A 2019 special issue of Management & Organizational History, edited by Simon Mollan brings together five articles examining how imperialism and coloniality shaped management practices, organizational forms, and knowledge systems.
In colonial Nigeria, ninety years after slavery was outlawed in North America and the Caribbean, forced labor continued. The colonial state did not merely tolerate this practice but it built its governance around it, weaving racialized labor relations into the machinery of colonial rule and commercial enterprise. Slave labour and forced labour were not exceptions. They were instruments of power.
This is the main discussion by Mollan examining how imperialism and coloniality shaped management practices, organizational forms, and knowledge systems, and how these structures co-exist together.
The argument is not that imperialism was merely a backdrop for business activity. It is that imperialism helped shape what management itself became in theories and practice.
Colonialism vs. Coloniality
Colonialism refers to the historical practice of territorial conquest and administration—the empires that European powers built and then, for the most part, dismantled. Coloniality, as the theorist Aníbal Quijano argues, describes something different: the ongoing structures of power, knowledge, and ways of being that persist long after colonial administrations have formally ended.
This is not an abstract distinction. When the anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler writes about “imperial debris,” she means the concrete legacies that still fracture contemporary landscapes: toxic dumping in Africa, devastated waste lands, ghettoized urban neighborhoods, ongoing land dispossession. “Contemporary problems,” she writes, “whose origins are steeped in the colonial histories of which they have been, and in some cases continue to be, a part.”
For Quijano, colonial domination operated through the suppression of local knowledge systems. It took colonized peoples’ knowledge—in mining, agriculture, engineering—alongside their products and labor. This was not incidental to economic exploitation. It was the condition that made exploitation possible. Before the colonial project could prosper, as the scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris puts it, “it had to render territories and peoples extractable”—and it did so through “a matrix of symbolic, physical, and representational violence.”
Extraction is both an economic process and a metaphor. It names what imperialism did to resources and what it did to knowledge.
Governing Through Labor
Cornelius, Amujo and Pezet examine labor relations in colonial Nigeria, drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality—the practice of governing populations through knowledge-based guidance of individual behavior.
The shift from conquest to governance, they argue, required organizing labor to support the economic activities the colonial state wished to pursue. This was embedded in a range of state structures designed to make the colony governable. The results were stark. “The use of slave labour (alongside forced labour),” they note, “continued in Colonial Nigeria 90 years after slavery in North America and the Caribbean was deemed unlawful.”
The colonial state did not merely permit such practices. It structured them. Governmentality, in this context, meant producing a docile labor force while maintaining the racial assumptions that had underpinned slavery. These assumptions were not peripheral to commercial enterprise in Nigeria. They were central to it.
The article also traces resistance. As social tensions rose, workers organized unions, leading to conflict with the colonial state. The colonial state’s treatment of labor generated its own opposition—a familiar pattern in imperial history, but one that the authors show was embedded in the very logic of colonial governance.
Narratives of American Empire
Two articles in the special issue examine Pan American Airways, the American airline that dominated Latin American aviation in the mid-twentieth century. Kivijarvi, Mills and Helms Mills focus on corporate narratives—the stories Pan Am told about itself and its competitors.
In the 1930s, a Colombian airline with strong German connections (many of its key personnel were Austrian or German born) posed a competitive threat to Pan Am in South America. With the help of the Colombian government, Pan Am forcibly took over its rival. Internally, the company narrated these events through anti-Nazi rhetoric, positioning itself as heroic, pioneering, technologically advanced, and patriotic.
What this narrative obscured was the neo-imperialism inherent in US business expansion into Latin America. Pan Am’s dominance was not merely commercial success; it was an instrument of American influence, carrying economic, cultural, and political impulses into the region. The company’s self-presentation as a progressive, anti-fascist force masked its role in extending US imperial power.
The authors use this case to introduce what they call “ANTi-history”—an approach that treats history as socially and intellectually constructed rather than objectively real. The approach positions itself as moving beyond postmodernism, but it has an interesting dependence: it requires an already-produced historical account to stand in contrast to. Its analysis is inherently revisionist, gaining its power from the contrast between its deconstruction and the narratives it examines.
Mollan’s 2019 special issue of Management & Organizational History brings together five articles demonstrating that imperialism and coloniality were not merely contexts for business activity—they were constitutive structures that shaped management practices, organizational forms, and knowledge systems. The argument is that these structures persist, often invisibly, in contemporary organizations.
Colonialism refers to the historical practice of territorial conquest and administration—the empires that European powers built and then, for the most part, dismantled. Coloniality, as theorist Aníbal Quijano argues, describes the ongoing structures of power, knowledge, and being that persist long after colonial administrations have formally ended.
Historical practice of conquest and administration. Territorial empires. Formal political control. “Ended” with decolonization.
Ongoing structures of power, knowledge, and being. Imperial debris. Continues after formal empire ends. Shapes contemporary landscapes.
Cornelius, Amujo and Pezet examine labor relations in colonial Nigeria, drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality—the practice of governing populations through knowledge-based guidance of individual behavior. The shift from conquest to governance required organizing labor to support economic activities, embedded in state apparatuses designed to make the colony governable.
“Racist notions of African workers were essential to the leitmotif of commercial enterprise and economic imperialism in Nigeria.” The colonial state did not merely tolerate such practices—it structured them, embedding racialized labor relations into the machinery of governance.
Kivijarvi, Mills and Helms Mills examine Pan Am’s corporate narratives in the 1930s. The company narrated its takeover of a German-influenced Colombian airline through anti-Nazi rhetoric, positioning itself as heroic, pioneering, technologically advanced, and patriotic.
Heroic, pioneering, technologically advanced, patriotic. Anti-Nazi. Progressive. Defender of freedom.
Neo-imperialism. US business expansion as an instrument of American influence. Economic, cultural, and political impulses into Latin America.
The “gentlemanly capitalism” thesis argues that a network of the British aristocracy and financial elites organized investment around the globe in close cooperation with colonial officials. White’s article examines Sir John Hay, a rubber baron in Malaya, and finds the theory does not hold.
White’s article demonstrates how empirical historical work can refine or refute existing theoretical notions. Even the most influential theories require testing against archival evidence.
The special issue makes a compelling case for engaging with imperialism and coloniality, but it leaves important tensions unresolved—invitations for future research.
- What counts as inclusion? If the field needs theories from “other geographies,” citation alone is not enough.
- How does coloniality persist? The conceptual distinction is clear; the empirical demonstration is thinner.
- What about other empires? The special issue focuses on British and American imperialism. French, Dutch, Japanese, and Portuguese imperial business histories remain underexplored.
- What is the path forward? The call to action is clear; the methodological reforms are less specified.
Sanitized Colonialism in Marketing
Paludi, Helms Mills and Mills take a different approach to Pan Am, examining maps, travel guides, and advertisements to understand how the airline represented Latin America over time. They use decolonial feminist theories, particularly the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, to deconstruct these sources.
The representations of Latinas and Latinos in Pan Am’s marketing were frequently gendered and racialized. They invoked a sanitized “attractive colonial history” that simplified and categorized Latin American culture and society to suit the organization’s needs—making travel and tourism appealing to a predominantly white North American audience.
Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera—a semi-autobiographical account of how a lesbian Chicana woman experienced the effects of centuries of colonialism—offers a powerful counterpoint. Anzaldúa describes how, in the 1930s, agribusiness “cheated the small Chicano landowners of their land” and then hired “gangs of mexicanos to pull out the brush, chaparral and cactus to irrigate the desert.” The transformation of the land enabled extraction on an industrial scale—a pattern repeated across colonized territories. Her father became a sharecropper. The family worked to repay the loan that enabled them to sharecrop, structurally embedding them in a system of unequal economic exchange. The company even took recipes from the women who lived on the farms and made them into a book.
This is Quijano’s argument about the taking of knowledge made vivid and personal. It is also a reminder that colonial structures persist not only in economic relations but in the everyday practices of extraction—of land, labor, and culture.
The Limits of Gentlemanly Capitalism
White’s article takes as its starting point the “gentlemanly capitalism” thesis developed by Cain and Hopkins—one of the most influential theories of British imperialism. The argument, in essence, is that a network of the British aristocracy and financial elites came to dominate the country’s economic institutions, organizing investment around the globe in close cooperation with colonial officials.
White examines the business career of Sir John Hay, a rubber baron running plantations in Malaya. Hay was not a “gentleman” in Cain and Hopkins’s sense. He did not maintain harmonious relationships with British government officials or with colonial authorities in Malaya. His relationship with financial interests in the City of London was often strained.
This is not merely a biographical quirk. White’s analysis suggests that the “gentlemanly capitalism” thesis may not work as a universal explanation of the British empire. When applied to the case of Malaya during the period of decolonization, its explanatory power weakens. Government interests were important factors, but they were not always aligned, and the assumption of harmonious cooperation hides as much as it reveals.
White’s article also demonstrates how empirical historical work can refine or challenge existing theories. The Cain and Hopkins thesis was always a broad synthesis, drawing on a vast reading of imperial history. But like all theories, it required testing against archival evidence.
Decolonial Critique from Latin America
Wanderley and Barros take the most explicitly critical stance. Their argument is that for the historic turn in management studies to be more fully engaged with critical perspectives, it needs to include authors, theories, concepts, objects, and themes from “other geographies”—moving beyond the Anglo-Saxon world of ideas.
The critique that management studies is too focused on the present, they argue, cannot only be about the lack of historical understanding. It must also consider whether the knowledge produced by the historic turn itself fails to critique the ideological and discursive focus on the present that is built into the production of that knowledge.
Without this step, even the historic turn risks remaining within intellectual frameworks shaped by colonial power structures—producing knowledge that does not fully account for the colonial contexts of management.
Wanderley and Barros draw on the tradition of Latin American dependency theory, which they argue should be seen as a forerunner of the historic turn—or even as its starting point. Latin American social thought, they show, contributed to subsequent postcolonial and critical discussions. They explore the role the United States played in exporting “ways of knowing and practices” during the Cold War and how this was incorporated into systems of thought in Latin America.
They also introduce the concept of “anthropophagy”—the figurative “eating” or digestion of Western ideas by Brazilian scholars, enabling unique Brazilian social knowledge to develop. This is not a rejection of Western thought but a transformation of it, a process of creative borrowing that produces something distinct.
Their critique of Alfred Chandler is instructive. Chandler’s work, they argue, promoted “market fundamentalism” and placed state-led, family, and small and medium businesses in a subordinate position. A growing field of Latin American business history explores wider concerns—the historical roots of slavery, the dark side of organization, and how these contributed to systems of oppression.