The common thread that runs through Frederick Cooper's scholarship, be it on slavery, labor, empire, or citizenship, is that major historical categories are best understood as sites of social struggle. The reason that Cooper's work has been so impressive and influential is because of the analytical power and precision that he brings to defining historical categories, which are capacious enough for trans-historical comparison yet specific enough to account for meaningful differences across time and space. These familiar virtues are on display in this short book, which originates from the Lawrence Stone Lectures that Cooper delivered at Princeton University. Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives considers the history of citizenship from the Roman Empire to the present day, with a particular focus on the imperial contexts of Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. Citizenship, Cooper argues, is best understood not simply as a legal category but as the right to claim rights as a member of a political unit, specifically a ‘divisible and flexible bundle of rights and obligations in relation to a political entity’ (4). Unlike strictly vertical relations between leader and follower that structure other political models, citizenship connotes a shared horizontal relationship with fellow citizens. Cooper is careful, however, not to impose further normative characteristics upon citizenship, for it can be inclusive or exclusive depending on context. Moreover, a ‘citizen’ cannot be reduced to a political condition antonymic to ‘subject’, as such categorical distinctions obscure gray areas of struggle over ‘what it meant to be part of a polity’ (6). He cautiously adopts the terminology of ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ citizenship — the latter embracing claims on material and cultural conditions, as well as the strictly civic and political conditions of the former — as a practical approach to compare widely differing cases.

With these subtle tools in hand, Cooper explores how citizenship became a site of imperial policy and colonial struggle. In imperial Rome, citizenship had a ‘differentiating quality’, on the one hand, serving as a means to attach conquered peoples to the Empire, while on the other intertwining with local hierarchies, which moved those on the excluded bottom to struggle for a more inclusive form of citizenship (30). In 212 C.E., the struggling Emperor Caracalla issued an eponymous Edict that created 30 million Roman citizens overnight, in a dramatic gesture that, while continuing to exclude women and slaves, nonetheless reshaped the possibilities of belonging and advancement across the empire's diverse localities. A similar gesture occurred at a similarly turbulent imperial juncture in 1812 with the passage of the Cádiz constitution, which bestowed citizenship upon free Indian as well as European men throughout the Spanish Empire. For Indians, recognition as equal citizens was accompanied by a loss of communal lands and protections; for slaves, little changed. Although the constitution was quickly repudiated in 1814, it created a citizenry whose votes would become the ‘ultimate arbiter of political legitimacy’ (52). Within the British Empire, the white populations of ‘Greater Britain’ came to enjoy growing autonomy over the nineteenth century as loyal subjects with what were in effect rights of citizenship, while the Imperial Indian Citizenship Association was created in Bombay in 1914 to coordinate South Asian claims to exercise the same rights across the empire. France, which created much of the modern language about citizenship, had excluded most of its imperial inhabitants from citizenship rights while consistently maintaining the possibility for all at some later point. Following the traumas of the Second World War and fully alive to Caracalla's precedent, France extended citizenship to 50 million subjects in yet another dramatic gesture through the creation of the French Union in 1946 — although unlike Caracalla, ‘citizenship was now hitched to the state's responsibility for the standard of living of the polity as a whole’ (115).

Most of these new citizens were in Africa, and readers of Cooper's previous work on the late French Empire will be familiar with this story. New to the analysis here, however, is a brief but invigorating account of the role of citizenship in post-colonial Africa. Cooper examines how the cases of Côte d'Ivoire and South Africa demonstrate how citizenship ‘can be the basis of xenophobic politics as well as civic order’ (121). Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who understood the necessity of migrant labor to Côte d'Ivoire's economy, tried to develop an inclusive Ivorian citizenship, but after he died and the country's economy declined, national politics turned on the question of excluding ‘foreign’ northerners from citizenship rights, which ultimately degenerated into civil war. While efforts to make states conform to nations and thereby create new group-based citizenships have led to terrifying violence in Congo (Katanga), Nigeria (Biafra), Rwanda, and Sudan (South Sudan), the more prosaic and widespread story of citizenship in post-colonial Africa is the decline in civic expectations that began in the 1970s and resulted in the strong temptation ‘for rulers to act in authoritarian ways and for people to try to obtain via clientage what they could not get as rights-bearing citizens’ (133). Cooper criticizes scholars who in effect celebrate these developments by belittling ‘the regularizing structures of elections and negotiations as European imports while celebrating patron-client relations’ as a more efficient and authentic means of making claims on the state (128). Such politics, he argues, can lead to clashing clienteles unable to share in a horizontal civic politics.

Cooper writes in light of recent public debates over citizenship in Europe and the United States, where its material value is thinning while its exclusionary character is growing. The history of natural citizenship that accompanies territorially-defined states, he reminds us, is a recent one that only begins after the Second World War, when a new world of juridically equivalent, sovereign nation-states ushered out colonial empires. The promise of self-determination and postwar citizenship ‘has not produced a stable pattern of international relations’, yet its great achievement, the recognition of social rights, stands under threat ‘from the mobile forces of global capitalism’ (146). Cooper concludes with a call not to abandon citizenship but to ‘thicken’ it through international institutions such as the United Nations. Short, erudite, and thought-provoking, this book provides a rich comparative lens through which to consider several specific African cases of citizenship as a meaningful terrain of claims-making alongside others from global history.