Yael Berda provides an intricate depiction of British colonial bureaucracies in India, Palestine, and Cyprus, exploring the complex legacies of these systems and their implications for the postimperial formation of states and citizens. Her main argument is that racial hierarchy and the perpetuation of emergency laws were mutually reinforcing features of British rule and, therefore, British bureaucracy. Subsequently, these features shaped state power during and after the transition to independence. In the wake of violent partition, or under its looming potential shadow, state-builders inherited British tools for classifying, surveilling, restricting, and excluding populations. These practices continue “to shape the way citizenship is practiced and experienced in the present day” (p. 162).
To make this argument, Berda introduces and mobilizes several, connected concepts. The first concept is hybrid bureaucracy, which is not grounded in the rule of law or Weberian rationality, but instead features “administrative flexibility and secrecy” and “wide discretion and personalism” (p. 33). The hybrid bureaucracy gets its name from “The Government of Subject Races,” a 1908 essay by Evelyn Baring (aka Lord Cromer), the chief British official in Egypt prior to World War I. Through a careful review of Cromer’s writings and correspondences, Berda derives the foundational characteristics of the British colonial bureaucracy, a system that she argues was not utterly ad hoc or incoherent. In particular, Berda identifies five key features. Among them, the bureaucracy’s embodiment of racial hierarchy is perhaps the most fundamental. The bureaucracy also features “personalism,” as opposed to impersonal rational-legalism, “secrecy, wide discretion and administrative flexibility, and the systemic creation of exceptions” (p. 35). The latter feature is best exemplified in the perpetuation of emergency rule, discussed more below. Chapter 1 introduces this bureaucratic architecture, and also documents how these features were tested, refined, and disseminated from India to other British colonies, including Cyprus and Mandatory Palestine.
To advance our understanding of the workings of British bureaucracy, particularly in the interwar period, Berda situates her work in the literature on emergency rule. Although the mostly static features of the hybrid bureaucracy described above were the basis upon which policies and practices were developed, the invocation of emergency is a critical contextual factor for the remainder of Berda’s conceptual innovations. The axes of population classification that were used to document, surveil, and control colonial subjects in Berda’s account were constituted by, and themselves reinforced, the invocation of a crisis or emergency. Berda identifies two, often mutually reinforcing classification schemes used vis-à-vis populations living under British rule: the axis of racial hierarchy and the axis of loyalty and suspicion. Although the newly independent states of Israel and India employed some of the same tools as their British predecessors in creating classification schema, the specific identity markers or individual traits that were used to designate suspicious populations under British colonial rule were not always perfectly reproduced in the new states.
What Berda refers to as the “bureaucratic toolkit of emergency” (the title of Chapter 3) had durable effects for new states after British withdrawal, becoming “the very permanent foundations of new state bureaucracies and the delineation of citizenship” (p. 128). Perhaps most poignant is Berda’s examination of how India and Israel, in particular, used permit regimes and mobility restrictions to exclude those who were displaced from the new states after partition and the Nakba, respectively. As Berda writes, “Virtually overnight, people who had been colonial subjects became refugees who would be classified as intruders, infiltrators, undesirables, and security threats” (p. 162). A fine-grained exploration of how India iterated its permit regime in Chapter 5 has strong echoes of colonial-era anxieties, interministerial negotiations, and the necessity of cruel, administrative inventions. Here, as well, the persistence of Berda’s hybrid bureaucracy—administrative discretion, the creation of exceptions, and personalism, for example—shines through. The comparison of India to Israel’s military rule over Palestinians who stayed within the 1949 armistice lines is nuanced and authoritative. Berda’s work on the iterative, bureaucratic consolidation of Israel’s military exclusion of, and rule over, Palestinian populations in the wake of the Nakba is revelatory.
Yet, Berda’s emphasis on spatial mobility and movement may imbue the status of Palestinian citizens in the new Israeli state (1949–66) with too much complexity and variation. Some would argue that, despite Berda’s claim, ethnic (or ethnonational) identity indeed produces a “categorical” type of citizenship. In other words, all Palestinians forced to live under 17 years of internal military occupation after Israel’s independence experienced a quite similar official status. Finally, in the case of Cyprus, the legacies of population classification are more tenuous, because the emergency powers were revoked at independence (see below).
Deeply entwined with the classification of peoples and the invocation of emergency powers is the concept of mobility regimes, which were used first by the British and, subsequently, by independent governments, to control movement of subjects and populations and, ultimately, political belonging. Chapter 2, although it has a brief discussion of colonial methods for controlling the spatial mobility of subjects, focuses most intensively on the significance of colonial censuses as venues for group-based mobilization and the politicization of identities. Berda claims that the censuses themselves had “far-reaching implications” (p. 73) for political relationships even after British withdrawal, for example, between Greek and Turkish Cypriots; in determining “suspicious” displaced populations in the wake of India’s partition; or in contributing to demographic battles in Palestine.
Berda insists that this particular model of exclusionary state-building—one grounded in control over movement—supersedes, or otherwise challenges, alternative models. For example, she often contrasts her mobility-based framework with regimes of citizenship that are grounded in the concept of “rights.” It is only toward the end of the volume that the reader begins to grasp the rival claim to which Berda refers; it is the idea that citizenship inherently confers uniform rights within the state. Of course, such a definition of citizenship is not uncritically accepted in relevant scholarship. Therefore, this reader was left wondering whether controlling movement is simply one way, among many possible others, that a state can enact a tiered system of rights upon its citizenry. Should we understand Berda’s contribution as emphasizing mobility instead of rights, or mobility as a type of right?
There is some question about the relationship between the cases, that is, India and Palestine, on one hand, and Cyprus on the other. At times, Cyprus is set up as a negative case because “colonial emergency laws were relinquished at independence” leading to a “divergence” (p. 165) from the cases of India and Palestine. Nonetheless, Berda notes that mobility restrictions were a central feature of the period of 1960s constitutional collapse when Turkish Cypriots lived “under a military siege” (p. 129). Overall, however, we are left with the observation that Cyprus’s “mobility regime” after independence is simply different from that of India or Israel/Palestine, with each of the latter advancing their own clear axes of suspicion and exclusion. Berda suggests that Cyprus’s cancellation of emergency laws at independence set up its alternative trajectory: “This divergence highlights the choice to retain the colonial emergency laws as the decisive factor through which bureaucracy in the new states amassed the power and authority to shape political outcomes, including political membership” (p. 165). However, in the context of the 1963–64 crisis, it appears that Greek Cypriots achieved the disenfranchisement of Turkish Cypriots by other means, so one wonders whether these outcomes would have been different in the event that colonial-era emergency laws were deployed.
The text is dense in its references to existing literature in historical and legal sociology, and the manuscript leans decidedly toward abstract theory. This is buttressed by a sweeping collection of empirical insights from intensive engagement with state and colonial archival sources across Berda’s three cases. However, there is a considerable excess to both: both in the laborious development of theory across choppy chapter structures and in the tapestry of primary source material. The latter includes colonial bureaucratic schema, communications, maps, policies, and laws. Berda’s prose can be overworked or repetitive. Causally oriented theorists will need to expend considerable effort to pull out core statements of argument, sometimes buried deep in the chapter, and to elevate the most consequential pieces of supporting evidence. However, there are many gems over the course of the journey, and the discussion and references contained in the footnotes to the main text evince an assiduous engagement with both archival material and secondary sources.
Another question that lurks throughout the volume, albeit somewhere in the background, is Berda’s use of the concept of legitimacy. It is never quite clear, when the author claims, for example, that “The hybrid bureaucracy gained legitimacy through the proliferation of rules” (p. 96) or “the expansion of emergency laws provided legitimacy to bureaucratic use of spatial control and violent enforcement” (p. 113), what is meant by legitimate and for whom. According to Berda, British colonial officials, in particular, were “preoccup[ied] with legality and legitimacy,” and this drove them to codify emergency laws, yet “the use of emergency laws proliferated in tandem with a decline in legitimacy of colonial rule” (p. 123, emphasis added). Israel’s “decision not to incorporate” the 1945 emergency law as formal legislation into the newly independent state “was central to the nascent state’s campaign for political legitimacy” (p. 120); yet, as Berda describes, these emergency powers were summoned by the military in its internal occupation over Palestinian civilians.
Today, we read Berda’s work in the context of a global drift toward authoritarianism and a growing powerlessness in normative injunctions against state violence. Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship provokes important questions about whether bureaucratic procedures, discretion, and categories of exception play any role in upholding today’s regimes of domination.
