What Was the Late Colonial State?

Abstract

The historiography of the late colonial era has had a love-hate relationship with the colonial state. In the early years of post-colonial independence, much history was written to record and celebrate the achievements of ‘nation-building’. The founding fathers of independence had defeated the colonial state in their struggle against its oppressions. The old state, now under new management, but with the same boundaries, language and (usually) administrative structure, had become a nation, with an undisputed claim to the loyalty of its former colonial subjects. The task of the historian was to show how a national identity had emerged ineluctably from the bundle of districts cellotaped together by colonialism into a dependency, and how it had been mobilised to throw off colonial rule and create a sovereign nation. Subsequently, as this version of the recent colonial past was undermined by the difficulties and divisions of the independent present, and, in some cases, by disillusionment with its ruling elite, the focus shifted towards the sources of popular resistance in the colonial period. In this ‘subaltern’ history, the emphasis was upon uncovering rural struggles, local solidarities, and ‘hidden’ communities of belief that colonial rulers had ignored, or suppressed but which had played a key part in destroying the legitimacy and exercise of their power. The implication here was that the colonial state was an alien coercive force whose continuation into the post-colonial era (even with a change of crew) had frustrated social justice and the achievement of an authentic post-colonial identity.

The Transnational Formation of Imperial Rule on the Margins of Europe:1 British Cyprus and the Italian Dodecanese in the Interwar Period

“…The expansion of the British and Italian colonial states into the social fabric of these islands may finally be symptomatic of what John Darwin termed the 'proactive or developmental mode' of the embattled 'late colonial state', which offered an increasing number of services to local populations in a bid to bolster their flagging loyalty. 134 While acknowledging the importance of these intersecting contexts, this article intended to draw attention to a broader process at work, what may be termed a cross-fertilization in colonial policymaking on inter-imperial borders. Depending on the specific context, this mutually influential circulation of information could take the form of high-level meetings between active governors or covert intelligence-gathering through consular representatives.…”

Governing prostitution in colonial Delhi: from cantonment regulations to international hygiene (1864–1939)

“…This is particularly incongruous given that Darwin has singled out the openness of the "late-colonial state" as one its defining features. 83 The wider world constantly impressed itself upon the Delhi Administration, via memos from the Government of India and the Secretary of State for India in London, and by international campaigning bodies.…”

Ordinary Urban Spaces: Between Postcolonialism and Development

“…The late colonial period saw British officials in India challenging earlier notions of the biological, essential otherness of indigenous peoples (Metcalf, 1994) in favour of an improvable difference in what Zachariah (2005) has questioningly termed the government of India's``reformed imperium? '' Darwin (1999) has suggested that this shift to development was a key characteristic of the`late colonial state' in general, in which waves of experts and advisors swept through colonial territories advancing social and economic change. One should not underestimate, however, the dependence of such experts on past patterns of development, their financial limitations (Legg, 2008), their failure to engage with local representatives (Myers, 2003;Yeoh, 1996), or their assumption of anthropological categories that further politicised the indigeneity, and fortified the communal divisions, of the local population (Mamdani, 2002;Pandey, 1990).…”