In the 1920s, the Bank of England promoted central banking to preserve London’s control over Indian financial policies and insulate those policies from political changes sweeping the colony. This chapter traces India’s deepening distrust of London in the monetary sphere, and the role envisaged by the Bank of England for an Indian central bank operating under its tutelage. After the failure of efforts to create a central bank in the 1920s, the Bank of England and Whitehall insisted on a privately owned, ‘independent’ central bank as a precondition for Indian constitutional reform. In the end, notions of an independent central bank did not stand up to the vicissitudes of colonial bureaucratic politics. Efforts of the colonial government and the Bank of England to curb the independence of the Reserve Bank of India offer important insights into the early history of central banking in India, but also shed new light on the role central banks in economies undergoing the transition from colonialism to independence.

This chapter by the late Jonathan Goldstein deals with the rise of the Jewish community in Singapore. In this port city, which emerged under British rule, Jews prospered initially in drug smuggling but with the years moved to other occupations. This chapter traces the evolution of this trading community of mainly Baghdadi Jews. It also examines its ordeal during the Japanese occupation, its survival during the period of decolonization and its present prosperity, along with the cultural and religious implications of its two-century existence.

This chapter examines the Baghdadi network in British Asia and its identity crisis during decolonization with a focus on Southeast Asia and the survival of the Singapore community in particular. The chapter argues that through the colonization process, the transient identity of the Baghdadi Jewish diasporic communities was largely cemented as an anglicized one. However, following decolonization, the class divide within the communities was made all the more obvious as the anglicized elites emigrated to English-speaking countries while leaving the poor behind, as noted in Singapore.

The chapter chronicles the emergence of religious minorities in late colonial constitutional politics. Efforts to actualize the missionary dream of winning souls took the form of self-determination advocacy in the late colonial years with Protestant advocates constructing the religious minorities as the group seeking self-determination. Although the religious minorities emerged to resist colonial rule, paradoxically, making that identity affirmed the Muslim-non-Muslim classification central to colonial governance. By telling a story of the oppression of Christians and diverse indigenous faiths based on their status as non-Muslims, Protestant advocates constructed an identity centered on its antithesis to Islam. That binary failed to capture the complex forms of exclusion that colonial governance of religion entailed. Although it purported to be inclusive of all non-Muslim concerns, self-determination advocacy overwhelmingly privileged the Protestant experience. Moreover, the religious minorities' identity excluded Muslim populations marginalized in the colonial state. The ultimate consequence was that the religious minorities project opened new doors to inequality.

Indirect rule was integral to the colonial governance of religion. The state’s intimacy with Muslim elites gave rise to accusations of ‘Muslim sub-imperialism” by Protestant missionaries and other critics who argued that rather than hinging on the separation of the state from all religions, colonial governance entailed the “unblushing bolstering up of Islam.” This chapter argues that indirect rule did not amount to an elevation or even preservation of the caliphal governance ideals. Instead, that mode of governance entailed the transformation of those institutions. Indirect rule was, therefore, not only governance through ‘Islamic institutions,’ but more importantly, it was the governance of those institutions. That governance process culminated in the making of a distinct British colonial Islamic law. That colonial law emerged from the alteration of the precolonial constitutional balance of powers between jurists’ expositions of the Shari’a (fiqh), on the one hand, and political authorities’ jurisdiction over a law (“siyasa”), on the other. This chapter traces that transformation as central to the career of imperial secular governmentality in the colony.

The British colonial government frustrated European missionaries’ desire to convert Northern Nigeria by curtailing Christian proselytization. This chapter situates missionaries’ tumultuous relationship with the state in the emergence of secularism as an imperial technique of managing religions and religious difference. That technique involved the government’s insistence on its separation from Christian missions, and its indirect rule of the territory through Muslim chiefs. Colonial administrators resolved that paradox–of the state’s rhetoric of separation from Christian missions even while the state remained intimate with Muslim elites–in one of two ways. Some administrators emphasized the superiority of the religious liberty of Muslims over the missionary desire to proselytize; others stressed the imperative for the state to be separate from what remained of the precolonial Sokoto caliphate. As administrators latched on to either argument, so did colonial subjects also deploy either notion to further their agenda. What emerges is a story of a struggle between imperial bureaucrats, Christian missionaries, and Muslim chiefs over the governance of religious difference.

This chapter chronicles the late colonial state’s elimination of Islamic law from public law through a Penal Code rooted in imperial law. The transformation of Islamic law since the inception of colonial rule belied the early colonial state’s claim to retaining Islamic criminal law. Nevertheless, the formal retention of the Shari’a in public law through Islamic criminal law had been a distinct feature of Northern Nigeria, underlining the formal status of Muslim elites and Islamic law. In response to the concerted criticism of missionaries, and senior colonial officials, the 1958 reforms abrogated the ceremonial status of Islamic law. Even as the 1958 Penal Code removed all illusions of the retention of Islamic law, administrators and Muslim elites legitimated the reform exercise by invoking Islamic legal authority, particularly the practice of Muslim societies. That discourse capaciously expanded the state’s power to regulate the content of Islamic law by re-casting the state’s Sharia-constrained siyasa jurisdiction as an expansive siyasa whose constitutional boundaries are drawn by the modern state. By so doing, the 1958 reforms sealed the state’s prerogative to govern religion.

This chapter chronicles the triumph of a Protestant notion of religious liberty at Independence. The Protestant victory took the form of the late colonial state's domestication of an international legal provision—Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 18 emerged from the concerted effort of international Protestant ecumenists to protect Christianity from the ravages of secularism, manifesting in restrictions on missions in places like Northern Nigeria, among other things. Protestant ecumenists emphasized two religious liberties: the liberty of the proselytizer to preach and the target audience to convert. Further, Protestant ecumenists argued that the Protestant notion of religious liberty trumped arguments about the empire's need to be separate (or distanced) from Christian missions. By narrating the Protestant effort to neutralize a mission-hostile secularist separation with a mission-friendly notion of religious liberty, the chapter argues that these constitutional ideas take shape in specific contestations. Consequently, the chapter makes a case for apprehending these ideas by closely studying the struggles that galvanize them.

This chapter examines the legacy of the colonial governance of religion. Those struggles have inherited the nation's complex colonial history as an essentialist debate between a Muslim camp advancing a Sharia renaissance agenda and opposed to secularism and a Christian camp opposing the Sharia project and championing the secularist separation of the state from religion. That memory of the colonial experience is borne of both sides' criticism of colonial rule; however, neither the drivers of the Sharia renaissance agenda nor their Christian critics are liberated from the history of imperial rule. Both seek the governance of religion in the manner of the colonial state they despise. As with actors in the colonial state, the postcolonial camps also deploy the notions of secularist separation and religious liberty in fluid ways, belying their arguments about their unconditional fidelity to either idea. The chapter, therefore, argues that imperial secular governmentality, which has survived into the postcolonial state, is far from the untroubled mode of domination it is often criticized as being. It is instead a domain of contestation.

While not typically considered a postcolonial writer, Ishiguro’s work often engages with the question of British and Japanese imperialism and colonialism, either directly in works such as An Artist of the Floating World, When We Were Orphans, and the Ishiguro-scripted film The White Countess, or through subtle allusion to the American post-war occupation of Japan in A Pale View of Hills or the Suez Crisis in The Remains of the Day. Writing from the ‘inside’, from the perspective of individuals who are unwittingly complicit in the structures of oppression entailed by colonial rule, Ishiguro offers complex and unsettlingly sympathetic depictions of the psychological denials and displacements that allow individuals to operate within these regimes. Focusing on An Artist of the Floating World, When We Were Orphans, and The White Countess, this chapter responds to the ways in which Ishiguro’s fiction attends to the relationship between individual and collective responsibility and historico-political forces.

This chapter challenges the claim that historians are able to offer value-free, impartial, and verifiable observations about the history of something called ‘international law’. While numerous historians have criticised international legal scholars for misusing the past to tell stories, draw analogies, or link material from diverse periods, historical work is presented as a process of finding evidence rather than making arguments, committed to reality rather than myths. This chapter argues that histories of international law are necessarily as partisan and political as those produced by the most pragmatic of lawyers. Any study that is described as offering a history of something called ‘international law’, or of a subfield of international law such as international economic law or human rights law, necessarily makes normative and political choices about what international law is and where it is to be found. To show how that works in practice, the chapter explores three empiricist historical accounts that are overtly presented as offering correctives to the distorted, presentist, or incomplete histories of international law produced to date – Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford’s Rage for Order, Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia, and Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists.

This chapter lays out the central themes of the book: the study of Sri Lankan Malay history and culture via the trope of mobility in its many forms, with a particular focus on exile and its literary, religious and imaginative associations with the island; the Sri Lankan Malays’ history and literary culture from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century; connected histories across the Indian Ocean as viewed through the prism of Malay linguistic continuity and writing practices in Ceylon and the Indonesian-Malay world, as well as a range of multilingual texts from the two regions. The chapter introduces the methodology and comparative approach employed in writing which seeks to explore the Sri Lankan Malays’ history, literature and perspectives on exile through multiple lenses and from different shores, integrating sources in Malay, Javanese, Arabic, Dutch and English to present the views of colonized and colonizer in the Dutch and British periods, poetic and prose depictions of exile, single texts that move between and across languages, religious traditions relating to Ceylon and documents ranging from letters to family diaries to theological manuals and charms.