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.