A call for postnational historiography: notes on writing "history from above"

Postcolonial historiography has presented a welcome, albeit belated, critique of management studies - from the central role of management in the administration of colonies, to post-War management studies’ colonizing tendencies that other, essentialize, and reduce non-Western workers, their cultures, organizations and identities. This influential critique of colonialism, however, has tended to leave colonialism’s counter and successor, the post-colonial national-form largely uninterrogated and intact. This peculiar silence of management’s postcolonial historiography is particularly troubling in the twenty-first century for two main reasons. One, the refusal to discuss the problematic role of management in the on-going dispossession and destitution led by nation-states and wider nationalist forces. Two, its necessary critique of colonialism is now frequently and extensively appropriated by malign forces of right-wing nationalisms to justify a problematic return to atavistic nationalism. Reflecting on my experiences with researching and writing history from above, I outline the need for moving the postcolonial critique forward.