This article investigates cotton promotion policies in colonial Korea, with a focus on the role of a series of semi-governmental organizations (SGOs) in implementing colonial policies to shape farmers’ interactions with global, capitalist markets. Colonial attempts to develop the cultivation of cotton, a quintessential commodity of modern capitalism, highlight the incorporation of the Korean countryside into imperial networks of commercial commodity production and circulation. However, despite appeals to the rhetoric of capitalism and the expected response of profit-maximizing cotton cultivators, in practice colonial cotton campaigns relied on the active intervention of the colonial state to reinforce the adoption of new scientific and commercial agricultural practices. SGOs performed multiple roles in the promotion of cotton cultivation—distributing resources, defining expertise, regulating the production and sale of cotton, and attempting to change the behaviour of cotton cultivators, landlords, and even merchants in line with the colonial government’s strategic interests. As such, SGOs represent an understudied extension of the colonial state into the rural economy, which influenced the conditions under which farming households engaged in the commercial cultivation of cotton.

This essay aims to situate the emergence of Siddha medicine as a separate medical system in the erstwhile Madras Presidency of colonial India within a broader socio-economic context. Scholars who have worked on Siddha medicine have stressed more on political dimensions like nationalism and sub-nationalism with inadequate attention to the interplay of various (other) factors including contemporary global developments, changes in the attitude of the colonial State and especially to the new promises held by the greater deference shown to indigenous medical systems from the 1920s. If the construction of ‘national medicine’ based on the Sanskrit texts and the accompanying marginalisation of regional texts and practices were the only reasons for the emergence of Siddha medicine as presented by scholars, it leaves open the question as to why this emergence happened only during the third decade of the twentieth century, though the marginalisation processes started during the first decade itself. This paper seeks to find an answer by analysing the formation of Siddha medical identity beyond the frameworks of nationalism and sub-nationalism. Further, it explicates how material factors served as immediate cause along with the other, and more ideational factors related to the rise of the Dravidian political and cultural movement.

Scholarship on the modern state’s symbolic and social infrastructural power typically correlates high state capacity to practices of standardization, homogenization, and integration. Less attention has focused on how this power can be directed towards differentiation and heterogenization, as amply demonstrated in the case of empire. This article develops a framework for analyzing how infrastructural power is employed by modern colonial states and how it impacts society. It argues that formal legitimization structures defined for colonial subunits influence legibility practices enacted within them—what is named and counted and how it is named and counted—and that these legitimization-legibility linkages are significant because they politicize particular boundaries of collective identity in lasting ways within the subjugated society. This model is used to analyze variation within French North Africa between a colony-type linkage in Algeria and a protectorate-type linkage in Morocco, and account for the divergent identity politics and claims-making strategies that emerged within these units. The conclusion considers the broader comparative implications of legitimization-legibility combinations in formerly colonized political units.

In this article, I explain the establishment of Crown Colony government within the racially diverse colonies of the British Empire through an examination of the reconstitution of the Straits Settlements as a Crown Colony in 1867. My central argument is that the reconstitution of the Straits Settlements as a Crown Colony rested on colonial officials and subjects’ shared understandings of the fragmented and unstable character of racially diverse societies. Such understandings were analogous to J.S. Furnivall’s concept of “plural society” and were generated by the negative images of “native” populations and the precarity of colonial rule. Despite the reception of the common law and its institutions in the colony, these beliefs ultimately justified colonial officials’ repudiation of liberal principles of government and law despite intransigent protests by a minority of officials and subjects. In the Crown Colony of the Straits Settlements, this meant the institutionalization of a constitutional framework and laws that granted the Governor authoritarian powers over the legislature, judiciary, and society to maintain the social order.

Capital punishment in British colonial Africa was not just a method of crime control or individual punishment, but an integral aspect of colonial networks of power and violence. The treatment of condemned criminals and the rituals of execution which brought their lives to an end illustrate the tensions within colonialism surrounding the relationship between these states and their subjects, and with their metropolitan overlords. The state may have had the legal right to kill its subjects, but this right and the manner in which it was enacted were contested. This article explores the interactions between various actors in this penal ‘theatre of death’, looking at the motivations behind changing uses of the death penalty, the treatment of the condemned convicts whilst they awaited death, and the performance of a hanging itself to show how British colonial governments in Africa attempted to create and manage the deaths of their condemned subjects.