1. Subjects of Indirect Rule: Nigeria, Cinema, and Liberal Empire

2021 ◽  
pp. 33-65
Keyword(s):  
Indirect Rule

Colonial Origins of Maoist Insurgency in India

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (10) ◽  
pp. 2232-2274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shivaji Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Inequality ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
Security Threat ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
New Instrument ◽  
Maoist Insurgency ◽  
Rule Set ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Indirect Rule

What are the long-term effects of colonial institutions on insurgency? My article shows the historical origins of insurgency by addressing the puzzle of why the persistent Maoist insurgency, considered to be India’s biggest internal security threat, affects some districts along the central eastern corridor of India but not others. Combining archival and interview data from fieldwork in Maoist zones with an original district-level quantitative data set, I demonstrate that different types of British colonial indirect rule set up the structural conditions of ethnic inequality and state weakness that facilitate emergence of Maoist control. I address the issue of selection bias, by developing a new instrument for the British choice of indirect rule through princely states, based on the exogenous effect of wars in Europe on British decisions in India. This article reconceptualizes colonial indirect rule and also presents new data on rebel control and precolonial rebellions.

CHIEFTAINCY POLITICS AND COMMUNAL IDENTITY IN WESTERN NIGERIA, 1893–1951

2003 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
OLUFEMI VAUGHAN
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Communal Identity ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Strong Emphasis ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
Traditional Authorities ◽  
Indirect Rule

This article examines the dimensions of indigenous political structures that sustained local governance in colonial Yorubaland. Legitimated by reconstructed traditional political authorities and modern concepts of development, Yoruba indigenous political structures were distorted by the system of indirect rule. Conversely, obas (Yoruba monarchs), baales (head chiefs), chiefs, Western-educated Christian elites and Muslim merchants embraced contending interpretations of traditional authorities to reinforce and expand their power in a rapidly shifting colonial context. With a strong emphasis on development and governance, collective political action also entailed the struggle over the distributive resources of the colonial state. Traditional and modern political leaders deployed strong communal ideologies and traditional themes that defined competing Yoruba communities as natives and outsiders.

The Creative Advance Must Be Defended: Miscegenation, Metaphysics, and Race War in Jan Smuts’s Vision of the League of Nations

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
JACOB KRIPP
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
International Order ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Global Peace ◽  
Mandate System ◽  
Race War ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Indirect Rule

This paper argues that the idea of global peace in early twentieth-century liberal international order was sutured together by the threat of race war. This understanding of racial peace was institutionalized in the League of Nations mandate system through its philosophical architect: Jan Smuts. I argue that the League figured in Smuts’s thought as the culmination of the creative advance of the universe: white internationalist unification and settler colonialism was the cosmological destiny of humanity that enabled a racial peace. In Smuts’s imaginary, the twin prospect of race war and miscegenation serves as the dark underside that both necessitates and threatens to undo this project. By reframing the problem of race war through his metaphysics, Smuts resolves the challenge posed by race war by institutionalizing indirect rule and segregation as a project of pacification that ensured that settlement and the creative advance of the cosmos could proceed.

Indirect Subjects

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
Culture Industries ◽  
Screen Media ◽  
African People ◽  
Local Practices ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Liberal Capitalism ◽  
Nigerian Film ◽  
Indirect Rule

In Indirect Subjects, Matthew H. Brown analyzes the content of the prolific Nigerian film industry's mostly direct-to-video movies alongside local practices of production and circulation to show how screen media play spatial roles in global power relations. Scrutinizing the deep structural and aesthetic relationship between Nollywood, as the industry is known, and Nigerian state television, Brown tracks how several Nollywood films, in ways similar to both state television programs and colonial cinema productions, invite local spectators to experience liberal capitalism not only as a form of exploitation but as a set of expectations about the future. This mode of address, which Brown refers to as “periliberalism,” sustains global power imbalances by locating viewers within liberalism but distancing them from its processes and benefits. Locating the wellspring of this hypocrisy in the British Empire's practice of indirect rule, Brown contends that culture industries like Nollywood can sustain capitalism by isolating ordinary African people, whose labor and consumption fuel it, from its exclusive privileges.

scholarly journals Forced Labour, Roads, and Chiefs: The Implementation of the ILO Forced Labour Convention in the Gold Coast

2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-476
Author(s):  
Sarah Kunkel
Keyword(s):  
Gold Coast ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Colonial Administration ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
The North ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Forced Labour ◽  
Indirect Rule

AbstractThis article analyses the implications of the Forced Labour Convention of 1930 on colonial labour policies for road labour carried out under chiefs in the Gold Coast. The British colonial administration implemented a legal application of the convention that allowed the continuation of the existing system of public works. In the Gold Coast, the issue of road labour was most prominent in the North, where chiefs maintained the majority of roads. Indirect rule became crucial in retaining forced labour in compliance with the convention. This article focuses on “hidden strategies” of British colonialism after 1930, contrasting studies of blatant cases of forced labour. The analysis is based on a close scrutiny of the internal discourse among colonial officials on the question of road labour and the Forced Labour Convention.

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