Imperial Time and Hierarchies of Readiness: The Recursive Logic of Colonial Control from Early Modern Empire to the Present

Melanie Mitchell, Independent Scholar, Solve For C

This paper argues that the developmental hierarchies structuring how we understand and organize the modern world are not products of nineteenth-century European social science alone, but an inherited architecture built on the assumption of linear time and rooted in the legal, theological, and administrative infrastructure of early modern imperial expansion. The mechanisms of imperial time predate the fifteenth century, but the papal bulls, particularly the Doctrine of Discovery, represent the moment this framework was theologized, legally codified, and scaled for global application. Imperial time operated by classifying populations as lacking civilization, subjecting them to civilizing interventions, and re-evaluating them against the original standard, perpetually reproducing hierarchies of readiness within systems that presented themselves as universal and redemptive. While earlier imperial projects relied on administrative and cultural mechanisms, Atlantic colonialism fused ecclesiastical and state authority to the existing infrastructure of control, an apparatus I trace as it morphed from Celtic administrative practices through Spanish colonialism into Anglo-American legal frameworks and the federal Indian boarding school system. The paper concludes by situating twentieth-century development discourse as a secular inheritance of imperial time, where the question, " Are you ready yet?” continues to organize relationships between nations, institutions, and populations. Decentering modernity requires recovering suppressed parallel modernities, dismantling the temporal infrastructure through which that suppression continues to be administered, and opening space for ways of being and knowing that imperial time was designed to eliminate.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 190. Governing by Classification: Archives, Imperial Time, and the Long Life of Colonial Rule