Rules for Rulers: Obscure Texts, Authority, and Policing in Two Malay States

2001 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Barnard
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Distinctive Character ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Crime And Punishment

Police manuals produced in the Siak and Riau-Lingga sultanates during the 1890s reveal something of the concerns of each society in an early stage of colonial state formation, and how they dealt with changing understandings of crime and punishment. Despite their many similarities, the manuals show that each Malay state had a distinctive character, and differed in its approach to issues of modernisation.

Kings versus Bandits: Anti-colonialism in a Bandit Narrative

2003 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shail Mayaram
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Early Writing ◽  
Weak State ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Specific Theme ◽  
Indirect Rule

AbstractDebate and controversy have bedevilled the subject of social banditry. The early writing on social banditry saw it as primitive rebellion, as prepolitical and antithetical to class consciousness. Another approach identified it with weak state formation. The literature on South Asia saw social banditry as absent having been eroded by the institutional structure of caste. This article examines and critiques some of these theses on banditry. It argues, firstly, that social banditry can be simultaneous with a phase of intensified state formation. The specific theme investigated here is the interaction of the king, peasant and bandit in an Indian kingdom under late colonialism. A window to this universe is opened up by a folk epic from the oral tradition of a community of Muslims called the Meos. Far from being prepolitical, banditry raises crucial questions with respect to authority and legitimacy. This narrative not only interrogates the legitimacy of kingship, it also challenges the authority of the colonial state. Secondly, the article challenges the argument of South Asian exceptionalism to banditry that is perhaps easier to refute. Thirdly, as this article demonstrates, banditry need not relate to a pre-industrial capitalist world. Our bandit narrative indicates the reverberations of industrialism and attendant exchange relations and institutions in the colony even though it belongs to an area of ‘indirect’ rule.

‘WE DO IT SO THAT WE WILL BE MEN’: MASCULINITY POLITICS IN COLONIAL NAMIBIA, 1915–49

2011 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
MOLLY MCCULLERS
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
Colonial Violence

ABSTRACTThis article examines struggles for masculinity among Herero elders, South African colonial administrators, and the Otruppa, a Herero youth society that appropriated a German military aesthetic, in Namibia between 1915 and 1949. As previous scholars have argued, masculinities are mutually constituted through competitions for authority, though dominance is rarely achieved. Such contestations were integral to processes of Herero societal reconstruction following German rule and during South African colonial state formation, beginning in 1915. Different generational experiences of colonial violence and the destruction of the material resources that undergirded elders' authority led to conflicts between elders and youths over how to define Herero masculinity and negotiate authority in a rapidly changing colonial milieu.

Feminist Contentions in Socialist State Formation

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wang Zheng
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
Power Struggles ◽  
Grassroots Organization ◽  
Socialist State ◽  
Initial Stage ◽  
Mass Organization ◽  
The Government

Focusing on the Shanghai Women’s Federation’s organizing and mobilizing efforts at the grassroots since the CCP took over Shanghai in 1949, this chapter traces the ACWF’s institutional development and feminist contentions in the early stage of socialist state formation. It illuminates contentious gendered power struggles in the process of demarcating differences between the “government” and the “mass organization” that structured an appearance of a socialist state as well as regulated a subordinated status of the WF system in the power structure of the new socialist state. Feminist critical voices found in the archives demonstrate a relaxed political atmosphere in the initial stage of the CCP’s rule, while the battles over the grassroots organization Women’s Congress reveal male hostility towards feminist endeavors in the CCP upon the founding of the PRC. A politics of concealment was identified in this early stage.

scholarly journals Anchors of Colonial Rule: Pluralistic Courts in Java, ca. 1803–1848

Itinerario ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanne Ravensbergen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Complex Formation ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Local Dynamics ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Institutional Approach ◽  
Local Actors

Through an institutional approach and by focusing on long-term developments, this article offers a genealogy of the pluralistic character of thelandraad(regional colonial court) in colonial Java. It argues that the pluralistic landraden—consisting of a Dutch president, Javanese judges, a local prosecutor, and Islamic and Chinese advisers—were crucial to the process of colonial state formation. This long-term process reflects continuities rather than rupture and change between the era of the VOC and the nineteenth-century developing colonial state. The spatial sites of the landraden reveal not only the conflicts between several layers, institutions, and individuals in the process of colonial state formation but also the importance of local actors in this process. Local dynamics as well as tensions between the various layers of the colonial state, which were striving either for uniformity or for the maintenance of local pluralities, provide insights into the complex formation processes of dual rule from below.

Indigenous Peoples and Nation-States in Spanish America, 1780–2000

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florencia E. Mallon
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Nation State Formation ◽  
Independence Movements

This article shifts the discussion of race from Afro- to Indo-America, focusing on a corpus of historical studies that underline how Amerindians, anti-Indian racism, and Indigenism have played a central role in the formation of nations and national identities along the mountainous backbone of Spanish America. With the crisis of the Spanish colonial system and the rise of independence movements, emerging elites interested in projects of nation-state formation entered into new forms of negotiation and confrontation with indigenous peoples and their visions for both inclusion and autonomy. While these negotiations differed markedly from those that had earlier taken place between Natives and the colonial state, they were conditioned by the forms of conquest and colonization that had gone before, as well as by emerging political, geographic, military, and economic distinctions among the newly independent societies.

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