Abstract
Yet colonial studies endures, as historians, anthropologists, political scientists, literary scholars, and others try to understand the political, economic, social, and cultural dynamics of colonial conquest and rule, and how the legacies of the period shaped the present. A key purpose of the book is to challenge all of us to clarify our language of analysis, in part by distinguishing "categories of practice" from "categories of analysis," but also by grounding our analysis in the details of our cases rather than obscuring our findings by appeal to such imprecise terms as "identity," "globalization," or "modernity" (each a separate essay topic in the volume).