Inventing Direct Rule: Race, Law, and the Constitution of Difference in the British Empire
By 1865, officials in Britain’s Colonial Office and the governors of their colonies were at an impasse. Rocked by the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and concerned with the growing reach of the Crown beyond the Atlantic, the leading men of Britain’s ocean-spanning empire found themselves on unfamiliar territory. Faced with growing non-White populations, officials were no longer willing to grant representative institutions in the form of elected legislative assemblies when White settlers stood in minority. Instead, to govern racially divided societies, officials and elites institutionalized Crown Colony government, which originated as an ad hoc arrangement for newly acquired colonies. In this authoritarian scheme, the Crown and its appointed representative in the colony, the governor, held full powers over colonial law-making and administration. This model rejected the need for the consent of an elected assembly in favor of a nominated legislative council. In short, Crown Colony government implemented “direct rule” – a term that signified the centralized and unfettered exercise of sovereign power in an empire that was increasingly ordered in the language of difference.
My book examines the invention of Crown Colony government as the standardized mode of colonial rule and imperial control imposed on plural societies in the modern British Empire during the second half of the nineteenth century. Placed under direct rule, Crown Colonies were governed with the means of law and the colonial civil service while preserving the façade of liberal imperialism. The “rule of law” was to be secured by the centralized supervision of law-making and official conduct instead of the traditional guarantees of judicial independence and the preservation of liberties. This bureaucratic system was supposed to temper the excesses of power even while Britain’s empire expanded via conquest. To unravel the makings, workings, and myths of direct rule, I examine the re-constitution of two racially divided plural societies in the East and West Indies—the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang, and Malacca) and Jamaica—as Crown Colonies in this formative period. I also connect this process to developments across other Crown Colonies, Quebec, Grenada, British Guiana, Trinidad, and Hong Kong. In contrast to the devolution of self-government to White-settler colonies in Australia and North America, the constitutional forms that came to govern plural societies reveal how the Crown and its officials equated social difference with the need for authoritarian control.
The first book to address the institutionalization of the Crown Colony system as the constitutional form of direct rule, Inventing Direct Rule also addresses the historical significance of direct rule for contemporary understandings of law and race. The workings of direct rule remain inadequately theorized, either overlooked in influential studies of British colonialism that focus on indirect rule, or glossed as the mere transplantation of British institutions to the colonies. This book presents a historical sociology of direct rule that highlights the laws, administrative structures and practices, and racialized understandings that catalyzed its historical origins and development. I argue that the invention and adoption of direct rule were colonial officials and elites’ responses to what they construed as the problem of difference. Fueled by racialized anxieties about colonized subjects, the tensions generated by every-multiplying categories of difference, and their professed concerns for the “protection” of subjects, officials subjected the inhabitants of plural societies to colonial Leviathans that extended state power across growing social domains.
Crown Colony government was established as a constitution of difference. Framed as colonial officials’ response to the heightened racial divisions in an expanding empire, this system of direct rule encoded racialized, comparative understandings of colonized populations in the formal strictures of colonial law. As I theorize, the centralized framework and practices of law-making under Crown Colony government generated and reinforced racialized legalities that not only differentiated the colonized, but also structured their unequal status as subjects in the figurative language of myths, such as the colonial rule of law. Law, in this system, did more than offer the technology and media of governance. Not only a tool of power, law rendered an authoritative imaginary that justified the empire’s definition and governance of its subjects, fixing the fictions of race in place.
Jack Jin Gary Lee 