Small review of Mahmood Mamdani's Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity
I capped off 2024 by reading Mamdani's Neither Settler Nor Native , which was a fantastic romp, so I figured I'd get around to the little book that came before it, his 2012 Define and Rule . Here's what I thought of it. Define and Rule is something like the skeleton key to Mahmood Mamdani's more recent and elaborate Neither Settler Nor Native . As the smaller, more focused work however, it packs an undeniably larger punch. Its objective is straightforward: to get at the specificity of how imperial 'indirect' rule worked (particularly under the British), as distinct from the earlier 'direct' rule of Roman empire. The answer too, is relatively straightforward. If the Romans ruled over subjects whose identities were already largely defined and given, the British (and Dutch) took this one step further and intervened in the very shaping of the identities of those they colonized. Such was the distinction between the Roman 'divide and rule', a...