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The Creation of Identity: Colonial Society in Bolivia and Tanzania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Robert H. Jackson  and
Gregory Maddox
Robert H. Jackson
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Gregory Maddox
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

Many colonial regimes appropriate traditional symbols of power to enhance authority. In many cases this appropriation results in the hardening of more transitory political divisions among subject people into ethnic, national, or tribal ones. Colonialism often, in essence, creates different identities for subject peoples. For example, the East India Company (E.I.C.) and royal colonial government in India manipulated caste and religion to carry out a policy of divide and rule. Moreover, the E.I.C. and later the Raj attempted to create a European-style landed elite that could promote development of agriculture, maintain social control in the countryside and, perhaps most important, collect taxes owed to the government. The Raj attempted to place the structures of power that evolved within the framework of the symbols of Moghul legitimacy, going so far as to create a hybrid traditional style of architecture used in many public buildings that mixed elements from both Hindu and Muslim buildings. In South Africa, colonial legislation, as seen in the process begun by the Glen Gray Act of 1894, resulted in the proletarianization of the African population by creating tribal reservations without enough resources to support all the people often arbitrarily defined as members of a particular tribe. And, as seen in studies of mine labor, coloniallegislation also defined a distinctive legal status for workers.

Type
Defining Difference
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , April 1993 , pp. 263 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1993

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References

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8 Idem.

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10 A kin-based social, political, and economic unit―community―in the Andean region.

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27 TNA, Central Province Provincial Book, sections on Native Authorities and Customary Law.

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