Late colonial power: Counterpointing Northern Ireland and Puerto Rico in the post-World War II modern/colonial capitalist world-system

This dissertation analyzes the persistence, restructuring, and redefinition of imperial/colonial constellations of power in the post World War II period in which most of the world engaged in a process of formal (i.e., juridical-political) decolonization. This analysis of reconfigurations of empire and of colonial power in the late modern/colonial capitalist world-system is done by means of a comparison and contrast of Puerto Rico and Northern Ireland focusing on the period from 1945 to 2000. Arguably, Puerto Rico and Ireland (before partition in 1921 will only be called Ireland) are the two oldest colonies of the modern/colonial capitalist world-system. Hence, a world-historical counterpoint between the two colonial situations and their relationships with their respective imperial formations would be of great value to our theoretical and historical understanding of the coloniality of modern regimes of power. The emphasis of the comparison is on the formations and transformations of colonial states and polities in their relations with the metropoles and on the structuration and developmental dynamics of regional/colonial economies in their respective regional imperial zones as well as within the capitalist world-economy as a whole. The main thesis is that the continuous imperial political domination of Puerto Rico and Northern Ireland (in the former case by a rising American Empire and in the latter by a falling British Empire), as well as the persistent subordination of their colonial economies within world hierarchies of wealth, demonstrate the persistent role of coloniality as a key attribute of modern regimes of power. Modern power continues to be colored by coloniality in spite of the significant changes in the character of colonial rule and of capitalist accumulation in the post World War II period. In this sense Puerto Rico and Northern Ireland are not colonial exceptions in a postcolonial world but clear expressions of colonial continuities and imperial power in late capitalist modernity. The introduction will make a theoretical and methodological argument about the significance of world-historical comparisons by the emerging paradigm within world system analysis wherein the coloniality of power is a key conceptual tool. Chapters Two and Three apply this argument by means of a theoretically informed historical narrative of colonial power (i.e., state and polity) in Northern Ireland and Puerto Rico concentrating in the post World War II period. Chapter Four and Chapter Five deal with the political-economy of Ireland and Puerto Rico in the same period focusing on questions of developmentalism and labor migration. The discussion on Ireland will deal both with Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to show the contrast between the two Irish polities and the parallels between the Irish Republic and Puerto Rico which provides a clear example of coloniality without formal colonialism. The conclusion addresses the substantive questions involved in the comparison and contrast including the character of late colonial power, the relationship between coloniality and racial discourse, and the changing and contested meanings of nationalism and decolonization in late capitalist modernity.