Rethinking the Colonial State: Family, Gender, and Governmentality in Eighteenth-Century British Frontiers

Abstract

States, if the pun be forgiven, state … They define, in great detail, acceptable forms and images of social activity and individual and collective identity … Indeed, in this sense, “the State” never stops talking.1 Studies of the colonial state may seem to be characterized more by plenitude than by lack. Scholars have been assiduous in suggesting theories of its nature and its relationship to the legal and political structures of Western imperial modernity.2 However, the eighteenth-century British colonial state has received far less attention. Historians of Britain have recently been keen to examine the expansion of the Hanoverian state in a period of protracted war and intense international rivalries, but generally have limited their inquiries to the targets and reach of the amalgamated metropolitan “British” state. That this “fiscal-military state,” as John Brewer famously dubbed it, precociously forged some of the unique capacities of modern states is now taken as read, as is the role of these capacities in Britain's domination and ultimate victory in the century of war for trade and empire that ended at Waterloo.3 Perhaps as a result of the effectiveness of this institutional model, imperial historians of the period have been less interested in thinking about “a colonial state” as such, which has been conceptualized by default either as un état manqué of weak institutional forms and limited coercive powers, or as the unfinished product of negotiation between metropolitan and colonial authorities that bestowed considerable autonomy on British domains from North America to the Indian Ocean.4 What remains striking is that the performative nature of state power, and the cultural intimations and practices of state-building, tend to escape sustained attention: the “great arch” of English state formation as cultural revolution, so masterfully described by Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer some years ago, remains curiously under-constructed within eighteenth-century British colonial history, while the studies of institutional forms of state power in turn tend to forget that the entity called “the State” is a fiction.5

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