How empires built control through violence and paperwork, not just force
A new historical analysis reveals how Britain consolidated power in 19th-century Southeast Asia by combining military force with bureaucratic systems—a dual strategy that proved more effective than either alone. The finding offers lessons for understanding how modern institutions establish authority in contested regions.
Originaltitel: Armed and Bureaucratic Violence in the Formation of British Governance in Southeast Asian Contested Tracts
<p>This study focuses on the British annexation of the Dai territories in the border zone of Qing China and Burma in the late nineteenth century. It investigates the coercive force used by the British to secure control of territory and people, which was asserted on the basis of having been under tributary relations with the earlier kingdom of Burma. In this case, I argue that the use of violence as a means to reach an end is better understood when separated into the mutually reinforcing forms of armed and bureaucratic violence. In these two forms, violent force shaped a practice – a mode of operation – that facilitated and secured British governance in the large territories separating the Chinese Qing state from British Burma. The study is part of a larger investigation that connects British operations on the Empire’s much-varied northeastern frontier from the Brahmaputra eastwards into Yunnan, at two periods of its expansion in the early and late nineteenth century.</p>