Kant and Colonialism

Katrin Flikschuh is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics. She works on Kant's political philosophy and its relation to contemporary liberal thinking, and has growing interests in modern African political philosophy. She is principal investigator of a three year International Networks Project awarded by the Leverhulme Trust that endeavours to bring African and Western political thinking into productive contact with each other (2014-2017). She is author of Kant and Modern Political Philosophy (CUP, 2000); Freedom: Contemporary Liberal Perspectives (Polity Press, 2007), and Kant contra Cosmopolitanism: Assessing the Global Justice Debate (CUP, forthcoming).Lea Ypi is Associate Professor in Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is interested in theories of justice, representation in democratic theory and Enlightenment political thought. She is the author ofGlobal Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (OUP, 2012) and co-editor (with Sarah Fine) of Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership (OUP, forthcoming).

The present collection provides evidence of the complexity, diversity and evolving nature of Kant's thinking. He tackles the problems of race and colonialism at various stages of his philosophical career. Each stage evinces a slightly different hue to his thinking... This lively collection seeks to discover to what extent these wrongs can be mitigated and possibly made right, largely from within a Kantian perspective. Through careful analysis of Kant's writings, the authors seek to demonstrate the extent to which Kant shared the mindset of the ascendant European colonizers and to what extent he is critical of it.

• Introduction: Kant on colonialism: apologist or critic? ; 1. The Law of continuity: colonies, provinces and the justice of war within the limits of Kant's International Right ; 2. Kant's second thoughts on colonialism ; 3. Productive resistance in Kant's political thought: domination, counter-domination, and global unsocial sociability ; 4. Commerce and colonialism in Kant's philosophy of history ; 5. Colonists, traders or settlers? Kant on fair international trade and legitimate settlement ; 6. Kant's juridical theory of colonialism ; 7. Restorative justice in international and cosmopolitan law ; 8. Provisional right and non-state peoples ; 9. Colonial mentality: Kant's hospitality right then and now ; Index