Chapter 2 examines a constitution written for the princely state of Mysore in 1923. It interprets the constitution as an early expression of anti-parliamentary model of popular government.

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.

In the following chapters, I analyse several attempts to interrupt the abyssal nature of the modern state emerging from my previous research on sociology of law. I try to identify the reasons why most of such attempts failed. In this chapter, I analyse some of the most salient features of the state and the legal system in Mozambique proposing the concept of heterogeneous state to highlight the breakdown of the modern equation between the unity of the state and the unity of its legal and administrative operation. The centrality of legal pluralism is analysed in light of an empirical research focused on community courts and traditional authorities. I use the concept of legal hybridisation with the purpose of showing the porosity of the boundaries of the different legal orders and cultures in Mozambique and the deep cross-fertilisations or cross-contaminations among them. Special attention is given to the multicultural plurality resulting from the interaction between modern law and traditional law, the latter conceived of as an alternative modernity.

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 shows how the modern state’s first two major interventions into society explain the origins of contemporary intra-ethnic inequality in Northern Ghana. The chapter begins by explaining the research design, detailing how the pre-1914 colonial border creates an opportunity to estimate long-run effects of the colonial state’s imposition of new intra-ethnic elites. I then introduce the data and explain how inequality is measured. The analysis first establishes a strong correlation between the invention of chieftaincy and inequality today, comparing the “invented chiefs” and “never recognized” communities. I then explain how the state’s selective provision of education accounts for this relationship. The final section rules out a series of alternative explanations and mechanisms.

The absence and presence of state law was central to the ways in which the colonial project was conceived, enacted and legitimated in the southwest Pacific, and this chapter traces the key ways in which questions of land, property and territory were contested across the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. It demonstrates first, that property disputes formed part of a suite of territorialising projects in which a range of actors competed to delimit and assert control over a geographic area and in so doing, constitute their political authority. Second, territorial struggles generated present legal pluralities in which claims to land are legitimated not only by reference to kastom and the state, but also Christianity. Third, the chapter demonstrates that people were very differently positioned to navigate the new social worlds established by the colonial administration and churches. From the outset of the colonial period, the language of state law and the practices of British administrators tended to consolidate particular idealisations of masculine authority, enabling a small number of men to extend their authority while remaining largely inaccessible to the majority of the population.

Long before the East India Company’s founding, individual Europeans traveled to India as soldiers. Rulers recruited such men to gain access to new technical knowledge and to demonstrate their cosmopolitan reach. Company officials had long sought to make use of these adventurers as informal diplomatic agents, but had little success until the mid-eighteenth century, when the Company’s expanding political power made such connections valuable to European adventurers. As the balance of power between the Company and Indian states shifted, those adventurers demanded more formal positions within the Company, including as political residents through whom the Company asserted indirect influence over nominally independent states. Their success in implanting themselves as Company agents contrasts with the status of Indian officers and sepoys employed by the Company, who were also active in the fluid military labor markets of India. Rather than seeing such figures as potential representatives, Company officials used their growing corps of diplomat-adventurers to compel Indian states into new treaties criminalizing such movement and thus curtailing the fluidity of South India’s military economy.

This chapter addresses the challenge of endogeneity, testing Master Hypothesis 4. Some critics of the grievance-based literature argue that endogeneity may undermine the link between exclusion and conflict, and by implication the opposite one linking inclusion to peace. Endogeneity derives from the fact that the governments' decisions to include or exclude could be motivated by the anticipation of conflict. We counter this threat to inference by articulating a causal pathway that explains ethnic groups' access to power independently of conflict. Focusing on postcolonial states, we exploit differences in colonial empires' strategies of rule to model which ethnic groups were represented in government at the time of independence. This identification strategy allows for estimating the exogenous effect of inclusiveness on conflict. We find strong and systematic evidence that - at least for the post-colonial world - inclusion in governmental power sharing systematically reduces the likelihood that ethnic groups become involved in ethnic civil war. Our instrumental-variable analysis confirms Master Hypothesis 4, because we have found that governments tend to co-opt potential rebels rather than excluding them.

This chapter lays out some of the key concepts and theories that support the book, as well as a key conceptual typology of colonial governance. It starts with an examination of the literature on civil conflict, highlighting its attributes but explaining its limitations in relation to the types and patterns of both insurgent and social violence in south Asia. It then lays out the framework of political order and institutions that has implicitly driven much of the research on political violence and related outcomes in comparative politics. I argue that some of the assumptions embedded in this framework do not allow for the examination of the historical roots of subnational institutions. I provide an alternative in the analytical tradition of state-building, and suggest how uneven state-building in developing countries can shape state-society relations. The chapter concludes with laying out the key conceptual typology of colonial governance, by interacting two dimensions of direct and indirect rule, which serves as the basis for legible categories of colonial difference.

This final chapter explores the patchwork state in comparative perspective. It places the uneven state-building trajectories of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh in the context of broader South Asia. It then contrasts South Asian patchwork states with dynamics in East and Southeast Asian cases, which had internal differentiation in colonial governance, but also Japanese conquest and postwar revolutionary and counterrevolutionary mobilization. The chapter concludes with the application of fear, greed and frugality in the creation of the British and American Empires, and their consequences in state strength and weakness.

Mademba marched into his new kingdom at the head of a large entourage of his followers, prisoners of war, and their wives. Upon his arrival in his new kingdom, Mademba demanded that chiefs and notables submit to him, although the town of Sinsani and its region had never had rulers of their own. Mademba’s actions during the first year of his rule exacerbated old rivalries and resulted in a widespread revolt, which formed part of a wider set of revolts against French colonial conquest and rule throughout the Middle Niger Valley. The French attributed the revolts to Islamic conspiracies, which displaced attention from their own colonial policies. The French eventually suppressed the revolts and rescued Mademba from the siege of Sinsani. Archinard removed Bojan from the rulership of Segu, but he retained his commitment to indirect rule by appointing Aguibu as ruler of Bandiagara and reasserting Mademba as ruler of a somewhat reduced kingdom in Sinsani. The Ministry of Marine in Paris intervened to restrain continued military actions and incessant budget overruns by appointing a civilian governor in 1893.

As Mademba reestablished his authority in his kingdom, he steadily augmented his household by seizing girls and women who pleased him regardless of their age or marital status. As complaints about Mademba’s abuses of power arrived at the district office in nearby Segu, the French commander began to investigate allegations of abductions and kidnappings. At the same time, a French journalist arrived in Sinsani and described the curious mix of European and African artefacts and styles that reflected Mademba’s persona. During this period, Mademba developed a French-facing persona that reflected a modernizing ruler seemingly dedicated to the development of his kingdom and to the French civilizing mission, while simultaneously acting as an autocratic ruler to his African subjects. Mademba’s increasing paranoia regarding alleged adultery with his expanded household and many wives and his execution of the alleged conspirators led to heightened official scrutiny over Mademba’s rule.

This chapter analyzes the rhetoric and propaganda used by both supporters and opponents of these four regimes. Arguments for and against their sovereign claims formed a distinctive discursive web that defined the unique ideological shape of these contests. The types of argument in support of their sovereign claims are grouped into three broad argument families, which thematically divide the chapter. These were: (1) arguments articulating their authentic natures and the inauthenticity of their nationalist rivals, (2) arguments trumpeting their pro-Western orientations, and finally (3) arguments about how these pseudo-states’ sovereign claims favorably compared against legal states in Africa. This chapter will provide a broad framework to categorize the varied rhetorical and symbolic contests described in more detail in the chapters that follow.

The conclusion examines some broader questions raised by the analysis. It first discusses the pattern of the normative/empirical inversion noted throughout the book, whereby conditions associated with some desirable outcomes (e.g. separation of powers) are projected back into an account of origins. This is identified as a major obstacle in effective causal analysis. Second, the chapter examines a fundamental underlying concern of the book, the origins of power. Although no answer can be offered, it explains the implications of the book's argument to our understanding of despotic and infrastructural power, perhaps the most influential formulation in social science, as well as to the distinction between direct and indirect rule, which is shaping discussion of the state in varied literatures. Third, the chapter offers some thoughts about how the medieval account I have provided can be reconciled with the early modern accounts that have proved far more influential in explanations of state- and institution-building. I conclude with some shorter thoughts on the implications of the argument on the use of bargaining theory in modern development theory, on the popular notion of land redistribution, and on Huntington's problem of political order and instability.

In this chapter, I address the issue of selection bias more directly. First, I present a comparative case study using most-similar research design between the two similar princely states of Awadh and Hyderabad, which shows that historical contingency determined by external geo-political circumstances prevented British from being selective and led to direct rule in Awadh vs. indirect rule in Hyderabad. Second, I develop a new instrument for the British choice of indirect rule through princely states based on the exogenous effect of major European Great Power wars that decreased the ability of the British to fight wars of annexation to bring additional territory into direct rule and increased their tendency to sign treaties of indirect rule with Indian states on the frontiers of British direct rule. The instrumental variable (IV-2SLS) analysis is a major empirical contribution and allows an estimate of the causal effects of colonial indirect rule on Maoist insurgency. I also develop a fine-grained typology of different types of princely states and show that warrior states like Mysore had higher development, while successor states like Hyderabad and feudatory states like Bastar had more inequality and less development and thus Maoist insurgency.