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This introductory chapter establishes the bureaucracy as a major player in the prohibition of opium in Southeast Asian colonial government. It argues that local administrators stationed in each colony are key to understanding when and how drug reforms were possible. Prohibition involved unraveling a state's deep-seated opium entanglements—a process enabled by a loss of confidence deep within the bureaucracy about the drug's contributions to colonial government. Local administrators played a pivotal role in constructing official problems, which internally eroded the legitimacy of opium's commercial life for European colonial states across Southeast Asia. From here, the chapter discusses the possible contributions such a study into bureaucracies and opium can make for scholarship, and also presents the method and sources underpinning this work.

Unlike most other departments that made the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial regime, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) underwent a fundamental transition of both personnel and ideas. Although there existed three different Departments—the Commonwealth Relations Department and the External Affairs Department and the Commerce Department—which handled different aspects of foreign affairs, there were only four Indians who had served as diplomats abroad. Hence, it was not only the question of recruiting new staff, but also training them in a new skill, diplomacy. The chapter argues that there were five main reasons for the ideational weakness of the MEA in the first decade of Indian independence: the tendency towards greater bureaucratization, the lack of communication, the neglect of thinking on economic issues, the blind imitation of British protocols and policy traditions, and the lack of organizational unity. These factors contributed towards the weak foundations of the MEA.

This chapter describes the scale and extent of famine relief by the colonial state, and explores the genealogy of the categories used to classify relief-seekers. Official policy at first sought to employ the able-bodied on relief works at fixed wages per day. The issues of the debate on the policy of wage-reductions are explained, with the author pointing out how the debate also illustrates several aspects of the emerging colonial bureaucracy. The chapter also discusses the colonial state’s responses to indigenous methods of charity which were deemed too ‘personalized and ritualistic;’ and more formal, rational, and utilitarian forms of charity were established. The colonial state’s drive towards the institutionalization of charity led to the further de-legitimization of the indigenous élite already under all sorts of new pressures under the colonial regime.

This chapter presents the guiding concepts, theoretical claims, and analytical frameworks that guide the book. It shows how colonial states came to ban opium consumption, a once permissible vice that they had taxed and justified collecting revenue from. The chapter reveals that the change was the product of longstanding tensions within the colonial bureaucracies. The everyday work of managing opium markets involved makeshift solutions to small problems that accumulated over time and escalated into large perceived challenges to the legitimacy of colonial governance. Local administrators played a key role in this process by constructing social, fiscal, and financial problems relating to opium, through their everyday work. The chapter lays out this argument in detail, while clarifying definitions of colonial vice, prohibition, and the state that the book uses throughout.

This chapter provides a discussion on the purpose of the book and its main arguments. It briefly discusses the cultural angle of the rule of law, as introduced and developed by colonial discourse, and looks at how ‘the rule of law’ brought with it a new language of the social and the institutional. It then presents the three themes running through this study. The first theme sets out the parameters of colonial discourse which posits that the colonial government created the spaces for the bhadralok's understanding of the good legal subject. The second theme argues that the bhadralok evolved a counter discourse that spun out the self-identity of good legal subjects in the public space. The third theme, the exclusion of other social categories, is based on three hidden premises that were fundamental to the educated Bengali's understanding of law and order, security, and criminality in the late nineteenth century.

This chapter first provides a discussion on legal help to the purdahnashins and extensions of the authority of the Empire. Cornelia Sorabji's duties as the lady legal adviser to the court of wards comprised legal as well as non-legal functions. An important implication of her role as an intermediary between the government and her wards was the extension of imperial authority to the court of wards' estates. It also addresses Cornelia and the purdahnashins of Bengal. It then deals with Cornelia's imagined sisterhood of purdahnashins. Working with the purdahnashins, she developed a deep admiration for them. The English women and the purdahnashins of Bengal are reported. In general, Cornelia's work in colonial bureaucracy clearly reveals how, being a pioneer, she too had to convince the authorities of the value and worth of her work, and fight for its proper recognition, in vain.

Chapter 1 analyzes the construction of the legal, bureaucratic, and semantic infrastructures of Korean nation-building, which emerged amidst the dramatic transformation of the regional interstate system and the massive intraregional migration in the beginning of the twentieth century. By comparatively examining the colonial state’s engagement with Korean migrants in Japan and Manchuria, Chapter 1 shows how these infrastructures helped the colonial state claim migrants of peninsular origin uniformly as “its own”—if with varying degrees of success—despite differences among these migrants, their resistance to this compulsory incorporation, and the competing claims made by other states. The colonial state’s transborder engagement contributed to the formation of the Korean nation as a legally codified, pervasively institutionalized, and enduringly documented community both inside and outside the colony, providing a critical institutional scaffolding for the diasporic imagination of Korean nationalism and laying the ground for transborder membership politics for decades to come.

This chapter examines the evolution of policies by the Indian colonial state toward property rights in land. Initially, the fiscal imperative predominated: it tried to identify the “owners” of land who could be in charge of collecting the land tax within the existing institutional framework. Indian realities were more complex, however, and the zamindars, the elite identified as the owners of the new property rights, did not play the progressive role they were supposed to. This led to the development of alternative institutional schemes, supported by the growth of the colonial bureaucracy. After the 1857 mutiny, colonial perceptions of what was required changed fundamentally, and the protection of the rights of the peasantry increasingly became the focus of administrative concerns.

This concluding chapter reflects on the analytical and normative significance to this book's approach toward colonial bureaucracies and inner anxieties of the administrative state. Understanding this bureaucratic dynamic in the historical context of Southeast Asia provides a theoretical opportunity for scholars of colonialism and the modern state to rethink some basic assumptions about why and how rulers govern. The interrelated analytical and normative implications to this alternative understanding orients attention away from the loud hubris of power toward the quiet trepidations of those who govern. To begin by thinking along with welcome approaches to reconceptualizing the state in light of its complexity and “many hands, functions, and forms of power,” political scientists gain reason to assume less coherence behind motivations for bureaucratic projects that adjust and advance the state's fiscal reach. If there are context-specific regulatory histories and ambivalent administrative actors, then rationales for policies altering the scope of taxation and depth of social control must differ depending on how bureaucracies reflect on their own pasts and construct problems internally. It follows that retrospective assessments, ways of archiving official records, and interpretation by low-level administrators may define reasons that higher officials take for granted as imperatives for state action.

Cornelia Sorabji was aware of the difficulties that she would have to face in pursuing a career in the legal profession when she returned to India. She spent her time in trying to secure a foothold in India's legal world, first as a roving practitioner of law, and subsequently as a lawyer for zenana women in colonial bureaucracy. Her early experiences are described. It is stated that there was a need for legal protection for women in colonial India. Despite the objections to and criticisms of Cornelia's project, the Secretary of State intervened in the matter and consulted the Government of India. Ultimately, in 1904, the British government sanctioned Cornelia's project of providing legal assistance to the purdahnashins in Bengal, which, was partitioned in 1905 into two provinces — Bengal and Eastern Bengal and Assam.

Chapter 3 examines the creation and administration of the Caracas Company as an organization designed to increase trade to Venezuela but also to police its coastline. Although realizations of Spanish commercial vulnerabilities predated the Bourbon period, bureaucrats in the new dynasty singled out contraband trade as an especially troubling defect. Venezuelan commercial rejuvenation represented one of the earliest Bourbon reform projects. Crown ministers conceived of the Caracas Company as a solution to the province’s commercial dysfunction. Madrid allowed the Caracas Company to maintain its commercial privileges in Venezuela despite prickly relations with the colony’s subjects because it was a profitable enterprise. This reality delayed the implementation of comercio libre reforms in Venezuela until 1789, long after every Spanish American colony aside from New Spain had been permitted trade liberalization. Essentially, an early Bourbon reform had overpowered the designs of later ones. Continued Company control assured that the province would remain a conflict zone. As this chapter emphasizes, imperial reformers were not ignorant or inflexible where smuggling was concerned. Rather, their plans miscalculated how deeply it was stitched into the fabric of Venezuelan life.

Chapter 1 defines ‘mamlatdars’, important actors in the events the book covers. It also presents an overview of the Crawford scandal and an earlier scandal―both of which occurred in the Bombay Presidency. Public opinion, mainly in the local vernacular press, gives a courageous governor the impetus to investigate allegations of corruption. Vernacular press also presents outspoken, candid appraisals of government actions.