Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India

Abstract

Historical anthropologist Bernard Cohn, whose work has focused mainly on colonial India, has been a major influence on many younger practitioners of ‘critical colonial studies’ and a ‘new imperial history’. From the eighteenth century onward, European states increasingly made their power visible not only through ritual performance and dramatic display, but through the gradual extension of ‘officializing’ procedures that established and extended their capacity in many areas. They took control by defining and classifying space, making separations between public and private spheres; by recording transactions such as the sale of property; by counting and classifying their populations, replacing religious institutions as the registrar of births, marriages, and deaths; and by standardizing languages and scripts. The process of state building in Great Britain, seen as a cultural project, was closely linked with its emergence as an imperial power, and India was its largest and most important colony.