Encyclopedia of Sociology Vol

(SEE ALSO: Deviance Theories; Law and Society)

REFERENCES

Amato, P.R., and A. Booth 1997 A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Arendell, T. 1995 Fathers and Divorce. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.

Bell, N. W., and E. F. Vogel (eds.) 1968 A Modern Introduction to the Family. New York: Free Press.

Blake, J. 1961 Family Structure in Jamaica. New York:

Free Press.

Blakenhorn, D., S. Bayne, and J. B. Elshtain 1990 Rebuilding the Nest. Milwaukee, Wis.: Family Service America.

Bumpass, L. 1990 ‘‘What’s Happening to the Family? Interactions Between Demographic and Institutional Change.’’ Demography 27:483–498.

Burns, A., and C. Scott 1994 Mother-Headed Families and Why They Have Increased. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Cherlin, A. J. 1992 Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, rev. and enl. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

——— 1999 Public and Private Families, 2nd ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Chilman, C. S. 1983 Adolescent Sexuality in a Changing American Society: Social and Psychological Perspectives for the Human Services Professions. New York: Wiley.

Clague, A. J., and S. J. Ventura 1968 Trends in Illegitimacy: United States 1940–1965. (Vital and Health Statistics, Public Health Service Publication no. 1000, ser. 21, no. 15.) Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Coser, R. L., (ed.) 1964 The Family: Its Structures and Functions. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Cutright, P. 1972 ‘‘Illegitimacy in the United States, 1920–1968.’’ In C. Westoff and R. Parks, eds., Demographic and Social Aspects of Population Growth. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Davis, K. 1939 ‘‘Illegitimacy and the Social Structure.’’ American Journal of Sociology 45:215–233.

———1949 Human Society. New York: Macmillan.

———1985 Contemporary Marriage: Comparative Perspectives on a Changing Institution. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Dornbush, S. M. 1989 ‘‘The Sociology of Adolescence.’’ The Annual Review of Sociology 15: 233–259.

Duncan, G. J., and S. D. Hoffman 1990 ‘‘Teenage Welfare Receipt and Subsequent Dependance Among Black Adolescent Mothers.’’ Family Planning Perspectives. 22:219–223.

Edin, K. 1998 ‘‘Why Don’t Poor Single Mothers Get Married (or Remarried)?’’ Paper presented at the Russell Sage Foundation, New York, May.

Ellwood, D. T. 1988 Poor Support. New York: Basic Books.

Furstenberg, F. F., Jr. 1989 ‘‘Supporting Fathers: Implications of the Family Support Act for Men.’’ Paper presented at the forum on the Family Support Act sponsored by the Foundation for Child Development, Washington, D.C., November.

———1990 ‘‘Coming of Age in a Changing Family System.’’ In F. Feldman and G. Elliott, eds., At the Threshold: The Developing Adolescent. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

———1991 ‘‘As the Pendulum Swings: Teenage Childbearing and Social Concern.’’ Family Relations 40:127–138.

———1995 ‘‘Fathering in the Inner-City: Paternal Participation and Public Policy.’’ In W. Marsiglio, ed.,

Fatherhood: Contemporary Theory, Research, and Social Policy. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.

———1996 ‘‘The Future of Marriage.’’ American Demographics (June): 34–40.

———, and A. Cherlin 1991 Divided Families: What Happens to Children When Their Parents Part. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

K.E. Sherwood, and M. L. Sullivan 1992 Caring and Paying: What Fathers and Mothers Say About Child Support. New York: Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation.

Garfinkel, I., J. L. Hochschild, and S. McLanahan (eds.) 1996 Social Policies for Children. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution.

Garfinkel, I., and S. McLanahan 1986 Single Mothers and Their Children. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press.

——— 1990 ‘‘The Effects of the Child Support Provisions of the Family Support Act of 1988 on Child Well-Being.’’ Population Research and Policy Review

9:205–234.

Geronimus, A. T. 1987 ‘‘On Teenage Childbearing in the United States.’’ Population and Developmental Review 13:245–279.

Glendon, M. A. 1989 The Transformation of Family Law.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Goode, W. J. 1960 ‘‘A Deviant Case: Illegitimacy in the Carribean.’’ American Sociological Review 25:21–30.

———1961 ‘‘Illegitimacy, Anomie, and Cultural Penetration.’’ American Sociological Review 26:319–325.

——— 1971 ‘‘Family Disorganization.’’ In R. K. Merton and R. Nisbet, eds., Contemporary Social Problems, 3rd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch.

Goody, J. 1983 The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Hayes, C. D. 1987 Risking the Future, vol. 1. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Hoem, B., and J. M. Hoem 1988 ‘‘The Swedish Family: Aspects of Contemporary Development.’’ Journal of Family Issues 9:397–424.

Hofferth, S. L., and C. D. Hayes 1987 Risking the Future, vol. 2. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Hoffman, S. D., E. M. Foster, and F. F. Furstenberg, Jr. 1993 ‘‘Re-Evaluating the Costs of Teenage Childbearing.’’ Demography 30:1–13.

Hogan, D. P., and E. Kitagawa 1985 ‘‘The Impact of Social Status, Family Structure, and Neighborhood on the Family Structure of Black Adolescents.’’ American Journal of Sociology 90:825–855.

Institute of Medicine 1995 The Best Intentions: Unintended Pregnancy and the Well-Being of Children and Families. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

King, V., and Heard, H. E. 1999 ‘‘Nonresident Father Visitation, Parental Conflict, and Mother’s Satisfaction: What’s Best for Child Well-Being?’’ Journal of Marriage and the Family 61:385–396.

Malinowski, B. 1930 ‘‘Parenthood, the Basis of Social Structure.’’ In R. L. Coser, ed., The Family: Its Structure and Functions. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Marsiglio, W. 1998 Procreative Man. New York: New York University Press.

Mason, M. A., A. Skolnick, and S. D. Sugarman (eds.) 1998 All Our Families: New Policies for a New Century.

New York: Oxford University Press.

Maynard, R. A. (ed.) 1997 Kids Having Kids: Economic Costs and Social Consequences of Teen Pregnancy. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press.

McLanahan, S., and K. Booth 1989 ‘‘Mother-Only Families: Problems, Prospects, and Politics.’’ Journal of Marriage and the Family 51:577–580.

McLanahan, S., and L. Casper 1995 ‘‘Growing Diversity and Inequality in the American Family.’’ In R. Farley, ed., State of the Union: America in the 1990s, vol. 2. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

McLanahan, S., and G. Sandefur 1994 Growing up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Miller, B. C., and K. A. Moore 1990 ‘‘Adolescent Sexual Behavior, Pregnancy, and Parenting.’’ Journal of Marriage and the Family 524:1025–1044.

Moffitt, R. A. (ed.) 1998 Welfare, the Family and Reproductive Behavior. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Moore, K. A., M. C. Simms, and C. L. Betsey 1986 Choice and Circumstance: Racial Differences in Adolescent Sexuality and Fertility. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books.

Murray, C. 1984 Losing Ground. New York: Basic Books.

O’Connell, M., and M. J. Moore 1981 ‘‘The Legitimacy Status of First Births to U.S. Women Aged 15–24, 1939–1978.’’ In F. F. Furstenberg, Jr., R. Lincoln, and J. Menken, eds., Teenage Sexuality, Pregnancy, and Childbearing. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Popenoe, D. 1996 Life Without Father. New York:

Free Press.

———, J. B. Elshtain, and D. Blankenhorn (eds.) 1996

Promises to Keep: Decline and Renewal of Marriage in America. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

Seltzer, J. A. 1991 ‘‘Relationships Between Fathers and Children Who Live Apart: The Father’s Role after Separation.’’ Journal of Marriage and the Family 53:79–101.

Smith, H. L., S. P. Morgan, and T. Koropeckyz-Cox 1996 ‘‘A Decomposition of Trends in the Nonmarital Fertility Ratios of Blacks and Whites in the United States, 1960–1992.’’ Demography 33:141–151.

Smollar, J., and T. Ooms 1987 Young Unwed Fathers: Research Review, Policy Dilemmas, and Options. Washington, D.C.: Maximus.

Teachman, J. D. 1990 ‘‘Still Fathers? The Reorganization of Parental Obligations Following Divorce.’’ Paper presented at the Albany Conference of Demographic Perspectives on the American Family: Patterns and Prospects, April.

Trussel, J. 1988 ‘‘Teenage Pregnancy in the United States.’’ Family Planning Perspectives 20:262–272.

Ventura, S. J., J. A. Martin, S. C. Curtin, and T. J. Matthews 1996 ‘‘Report of Final Natality: Statistics.’’

Monthly Vital Statistics Report 45 (11) (supp. 2) Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics.

Vincent, C. E. 1961 Unmarried Mothers. New York:

Free Press.

Vinovskis, M. 1988 An ‘‘Epidemic’’ of Adolescent Pregnancy? Some Historical and Policy Considerations. New York: Oxford University Press.

———, and P. L. Chase-Lansdale 1987 ‘‘Should We Discourage Teenage Marriage?’’ Public Interest 98:23–37.

‘‘Virginia Slims American Women’s Public Opinion Poll’’ 1985 A study conducted by the Roper Center for Public Opinion.

Wilson, W. J. 1987 The Truly Disadvantaged. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

FRANK F. FURSTENBERG JR.

IMPERIALISM, COLONIALISM, AND DECOLONIZATION

The colonial expansion of European states into the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, followed by the collapse of these empires and their replacement by sovereign nation-states, is a double movement of great historical importance. The following briefly reviews the larger contours of this history and outlines some central arguments about its causes and consequences.

IMPERIALISM AND COLONIALISM

The term ‘‘imperialism’’ was first used in the 1830s to recall Napoleonic ambitions. It gained its core contemporary meaning around the turn of the century as a description of the feverish colonial expansion of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, and Italy. But the term is not confined to formal colonial expansion; in particular, the continuing dependence of much of the Third World on Western states and multinational corporations is often understood as neocolonialism or neoimperialism (Magdoff 1969; Nkrumah 1966).

Contemporary efforts to distill these diverse usages generally define imperialism as the construction and maintenance of relationships of domination between political communities. Such relations are often seen as explicitly political, either in the narrow sense of direct administrative control or more broadly as formal or informal control over state policy. Economic conceptions of imperialism sometimes develop an analogue to these notions, where relations of economic control or exploitation replace political domination.

‘‘Imperialism’’ has also been appropriated in a much narrower sense to support particular lines of argument. Lenin’s statement that ‘‘imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism’’ ([1917] 1939, p. 88) may be understood as a move of this sort. Arrighi, among others, argues that Lenin is better understood as formulating a substantive proposition; he suggests the interpretation ‘‘imperialism,

or the tendency to war between capitalist countries, is a necessary consequence of the transformation of capitalism into monopoly or finance capital’’ (1978, p. 14).

Even when imperialism is equated with the establishment and maintenance of political domination, an awkward relationship between imperialism and empire persists. Classically, ‘‘empire’’ refers to the great agrarian bureaucracies that dominated antiquity, from the Aztec to the Chinese, from ancient Sumer to Imperial Rome. It is not clear how much these structures have in common with the overseas colonial empires of Western states, much less with contemporary structures of dependence on foreign investment. Agrarian bureaucracies involved ethnic divisions that separated classes (most importantly separating warriors and peasant producers) rather than entire communities or nations (Gellner 1983).

A second historical use of ‘‘empire’’ is the medieval image of a temporal parallel to the Roman Church (Folz 1969; Guenee 1985). Rather than an alien and illegitimate structure, empire was seen as a political order unifying the Christian world. Revived by Charlemagne, the notion of a universal polity lived on, in an increasingly ghostly fashion, through the Holy Roman Empire. It receded into the background as a real political force with the construction of absolutist states and was lost as a compelling image with the rise of the nation-state.

In contrast to these historical understandings of empire, modern conceptions of imperialism rest on the notion that popular sovereignty forms the basis of political community. Only with the notion of popular sovereignty does domination refer to relationships between rather than within communities. If the criteria that the United Nations uses today to identify colonialism were to be applied before 1700, all territories would be parts of empires and all peoples would be dependent subjects. It is thus no accident that the notion of imperialism arose with the nation-state; it connotes the expansionary drive of a community that is internally organized around (the myth of) popular sovereignty.

European Political Expansion. European overseas expansion can be described crudely as occurring in two stages, the colonial and the imperial. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, seagoing

powers constructed networks of colonial enclaves along the route to the East Indies. Less than half a century after the voyages of Columbus, the conquistadores had laid waste to the Incan and Aztec empires and were sending gold and silver back to Spain. In the following two centuries, Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands colonized virtually the whole of the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the North Atlantic seaboard. The colonial period per se came to a close with the wars of national independence in the Americas between 1776 and 1830, leaving European states in control of little more than trading posts and exhausted sugar plantations.

The second period of expansion, one of imperial rather than colonial expansion, began after an interregnum marked by British naval hegemony. In the three decades after 1880, a scramble for territory partitioned Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific among Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, and Portugal, while the United States annexed the remains of the Spanish Empire. None of this expansion involved much metropolitan emigration; colonial officials, traders, planters, and missionaries formed a thin veneer on indigenous societies.

The sources of the political structures of imperial rule lie in both metropolitan and indigenous traditions. Colonies tended to be formally organized along metropolitan lines (Fieldhouse 1966). Settler colonies mirrored domestic political structures quite directly (Lang 1975), while nonsettler colonies recall metropolitan structures in a more abstract fashion. For example, the British tried to fashion systems of local rule (Lugard [1922] 1965), while the French strove to create a unified, centralized administration. But the superficiality of most imperial rule led to great variation in actual administrative arrangements. Even empires whose guiding rationale was assimilation (the French and the Portuguese, especially) depended heavily on indigenous authorities and traditions.

Overseas colonies also varied in the strength and character of their economic relationship to the metropolis. Only a few colonies were the source of great riches for the metropolitan economy: most prominently, the American settler and plantation colonies, British India, and the Dutch East Indies. Others had a largely strategic value; much

of the British Empire, for instance, was acquired in the effort to maintain lines of communication to India. The great majority of colonies acquired after 1880 had rather little importance for the metropolis, either as markets for imperial products or as sources of raw materials (Fieldhouse 1973).

Theories of Imperialism. The starting point for modern theories of imperialism is John Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study ([1902] 1965). A liberal critic of the Boer War, Hobson saw imperial expansion as a search for new outlets for investment. He found the source of this search in the surplus capital amassed by increasingly monopolistic corporate trusts. Hobson viewed imperial expansion as costly for the nation as a whole and sought to expose the special interests promoting imperialism. He also contended that capital surpluses could be consumed domestically by equalizing the distribution of income.

Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism ([1917] 1939) provides the most influential statement of an economic analysis of imperialism. Lenin agreed with Hobson that imperialism flowed from the need to invest outside the domestic economy, drawing explicitly on Hilferding’s ([1910] 1981) analysis of finance capital as a stage of capitalism. He was concerned to show that imperialism was a necessary consequence of the dynamics of capitalism (in contrast to Hobson’s anticipation of Keynes) and that the expansionary impulse could not be globally coordinated (versus Kautsky’s notion of an ultra-imperialism). Lenin argued that the unevenness of development makes imperialist war inevitable, as ‘‘late starters’’ demand their own place in the sun.

More contemporary writers like Baran and Sweezy (1966), Frank (1967), and Wallerstein (1974) drew upon both the Marxist tradition and Latin American theories of dependencia to suggest an alternative economic analysis of imperialism. They argued that international economic relations involve a net transfer of capital from the ‘‘periphery’’ to the ‘‘core’’ of the economic system and point to the continuities in this process from early colonial expansion to contemporary neoimperialism. This is in sharp contrast with the Leninist tradition, which argues that colonial forays bring noncapitalist societies into the world economy.

Other writers consider political ambitions or relationships to be the taproot of imperialism. In

perhaps the most interesting account of this sort, Schumpeter (1951) turned the Marxist perspective on its head. He noted that the characteristic motif of the ancient empires is military expansion for its own sake. Schumpeter argued that imperialism appears as an atavistic trait in the landed aristocracy of modern societies, stressing the mismatch between the social psychology of the warrior and the industrious, calculating spirit of the entrepreneur. A more political perspective treats imperial activity as flowing from the anarchical structure of the Western state system (Cohen 1973; Waltz 1979). In the absence of an enforceable legal order, states are motivated to expand when possible or endure decline relative to more aggressive states. This perspective explains European imperialism in the nineteenth century as the product of increasing levels of international competition and conflict.

Whether economic or political, most analyses of imperialism find its sources in the logic of the West, ignoring indigenous peoples in the process. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson led a historiographic revision aiming to redress this imbalance. Their seminal essay ‘‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’’ (1953) emphasized the continuity in British policy between the informal imperialism of the mid-eighteenth century and the rush for colonies after 1880. In Africa and the Victorians, Robinson and colleagues (1961) argued that it was increasing indigenous resistance to European influence that led Britain to replace informal domination with formal empire. In later work, Robinson (1972) emphasized the other side of the coin—the extent to which Western empires as political systems were dependent on local collaboration.

DECOLONIZATION

‘‘Decolonization’’ refers to a polity’s movement from a status of political dependence or subordination to a status of formal autonomy or sovereignty. In modern usage, it is generally assumed that the imperial or metropolitan center is physically separated from the dependency and that the two societies are ethnically distinct. The term refers specifically to the disintegration of Western overseas empires and their replacement by sovereign states in the Americas, Asia, and Africa.

There are several routes by which decolonization can take place. Most frequently, the dependency

becomes a new sovereign state, a political entity recognized in the international arena as independent of other states and as possessing final jurisdiction over a defined territory and population. Less often, decolonization may occur through the dependency’s full incorporation into an existing polity, such that it is no longer separate and subordinate.

It is often unclear when (or whether) decolonization has occurred. Puerto Rico’s relation to the United States can be described as one of colonial dependency or as free association. In the 1960s, Portugal claimed to have no colonies, only overseas territories formally incorporated into a unitary Portuguese state (Nogueira 1963). And where political relations are not contested, the absence of overt conflict makes it difficult to know when sovereignty has been achieved. For example, arguments can be made for dating Canadian independence at 1867, 1919, 1926, or 1931.

European Political Contraction. Virtually all of the decolonization of Western overseas empires occurred in two historical eras (Bergesen and Schoenberg 1980). The major American colonies became independent during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The mid-twentieth century witnessed a more rapid and complete wave of decolonization worldwide. The types of colonies in existence in each period and the nature of the decolonization process varied greatly across the two periods (Fieldhouse 1966; Strang 1991a).

The first wave of decolonization began with the independence of Britain’s thirteen continental colonies as the United States of America. The French Revolution touched off a slave uprising that led ultimately to the independence of the French colony of Saint Domingue as Haiti. Portuguese Brazil and Spanish Central and South America became independent after the Napoleonic Wars, which had cut Latin America off from the Iberian peninsula.

While the first period of decolonization was limited to the Americas, twentieth-century decolonization was global in scope. It included the independence of most of the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and Australasia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean. Between the world wars, some of Britain’s settler colonies and a number of loosely held protectorates became fully sovereign. Soon after World War II, the major

Asian colonies—India, Indonesia, Indochina, and the Philippines—achieved independence. The pace of change rapidly accelerated during the 1960s, which saw the decolonization of nearly all of Africa. By the 1980s, nearly all Western colonies had become independent or had been fully incorporated into sovereign states.

One fundamental difference between the two eras of decolonization has to do with who sought independence. Early American decolonizations were creole revolutions, as the descendants of European settlers sought political autonomy from the ‘‘mother country.’’ The American Revolution and the Spanish Wars for Independence were political rather than social revolutions. Slave revolt in Haiti provided the sole exception, to the horror of creole nationalists as well as loyalists elsewhere.

By contrast, twentieth-century decolonization was rooted in indigenous rather than creole movements for independence, as decolonization came to mean freedom from racially alien rule. After World War II, settler minorities opposed decolonization, since national independence spelled an end to their privileged political, economic, and social position. Only in South Africa did a racialist minority regime survive decolonization.

The first and second waves of decolonization also differed importantly in the amount of violence involved. Early decolonization in the Americas was won through military combat between settler and imperial forces. Wars for independence raged in Britain’s thirteen continental colonies, in Spanish Central and South America, and in Haiti. Only in Portuguese Brazil was independence achieved without a fight, largely because Brazil was several times richer and more populous than Portugal.

During the twentieth century, protracted wars for independence were fought in Indochina, Indonesia, Algeria, and Angola. But these were the exceptions to the rule. Most colonies became independent with little or no organized violence between the imperial state and colonial nationalists. In much of Africa, imperial powers virtually abandoned colonies at the first sign of popular opposition to the colonial regime. By the mid-1960s, decolonization had become a rather routine activity for many imperial powers, often achieved through institutionalized expressions of popular will such as plebiscites.

Causes of Decolonization. A variety of arguments have been developed about factors contributing to decolonization. While most treatments have dealt with a single dependency or empire, there have been a number of efforts to develop explicitly comparative analyses (see Albertini 1982; Anderson 1983; Bergesen and Schoenberg 1980; Boswell 1989; Emerson 1960; Grimal 1978; Lang 1975; Smith 1978; Strang 1990).

Decolonization is often seen as the result of structural change in the dependency itself. Settler colonies are thought to undergo a natural process of maturation, well expressed in the physiocratic maxim that colonies are like fruit that fall from the tree when they are ripe. Indigenous populations are also importantly affected by contact with Western economic and political structures.

In both kinds of colonies, the specific condition that seems to precipitate decolonization is the emergence of peripheral nationalism. Settler colonies generally began as economic corporations chartered by European states. Non-Western peoples were generally tribal or segmental societies prior to colonization, and imperial structures were fundamentally dependent on the collaboration of indigenous elites (Robinson 1972). Decolonization required a new vision of the colonial dependency as a national society (Anderson 1983; Diamond 1958).

Colonial powers contributed unintentionally to the formulation of a national vision. They did so partly by spurring the rise of new social groups— indigenous bourgeois, landless workers, civil servants, teachers—who proved to be the carriers of colonial nationalism and independence. Contact with the colonial power exposed these groups to the notions and institutions of the Western nationstate while simultaneously denying them participation rights. Settlers, of course, carried notions of these rights with them (see Bailyn 1967 and Greene 1986 on the ideological origins of the American Revolution). Under these conditions, nationalism was a weapon easily turned on its creators (Emerson 1960; Strang 1992).

While pressures for decolonization invariably stemmed from the dependency itself, the response of the metropolitan power played a crucial role in the outcome. The classic contrast in imperial policy is between British ‘‘association’’ and French ‘‘assimilation’’ (though parallel contrasts between

the imperial policies of the United States and Portugal are even more striking). The British empire was administratively structured around indirect rule and local autonomy, which permitted considerable flexibility in the imperial reaction to pressures for decolonization. By contrast, the French aimed at the assimilation of their colonies into a unitary republic, which led to firmer resistance to decolonization.

Some decolonization occurred because the balance of military capacity shifted against metropolitan states. This was crucial to the decolonization of the Americas, as increasingly vigorous creole societies could not be controlled from across the Atlantic. After World War II, metropolitan weakness was a contributing factor as European colonial states found themselves reduced to the position of second-rate powers. At critical junctures after 1945, metropolitan governments were unable to project sufficient military power abroad to control events: the British in Suez, the French in Indochina and Algeria, the Dutch in Indonesia.

Finally, several systemic factors or processes may be linked to decolonization. One is the presence of a state that is economically and politically dominant on the world stage. It has been argued that ‘‘hegemonic’’ states seek to construct a global free-market system that provides them access to markets more cheaply than does formal control (Bergesen and Schoenberg 1980; Boswell 1989; Krasner 1976). This argument has much in common with Gallagher and Robinson’s (1953) notion of an ‘‘imperialism of free trade’’ that metropolitan states preferred to the overhead costs of empire. Both Britain and the United States supported the collapse of rival empires and avoided empire building themselves during the periods of their global hegemony.

A second systemic factor is the contagiousness of decolonization. The American Revolution served as a model for insurrection in both Haiti and Latin America. After World War II, the independence of India, Indochina, and Indonesia had a substantial impact on colonized peoples everywhere. The contagiousness of independence is most apparent in the rapidity with which decolonization swept across Africa, where thirty-three colonies became independent between 1957 and 1966.

Finally, global political understandings and discourse play a critical role in decolonization

(Strang 1990). After 1945, the two superpowers were ideologically opposed to colonialism, though each accused the other of imperialism. Even the major imperial powers (Great Britain, France, the Netherlands) found it difficult to reconcile colonial possessions with the political ideas and institutions of the evolving national polity. As a result, the rationale for colonialism crumbled under pressure, with imperialism being formally denounced by the United Nations in 1960.

The social construction of a society or administrative unit as a ‘‘colonial dependency’’ is thus crucially important to mobilization around national independence, particularly given contemporary political understandings. A sharp distinction is generally drawn between the overseas empires of European states and ‘‘internal colonies’’ such as Wales, Armenia, or Eritrea. While the empirical basis for such a distinction is sometimes shaky, it is real in its consequences. Identification as a colonial dependency greatly increases the chances of mobilizing internal and external support for indigenous nationalism; it also vastly reduces the compulsion that the metropolitan state can legitimately bring to bear.

Consequences of Decolonization. The implications of decolonization for more general notions of international domination or exploitation are strongly contested. Dependency and world systems theorists view decolonization as producing change in the mere form, but not the content, of core–periphery relations (Chase-Dunn and Rubinson 1979). The argument is that contact between more and less developed economies tends generally to reinforce the differential between them, even in the absence of explicit political controls. Dependence on foreign capital has been argued to slow long-term economic growth (Bornschier et al. 1978) and more generally to shape the political and economic structure of the dependent society (Amin 1973; Cardoso and Faletto 1979).

Despite these concerns, it is clear that decolonization involves a fundamental shift in the structures regulating international exchange, especially in the post–World War II era. Contemporary states are armed with widely accepted rights to control economic activity within their boundaries, including rights to nationalize foreign-owned

industries and renegotiate contracts with multinational corporations (Krasner 1978; Lipson 1985). Third World nations mobilize around these rights (Krasner 1985), and the negative impact of economic dependency seems to decrease when the peripheral state is strong (Delacroix and Ragin 1981).

While notions of dependency and neocolonialism are the subject of vigorous debate, a straightforward consequence of decolonization is the worldwide expansion of an originally European state society. Most of the present members of the United Nations became sovereign through decolonization (McNeely 1995). And historically, the political units emerging from decolonization have been strikingly stable. Few ex-dependencies have been recolonized or annexed or have merged or dissolved (Jackson and Rosberg 1982; Strang 1991b). Against much expectation, decolonization has produced states that figure as core players in the contemporary international economic and political order.

REFERENCES

Albertini, Rudolf von 1982 Decolonization: The Administration and Future of the Colonies 1919–1960. New York: Holmes and Meier.

Amin, Samir 1973 Neo-Colonialism in West Africa. London: Monthly Review Press.

Anderson, Benedict 1983 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Arrighi, Giovanni 1978 The Geometry of Imperialism. London: New Left Books.

Bailyn, Bernard 1967 The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Baran, Paul, and Paul Sweezy 1966 Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Bergesen, Albert, and Ronald Schoenberg 1980 ‘‘The Long Waves of Colonial Expansion and Contraction 1415–1970.’’ In A. Bergesen, ed., Studies of the Modern World System. New York: Academic Press.

Bornschier, Volker, Christopher Chase-Dunn, and Richard Rubinson 1978 ‘‘Cross-National Evidence of the Effects of Foreign Investment and Aid on Economic Growth and Inequality: A Survey of Findings and a Reanalysis.’’ American Journal of Sociology 84:651–683.

Boswell, Terry 1989 ‘‘Colonial Empires and the Capitalist World-Economy: A Time Series Analysis of Colonization, 1640–1960.’’ American Sociological Review

54:180–196.

Cardoso, Fernando H., and Enzo Faletto 1979 Dependency and Development in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Richard Rubinson 1979 ‘‘Toward a Structural Perspective on the WorldSystem.’’ Politics and Society 7:453–476.

Cohen, Benjamin J. 1973 The Question of Imperialism. New York: Basic Books.

Delacroix, Jacques, and Charles C. Ragin 1981 ‘‘Structural Blockage: A Cross-National Study of Economic Dependency, State Efficacy, and Underdevelopment.’’

American Journal of Sociology 86:1311–1347.

Diamond, Sigmund 1958 ‘‘From Organization to Society.’’ American Journal of Sociology 63:457–475.

Emerson, Rupert 1960 From Empire to Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Fieldhouse, David K. 1966 The Colonial Empires. New

York: Dell.

——— 1973 Economics and Empire, 1830–1914. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Folz, Robert 1969 The Concept of Empire in Western Europe from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century. London: Arnold.

Frank, Andre Gunder 1967 Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Gallagher, John, and Ronald Robinson 1953 ‘‘The Imperialism of Free Trade.’’ Economic History Review S5:1–15.

Gellner, Ernest 1983 Nations and Nationalism. Oxford:

Basil Blackwell.

Greene, Jack P. 1986 Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States 1607–1788. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Grimal, Henri 1978 Decolonization. London: Routledge

and Kegan Paul.

Guenee, Bernard 1985 States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Hancock, William K. 1950. The Wealth of Colonies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hilferding, Rudolf (1910) 1981 Finance Capital. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Hobson, John A. (1902) 1965 Imperialism: A Study. New York: Allen and Unwin.

Holland, R. F. 1985 European Decolonization 1918–1981. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Jackson, Robert, and Carl Rosberg 1982 ‘‘Why Africa’s Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood.’’ World Politics 35:124.

Krasner, Stephen D. 1976 ‘‘State Power and the Structure of International Trade.’’ World Politics 28:317–343.

———1978 Defending the National Interest. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

———1985 Structural Conflict. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lang, James 1975 Conquest and Commerce: Spain and England in the Americas. New York: Academic Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel 1974, 1980, 1989 The Modern World-System, 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Waltz, Kenneth 1979 Theory of International Politics.

Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

Weber, Max 1958 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribners.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich (1917) 1939 Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. London: International Publishers.

Lipson, Charles 1985 Standing Guard: Protecting Foreign Capital in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lugard, Frederick J. D. (1922) 1965 The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, 5th ed. London: Cass.

Magdoff, Harry 1969 Age of Imperialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

DAVID STRANG

IMPRESSION FORMATION

See Affect Control Theory and Impression

Formation; Social Psychology.

McNeely, Connie L. 1995 Constructing the Nation-State:

International Organizations and Prescriptive Action.

Westport, Conn.: Greenwood.

Nkrumah, Kwame 1966 Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London: International Publishers.

Nogueira, Franco 1963 The United Nations and Portugal:

A Study of Anti-Colonialism. London: Sidgwick and

Jackson.

Robinson, Ronald 1972 ‘‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration.’’ In Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe, eds., Studies in the Theory of Imperialism. Bristol, U.K.: G. B. Longman.

———, John Gallagher, and Alice Denny 1961 Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism. London: St. Martin’s Press.

Schumpeter, Joseph 1951 ‘‘The Sociology of Imperialism.’’ In Imperialism and Social Classes. New York: Kelley.

Smith, Tony 1978 ‘‘A Comparative Study of French and British Decolonization.’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 20:70–102.

Strang, David 1990 ‘‘From Dependency to Sovereignty: An Event History Analysis of Decolonization.’’ American Sociological Review 55:846–860.

———1991a ‘‘Global Patterns of Decolonization 1500– 1987.’’ International Studies Quarterly 35:429–454.

———1991b ‘‘Anomaly and Commonplace in European Political Expansion: Realist and Institutional Accounts.’’ International Organization 45:142–161.

———1992 ‘‘The Inner Incompatibility of Empire and Nation: Popular Sovereignty and Decolonization.’’

Sociological Perspectives 35:367–384.

INCEST

Incest is illicit sex or marriage between persons socially or legally defined as related too closely to one another. All societies have rules regarding incest. Incest is conceptualized in four ways: as a proscribed or prescribed marriage form, as a taboo, as prohibited coitus, and as child abuse. The first three conceptualizations are most closely related to early scholars (mid-1800s to mid-1900s), who tended to overlap them. The last conceptualization has become prominent more recently.

Incest-as-marriage rules are usually proscriptive (‘‘Thou shalt not’’). Prescriptive (‘‘Thou shalt’’) incestuous marriage rules have been documented for royalty in Old Iran and ancient Egypt and for Mormons in the United States (Lester 1972). Some groups historically encouraged brother–sister incest. Cases in point were the ruling families of Egypt and Polynesia, where preservation of family resources and ethnic identity took precedence over political alliances with other groups (Firth 1936, 1994).

That some groups proscribe while others prescribe incestuous marriages has caused some to be skeptical of many theories about incest, especially theories that assume that incest avoidance is natural, that close inbreeding is genetically disadvantageous, or that there is an incest taboo. John F. McLennan ([1865] 1876), a lawyer, coined the terms endogamy (within-the-group marriage) and

exogamy (outside-the-group marriage). He defined incest as endogamy. Based on his analyses of marriage in Ireland, Australia, ancient Greece, and other societies, he concluded that rules proscribing endogamy evolved as a group survival mechanism. He reasoned that as members of one tribe or group married into others, ‘‘blood ties’’ emerged. These blood ties encouraged reciprocity between groups and cooperation and harmony within groups.

Anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan ([1877] 1964) generally agreed with McLennan’s definition of incest as endogamy and with McLennan’s assumption that proscribing incest promoted both exogamy and group survival. Morgan assumed, however, that incest originally became prohibited due to the presumed deleterious effects of inbreeding. That is, Morgan assumed that at some point, humans developed the capacity to see that exogamy increased the ‘‘vigor of the stock’’ (p. 65). Moreover, in agreement with sociologist Herbert Spencer’s ([1876] 1898, pp. 623–642) earlier critique of McLennan’s application of the terms ‘‘endogamy’’ and ‘‘exogamy,’’ Morgan ([1877] 1964) contended that given the very contradictory nature by which kinship is recognized and organized among humans, McLennan’s ‘‘terms and his conclusions are of little value’’ (p. 432). Finally, Morgan contended that practices such as brother– sister and father–daughter marriage among Hawaiians, for instance, spoke to earlier, savage stages of human existence. To Morgan, human groups evolve through three basic epochs: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. The first two epochs each have two stages, the last one only one stage. In Morgan’s schema of the evolution of humankind, at the very first stage there is promiscuous intercourse and the marriage of brothers and sisters. In the second stage, brother–sister marriage is prohibited. The third stage of evolution sees prominence given to the Gentile pattern of social organization, which includes monogamy. The patriarchal family characterizes the fourth stage. The fifth, and final, stage in the schema, arising with the concept of property, is hallmarked by the monogamian family and the superiority of the ‘‘Aryan, Semitic, and Uralian system of consanguinity and affinity’’ (Morgan [1877] 1964, pp. 421–422). To Morgan, the Aryan family represented the highest level of human evolution, and thus the epitome of civilized humans. This high civilization was attributed to the ‘‘providence of God’’ (p.

468). To Morgan, in this civilized arrangement, cousin marriage is prohibited. In reading Morgan’s work, one gets the impression that he saw this last stage as the best and the highest, and seemed to personally identify with it. Thus, it is somewhat curious that he married his cousin, Mary Elizabeth Steele.

Tylor (1889) elaborated on McLennan’s notion of exchange and reciprocity among exogamous groups. He noted that men made political alliances with men in other groups by exchanging women in marriage. Spencer ([1876] 1898) argued that endogamy was probably the original practice among early peoples, especially among peaceful tribes. Exogamy probably began through wife stealing. He assumed that some early groups probably stole wives from other groups because they faced a scarcity of women. Other groups forcefully captured wives in the process of war. Thus, Spencer positioned exogamy as originally speaking to extremely brutal treatment of women. He assumed that as time passed and circumstances changed, exogamy would be seen as advantageous to groups who could make the linkages between sexual intercourse and procreation. That is, these groups might come to see exogamy as leading to a healthier stock of people. In addition, he assumed that, over time, such exchanges also would be seen as creating bonds among groups who otherwise might compete for scarce resources or else annihilate each other through warfare.

The common thread among these theories is the focus on incest rules as social organizational principles. A shared weakness is the reliance on analyses of primitive or premodern groups. These inclinations are also found in varying degrees in writings by Sir James Frazer (1927), Brenda Seligman (1929, 1932), Robert Briffault (1930), Bronislaw Malinowksi (1922, 1927, 1929), George Murdock (1949), and Claude Levi-Strauss ([1949] 1969). Many of these and other writers also fail to differentiate between incest rules and exogamy rules. What one group calls incestuous marriage may not biologically be such. Likewise, some groups’ exogamy rules permit biologically incestuous marriage. Recognizing that incest rules are socially defined, Sumner (1906) presaged today’s sociobiologists. Sumner argued that incest rules should be modified as researchers gathered genetic evidence that