“…Conversely, techniques of colonial government such as the imposition of taxes, which may appear to be primarily administrative, were intended to have the coercive effect of destroying the subsistence economy and largely succeeded in this purpose; the authorities’ response to rebels’ refusals to pay new taxes was, in turn, bombing (Neocleous, 2014: 146–147). Peter Lieb (2012: 634–635) adds that British counterinsurgency operations in Mesopotamia were ‘heavily influenced by racist stereotypes of a populace that would only react to the language of force, coercion, and suppression’, a condescending yet curiously mixed empathic–punitive–pastoral view of Arabs and Kurds as ‘semi-civilized’ peoples who had been schooled into savagery by long years under the Ottoman yoke, but who could yet be civilized by more civilized colonial rulers. A latter-day variant of this empathic–punitive–pastoral understanding can be discerned in the intensive domestic policing of largely racialized ‘surplus populations’ (Shaw, 2016a) in the global North today, which registers the historic collective trauma of slavery and discrimination but only to infer that in its angry aftermath the language of coercion is best suited to conducting the conduct of these particular populations.…”