Reddit mentions of The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society)

>The points trotted out seemed hackneyed and formalistic, and the "right answer" was always whatever cast Europeans and/or white males in the worst possible light.

It's funny because if you look at what's getting published in the top journals (American Sociological Review and American Journal of Sociology), it's nothing like that stuff. But that's still what our undergraduates are interested in (even though it's not really what are classes are like). I volunteered to be a discussant for some of the undergraduates' BA thesis and the two that I was assigned was something about Black Feminist epistemology (intersectionality is bad, boo! You should be black and feminist, but nothing more) and something about Foucault and death penalty abolition. They were just so out of the norm of the work done by the faculty and graduate students of the department, I didn't know how to react to them.

Honestly, I'm not surprised at your experience--that's still a big part of the field, especially at the undergraduate level--but I can tell you that, from the perspective of people in my department at least, that stuff legacy of sociology is, in a word, "embarrassing". I'd recommend Shamus Khan's Privilege (it just won our biggest book prize last year, the C. Wright Mills award) as a better example of what's actually being researched right now in sociology. Here's a PDF of the introduction, where he lays out all his arguments and the rest of the book is mostly filling in those theses with data. Rather than saying "hierarchies are evil and it is European/white/male's fault", the very first "lesson" of the book is "hierarchies are natural and they can be treated like ladders, not ceilings" (pg. 15). Historical sociology has always been less interested in that gushy stuff and more interested in developing theories about macro-level changes (why did states form? what causes revolutions? how did the Ottoman state centralize? why is nationalism different in Germany and France? how did the passport come about? where did capitalism come from?), though there's also stuff about how macro-level events affect people and social structures at the micro-level (Charles Tilly's The Vendée comes to mind).