Colonial States, Colonial Rule, Colonial Governmentalities: Implications for the Study of Historical State Crime

Notes

1. This characterization draws from Cooper (2005) whose criticism was directed at historians and postcolonial scholars inclined to ignore that “the state” has no essence itself, but is merely the combined work of actual, once-living agents.

2. Despite the title of this work including the word “empire”, the empire of capital to which it refers could equally be described simply as global capital and the book does not engage meaningfully with either colonialism or empire in a way relevant to the current discussion.

3. For the history of interest, debt and land alienation in pre-colonial times, see Darling (1925). He observes that through to the end of the nineteenth century, much rural life was pre-capitalist and outside the money economy. Agricultural interest was levied in seed itself and prior to British times the rate of interest on seed was up to 60 per cent. Later in the British period, it reduced to around 25 per cent, but compounding interest would still double that debt in 2 years.