Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Agents and the problem of agency: the context
- 2 Why Africa needs Europe: from Livingstone to Stanley
- 3 Kipling's “Law” and the division of bureaucratic labor
- 4 Cromer, Gordon, Conrad and the problem of imperial character
- 5 T. E. Lawrence and the erotics of imperial discipline
- 6 Resurrecting individualism: the interwar novel of imperial manners
- Conclusion: work as rule
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion: work as rule
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Agents and the problem of agency: the context
- 2 Why Africa needs Europe: from Livingstone to Stanley
- 3 Kipling's “Law” and the division of bureaucratic labor
- 4 Cromer, Gordon, Conrad and the problem of imperial character
- 5 T. E. Lawrence and the erotics of imperial discipline
- 6 Resurrecting individualism: the interwar novel of imperial manners
- Conclusion: work as rule
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This book has been a book about management: the management of the self in the interest of the management of others, and the management of feeling to which the bureaucrat must submit. In asserting a connection between that mysterious thing the English call “character” and the colonial enterprise, I have suggested that the unique demands of the work that is rule led to the discursive construction of a type of bureaucratic subject designed to rule as unobtrusively as possible, a subject designed to meet the taxing psychological demands of Indirect Rule.
Adapting a notion of the subject made available to them by Victorian novelistic culture and already put into administrative practice in the Punjab of the Lawrences, turn-of-the-century promoters of empire such as Cromer and Lugard sought to formulate a system of rule for the colonies that would procure for imperial rule the appearance of innocence that grand moral projects commanded in the Victorian middle-class mind. By demanding much personal sacrifice from would-be administrators, the theory of Indirect Rule evolved into a philosophy of government over the conquered masquerading as a philosophy of the self-government of the bureaucrat. In designing this theory, the theorists of Indirect Rule were able to insure a role for a new kind of professional colonial manager in a twentieth-century world order characterized by gradual decolonization, for, when the goals of rule are conceived in instrumentalist terms, the means of rule — bureaucracy — becomes a powerful machine capable of generating new business for itself, as it generates new goals to replace its founding purpose, and supplies new gratifications in place of the old.
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- Information
- British Imperial Literature, 1870–1940Writing and the Administration of Empire, pp. 193 - 201Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998