3 - Public Works, Publicity, and the Search for a New State-Idea

Summary

Reformers chastised the colonial administration for its extractive military-fiscalism and its inability to generate new “state-ideas” as a peacetime power. Public works constructed under native rule had widely fallen into despair; in the Company era, the government rarely expended more than 1 percent of its revenue on their maintenance. In Chapter 3, I argue that reformers considered this parsimony to be an anomalous departure from both pre-colonial and metropolitan precedents. Aligning themselves with Sir Arthur Cotton, a doyen of irrigative canal engineering, they developed a biopolitical state-idea that tasked the colonial state with the preservation of human life. At the same time, they rebuked the colonial bureaucracy for its culture of obfuscation and demanded the establishment of a new “state-system” rooted in transparency.