Creating An Early Colonial Order

By the end of the eighteenth century, war-making and the East India Company's violent conquest of South Asia created an 'early colonial order'. This distinctive early colonial order comprised of a political economy of conquest marked by repeated financial crises, a new regime of laws, ideological innovations justifying expensive warfare, changing conceptions of sovereignty, and the privileging of military over civilian power. This early colonial order was followed byan authoritarian, militarily dominant British Raj and continues to profoundly influence postcolonial South Asian polities.By drawing on a diverse range of archival documents and later studies, Manu Sehgal makes an important intervention in historiographical debates about eighteenth-century South Asian history and the centrality of violence to colonial rule. This work is the first full-length study of how coercive structures of authority trace their origins to this early, missing chapter in the history of modern South Asia.

By the end of the eighteenth century, war-making and the East India Company's violent conquest of South Asia created an 'early colonial order'. This distinctive early colonial order comprised of a political economy of conquest marked by repeated financial crises, a new regime of laws, ideological innovations justifying expensive warfare, changing conceptions of sovereignty, and the privileging of military over civilian power. This early colonial order was followed by an authoritarian, militarily dominant British Raj and continues to profoundly influence postcolonial South Asian polities. By drawing on a diverse range of archival documents and later studies, Manu Sehgal makes an important intervention in historiographical debates about eighteenth-century South Asian history and the centrality of violence to colonial rule.

This is a pioneering, multi-empire account of the relationship between the politics of imperial repression and the economic structures of European colonies between the two World Wars. Ranging across colonial Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, Martin Thomas explores the structure of local police forces, their involvement in colonial labour control and the containment of uprisings and dissent. His work sheds new light on broader trends in the direction and intent of colonial state repression. It shows that the management of colonial economies, particularly in crisis conditions, took precedence over individual imperial powers' particular methods of rule in determining the forms and functions of colonial police actions. The politics of colonial labour thus became central to police work, with the depression years marking a watershed not only in local economic conditions but also in the breakdown of the European colonial order more generally.

Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but Bhavani Raman, in Document Raj, uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on extensive archival research in the files of the East India Company’s administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created. In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. Raman shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight of hand increased the company’s reach and power within the Empire, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved. Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, Document Raj maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.

Study of conjugal relationships between Indian women and British men in colonial India.

In a penetrating account of the evolution of British intelligence gathering in India, C. A. Bayly shows how networks of Indian spies were recruited by the British to secure military, political and social information about their subjects. He also examines the social and intellectual origins of these 'native informants', and considers how the colonial authorities interpreted and often misinterpreted the information they supplied. It was such misunderstandings which ultimately contributed to the failure of the British to anticipate the rebellions of 1857. The author argues, however, that even before this, complex systems of debate and communication were challenging the political and intellectual dominance of the European rulers.

On December 19, 1554, the members of Tenochtitlan’s indigenous cabildo, or city council, petitioned Emperor Charles V of Spain for administrative changes “to save us from any Spaniard, mestizo, black, or mulato afflicting us in the marketplace, on the roads, in the canal, or in our homes.” Within thirty years of the conquest, the presence of these groups in New Spain was large enough to threaten the social, economic, and cultural order of the indigenous elite. In Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico, an ambitious rereading of colonial history, Robert C. Schwaller proposes using the Spanish term géneros de gente (types or categories of people) as part of a more nuanced perspective on what these categories of difference meant and how they evolved. His work revises our understanding of racial hierarchy in Mexico, the repercussions of which reach into the present. Schwaller traces the connections between medieval Iberian ideas of difference and the unique societies forged in the Americas. He analyzes the ideological and legal development of géneros de gente into a system that began to resemble modern notions of race. He then examines the lives of early colonial mestizos and mulatos to show how individuals of mixed ancestry experienced the colonial order. By pairing an analysis of legal codes with a social history of mixed-race individuals, his work reveals the disjunction between the establishment of a common colonial language of what would become race and the ability of the colonial Spanish state to enforce such distinctions. Even as the colonial order established a system of governance that entrenched racial differences, colonial subjects continued to mediate their racial identities through social networks, cultural affinities, occupation, and residence. Presenting a more complex picture of the ways difference came to be defined in colonial Mexico, this book exposes important tensions within Spanish colonialism and the developing social order. It affords a significant new view of the development and social experience of race—in early colonial Mexico and afterward.

Viewing a variety of narratives through the lens of inebriation imagery, this book explores how such imagery emerges in colonial Peru as articulator of notions of the self and difference, resulting in a new social hierarchy and exploitation. Reading Inebriation evaluates the discursive and geo-political relevance of representations of drinking and drunkenness in the crucial period for the consolidation of colonial power in the Viceroyalty of Peru, and the resisting rhetoric of a Hispanicized native Andean writer interested in changing stereotypes, fighting inequality, and promoting tolerance at imperial level in one of the main centers of Spanish colonial economic activity in the Americas. In recognizing and addressing this imagery, Mónica Morales restores an element of colonial discourse that hitherto has been overlooked in the critical readings dealing with the history of sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Andes. She presents drinking as the metaphorical site where Western culture and the New World collide and define themselves on the grounds of differing drinking rituals and ideas of moderation and excess. Narratives such as dictionaries, legal documents, conversion manuals, historical writings, literary accounts, and chronicles frame her context of analysis.