at the very moment when metropolitan intellectuals were increasingly skeptical of liberal models of imperial tutelage is an effort to redeem the promise of improvement and modernization. What Rowse calls indigenous “counter-historicisms” might concede indigenous inferiority, but at the same time they “uphold [the indigenous’s] innate capacity for acculturation . . . and [give] grounds for indigenous evaluation of their self-appointed tutors” (p. 143). Like Rowse’s nineteenth-century figures, Daifallah illustrates that the twentieth-century historian Laroui takes the view that given the ways in which colonialism has violently transformed the conditions of political life, liberation can only be sought within the terms of modernity (p. 222). Like that of other anticolonial modernists of his age, Laroui’s historicism is, on the one hand, directed at traditionalists who seek to revive a distant precolonial past (p. 231) and, on the other hand, grounds an effort to distill a specific trajectory for Third World and Arab modernity that does not simply replicate Europe (pp. 241–42).

It should already be clear form these examples that the “agency of the colonized” referenced in the subtitle of the volume is not meant to invoke a triumphal anticolonial resistance. Because colonial conscription to modernity both enables by making new languages and discourses available to the colonized and disables by foreclosing alternative forms of critique, the agency of the colonized displayed throughout the volume is as much about adaptation, accommodation, and negotiation as it is about outright resistance to imperialism. For example, Jimmy Klausen explores that ways that Jotirao Govindrao Phule’s critique of Brahman domination in India appealed to the British Empire and especially the Queen for “humanitarian superintendence” (p. 96). At precisely the moment of a nascent nationalist critique of alien rule, Phule engages in a performative supplication designed to secure solidarity among the victims of Brahman supremacy and to enlist British sympathy for the purposes of imperial redress (p. 89).

In looking beyond anticolonial resistance, the essays suggest a context-specific, strategic, and also limited form of colonized agency. The limits appear throughout the volume as signs of the unevenness that characterizes colonial exchange. If the metaphor of networks in the field of global intellectual history suggests an open and free marketplace of ideas, attending to the imperial character of these networks reveals the deep inequalities that structure circulation. Like the dependency and hierarchy that marked colonial political and economic life, the ideational context of empire registered a parallel differentiation. In Lynn Zastoupil’s study of John Stuart Mill and the Bengali reformer Rammohun Roy, the effect of this differentiated imperial space is silence. While Mill and Roy inhabited an overlapping network of intellectuals and activists and shared similar views on key political debates, Roy appears not to have registered in Mill’s political thinking. As Zastopuil notes, “although colonialism produced changes that enabled a global intellectual culture to emerge, the transmission and reception of ideas was uneven, ambiguous, and not always fruitful or long-lasting” (p. 23).

For Murad Idris, this unevenness takes the form of selective misreadings of the Egyptian jurist Qasim Amin. Idris argues that we ought to situate colonized intellectuals in “layered webs of power” and attend to their multiple audiences, which include both fellow colonial subjects and European thinkers (p. 181). In the hands of European missionaries, intellectuals, and colonial bureaucrats, Amin’s polemical critiques of Arab backwardness that sought to incite internal reform came to be read as evidence of and justification for European intervention (p. 209). As Idris notes, it is not only the colonized that “writes back” by selectively appropriating and remaking Euro-American ideas. The “colonizer can respond [and] the colonized’s writings can be strategically appropriated for the colonizer’s ends” (p. 210). To be sure, all intellectuals must reckon with the disjuncture between authorial intent and reception, but the hierarchical nature of colonial exchange magnifies and exacerbates this gap such that a critique of empire can come to mean its opposite.

One strategy for decentering the hierarchy of exchange between Europe and its conscripts might be to consider how colonized intellectuals forged horizontal linkages among themselves that traversed imperial and national boundaries. To be sure, problems of translation and misreadings also characterize these exchanges. However, attending to horizontal colonial networks offers avenues for exploring the ways that empire opened up circuits of exchange within the colonized world while also highlighting the collective projects through which colonized intellectuals negotiated and contested their colonial conscription. What might be called “South–South” exchange receives little attention in the collected essays and has yet to play a central role in the broader effort to globalize the history of political thought.

While the editors do not take up this task, Colonial Exchanges sets the stage for it by centering imperialism in global intellectual history and identifying intellectual resources and traditions beyond the canon of Western political thought. In both holding together the ways that European imperialism radically transformed the conditions of non-Western intellectual life and attending to the agency of non-Western intellectuals, the volume highlights the central role of empire without assuming that the intellectual trajectories of colonial conscription are one-sidedly determined. In doing so, the editors introduce non-Western thinkers into the study of empire in political theory and reframe comparative political theory around the ways that differently situated actors negotiated the legacies of empire.