On 23 March 1972 the British cabinet suspended the Northern Ireland parliament, scaled down military operations, and prepared to negotiate with nationalists and republicans. This chapter asks why it took Heath’s government so long to strategically adapt, and what the delay resulted in. A straight causal line is often drawn between internment, Bloody Sunday and direct rule from London being imposed. Bloody Sunday, when the Parachute Regiment shot dead thirteen unarmed protesters during an anti-internment march on 30 January, is considered to have happened in the context of a policy vacuum, or amidst frenetic efforts to secure peace. This chapter argues that the persistence of an offensive strategy intended to defeat the IRA and force nationalists to accept minor constitutional reforms contributed to Bloody Sunday. The direct-rule decision is frequently attributed to the fallout from Bloody Sunday. But the thinking and planning necessary for strategic adaptation had already taken place. The offensive strategy endured for weeks longer because ministers decided to delay direct rule. The massacre propelled large numbers to join the IRA, a recruitment glut essential for the expansion in violence seen during 1972. Those new recruits proved effective because IRA strategy and tactics had already changed before Bloody Sunday.

This chapter analyses British strategy once direct rule had been imposed from London, and covers the period up to September 1972, when talks between the political parties happened without the moderate nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party. The chapter documents the efforts by the army to buttress Northern Ireland Secretary William Whitelaw’s quest for peace. Discontent lingered amongst elements in the security forces over restraint in fighting the IRA. Low-level brutality continued, particularly in tough regiments. In July the British government and the Provisionals held secret negotiations. Beforehand, republicans and loyalists targeted civilians to shape the impending dialogue. Senior figures in the Ministry of Defence believed loyalist attacks on Catholics might encourage republicans to modify their demands. Loyalist mobilisation probably convinced the government not to give anything away to republicans. These events, and the success of Operation Motorman in re-entering republican areas, persuaded the army to go back on the offensive against the Provisionals. In doing so they committed to retaining internment, expanding interrogation and adopting a modus vivendi with loyalists. These choices allowed the force level in Northern Ireland to be brought down, as demanded by the commitment to NATO, and swelling discord about repeated deployments on a deeply unpleasant mission.

This chapter lays out some of the key concepts and theories that support the book, as well as a key conceptual typology of colonial governance. It starts with an examination of the literature on civil conflict, highlighting its attributes but explaining its limitations in relation to the types and patterns of both insurgent and social violence in south Asia. It then lays out the framework of political order and institutions that has implicitly driven much of the research on political violence and related outcomes in comparative politics. I argue that some of the assumptions embedded in this framework do not allow for the examination of the historical roots of subnational institutions. I provide an alternative in the analytical tradition of state-building, and suggest how uneven state-building in developing countries can shape state-society relations. The chapter concludes with laying out the key conceptual typology of colonial governance, by interacting two dimensions of direct and indirect rule, which serves as the basis for legible categories of colonial difference.

Chapter Six looks at how the design and implementation of the Hong Kong version of “One Country, Two Systems” and its discontents. The Basic Law guarantees some fundamental rights and freedoms for Hong Kong’s residents. It promises eventual universal suffrage of the government. But an alliance of Beijing and the local business elite prevented it from specifying the exact form and timetable for universal suffrage. It also contains a clause about the necessity of anti-subversion legislation that threatens preexisting rights and freedoms. These contradictions and ambiguities of the Basic Law sowed the seeds of political conflicts after 1997. These conflicts, coupled with the rising monopoly of Chinese capital in Hong Kong, stimulated Beijing’s urge to forfeit indirect rule and move to a radical assimilationist politics and direct rule. Beijing’s urge has been articulated systematically by a group of official scholars who advocated Beijing’s statist absorption of Hong Kong as a rehearsal of China’s power projection farther abroad. Beijing’s premature crackdown on Hong Kong’s autonomy unleashed escalating resistance that culminated in the great clash of 2019.

The conclusion examines some broader questions raised by the analysis. It first discusses the pattern of the normative/empirical inversion noted throughout the book, whereby conditions associated with some desirable outcomes (e.g. separation of powers) are projected back into an account of origins. This is identified as a major obstacle in effective causal analysis. Second, the chapter examines a fundamental underlying concern of the book, the origins of power. Although no answer can be offered, it explains the implications of the book's argument to our understanding of despotic and infrastructural power, perhaps the most influential formulation in social science, as well as to the distinction between direct and indirect rule, which is shaping discussion of the state in varied literatures. Third, the chapter offers some thoughts about how the medieval account I have provided can be reconciled with the early modern accounts that have proved far more influential in explanations of state- and institution-building. I conclude with some shorter thoughts on the implications of the argument on the use of bargaining theory in modern development theory, on the popular notion of land redistribution, and on Huntington's problem of political order and instability.

In this chapter, I address the issue of selection bias more directly. First, I present a comparative case study using most-similar research design between the two similar princely states of Awadh and Hyderabad, which shows that historical contingency determined by external geo-political circumstances prevented British from being selective and led to direct rule in Awadh vs. indirect rule in Hyderabad. Second, I develop a new instrument for the British choice of indirect rule through princely states based on the exogenous effect of major European Great Power wars that decreased the ability of the British to fight wars of annexation to bring additional territory into direct rule and increased their tendency to sign treaties of indirect rule with Indian states on the frontiers of British direct rule. The instrumental variable (IV-2SLS) analysis is a major empirical contribution and allows an estimate of the causal effects of colonial indirect rule on Maoist insurgency. I also develop a fine-grained typology of different types of princely states and show that warrior states like Mysore had higher development, while successor states like Hyderabad and feudatory states like Bastar had more inequality and less development and thus Maoist insurgency.

This chapter focuses on the changing strategies of ethnic governance in China’s transition from empire to the modern nation state. That is, evolution from a maintenance-oriented strategy to a transformative strategy aimed at national integration in the socialist era. Pre-modern Chinese dynasties applied diverse and indirect rule over their extensive frontier regions. This “minimalist state” came under serious challenges in modern times when the idea of the nation state arrived. After late Qing and Republican failures at modern state building, the CCP completed the transition to a modern state by establishing a uniform and direct form of ethnic governance based in titular ethnic status. Known as the system of autonomous regions, the new system served to incorporate frontier regions but departed from pre-modern practices of diverse and de-ethnicized rule. The contradictions therein – promoting political integration but also ethno-territories to fit that goal – or centralization and ethnicization, created a second set of institutional dynamics for ethnic strife in contemporary times.