Imperialism is best conceived as an emergent moral landscape rather than a strategic actor

Evidence

What is frequently missed in such attempted explanations, however, is that since the idea of “resistance” implies the presence of intrusive power, proper attention must be paid to what that power consists of, what intrusive power seeks when it seeks “improvement”—in short, one must ask what acts one is confronted with and how they are fitted into a larger figure. If “imperialism” is thought of as the term for an actor contingently connected to acts, for a player calculating what his next move should be in a game whose stakes are familiar to all participants, and whose rules are accepted by them, then one may talk of agents seeking to strategize and of others resisting that strategy. If, on the other hand, imperialism is regarded not as an already constituted agent who acts in a determinate way but as the totality of forces that converge to create (largely contingently) a new moral landscape that defines different kinds of act, then one should certainly not say, as some now do, that “imperialism was a far weaker force for legal reform than has generally been assumed to be the case.” … It is the determination of that new landscape, and the degree to which the languages, behaviors, and institutions it makes possible come to resemble those that obtain in the West European nation-states. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1033

Categorization

• DEFINE: Asad’s distinction between two senses of ‘imperialism’ — constituted agent vs. converging totality of forces — is a precise conceptual tool.
• XREF: Connects to the vaulted Cooper thread: both contest the assumption that Western norms enter Muslim societies as traceable, resistible interventions rather than through constitutive re-landscaping.
• QUESTION: How does Asad’s ‘moral landscape’ formulation reframe Cooper’s account of how Christian-conservative norms became wired into neoliberal governance structures?