Colonial States, Colonial Rule, Colonial Governmentalities: Implications for the Study of Historical State Crime

Mark Brown

doi:10.13169/statecrime.7.2.0173

Abstract

The colonial state has been an object of intense study and debate among historians and postcolonial scholars. In this special issue, devoted to questions of colonial state crime, I consider the utility of the colonial state as a conceptual and analytic category for state crime scholars. Focusing upon European colonialism in South Asia, the article first examines definitional problems: within what normative parameters might colonial state behaviour be understood and, thus, its transgressions and crimes registered? I then move to consider two contrasting schools of historiography and their difficulties in settling upon some agreed view of how colonizing foreigners connected with indigenous elites and masses to develop and implement strategies of rule. I suggest that the concept of a colonial state, to which culpability for state crimes may be ascribed, is a chimera and of limited use today. Instead, I describe a model of colonial governmentality and, through a case study of mass famine death, illustrate both its strengths and weaknesses for making sense of how such tragedies occurred and thus how insights from the historical field might improve our understanding of modern and postcolonial states today.

Highlights

It is not so clear what anyone should do once one has located colonialism as post-Enlightenment rationality’s evil twin.(Frederick Cooper 2005: 53)Empires and colonial occupation have marked and shaped the course of world history
This article opened with a question posed by Frederick Cooper (2005: 53) inviting us to contemplate what, precisely, we should do with knowledge of whatever evils we choose to attribute to colonialism
Having examined how historians of colonialism have struggled to achieve a vision of the colonial state that lies somewhere between the politically satisfying, best reflected in Ranajit Guha’s (1989: 274) colonial state as “absolute externality”, and the manifold complexities of local political and economic power that, as Bayly (1983: 163) observes, so often leaves us “enmeshed in paradox”, we might profit from listening once more to Cooper

Summary

Introduction

It is not so clear what anyone should do once one has located colonialism as post-Enlightenment rationality’s evil twin.(Frederick Cooper 2005: 53)Empires and colonial occupation have marked and shaped the course of world history. In my book Penal Power and Colonial Rule (Brown 2014), I sketched out a genealogy of this liberal governmentality viewed through the lens of crime and social order in British India.

Results

Conclusion