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Mahmood Mamdani. 2012. Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 154 pp.
Mamdani's book which is organized into a brief introduction and three short, but concise and insightful chapters, is based on lectures inspired from the author's reading of W.E.B. Dubois's The World and Africa (1947) and from his realization that he had given an inadequate answer to an important question posed at one of the lecture events about how British indirect rule was different from previous empires (including the Roman Empire). Mamdani explores the dichotomy between settler and native as separate political identities and shows how this new politics of identity laid the basis of British indirect rule and native administration in British colonies worldwide. He argues that the crisis of the British Empire in the mid-nineteenth century starting with a mutiny in India in 1857 attracted the attention of British intellectuals, especially Sir Henry Maine, who claimed that natives were bound by geography and custom rather than history and law. This view not only led to the re-examination of the colonial mission, but also to the transformation of colonial peoples' cultural identities to political identities and to the establishment of administrative reforms starting in India and spreading to other British colonies in Africa and elsewhere. The author then analyzes the intellectual and political dimensions of the decolonization and nationalist movements in Africa.
The introduction contends that indirect rule was a form of governance considered the "holy grail" of managing pluralism and difference in modern statecraft. He argues that it was different from modes of rule in previous western empires (including Roman and British "direct" rule before mid-19th century) in two important ways: first, previous empires focused on conquered elites rather than masses of the colonized; and second, they sought to eliminate difference through a policy of cultural or political assimilation of colonized elites (pp. 1-2). The author views the political identity of 'native' as an invention of intellectuals of a British empire- in-crisis. Furthermore, Mamdani analyzes the distinction between settler and native and between natives on the basis of tribe, and the creation of indirect rule. He argues that the indirect rule state governed natives under the native authority and restricted their rights to land and power on...