Uncertain Dominance: The Colonial State and Its Contradictions (With Notes on the History of Early British India)

Political struggle is enormously more complex: in a certain sense, it can be compared to colonial wars or to old wars of conquest—in which the victorious army occupies, or proposes to occupy, permanently all or part of the conquered territory. Then the defeated army is disarmed and dispersed, but the struggle continues on the terrain of politics.

—Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks

It has been held for a long time now that certain historic and enduring facets of the modern European nation-state reached their most telling limits in the colony. A large part of the world under colonial rule, by the very same token, would also seem to have its political fate tied to histories that are intimately European. Among other institutions that arose in the particular context of Europe and sought their universal form outside Europe, the most fundamental was perhaps the modern form of statehood itself.

In this brief consideration I further explore what is by now a familiar direction of thinking in the abundant recent work on the rich and diverse history of colonial modernities (Barlow 1997; Burton 1999; Chakrabarty 2000). The query I take up here is not so much how the universal structure of polity, consisting of the relationships among state, civil society, family, and political economy, was compromised and beleaguered as it spread across the non-European world in the age of expanding empires, but rather how colonial forms of domination impacted forms of the European state and its association with civil society. I address these questions with British India in mind, but I shall hazard a few comparative notes on the Spanish imperial moment in Latin America, especially Mexico. These contexts are very different indeed, removed in both time and space, but they suggest that acts of conquest initiate, though hardly resolve, what Gramsci describes as an ongoing war within the depths of all colonial societies.

Crucial questions still remain on the nature of European state formation away from the terroir of European politics, and on the conditions, limits, and historia specifica of various forms of political dominance implanted in the colonial world in the period under consideration here, roughly the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My observations draw on Gramsci's Prison Notebooks (1971), especially the chapter “State and Civil Society,” where he considers the following question: To what extent can a state be identified with governance, thus underlining its basic political economic aspect—or, as Gramsci terms it, “the economic-corporate form”—and creating a fortuitous confusion between civil and political society (262–63)? A general idea of the state, remarks Gramsci, must include elements of civil and political society joined together, a “hegemony protected by the armour of coercion” (263).

It is tempting to describe the colonial state at the height of its powers as a coercive apparatus masked by trappings of hegemony. I will argue, nonetheless, that in many respects the ideology of colonial state formation straddled the line between acts of dominance and ambitions of hegemony. This question has received increased attention in recent years from historians of colonialism, most notably Ranajit Guha (1989, 1997) in his work on British rule in India. Guha (1989, 277) writes of colonial domination as the historical limit to the universal tendency of capital and the development of the bourgeoisie beyond the context of the European nation-state. That the particular achievements of the bourgeoisie in England should appear as the universally significant ideal, especially in the context of a “liberal” colonialism, marked by the prominence of law, order, and social reform, strikes Guha as the “hallucinatory effects of ideology” (ibid.). Such a universal account of a colonial extension of capital then fabricates a “spurious hegemony” sanctified through an endless exercise of history that attempts to harness events of conquest to the progress of liberal imperial rule (283). Guha...