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Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) examined, of course, how European imperialism turned Africa into a subordinate zone of the world economy. But beyond that, this essay seeks to show how Rodney explored, with Marxist and Caribbean tools, the complex problem of temporality in world history: how events in one conjuncture form enduring structures; how imperial power orders, and is reproduced by, ways of living in and thinking about time; and revolutionary time, in particular the Tricontinental moment. Rodney's time conjuring was anchored both in that heroic 1960s emergency and in a tradition of challenging the constrictions of modern (imperial) time, alive in both elite and popular currents of the Caribbean intellectual tradition.

Abstract
Why did European history come so late to the global turn? Europe's past had of course always been constructed relative to its Islamic or Mongol peripheries, and later its colonial offshore. But only recently has it been understood that European and extra-European history are in a dynamic relationship of reciprocal influence. Intellectual and economic history recognized this before social history, which in its post-1960 flowering took it for granted that European social forms were both more advanced and categorically different from others. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a generation after political decolonization, new work began to explore the impact of peripheries on the European core, and to measure Europe from the outside. After 2000, a globalized European social history became visible. Its evasion of the constraints of the national paradigm has opened up striking new pan- and trans-European historical projects and methods. These are provoking new questions of how we might reconfigure European history in ways which understand eastern and central Europe in their own terms, rather than simply as the retarded extensions of "advanced" western European phenomena.

Histoire sociale de l'Europe et tournant global Une rencontre tardivePourquoi l'histoire européenne a-t-elle pris si tard le tournant global ? Si le passé de l'Europe s'est bien sûr toujours construit par rapport à ses périphéries islamiques ou mongoles, et plus tard par rapport à ses colonies, ce n'est que récemment que l'on a compris que l'histoire européenne et extra-européenne s'entremêlent dans une relation dynamique d'influences réciproques. L'histoire intellectuelle et économique l'a reconnu avant l'histoire sociale qui, dans son épanouissement à partir des années 1960, tenait pour acquis que les formes sociales européennes étaient à la fois plus avancées et catégoriquement différentes des autres. Dans les années 1970 et 1980 cependant, une génération après la décolonisation politique, de nouveaux travaux ont commencé à explorer l'influence des périphéries sur le noyau européen et à évaluer l'Europe de l'extérieur. Depuis le début du xxie siècle, on assiste à l'émergence d'une histoire sociale européenne globalisée. En sortant des contraintes du paradigme national, elle ouvre la voie à de nouveaux projets et méthodes historiques pan- et transeuropéens. Ceux-ci suscitent de nouvelles questions sur la façon dont nous pourrions reconfigurer l'histoire européenne de manière à comprendre l'Europe centrale et orientale selon leurs propres termes plutôt que comme de simples extensions retardées de phénomènes européens occidentaux « avancés ».

What might a Commonwealth 'history from below' look like? On what terms did subordinate stakeholders, those on the underside of that system of economic, political and cultural power we call 'empire', invest in ideas of Britain, the Empire, and the Commonwealth? What did such a claim of Britishness, or membership in the Empire or Commonwealth, mean for those racialised as black or brown? This essay proposes that we should see the political postures of those in a subordinate colonial location in terms of what Glissant called 'forced poetics', that is to say as occurring in an illocutionary context in which meaning was constrained not, per Quentin Skinner, by past usages, but rather by the pressures of present power on the speech act. This problem of the tug of interests operating on any system of political signifiers which sits between interlocutors who meet on unequal terms has vital methodological importance in global intellectual history. British imperial power was not just a political and economic system, it was also a social and cultural order, to which white supremacy and the cognitive centrality of Europe were central. Those on the underside of were compelled to negotiate their interests, as best they could, in its ideological currencies. This essay explores how Caribbean intellectuals and political actors, operating in a field of power dominated by white British and Dominions actors, used the ideas of the British Empire and the (British) Commonwealth in service to their own national and transnational ends. It pays particular attention to Pan-African and Pan-Caribbean projects which sought to negotiate themselves against and with the Imperial and Commonwealth ideas and their political logics.

Coloniser and colonised were produced as subjectivities through power relations mediated through objects. The erection of public statues of 'great men' in prominent places in European and colonial cities was a political act with an ideological meaning. These survive within the curated space of the city long after the end of imperial domination. In the case of Barbados, for example, a statue to Lord Nelson was erected in the early nineteenth century in Bridgetown, decades before its London equivalent, as part of a planter politics of anti-anti-slavery. The statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford, together with the other commemorative plaques and statues placed in his honour, were similarly part of an Edwardian pro-imperial propaganda in Oxford. In these places, as elsewhere around the world, from Barcelona to Cape Town, public campaigns have demanded the removal or public remediation of these forms of rhetoric via monument. But opponents of the removal of Nelson and Rhodes from their privileged positions in Bridgetown and Oxford have argued that these statues were very old, and were therefore now part of a public culture which should be preserved without revision. To remove them would be to "erase" history, in Mary Beard's phrase. But is leaving these objects as they are not also a kind of historical erasure, a silencing of the past in Michel Rolphe Trouillot's terms? For without a new mediation, what is lost from public memory and attention is that these objects were contested projects of minority ideologies and interests, both at their origins and today. Is the argument from 'heritage' not bound up with an odd contemporary imbalance of attention towards the needs of the present and future vs. the legacies of the past, the retrogressive temporality of the neo-liberal moment? The point is not the destruction of 'the past', as if there was ever one monolithic uncontested past, but the renegotiation of which past the present holds up to its face.

Frederick Cooper's Citizenship between Nation and Empire: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 is a masterwork on the high politics of the end of the French empire in Africa. His elucidation of the attempts by some African political leaders to find a path out of colonial domination that leads through a global French federal sovereignty, rather than the nation-state, is an important contribution. But was there really in practice "the possibility of dismantling empire … without having to choose between French colonialism and national independence"? There are important reasons why the federal utopias of 1946 had no chance of ever being realized. Central to these was the imperial nation-state of France and the forms of French political, economic, and racial privilege that would remain priorities during and after the moment of decolonization. The path that led to the nation-states of Africa after 1960 was already clear by the late 1940s.

Fred Cooper's Citizenship between Nation and Empire is a masterwork on the high politics of the end of the French empire in Africa. His elucidation of the attempts by some African political leaders to find a path out of colonial domination which lead through a global French federal sovereignty, rather than the nation state, is an important contribution. But was there really in practice 'the possibility of dismantling empire . . . without having to choose between French colonialism and national independence'? There are important reasons why the federal utopias of 1946 had no chance of ever being realized. Central to these was the imperial nation-state of France and the forms of French political, economic and racial privilege which would remain priorities during and after the moment of decolonization. The path which led to the nation-states of Africa after 1960 was already clear by the late 1940s.

The contemporary historian, as she or he speaks to the public about the origins and meanings of the present, has important ethical responsibilities. 'Imperial' historians, in particular, shape how politicians and the public imagine the future of the world. This article examines how British imperial history, as it emerged as an academic subject since about 1900, often lent ideological support to imperialism, while more generally it suppressed or avoided the role of violence and terror in the making and keeping of the Empire. It suggests that after 2001, and during the Iraq War, in particular, a new Whig historiography sought to retail a flattering narrative of the British Empire's past, and concludes with a call for a post-patriotic imperial history which is sceptical of power and speaks for those on the underside of global processes.