By Raewyn Connell
Raewyn Connell is an Australian feminist sociologist and Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney, best known for co-founding masculinity studies and developing the influential concept of hegemonic masculinity. Her work spans gender, class, education and global social theory, including the notable book Southern Theory. Connell has published extensively and is widely recognised for reshaping how sociologists understand gender and power.
An economy depends on a workforce. The intellectuals whom we normally treat as the authors of theories or research findings are members of a group who perform certain tasks, in certain social relationships. They are, in fact, a workforce, doing the specific kinds of work that we call intellectual labour.
Empire created different situations for intellectual workers. A colonising intellectual workforce was required to operate what Valentine Mudimbe in The Idea of Africa called the ‘colonising structure’ – controlling space, integrating the economy, and changing the natives’ minds. Many such jobs were done by specialists: missionaries, teachers, surveyors, agronomists, engineers, geologists, ethnographers, poets and journalists.
Of course intellectual workers already existed in societies impacted by Empire. The Muslim ulama of Arabic and Persianate societies, the Brahmin intellectuals of India, and the mandarin class of neo-Confucian China, are the best known. The poets and technologists of sub-Saharan Africa, the architects and scribes of central America, and the elders of Aboriginal communities in pre-colonial Australia, are others.
But Empire changed the situation of all these groups. Increasing numbers of colonists were born in the colonies, forming creole intelligentsias. As colleges and universities were created in the colonies, more indigenous people not only worked for colonial administrations but also for newspapers, schools, and professions. From this milieu emerged many of the activists in the great historical waves of independence movements.
In the twenty-first century CE, the world’s intellectually trained workforce is larger than ever before. It is loosely tied together by the global economy of knowledge, but divided by language, nationality and religion. Its institutional context varies from transnational corporations to local churches and mosques. Though the old empires have gone, new forms of imperialism are with us today. Intellectuals today face new forms of the old problems of peace, justice and survival.
References
There is a very large literature on these subjects. Here are some valuable collections of research and theory, in several fields, that will provide ways into the debates.
- Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott and Máximo Sozzo, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
- Wendy Harcourt, ed. The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development. Palgrave, 2016.
- Eric Macé, ed. An Invitation to Non-Hegemonic World Sociology. Rowman & Littlefield, 2024.
- Leandro Rodriguez Medina and Sandra Harding, eds. Decentralizing Knowledges: Essays on Distributed Agency. Duke University Press, 2025.
