The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Powe

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The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India

History > Asia - India & South Asia

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PublisherCambridge University Press
Book FormatPaperback
ISBN-139781108407014
PublishedMay 03 2020
Dimension9 X 6 X 0.58 inches
Weight 0.81 pounds
BISACHistory > Asia - India & South Asia
Categories(Single Author) Asian American
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

In this provocative new work, Mark Condos explores the 'dark underside' of the ideologies that sustained British rule in India. Using Punjab as a case study, he argues that India's colonial overlords were obsessively fearful, and plagued by an unreasoning belief in their own vulnerability as rulers. These enduring anxieties precipitated, and justified, an all too frequent recourse to violence, joined with an insistence on untrammelled power placed in the hands of the executive. Examining how the British colonial experience was shaped by a chronic sense of unease, anxiety, and insecurity, this is a timely intervention in debates about the contested project of colonial state-building, the oppressive and violent practices of colonial rule, the nature of imperial sovereignty, law, and policing and the postcolonial legacies of empire.

Author Bio

Mark Condos is a historian interested in the intersections between violence, race, and law within the British and French Empires, with a particular focus on India and Algeria.

He completed both his BA (Hons.) and MA at Queen’s University in Canada. In 2013, he received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining King's College London in January 2020, Mark held a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at Queen Mary, University of London, between 2014 and 2017, and subsequently worked as a Lecturer in Imperial and Global History between 2017 and 2020.

Research Interests

His previous research has examined the relationship between militarism, violence, and state-building in colonial Punjab and along the North-West Frontier of British India. This work explored how colonial anxieties, fears, and vulnerabilities played an important role in determining the authoritarian and often violent practices of the British colonial state.

Mark has also written extensively on the phenomenon of ‘fanaticism’ along the North-West Frontier of British India, tracing the colonial origins of some of the key legal and discursive tropes in contemporary engagements with terrorist violence.

He is currently working on two different projects. The first examines how various forms of legal and extrajudicial violence were incorporated by the British and French empires in their attempts to police different frontier regions, with particular emphasis on the ways that Indian revolutionaries used the tangled legal geography of British and French India to carry out their activities in the early 20th century. The second project looks at how concepts of prestige, dignity, and honour informed imperial practices of retributive violence, and the ways that imperial powers attempted to justify these within legal, moral, and other normative frameworks.

Colonial India and Punjab
Imperial and global history, c. 1750-1947
French Algeria
Colonial anxiety, fear, and terror
Anti-colonial resistance and insurgency
Race and violence
Law
Imperial policing and pacification
Frontiers
Empire

Source: King's College London

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