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often illicit, networks that organised the Chinese communities in the colony. These men were usually of obscure origin and occupied precarious positions in the colonial hierarchy: they were prone to corruption and the abuse of power; some were racially indeterminate; and, in the eyes of bourgeois colonial society, they mixed far too freely with the Chinese criminals they were supposed to be suppressing. Yet they were vital to the running of this troubled frontier colony. Daniel Caldwell, the archetypal European middleman in a
; and also that they contained the seeds of their own transformation. I also want to suggest that Burke’s reflections on the encounter of multiple legal systems were central to his more general project of chastening power. Unlike Hastings, who invoked multiple legal systems as means of authorising and channelling British power, Burke appealed to those systems as constraints on that power. He criticised the Company’s use of legal structures and arguments to deny Indians recourse against abuses of power, and Company officials’ efforts to arrange and appeal to plural
of imperial policy as well as the formation of new international relationships that anticipated the eventual First World War blocs. From the very beginning, Punch 's response to the massacres leaves no doubt that discussions over Ottoman abuses of power were of central importance to late Victorian politics and society. When news of massacres of Anatolian Armenians began to appear in British newspapers in the latter half of 1894, the killings were ‘swiftly politicised’. 12 This was part of a
denunciations, however, are far from similar. James Mill was convinced that this mixed system of government, with the military affairs under British control and the civil administration under the native prince’s own staff, resulted only in ‘misgovernment’ and ‘mismanagement’, in particular because it eliminated the traditional forms of political checks and balances against the tyrannical abuse of power: 20
responsibilities of governments and the rightful claims of the people. 43 Past abuses of power have arisen out of the imperfect state of our knowledge, but now the government is making every effort to perfect its administration; such ‘progressive improvement is all that we have a right to expect’. 44 The problems are considerable. India
combination of its power as a prominent bully pulpit and its constitutional power to refuse to pass the colonial budget, the Reichstag could seek to temper flagrant abuses of power in the colonies, albeit generally ex post facto , as the example of the ‘Hottentot Election’ of 1907 discussed below illustrates. This balance of sovereign power in German South-West Africa was, however
the textbooks reassured the student that without an abuse of power, and with proper concern for ‘native’ protection, there was ample room for the British in Africa, without the complications posed by the more ‘advanced’ societies of India or China. 43 Notes 1 H. A. Cairns, Prelude to Imperialism , London, 1965 , chapter IX
’s Saturday Review referred to it as a ‘newfangled term over which there is much unprofitable controversy’. 41 In Britain, in particular, the word brought to mind Napoleon III and the French Second Empire; as such, it was linked with despotic governance and the abuse of power as much as with the acquisition of territory. 42 Thus, in his celebrated Midlothian Campaign of 1879–80, Gladstone could
stories. Prominent among these preoccupations is the use and abuse of power. Multatuli began the tradition of using fiction to address the problem of responsibility in the colonial relationship. In the nineteenth century, his novel Max Havelaar , and others, like Perelaer’s Baboe Dalima and Annie Foore’s Indies Marriages , dramatised examples of injustice and negligence in the colonial system, and
effect to cause when evaluating direct and indirect evidence. In his Rationale of Evidence , first printed in 1827, Bentham addressed ‘the relationship between the world of fact, the world of fiction and our modes of apprehending both; [and] the institution of the oath as an instrument and as a symbol of both coercion and abuse of power by the forces of unreason …’. 36 These