Non-Settler Sovereignty: Intervention, Non-Interference, & Modern Imperial Rule

• In Event: Unsettling Empires

Abstract

This paper gives an account of British imperial authority in India during the late eighteenth century as non-settler sovereignty. I distinguish this from settler sovereignty in the British North Atlantic, which was predicated on the occupation of land. Non-settler sovereignty, on the other hand, was characterized by a jurisdiction over people. I draw this distinction from a close look at the institution-building of the English East India Company – Britain’s imperial agent – in Bengal, between 1765 and 1812, especially in the areas of land revenue and civil justice.

I argue that non-settler sovereignty in South Asia entailed a combination of intervention and non-interference. This schizophrenic nature of sovereignty was reproduced in nineteenth-century imperial rule elsewhere in India and the colonized world. In India, non-settler sovereignty emerged in a hybrid and collaborative form, mixing extant indigenous institutions and Indian officers with some purportedly British ideas and British supervision. The newly constructed ideas were used to govern the native population of the British territories in India.

The practices of non-settler sovereignty in British India were undergirded by the amalgamation of sovereignty (understood as the practice of passing fundamental legislation) and government (that of executing such legislation). Such a combination was contrary to the conceptual distinction between sovereignty and government drawn in Europe and America in the late eighteenth century. I show in this paper that it was, in fact, a conflict between the location of sovereignty and the source of sovereignty that allowed the sovereignty-government distinction to arise in eighteenth-century Europe. Such a contradiction was absent in India.

The coexistence of intervention with non-interference emerged as the central feature of modern imperial rule. Intervention and non-interference generally signify practices of direct and indirect rule, respectively. Scholars normally understand late-nineteenth and twentieth-century European imperialism in Asia and Africa as a period of indirect rule, coupled with a discourse of cultural protection and non-interference. Direct rule is thought to have preceded this period. In India, this was from the early years of Company rule till the rebellion of 1857. My research shows, instead, that early British rule in India featured both intervention and non-interference.

Maintaining intervention and non-interference simultaneously was the major innovation of non-settler sovereignty as a practice of rule. This innovation was not worked out theoretically or in the realm of ideas. It was produced, rather, by responding to political crises. The transformation in the nineteenth century was that imperial powers built ‘native’ institutions rather than adapting to extant indigenous institutions. The convergence of sovereignty and government in eighteenth-century Bengal, in turn instituting practices of both intervention and non-interference, was the forerunner of the widely used imperial practice of indirect rule in the nineteenth century.

Author

• Anurag Sinha, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities