This is a big and deeply scholarly book—360 pages of text, 121 pages of footnotes, and a 101-page bibliography. Steinmetz points out that in the twenty years following World War II, roughly half of all French sociologists worked on and in the colonies. Among them were such figures as Jacque Berque, Georges Balandier, and Pierre Bourdieu, all deeply critical of colonialism, who eventually attained positions at the pinnacle of the French academic hierarchy. Steinmetz argues convincingly that colonial sociologists’ experience in this turbulent era of late colonialism gave rise to important theoretical insights unavailable to domestically based scholars, insights that can be seen as culminating in the theoretical program of Bourdieu, currently the world’s most widely cited sociologist.
Yet the loss of Algeria and the abandonment of the French colonies in the early 1960s led to a kind of amnesia about colonial sociology, which seemed tainted by the tawdry and...