ny academic works for having considered colonization in an abstract and generic way, disconnected from imperial history. Instead, Cooper promotes a history of colonialism which takes in the full range of political imaginations and the contingent constraints people face in their formation of a post-colonial worldview.
             The book is made up of three distinguishable but closely integrated parts. Each of them has a different angle of focus. The first part is entitled "Colonial Study and Interdisciplinary scholarship." It introduces the historiography of colonialism, or rather the historiography of its paradigm (at least from 1951, La Situation colonial of George Balandier). This essay draws the theoretical and historical trajectories of the colonial studies. It denounces, for instance, the intellectual conformism of the subaltern studies which remain limited to a critique of colonialism.
             Cooper cautions against doing "ahistorical history" which distorts temporalities. Ahistorical history dangerously encourages apolitical politics. For him, this methodological failure can take four different forms: Story plucking, the first form, is when piece of history is extracted from its chronological and geographical contexts to be compared (from Spanish America in the XVIth century to XXth Africa, passing by the West Indies in the XVIIIth century).
             The second is leapfrogging legacy, whereby one situation is analyzed as the result of another without taking into consideration the transformations which occurred in-between. Here Cooper takes the example of "Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism," in which Mahmood Mamdani links colonial policies directly to the current authoritarianism in some African countries.
             The third is doing history backward, a move in which current mindsets and historical mindsets of the past are confused anachronistically. As a result, academics can't...