ABSTRACT
Scaling-up field theory to account for transnational and global relations poses new advantages as well as new challenges. Among the latter is the question of social change: how can change happen in transnational and global fields? This chapter builds upon Bourdieu’s existing accounts of change to specify the dynamics of change in global political fields by focusing upon the particular case of the end of colonial empires in the mid-twentieth century. Understanding change requires recognizing different types of field struggles and different relations between fields that shape the outcomes of those struggles. Colonial fields generated ‘subversive’ struggles initiated by anti-colonial nationalists (the ‘challengers’) that offered a new heterodoxy against the prevailing orthodoxy and rules of the existing global field of empires. Field homologies facilitated the globalization of this struggle. This coupled with the location of empires at multiple fields, compelled dominant empires like Britain and the United States to adopt anticolonial nationalism as a new form of symbolic capital and thereby excise colonialism from their repertoire of power. To flesh out this approach empirically, the essay draws upon secondary and primary materials, focusing upon the British and US empires and the Anglo-French assault on the Suez Canal in 1956 as an exemplary event.
