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In Malaya and India, the British devised a system of indirect rule whereby they relied on local norms, social organizations, and indigenous institutions of authority such as landlords and sultans who managed the daily lives of their subjects but were controlled by the British through treaties. Both the colonial states used patronage to rule, creating dependencies between local authorities and the colonial state, and also creating economic, legal, and social structures that, along with the patronage, divided the society vertically.

This chapter examines the continuity and the resilience of slavery and other modes of forced or compulsory labour in the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa from the late nineteenth century. Addressing the major transformations of the political and moral economy of the ‘new Brazil’, it demonstrates how longstanding racial ideologies were crucial to the formulation of the country's doctrine of a civilising mission and to the development of the successive native policies that governed colonial populations – especially the native labour policy that legalised forced labour until the 1960s.

The last few decades of the nineteenth century heralded a period of intense anti-British Muslim politics in the subcontinent, and Mecca was at the centre of real or perceived insurgent activities. Subjects such as the pilgrimage to Mecca were discussed extensively and debated intensely, but the veneer of inactivity (in terms of the status quo maintained with regard to actual policies) camouflaged the many seething apprehensions. A close watch was kept on the pilgrimage arrangements, and the situation within ‘Arabia’ in general, but this did not appear to lead to any concrete interventionist measures. As the politics of pan-Islamism intensified, the colonial state appeared almost to be in a state of semi-paralysis as far as deeply religious subjects were concerned. This chapter explores the dynamics of this inactivity and reveals the frenzy that caused this paralysis.

While the colonial state's nature may be portrayed through contrasting images, the most common of these entails how Hong Kong is perceived as a minimalist laissez-faire state. Although there may have been debates on whether the Hong Kong state was indeed non-interventionist, the political and social changes experienced since the 1980s have nonetheless proved the “minimalist state” description inadequate for studying the current situation in Hong Kong. This chapter provides a review of the state's contrasting images—the minimalist state and the interventionist state—and then discusses the various changes that initiated the changes to the state and Hong Kong's society relations. Both of these images are found to be state centered and have failed to account for the role of societal forces. As such, a corporatist image is also suggested.

British colonies were not failed states, but they were sometimes fragile states. The Colonial civil service was tiny compared to the territory and the number of people that it governed. Colonial police forces were small, badly trained and under equipped, and their domestic intelligence services were frequently inadequate. In an emergency they could summon military help. But the number of soldiers that could be sent was itself limited, both by the strategic necessity of deploying most of the army in a conventional role elsewhere, by shortages of money that made it impossible to tap more than a small proportion of the potential military manpower of the colonies themselves, and by political constraints on deploying that manpower even when it had been raised.

Histories of colonial medicine in sub-Saharan Africa have tended to focus on the role of the colonial state in establishing and running health systems. Where voluntary agency roles have been considered, it has presented them as operating outside that system, independent and isolated. This chapter explores how voluntary (mission) sector health service providers interacted with the colonial state in creating a health system in Tanganyika characterised by its public-private hybridity. Mission health providers were formally made part of the country's health system, a process that led to the creation of a distinct ‘voluntary sector’ which continued to shape non-state action in social development and welfare after independence. The colonial state relied upon voluntary sector engagement to meet (however partially) its obligations in health care provision; and the missions saw their incorporation into the official health system as an opportunity to exercise greater power in helping to shape health policy and direction, as well as a means to ensure their primacy as non-state voluntary actors.

This chapter examines political organisation in Hong Kong from the point of view of local governance, and argues that the post-colonial government has continued to rely on structures and machinery created by the colonial state for support and legitimacy. Her study of citizens' mobilisation in reaction to urban renewal plans in Wanchai is a case study of how a defensive concern group centring originally on compensation and relocation transformed itself into an activist body demanding, albeit without immediate success, a voice in urban planning.

This chapter discusses some aspects of urban society which provided a background to all these conflicts, specifically rapid population movement and poverty. It explains that relationship between political power, elite consumption, trade and the agrarian society established in the mid-eighteenth century had come under pressure by 1830 and this pressure originated in the incompatibility of the colonial state and the Indian successor regimes to the Mughal Empire. It argues that many conflicts between different social groups reflect the changing role of the state. The British had eroded the old forms of government and redistribution without replacing them with new system.

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to demonstrate the important contribution of writing and literary fiction to understanding the relationship between colonialism, law and political violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Specifically, it assesses the multiple and conflicting ways in which literary and cultural texts have either contributed to and/or interrogated the necessity for emergency legislation across a range of different historical and political contexts. The chapter then examines one of the foundational critical texts on states of emergency: Benjamin's Eighth Thesis on the concept of history. It goes on to discuss the literature of empire — an important resource for understanding the legal and extra-legal nuances of colonial states of emergency. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter shows how, with the rise of a national movement couched by some of the actors in terms of Islam, the advisors and their reformist fellow-travelers would be blamed and marginalized by a reactionary colonial state, just in time for the Japanese occupation. The disastrous events of the Afdeeling B and its aftermath did not immediately destroy the relationship between the colonial advisors and the state, but they showed only too clearly that matters modern were not resolved. They also empowered forces whose ascent would result in the practical excommunication of the Office for Native Affairs from key decisions impacting the lives of Indonesians disabused of the promises of colonial tutelage. The campaigners of Sarekat Islam and related bodies would be forced to withdraw as well from a political field increasingly dominated by nationalist and communist agitators, who directed their rhetorical attacks at those they believed had engendered the pervasive backwardness of Indonesians.

Hong Kong's political landscape underwent a major change after the start of the political transition in 1984. Aside from how the Chinese government attempted to build its post-1997 ruling elites corps through a united-front strategy, representatives and political groups utilized competitive elections to achieve public power because of gradual democratization. In response to such efforts, the business elites entered a conservative partnership with China's government so that their position would be retained. Socioeconomic changes have also initiated the less interventionist state's regulatory role, which resulted in the administrative state gaining several governmental or quasi-governmental bodies. The quasi-governmental bodies that resulted from the public sector reform created alternative decision-making loci. This chapter examines how these competing forces determined the post-colonial state.

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 addresses the sociopolitical construction of the newborn Sudan in the twentieth century, and the events and processes that shaped it. These processes include violent domination and subjugation, which, like a malignant brain tumor, provoked the immune responses of various forms of resistance and change. These processes profoundly affected the social, cultural, and political structures of the colonial state, and greatly influenced the postcolonial state. At the same time, they have systematically continued to produce ever-growing, conflict-charged effects in the fields of power, the state, its workers, and the nationalist community of the state, as well as in conditions that empower or suppress the existence and growth of a civil society and undergird the Sudanese lifestyle. Key to understanding the role of colonial and postcolonial experiences in the formation of the state in the Sudan are the similarities and differences between the developments and interactions of the dialectical opposites that characterize these experiences. At the same time, these experiences entail a series of peculiar historical relationships.

This chapter explores famine-crimes during 1837-8 with a view to constituting official notions of famine related collective crimes as being expressions of popular action. The author argues that these were suggestive of deep-rooted tensions between society and the colonial state. Since distinctions between known and new ‘criminals’ and between rank and class, tended to blur in collective popular action, official perceptions of crime at this time were ambivalent, with the context of scarcity posing problems of legal classification. The colonial state found it difficult to deem the repeated plunder of hoarded grain as heinous crimes, and found itself on the side of rioters. The chapter also discusses suicides, increasing hunger in women and children, the kidnapping (for ransom) of male children, and the sale of girl children.

The concluding chapter of the book begins by discussing the long term consequences of the 1837-8 famine. While official accounts argued that north Indian society quickly bounced back from the downturn following the famine, actual facts point to the setting in of a deeper malaise. The chapter also describes the response of the colonial state which began focus on deforestation as one of the causes of the drought, to encourage missionary recue projects, and to use its growing technical knowhow in the creation of large scale canal irrigation works such as the 900 mile long Ganga Canal, opened in 1954. The concluding pages describe how the people began to look to the colonial state for famine relief (which became more and more bureaucratized and standardized) even as its guiding philosophy continued to be the prevention of mass mortality and not the removal of the conditions of poverty.