Empire and Subject Peoples

This is the first book to examine the academic and activist career of the forgotten US sociologist, Herbert Adolphus Miller (1875-1951). Miller was associated with the Chicago school of sociology, but his role is neglected. He was one of the first critics of eugenics and was an active supporter of racial equality and mixing in Jim Crow America. He was a life-long associate of W.E.B. Du Bois and had a long-term association with Fisk University. He criticised assimilation (Americanization) as a goal of immigration policy and was an early advocate of multiculturalism. He was a critic of empire within Europe and of European empires globally and argued for the self-determination of subject minorities. He believed revolution against imperial domination to be necessary, but warned of new forms of oppression deriving from ethno-nationalist movements. His sociological arguments were integral to his involvement in civil society movements for racial justice, the formation of the Mid-European Union of subject peoples (through which he drafted the Czechoslovakian Declaration of Independence), support of Korean independence and the Indian satyagrahi movement of Mahatma Gandhi. Opposed by the Ku Klux Klan, he was dismissed by Ohio State University for his political activities in 1932.