In the post-Reconstruction USA, biopolitical technologies of governmentality became central to the project of racial control. As the USA moved from a settler colonial and slave-owning nation to a settler colonial and nation of overseas colonies, a politics of violence was followed by a pedagogy of recovery, particularly in education and health, through which the lives of racialized populations could be “improved.” The salubrious racial management of populations through discourses of health in the Philippines, Guam, Hawai’I, and Indian reservations emphasized distinctions between clean and unclean bodies, hygienic and unhygienic behaviors, and ultimately moral and immoral lifestyles. However, the technologies of care in the USA occupation of Japan during its reverse course phase (1948–1952) illustrate how racial–cultural difference could be refashioned for geopolitical purposes. While early in the occupation the Japanese were Orientalized as conformist, obsequious, and feudalist, Brides Schools for wives of American GIs exemplified how the creation of Japanese wives as perfectly assimilable subjects functioned to demonstrate American racial democracy during the Cold War.

This chapter offers a broad account of two key governmental themes in post-war British theatre: policy and censorship. The chapter’s discussion of these themes is informed by Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which embraces both the activities of the state and the broader discursive regimes that constitute groups and individuals, including self-governing. The chapter examines a range of values that have featured in post-war cultural discourse in terms of continuities, ruptures, and changes between the post-war period and earlier moments in capitalist modernity, and within the period itself. The chapter surveys the expansionist arts policies implemented in the decades following the war, before turning to the effects of neoliberal governmental politics from the 1970s onward, which saw the value of the arts become subject to increasing scrutiny and justification. Next, the chapter addresses censorship and the contours of its post-war cultural politics. It notes overlapping shifts in focus from sexuality and gender to racial and religious identities – shifts which speak to the governmental ‘management of populations’. Finally, it analyses David Hare’s I’m Not Running (National Theatre: Lyttelton, 2018) – a work that responded to contemporaneous governmental crisis.

This chapter examines the structure of regional authority in early modern Japan. Its aim is to clarify the nature of the early modern Japanese state. The shogunate delegated authority to autonomous daimyo domains, and both shogunate and domains delegated authority to village heads, who managed their communities with little direct oversight. The system worked well enough to keep the realm generally peaceful and prosperous for 265 years. The chapter begins with a top-down taxonomy of the daimyo domains and other, lesser jurisdictions under the authority of the Tokugawa shogunate. It then moves onto a discussion of village rule, framed in terms of governmentality – that is, the structures through which villagers participated in their own subjecthood to the shogunate and domains. The chapter concludes with a discussion of shared-revenue villages (aikyū mura), which were divided among multiple overlords while retaining a character as singular communities.

The stabilization of drone programs and their implementation as part of the normal functioning of the state deserve much more attention than it has received, since the power it conveys goes far beyond prompt lethal strikes in foreign territories. The institutionalization of a drone program not only means that the extensive warfare that drones bring about is stable, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, because a drone program consists of the constant surveillance of populations "living under drones." Behavioral changes (in addition to the evident psychological ramifications) of populations living under drones have been proven, at both the individual and community level. This chapter makes clear that a transborder drone program cannot be viewed as occasional interventions in self-defense. Instead, through an institutionalized drone program, a state performs rituals of governance and sovereignty over the populations it monitors. The chapter conceptualizes the extension of state power over the populations of third states and explores what it means for the international legal order that the law is essential to such an extension.

In 1953, a man holding the position of “Indian Councillor” at Sarnia Indian Reserve #45 stood up. Government officials had been sent to his reserve to speak to the “Indians” and explain to them how being given the right to vote in elections, and the ability to purchase alcohol legally under Canadian law, would “help” his band properly develop into good “civilized” Canadian citizens. Having listened, he responded simply: “We were the first settlers on this continent. Then, the whites came and made us Indians.”1 This short statement eloquently summarizes two centuries of surveillance-focused law and social policy targeting First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in Canada. It expresses two key components of Canadian/British Imperialism; first, the creation and enforcement of an imposed and unwanted racial category of “Indian,” and second, the construction and assertion of an expected “education,” and cultural development, tied to this racial identity.

Chapter 3 considers the evolution of military disciplinary practices as military thought became ever more akin to a human science. It focusses on a key work in the theorisation of military discipline, Robert Jackson’s A Systematic View of the Formation, Discipline, and Economy of Armies (1804). Drawing on his extensive experience as a surgeon in the British army, Jackson places the medicalised body at the heart of military discipline. He insists that the soldier must be viewed as a living organism, possessed of a complex and self-governing interiority that determines how tactics operate. In Jackson’s conception, the soldier appears as a self-governing figure who functions independently and at a distance from disciplinary sites, a figure who more closely resembles the modern subject than the mechanical automatons associated with Frederick the Great’s military drill practices. More than this, however, Jackson’s book reveals how Romantic aesthetics penetrated military thought. The military’s concern with the imagination of the soldier in the field was undoubtedly a ‘shock’ to poets, Clausewitz surmised, but was nonetheless central to emergent aesthetic concerns with perception and interiority that suggest an unexplored context of wartime media surrounding a Romantic poetics and its formation of subjectivity.

This chapter outlines how the travels of Rowe’s Fair Penitent across Kingston, Calcutta and Sydney accumulated meanings related to the theatricality of state and colonial power, the counter-theater of the subaltern, whether women, Indigenous, enslaved or incarcerated, and the need for limits on patriarchal privilege if national reproduction were to be successful in alien settings and on other people’s lands.

This chapter interrogates trends in how the natural world is taken up, governed and constituted by international law, in particular the growing marketisation of environmental governance. This chapter suggests it is fruitful to understand these contemporary forms of governance as constituted by the co-articulation of two older anthropocentric modalities of exercising power over nature: appropriative domination and stewardship. It provides a background to both these modalities, showing that though these are often understood as opposites, on a deeper level they are similar. It suggests that the ‘offset’ relation is the paradigmatic example of the co-articulation of these two modalities, as the ‘offset’ establishes a relationship between activities that damage the environment at one site and activities intended to protect, repair, or improve the environment elsewhere. This chapter situates such mechanisms as one element of a broader project to make nature legible in economic terms. In closing, this chapter considers the effects of the rise of ‘green governmentality’ and maps the terrain against which struggles for different nature/human relations take place.

In 1905, Mohandas Gandhi paid homage to Joseph Chailley, the founding father of the International Colonial Institute. Gandhi’s appreciation for Chailley exposed the complex interconnectedness of the colonial world around 1900. The Indian Opinion, a journal Gandhi published in South Africa, bestowed honor upon the Frenchman Chailley, who had recently spent several months in the Dutch Indies and was about to coauthor a book with British colonial administrators. To give the imperial interconnectedness an institution, Chailley had established the International Colonial Institute (ICI) in Brussels, as early as 1893. By 1905, this institute had grown to become the most important think tank for colonial rule, continuing with 136 (white) members. As it styled itself as reformist, this institute raised hopes among colonial subjects around the world. Gandhi’s Indian Opinion saw in Chailley’s writings on India “an unbiased testimony of a stranger,” and an adequate description of British colonial mismanagement: “He finds himself in a vast agricultural country, where there is great poverty and where commerce and trade are entirely local and therefore without real importance. He notices an absence of industrial activity, he discovers some people, perhaps owning fortunes, but – there is no capital.”1 Fighting against the underdevelopment of colonies was the declared aim of the ICI. Its members claimed to develop colonies through cooperation among international experts who would get the most out of the colonized population and the colonial economy. Gandhi was not alone in falling for this delusion, which actually served to legitimize and perpetuate colonial domination.2

This chapter begins by tracing the strong links between traditional political history writing and identity politics, be it national identity, the identity of empires or religious identity. It then analyses the crisis of political history writing in the 1960s and 1970s. Finally it examines the remaking of the ‘new’ political history, highlighting (a) a stonger concern for popular politics, (b) a major emphasis on the languages of politics, (c) the desire to look for links between popular politics and popular religion and (d) the study of political transfers. Overall the new political history has done much to problematise the strong link between political history writing and identity formation.

The worldwide exportation of the nation-state went hand in hand with the diffusion of the Western concept of religion, both of which are notably related to the expansion of the Westphalian order. Exploring the diffusion of the twin concepts of nation-state and religion intersects with two bodies of knowledge: nationalism and secularization. Combining them helps explain why and how religion and politics influence each other. Historical institutionalism and conceptual history are used to establish areas of politicization of religion in the qualitative phase of the research and to identify patterns in big data bases in the quantitative phase of the research. This approach is applied to the politicization of religion in Syria, Turkey, India, China and Russia.

Here I outline two crucial concepts that are returned to throughout the book. The first is the notion of ‘undead capital’, a concept that provides a lens to analyze the specific commodity form that working animals took in the colony. The second is an expanded understanding of colonial bio-politics, a politics that I argue served to render animals (including humans) into three states, namely, as subjects, as objects, and as abject. Together these concepts outline two key underpinning forces that shaped how animals came to be valued under colonial rule in Myanmar. In the first concept, this was through a process of valorisation as animal capital. In the second concept, this was through a governmentalizing evaluation of an animal.