Jon E. Wilson's monograph makes three very significant and related claims. First, Wilson argues that the emergence of the British colonial state in Bengal was a part of the worldwide transformation of the systems of governance in the late eighteenth century. In this process, “indecision and ambivalence” (2) came to characterize all interactions between the modern state and its subjects. These subjects, who were no longer part of a kinship structure or a stable social hierarchy, elicited the desire on the part of the state to see itself responsible for “the domination of strangers.”
Second, Wilson argues that such “governance by modern, impersonal bureaucratic regimes” (182) was implemented in late eighteenth-century British-ruled Bengal before it became the kind of governance familiar to Europeans, thus revising Eric Stokes's classic genealogy of the utilitarian governing mentality in a colonial environment. This originary alienation of the rulers from the ruled was brought about by a “practical semantic crisis” (12) suffered by the colonizers in their daily attempts to understand and rule the colonized in the courthouse and in the revenue office.
Finally, such an experience of governance of “people whom British officials regarded as different and impossible to communicate with” (183) produced a constant “state of restless unease” (13) among the rulers. The “machine-like conduct” (18) of their colonial government was a response to this perpetual “sense of anxiety” (8), an assessment that echoes Ranajit Guha's earlier accounts of the affective history of British empire. To soothe the distress, Wilson claims, the colonial governmental machine relentlessly reinvented abstract concepts and general categories (e.g., “Bengali landholder,” “Hindu family,” and “Indian society”) by which it hoped to contain its wily subjects. Wilson suggests that the “permanent settlement,” a profound transformation of the structure of land ownership in India introduced under Governor-General Cornwallis in 1793, was one such “unsuccessful attempt to suppress those anxieties” (47).
Wilson claims that in its anxiety-ridden transition to the “new principles of legitimacy” (185), the colonial state in Bengal effected a radical rupture in the political actors’ relationship to the experiential, the local, and the tangible. For the purposes of deducing reliable general rules and categories for governance, the rulers “invented forms of jurisprudence” (186) and a “new constitution” (187). These legal concepts were located in the past no one remembered and designed to bring about the utopian futures that would replace the imperfect present. Thus, Wilson insists that the concept of time must be central to the study of colonial history: the vigilance about pursuing the new logic of rule—the constant renewal of the policies’ ties to the past and to the future—took precedence in the minds of the rulers over concerns with the policies’ immediate results in the present. Active modern state building, that “domination of strangers” from the title, was therefore by definition partially successful, designed to require ever new forms of alienation.
As an account of the processes whereby modern subjects found themselves protégés of states with little trust in empirical experience, Wilson's study is at its most compelling when it examines the legacy of colonialism as it survives in the methodologies of historiography. Wilson's constellation of methodological innovations aims to enable a kind of “new imperial history” unconfined by overly rigid, abstract, and unitary ideologies of empire. Using “anxiety” as an explanation for the actions of a government faced with a “crisis of colonial experience” (16), Wilson intends to mitigate the force of historical explanations powered by “over-simplified abstract forces” (17) such as “capitalism, the colonial state, the ‘modern regime of power’ or indigenous Indian society” (17). Consequently, Wilson's “book is concerned to explain historical change” (17), but it is also an invitation to explore further the “emotional history of colonial politics”—the history of affect that “mediates” for human historical subjects the more “objective forces” (e.g., the fiscal and political crises) that shape their lives (189).
The multiplication of historical forces and subjects allows eighteenth-century European colonialism to be seen as a less than “intellectually coherent project” (ix): it was more like a series of fits and less like a grand plan. In place of a history limited to the study of “colonial representation and discourse,” Wilson calls for a historiography of empire focusing more immediately on colonial “institutions or practices” (6) that gave rise to particular discourses. The prospect of such historiography is exciting because it recognizes that British colonialism, the political project in which “a group of people actively maintain their strangeness from the population whom they dominate” (190), has been constituted by constant revision.
While such historical narratives can illustrate “the wide gap that often exists between consciousness and action” (17), Wilson's also remains ambivalent about the available means of access, uncontaminated by representation and discourse, to historical subjects, to their consciousness, and to the historical forces that induce them to act. It distributes historical forces along a scale of objectivity or empirical verifiability in a political history of erosion of the value of experience, and it will inevitably raise questions about the significance it grants to human agency and deliberation. Since it assumes constancy and objectivity of an affect (“anxiety”), for instance, it neglects the possibility that the relationship of “anxiety” to colonialism may have been subject to revision by political and historical agents and that this transformation could be tied to the dynamic histories of economics, modern state formation, racism, and xenophobia. Wilson duly notes that it is “impossible to distinguish cause and effect with much rigour” (67) when it comes to explaining why sentiments toward India among its British rulers gradually turned for the worse.
Still, Wilson's emphasis on the transformation of colonialism's relationship to time foregrounds the importance of a fundamentally different relationship between historiography and statecraft to which we have grown accustomed since the period central to this study. Like the colonial inventions, this is inevitably a study of new pasts that nobody remembers, based on the “pictures on the wall” (12) that the colonial subjects and their rulers present to us. As such, this volume breathes new life into the study of colonialism's relationship to writing and documentation by suggesting that colonial archives are also archives of feeling and that they are yet to explain the damage colonialism caused.
