scholarly journals Colonial inclusivity : historical education and state capacity in post-colonial states

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Tiffanesha Williams
Keyword(s):  
State Capacity ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Contemporary State ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Historical Education

The contribution of this dissertation is to show that colonial state building efforts were more successful in the long term when the state invested in education for the colonized population. This argument builds upon recent literature showing that state cooptation of indigenous populations can facilitate state building, but I go further in arguing that colonial policy was not only cooptation, but in some contexts inclusive, leading the population to be vested in and participants in the state. I develop an argument for the influence of the causal mechanism, colonial inclusivity, on contemporary state capacity in post-colonial states. Through a qualitative and quantitative investigation of this mechanism, I find that the investment in and the colonized population's access to quality education during the colonial period reaps positive gains for contemporary state capacity.

Chiefs, elders, and traditional authority

2020 ◽  
pp. 296-309
Author(s):  
Michelle Osborn
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Traditional Authority ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
State Bureaucracy ◽  
Provincial Administration ◽  
Ordinary Citizens ◽  
The Way

For over a century, Kenya’s chiefs have served as central figures in the formation and implementation of state bureaucracy. Inextricably linked with the colonial and post-colonial state, Kenya’s chiefs are not representative of traditional forms of authority in the way that elders may be said to be, but are rather an embodiment of the state’s bureaucratic apparatus. As a key component of Kenyan bureaucracy through their position in provincial administration, chiefs have played a central role in the implementation of policies, the provision of order, and mobilization of political support. They act as an integral link between the state and ordinary citizens. While chiefs have obtained their right to govern through the state, their power has nevertheless waxed and waned over the years, as they have had to continuously negotiate legitimacy within a pluralistic landscape of locally recognized authorities. This chapter discusses chiefs’ authority in Kenya and the change and continuity of historical processes, which have created, reinforced, and challenged their position and role.

Redefining Criminality: Gambling and Financial Expediency in the Colonial Philippines, 1764–1898

1991 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Bankoff
Keyword(s):  
The Philippines ◽  
The State ◽  
Good Faith ◽  
Financial Benefit ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Official Recognition

“This consuming cancer”, wrote Governor-General Camba of gambling in the preamble to an edict dated 7 March 1838, “that destroys the fortune of many families, encourages sloth, hinders the sources of public wealth, perverts good faith, corrupts the people's morals and leads them to degradation and misery. Unfortunately the vice has spread prolifically in this rich soil”. Spanish authorities held gambling to be both morally reprehensible and economically detrimental, yet official recognition was extended to an activity that could not be eradicated and from which the colonial state derived considerable financial benefit. The definition of criminality in respect to gambling, therefore, became dependent on the inability of the state to enforce its own regulations and the exigencies of financial demands. This article will examine the popularity of cockfighting and other forms of gambling in the Philippines, the extent of official ambivalence towards these sports, and the motives behind colonial policy. In the process, Gusfield's concept of the “moral passage”, whereby once tolerated behaviour is redefined as deviant and treated as criminal, will be shown to have application in reverse. Gambling was progressively legalized during the late 18th and 19th centuries as the state profited from such activities.

Rethinking sovereignty with reference to history and anthropology

2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Wachspress
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anthropological Literature

While legal practice and scholarship are driven by the use and understanding of complex legal terminology, there has been little effort to incorporate the humanistic scholarship of anthropologists and historians into theoretical or practical accounts of these words and their usages. This paper attempts to historicise and complicate a term that serves as a bridge or meeting point between the legal and the political; sovereignty has been conceptualised since the sixteenth century as both a framing device that produces unity within the state while establishing mutual equality within the interstate order, and as the capacity to make law without being subject to that law. Recent anthropological literature has challenged the personification implicit in political–theoretical definitions of sovereignty, arguing instead for a theory of sovereignty that can be applied to ‘complicated’, post-colonial contexts, where legal orders are plural or overlapping and the state is weak or non-existent. What such critiques cannot explain, however, is how the concept of the ‘sovereign state’ became so central to political discourse on a global scale. This paper draws upon legal historical case-studies concerned with the production of the colonial or post-colonial state or the deployment of ‘sovereignty’ as a justificatory concept in colonial settings. In doing so, this paper argues for understanding sovereignty both as a practice across time and space that organises legal institutions and as a justificatory strategy in the intellectual and social history of those institutions, an approach that allows scholars to draw upon the insights of political theorists, anthropologists and historians. While primarily intended to instigate a broader interdisciplinary conversation, this paper also suggests a preliminary conclusion: sovereignty has historically been deployed as a means of including that which cannot be considered the same, mediating the colonial tension between ‘otherness’ and legal homogeneity.

scholarly journals Building a Conservative Welfare State in Botswana

2019 ◽  
pp. 42-67
Author(s):  
Jeremy Seekings
Keyword(s):  
Policy Making ◽  
Social Assistance ◽  
State Building ◽  
Cash Transfers ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Agrarian Society ◽  
The Face ◽  
Drought Relief

Of the African countries that initiated social assistance programmes prior to the 2000s, Botswana stands out in that its policy-making was not the result of settler or immigrant populations. Reforms in Botswana stemmed instead from the imperatives of drought relief in an agrarian society, fuelled by the ruling party’s concern first to establish the authority and legitimacy of the post-colonial state and then to ensure re-election in the face of electoral competition from opposition parties. State-building was made possible also by extraordinary economic growth. The result was a system of social assistance that covered a large part of the population but was also distinctively conservative in terms of the value of benefits, a preference for in-kind over cash transfers, and the prioritization of workfare. Botswana’s path to social assistance prefigured the path followed by many other African countries in the 2000s.

scholarly journals Post-Colonial State and Bureaucracy in Bangladesh: Theoretical Understanding

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 43-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanif Miah
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Military Rule ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
State Administration ◽  
State Bureaucracy ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Personal Interests

Bureaucracy is the management apparatus of a state administration. Even in private sector, bureaucratic organization is very much essential for its smooth functioning and betterment. A legalized domination of bureaucracy only can ensure highest efficiency of an organization in a country. But the state bureaucracy of Bangladesh not developed legally from Pre-colonial period to post-colonial phase as well as an independent Bangladesh eventually. The state bureaucracy of Bangladesh is patrimonial in nature based on personal interests. The politicians and bureaucrats are interdependent in various manners for the fulfillment of their purpose illegally in Democratic Bangladesh. Simultaneously, the impact of militarism still exists in state bureaucracy of Bangladesh as it faced military rule in several times.

Post-colonial state, and its political elites And its political approach, from ((1958 - 1968))

2019 ◽  
pp. 38
Author(s):  
Fawaz Hammad Mahmoud
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
British Occupation ◽  
The People ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Political Approach ◽  
Dominant Parties ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Military

The State of Iraq was formed in 1921 and described as a product of the British occupation state. This was in line with what was planned by the occupation government in all fields of intellectual, cultural and political. This resulted in the establishment of the "King of Iraq" of Arab origins, as well as contributed groups of tribal or economic influence to contribute to the establishment of the Iraqi state, where the Iraqi society was suffering from poverty and ignorance and disease under the Ottoman Empire, and others may see that the Iraqi state, which came under the umbrella Britain, after the First World War, may not differ in terms of dealing with the Iraqi society from the Ottoman administration, and may be a continuation of, and worse, and therefore there was concern, and fear of all steps of the government, even if it was positive, and increased military intervention through coups policy The state and its apparatus to calculate the dominant parties But it turned into a preoccupation with the minds of the people, the futility or futility of such coups, which are no more than conflicts between families, parties, and perhaps people, using the violence that the military led to express in the three coups which We gave it our attention in this study, which included, after this introduction, three investigations and a conclusion.

Industrialisation in Late Colonial Africa: A British Perspective

Itinerario ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 123-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry J. Butler
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Development ◽  
Policy Formation ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Legacy ◽  
State Involvement ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Industrial Sectors ◽  
British Perspective ◽  
Progressive Policy

Among the most entrenched criticisms of the record of European colonial rule in Africa is that it discouraged, or actively obstructed, the emergence of diversified colonial and post-colonial economies. Specifically, it is normally argued, the colonial state failed to create the climate in which industrialisation might have been possible. The two basic explanations advanced for this policy of neglect were a desire to ensure that the colonies continued to provide the metropolitan economies with a steady supply of desirable commodities, and a concern to protect the market share of metropolitan exporters. Critics of the colonial legacy, across the ideological spectrum, have often assumed that ‘development’ was a condition which could only be achieved through the process of industrialisation, and that specialisation in commodity production for export could not have been in the colonies' long-term interests. Moreover, in the late colonial period, industrialisation had come to be seen by many as a measure of a state's effective autonomy and economic ‘maturity’, as witnessed by the sustained attempts by many former African colonies to promote their own industrial sectors, often with substantial state involvement or assistance. While it cannot dispute the obvious fact that in most of late colonial Africa, industrialisation was negligible, this paper will offer a refinement of conventional assumptions about the colonial state's attitudes towards this controversial topic. Drawing on examples from British Africa, particularly that pioneer of decolonisation, West Africa, and focusing on the unusually fertile period in colonial policy formation from the late 1930s until the early 1950s, it will suggest that the British colonial state attempted, for the first time, to evolve a coherent and progressive policy on encouraging colonial industrial development.

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