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The main theme of this special volume is the colonial state and its governmental practices. This chapter introduces and contextualizes the contributions by providing a brief induction to recent developments within the study of the colonial state. It then presents the contributions under three perspectives which represent separate yet interrelated themes relevant for the understanding of the colonial state: practices, violence, and agency. Hereby, we also accentuate the value of a non-state-centric approach to the analysis of the colonial state.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

Against the grain of the paradigmatic postcolonial analytics of the colonial state, this chapter presents a non-dichotomous comparison of two regimes within the late 18th century Danish empire, which are commonly presumed to be of essentially different kinds – namely the colonial state in Tranquebar in South East India and the metropolitan government of rural Danish society. By focusing, firstly, on practices of policing and, secondly, on the general technology of power that targeted these significantly different socio-political spheres, it is argued that these regimes were governing according to similar strategies: seeking, on one hand, to deploy societal mechanisms of self-regulation and, on the other, to provide a balance and order to the otherwise chaotic forces of the population. On the basis of a Foucauldian vocabulary of government, it is thereby argued that colonialism, at this time and place, had not yet clearly constituted itself as a particular form of rule.

This chapter provides an assessment of how the late Portuguese colonial state (especially in Angola and Mozambique) responded to widespread conflict and anticolonial pressures. Focusing on its structures, idioms, and strategies of social transformation and control-especially as they relate to the domains of development and security-my assessment of state response emphasizes the coming together of: coercive repertoires of rule; planned developmental strategies of political, economic and social change; and processes of engineering sociocultural difference. The late colonial state’s developmental and repressive facets are critically assessed through mobilizing theoretical perspectives and empirical analysis.

This chapter puts practices of everyday violence at the center of its analysis of colonial order. It examines the micro-mechanisms and manifold forms of threatening and hurting people. While a quotidian part of colonial life, such practices – accepted and normal within the colonial moral economy – are not normally seen as state actions. However, they reveal the workings of a powerful state: one that was built in an improvised fashion by low-level state representatives.

Based on an analysis of everyday police work in German Southwest Africa, this chapter offers a theoretical reframing of the colonial state that aims to provincialize the modern European state. It shifts the perspective away from the legal and institutional aspirations and structures of the state, instead turning attention to less rationalized processes: the idiosyncratic, makeshift, affective procedures of low-ranking officials. On this plane, everyday violence played a key role in generating a new social order. Ultimately, it had constructive effects which were a fundamental and inherent part of the colonial state’s power.

This chapter analyzes the semiotic construction of US claims to sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Building on semiotic theories in sociology and theories within critical Indigenous and settler colonial studies, it presents an interpretive analysis of state, military, and academic discursive strategies. The US empire-state attempts to construct colonial narratives of race and sovereignty that rehistoricize the history of Hawaiians and other Indigenous peoples. In order to make claims to sovereignty, settler-colonists construct narratives that build upon false claims to superiority, advancement, and discovery. Colonial resignification is a process by which signs and symbols of Indigenous communities are conscripted into the myths of empire that maintain such sovereign claims. Yet, for this reason, colonial resignification can be undone through reclaiming such signs and symbols from their use within colonial metanarratives. In this case, efforts toward decolonial resignification enacted alternative metanarratives of peoples' relationships to place. This “flip side” of the synecdoche is a process that unravels the ties that bind layered myths by providing new answers to questions that underpin settler colonial sovereignty.

Drawing upon recent interests in Michel Foucault’s anti-essentialist conception of the state, I provide an analysis of state power in colonial slave societies that is attentive to the ongoing processes of “statification” and governmentalization of the state. This approach represents an alternative to classic state theory, which seems inadequate to describe the diverse political context of Caribbean colonial slave societies.

I apply the Foucauldian conception of the state to the empirical case of the Danish West Indies in the second half of the 18th century. Here, I focus on the problem of public order and its formation in relation to growing concerns over general economic, social, demographic, and political risks that the institution of slavery posed to colonial society. I argue that the slave laws of the 18th century can be seen as a governmental strategy to manage the risks of slavery by constituting a public order that would be subject to policing by the state. I also argue, however, that the specific circumstances of colonial slavery shaped the regulative practices toward the necessities of a flexible, adjustable, responsive government. I suggest that this should be interpreted as a governmental strategy calibrated to the realities of the specificities of colonial rule, rather than simply a reflection of incoherence and incompetence on the part of colonial authorities. The larger argument is that actual state practices have to be seen as results of problems of government in a given context, and as a function of the dynamic and reciprocal processes of government.

Why and how was the territorialized state form disseminated through colonial expansion? To begin to answer this question, this study proposes a relational account of the production of territorialized state space, drawing on empirical evidence from two understudied cases of colonial expansion in the early 20th century: Spain in Morocco and Italy in Libya. Drawing on colonial and local archival sources, I demonstrate how colonial territoriality resulted from a violent clash between an aspiring colonial power and a reactive, rural counter-state building movement, led by the Amir Abd al-Krim in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco and the Sanusi leader, Omar al-Mokhtar, in Cyrenaica in eastern Libya. Territorialization was not imposed from the outside by a European colonial power. Rather, it was produced relationally through violent interactions between the colonial state and a local autonomous political entity. This analysis contributes to the still-nascent study of colonial state space and to contemporary policy debates about political order in North Africa and the Middle East by emphasizing the importance of local political mobilization, the complexity of interactions catalyzed across local and translocal scales by colonial expansion, and the high levels of physical violence endemic to the production of territorialized state space.

In the periods, following the First and Second World Wars, colonial states across the British empire underwent waves of reforms that were geared toward improving human well-being, from enhancing social conditions, such as health and education, to expanding opportunities for economic and political engagement. The literature on the colonial state typically traces these state-building efforts to the agency of European colonial officials. However, evidence from a historical analysis of Trinidad and Tobago reveals a different agent driving state reform: the colonized. A local labor movement during colonialism forced the colonial state to construct a number of state agencies to ameliorate the economic, political, and social conditions in the colony, thereby resulting in an increase in state capacity. This study, therefore, provides critical intervention into the colonial state literature by showing that the agency of the colonized, as opposed to just the colonizers, is key to state-building, and specifying the mechanisms by which the subaltern constrained colonial officials and forced them to enact policies that improved colonial state capacity.

The article shows that the concept of patrimonialism is useful for the analysis not only of nation-states, but also of local and imperial power structures. Highlighting the limits of empires, we consider how local conditions shaped the strategies of colonial states in the process of empire building. We argue that the strength of local patrimonial networks before colonization, coupled with the sequencing of colonial conquests, either facilitated or hindered the French colonial and imperial project. Using a comparative-historical approach based on the analysis of two cases, Algeria and Tunisia, we find that the French colonial state employed markedly differing strategies of domination in each case. In Algeria, the French initially attempted and failed to destroy local patrimonial networks and the social practices associated with them through extensive military action. The failed attempt to destroy local practices resulted in over a century of resistance and bloodshed. When military rule became too costly, the French opted instead to rely on decentralized control that used the very structures they originally sought to eradicate. With constant reminders of the misguided colonial strategy in Algeria, the French used a different form of rule in Tunisia. They incorporated the existing Tunisian bureaucracy into their own political project, using it to limit the power of local patrimonial networks and transforming them instead through the development of capitalistic agriculture. The article illustrates the importance of paying close attention to local patrimonial networks in the analysis of colonial and imperial strategies.