Racial-state assumptions made the colonial project conceivable in the first place

Evidence

First, as I have insisted, the racial state trades in its emergence Second, and this by way of periodization, the racial state at least in its emerging form as a set of assumptions about the nature of being and living was deeply implicated not only in fashioning and effecting the outcome of the colonial imperative but in making it conceivable. In short, the presumption of the racial state, as we have seen in earlier chapters, opened up the possibility of thinking the colonial project at all. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 61

Second, and this by way of periodization, the racial state at least in its emerging form as a set of assumptions about the nature of being and living, was deeply implicated not only in fashioning and effecting the outcome of the colonial imperative but in making it conceivable. In short, the presumption of the racial state opened up the possibility of thinking the colonial project at all. As sets of institutions, and as ways of thinking and institutionalizing the governance of societies racial in both their metropolitan and their colonial expression, racial states emerged materially out of, as they were elaborated in response to, the “challenges” of colonial rule. And so conceptually they gave rise to conceiving the possibility of the colonial, while they emerged institutionally in elaborating rule in the colonies and - though less visibly but at least as presumptively to marking the nature and scope of metropolitan societies in Europe too. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1686

Categorization

• QUESTION: The causal priority claim — racial thinking precedes and enables colonial thought rather than merely following it — is worth chasing into the colonial historiography debates.
• XREF: Connects to the vault’s racial-state/Omi-Winant material and the relationship between racial categories and colonialism — qualifies how racial formation was conceptually prior to (not merely derivative of) particular colonial ventures.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 61; David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1686