Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Much of colonial studies over the last decade has worked from the shared assumption that the mastery of reason, rationality, and the exaggerated claims made for Enlightenment principles have been at the political foundation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial regimes and should be at the center of critical histories of them. We have looked at what colonial authorities took to be indices of reasoned judgment and the political effects of policies that defined rationality in culturally narrow and prescribed ways - at the epistemological foundations of received categories as much as the content of them. Students of the colonial consistently have argued that the authority to designate what would count as reason and reasonable was colonialism's most insidious and effective technology of rule - one that, in turn, would profoundly affect the style and strategies of anticolonial, nationalist politics. Viewed in this frame, colonial states would seem to conform to a Weberian model of rationally minded, bureaucratically driven states, outfitted with a permanent and assured income to maintain them, buttressed by accredited knowledge and scientific persuasion, and backed by a monopoly of weaponed force. Similarly, they have been treated as contained if not containable experimental terrain for efficient scientific management and rational social policy, “laboratories of modernity,” ... log in or subscribe to read full text