Day 208: Producing India

The unprecedented expansion of the scope and scale of the colonial state followed the brutal repression of the rebellion of 1857–58 and the formal incorporation of colonial India into the British Crown. The post-1857 colonial regime was the locus of a spectacular restructuring of political-economic, administrative, and military structures that wrought a profound transformation in the spatiotemporal matrices of everyday categories of understanding, political-economic institutions, and modalities of state power. Committed to spreading its authority evenly throughout the territory, to filling up the geographic space of colonial India with its authoritative presence, the post-1857 colonial regime made territorially comprehensive claims to rule. Territorial consolidation involved the attempted monopolization of regulatory powers by an increasingly centralized apparatus, the development of an elaborate, hierarchical bureaucracy that surveyed, mapped, and measured both land and people, the deepening and widening of the administrative and military reach of the state, and a determined reinvestment in epistemic modalities of rule.

Bernard Cohn—the historian par excellence of the political imaginary of the colonial absurd—has elaborated a central paradox constitutive of the post-1857 colonial regime. The officially enunciated policy of nonintervention in local social practices, expressed in Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858, was belied by the development of institutions and practices with an invasive, tentacular reach. The post-1857 colonial regime simultaneously sought to modernize the social body and keep intact its imagined traditional lineaments, what Victoria identified as its “ancient rights, usages, and customs.” Following Bernard Cohn’s pioneering analysis of the co-constitution of a distinctive “colonial sociology of knowledge” and modalities of rule, historians and historical anthropologists, working within diverse conceptual frameworks, have taken as their point of departure the gap between the stated policy of preserving existent practices and the proliferation of disciplinary regimens that profoundly reworked sociocultural practices in multiple arenas. The focus on colonial epistemologies and modalities of rule has more recently found fresh impetus in the burgeoning literature on colonial governmentality that has animated recent historiographical debates on late colonial India. My analysis of the making of a distinctive colonial state space in the post-1857 era builds on the many insights proffered by these intersecting literatures, especially the dense articulation between colonial sociologies of knowledge and modalities of rule. Yet it also departs from the currently ascendant literature on colonial governmentality in two interlinked respects. First, it explicitly focuses on the structural contradictions rather than discursive tensions of colonial practices and political rationality by specifying the dynamic relationship between the political-economic and epistemological coordinates of late colonial rule. Second, my account breaks from the “internalist” focus of the literature on colonial governmentality that neglects the global field of spatial-economic restructuring within and against which novel institutional and disciplinary forms took shape in late colonial India. By broadening the spatial referents of dominant approaches to the colonial state and economy, I attempt to specify the historicity of colonial space and show the “interpenetration and superimposition” of apparently distinct spaces (imperial and national, political-economic and ideological) within a specific global field.

Building on Henri Lefebvre’s conception of the state as a “spatial framework” of power, I delineate in this chapter the complex ensemble of institutions, practices, and ideologies that marked and made colonial state space and underwrote the transition from mercantile to territorial colonialism. The making of a colonial state space was inseparably part of a broader imperial scale-making project, one that sought to secure and maintain a Britain-centered and globe-spanning imperial economy. The territorialization of colonial state power in the decades after 1857 was premised on, enabled by, and constitutive of the expansion of a Britain-centered global economy. I take as my point of departure an often-noted yet underdeveloped (in both a historiographical and theoretical register) aspect of the late colonial state: the fact that its spatiality literally and institutionally exceeded state territorial boundaries. A constitutive aspect of the colonial state lay in the institutionalization of a disjuncture between political and economic structures, between the space of the production and the realization of value. By exploring the making of colonial political-economic space in a specific global field, I seek to specify the radically relational character of sociospatial formations and to historicize such categories as national and colonial, and internal, domestic versus external, international economy.

The analysis that follows emphasizes the internal relations between the territorialization of colonial state power in colonial India, the expansion of a Britain-centered global economy, and the initial consolidation and later unmaking of Britain’s hegemony. To claim a historically specific internal relation between processes that have been either ignored or analyzed as distinct and autonomous does not reciprocally imply that either the Britaincentered global economy or colonial state space was a unitary formation. Indeed, a chief analytical burden of this chapter is to elucidate the ways in which both colonial state space and the Britain-centered global economy were multiplex and contradictory force-fields.

~~Producing India : From Colonial Economy to National Space -by- Manu Goswami

Day 59 : Book Excerpt : Science and Empire

In the 1950s and 1960s, studies by American social scientists such as Walter Rostow popularized a view of agrarian societies as ‘traditional’ communities that were constrained by long-term fatalism and stagnation. For Rostow, as for other early exponents of modernization theory, a major cause of this inertia lay in traditional peoples’ attitudes towards science and the physical world, which he described as ‘pre Newtonian’. The Newtonian moment was symbolic of a watershed in  world history when western man [sic] came to believe the external realm was subject to knowable laws, and thus capable of systematic manipulation. The transition to a ‘modern growing society’ was marked by econ omic, political, social, and most of all, attitudinal transformations which cleared the way for the fruits of modern science and technology to be fully exploited in ways that would secure sustained economic growth. One’s physical environment came to be seen as an ordered world rather than simply ‘given’ by providence, which if understood rationally could be managed in ways that yielded greater productive surpluses and material progress.

Writing at about the same time, and through a similar lens, George Basalla produced his now classic essay on ‘The Spread of Western Science’. Basalla asked the question: how was the ‘modern’ scientific tradition, which began in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, diffused subsequently beyond its original boundaries to the rest of the world? As an explanation, he proposed a three-stage model of the process of transmission. In the initial phase of contact with other lands, European observers – many of them explorers, travelers, missionaries and other amateurs – survey, collect and appraise the flora, fauna and physical features of these new lands in their search for potential sources of wealth or settlement. In time, this period of reconnaissance gives way to a second, more substantial phase of ‘colonial science’ when the number of scientists involved and the range of activity expands considerably until it encompasses the full spectrum of scientific endeavor as it exists in the metropolitan ‘core’. Despite such growth, colonial scientists remain dependent on European scientific institutions for training and affiliation, as well as on European scientific societies and journals for professional recognition. However, colonial science contains in embryonic form the seeds that, with the rise of nationalism, will eventually develop into an independent, ‘native’ scientific tradition. Colonial science is thus best seen, according to Basalla, as an evolutionary phase in the transmitting of Western science to the non-Western world. And like Rostow’s trope of ‘take off’ to self sustaining economic growth, self-reliance in scientific matters can only be achieved by consciously struggling to eradicate the barriers of resistance posed by non-European philosophical, religious and cultural beliefs.

A substantial body of historical research on science, expertise and imperialism has been produced since the publication of Basalla’s seminal study, much of it critical of the diffusionist assumptions and progressive stages that underpin his model. Inspired by new directions in development studies, historians of science in the 1970s took a more radical turn as they began to incorporate the insights of dependency and underdevelopment theory into their work. Basalla’s own analysis helped lead the way with its depiction of colonial science as dependent on an external scientific culture. Another early analysis was offered by Donald Fleming, who described the ‘reconnaissance of natural history’ tradition that dominated science in Australia, Canada and the United States until the end of the nineteenth century, as displaying a distinct ‘colonial posture’. Investigators in all three countries, he noted, remained foragers and collaborators, focused on the local and particular, while the highest responsibilities of collating data and devising universal theorems were reserved for scholars working at universities in Britain, France and Germany. But whereas Basalla and Fleming saw this dependency as transitional and relatively benign, others have viewed the derivative, fact-gathering nature of colonial science as symptomatic of the unbalanced relationship that imperial ism fostered between Europe and much of the rest of the world. Building on the insights of dependency theorists, scholars in the 1970s and 1980s directed their attention increasingly to science as an instrument of imperial control and exploitation. The imperial ‘metropole’ and its colonial ‘satellites’, to use Andre Gunder Frank’s analogy, were bound together in a system of unequal, extractive exchange in which knowledge and specimens as much as industrial raw materials flowed back to Europe, but rarely the other way.

~~Science and Empire -by- ed. Brett M. Bennett and Joseph M. Hodge