Patrons, Clients, and Empire

Patrons, Clients, and Empire

Chieftaincy and Over-rule in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific

COLIN NEWBURY

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To the Memory of

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Historians of Empire

Preface and Acknowledgements

Reflection on the central theme of this book began in the 1950s,when I was engaged in the study of Polynesian ‘kingship’ before and duringcolonial rule in the central and eastern Pacific. The theme of traditional lead-ership under imperial rule continued to command my interest during severalyears of teaching and research in Nigeria, at a period when assumptionsabout ‘modernization’ in local and regional government in Africa were put to the test by transfer of power to political parties under new leaders. My understanding of the history of foreign over-rule in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific was subsequently challenged by a long-running series of graduateteaching seminars at Oxford in the 1970s and 1980s, where students and colleagues critically examined historical sources and methods. As one ofthose colleagues later wrote, we absorbed from widely different case studiesin time and place a ‘concept of continuity’ as ‘the peculiar stamp of imperialhistory at Oxford’.

That sense of continuity in the case of indigenous leadership and hierarchyhas, I think, remained with me. But as far as I can remember the model of political clientage did not feature much in our courses and seminars, thoughcritique of ‘collaboration’ and other euphemisms for foreign over-rule cer-tainly did. In retrospect, I think we circled around, rather than confronting,the broad topic of ethnological ‘encounters’, suspicious, as historians alwaysare, of ready-made theories from the Social Sciences. In those days the idea ofimperial rule as a form of discourse, as well as a source of tension and conflict,was better developed for the histories of settler societies than for African,Asian, or other societies. (Histories of the old Dominions illustrated the pointin detail.) Self-government, however, changed the historiographical perspec-tive for later successor states, as it had earlier for the political history of thesettler colonies. But the problem of accounting for political structures in otherterritories under imperial over-rule in terms that were not simplistic assump-tions about the transformation or preservation of chieftaincy through imported administrative skills in the face of alternative political elites still re-mains. Fortunately for historians the insights of other disciplines in the post-imperial study of successor regimes have increased. The weight of evidence infavour of continuities in civil and military government suggests rule through‘chiefs’, ‘big men’, and patrimonial presidents has taken on new forms withinthe parties and bureaucracies of post-colonial states. And if that is so, whatwas the political role of the administrative ‘guardians’ in the imperial phase—enlightened despots, judicious referees, or active participants in the ebb and

flow of local power struggles for status, authority, and resources? Answers attempted since the 1960s tend to concentrate on the origins, character, andintentions of the over-rulers. A different approach from the viewpoint of theruled regards alien rulers as essentially transient obstacles to national inde-pendence. But the legacies of imperial rule are not to be dismissed so lightly,especially if the focus is on the politics of administration and state-building.It helps, too, to widen the perspective over a number of imperial cases drawnfrom different political cultures to see whether there were common featuresto the interaction of indigenous and alien leaders.

An exploration of cases has to be selective and cover both the historiogra-phy and the narrative of imperial administration. This is especially so if thestudy is to be useful in teaching courses and for the general reader. Conse-quently, I have drawn heavily on area specialists as well as the work of an-thropologists and political scientists in fields other than my own. They are notresponsible, of course, for the argument or the conclusions of this study, orthe use I have made of a patron–client model to explain relationships withinimperial hierarchies. There are three reasons for this choice of method. Oneis that clientage is rooted in the segmentary politics typical of many pre-colonial societies and continued within the structure of European over-rule.Secondly, and especially for eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century admin-istrators overseas, advancement by patronage within a hierarchy was a familiar technique, recognizable in other societies and open to manipulation.Finally, there are continuities in the way post-colonial leaders organize andexercise power. The study, therefore, has some relevance to our judgement onimperial administration for failure or success in ‘preparing’ for the exigenciesand responsibilities of devolved government within political cultures thatcould be influenced but not entirely restructured, within the confines of uni-tary or federal states.

Accordingly, my debts to academic predecessors and contemporary schol-ars and friends cover several continents and many libraries. I owe much at theoutset to the late Professor Richard Gilson and Professor J. D. Freeman at theAustralian National University for their special knowledge of Polynesian political and social structures, and to the well-documented and perceptive observations of Professor Douglas Oliver in many aspects of leadership in Pacific societies. Richard Gilson was an exemplary scholar, anthropologist,and historian, keenly aware from his work on Samoan and Cook Islands so-cieties of the political continuities in nineteenth-century indigenous leader-ship at different levels and in contemporary government. Similarly, I learneda great deal from the late Professor K. O. Diké, as Director of the NigerianRecord Office at Ibadan, and from Professor Saburi O. Biobaku as head of theYoruba Historical Research Project. Both, too, in their own ways were wellversed in the art of patronage. Most of all I am indebted to the insights of Professor M. G. Smith into the anthropological theory of political conflict

viii Preface and Acknowledgements

and organization, and for a case study of politics and administration in aNigerian emirate that remains a model of its kind. The dedication of thisstudy to two outstanding colleagues and friends does no more than epitomizea long-standing gratitude to historians who have grappled with similar ex-planatory problems. That respect extends to include Frederick Madden andDavid Fieldhouse, whose edited collections of documents I have systemati-cally plundered for cases and ideas; to Professor Judith Brown, Balliol College, and to Professors P. J. Marshall and Andrew Porter of Kings College,London University, whose advice and encouragement came at opportune moments. Advice and material assistance were provided generously, too, byPeter Carstens, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Toronto, andby John Flint, Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University. I owe a special debtto Professor Jerry H. Bentley, University of Hawai‘i, Editor of the Journal ofWorld History, who published an earlier version of some of the themes andcases in this book. Similarly, Dale B. Robertson and Sharlene Rohter as edi-tors of Pacific Studies accepted a pilot study of patronage in the HawaiianKingdom which has been drawn on here. At the University of Hawai‘i, too,Dr Chieko Tachihata and Joan Hori gave access to the Hawaiian Collectionof the Thomas Hale Hamilton Library and Professor David Hanlon madeavailable research facilities within the Department of History. In NewZealand the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies Christchurch underthe direction of Dr Ueantabo Neemia-Mackenzie allowed me to take up a Visiting Scholarship at Christchurch in 1999 to revise the Pacific section ofthis book. I am especially grateful for the support of the Centre’s Administra-tive Assistant, Kate Scott, and for the opportunity to discuss that researchwith Professor Peter Hempenstall and Dr Ian Campbell in the Department of History, Canterbury University. At the University of the South Pacific, Fiji,Professor Stewart Firth has always been willing to offer counsel from hisknowledge of past and current Pacific History. As ever, Oxford UniversityPress has provided firm guidance and an enlightened and sympathetic aware-ness of the problems of textual presentation. I am grateful to Ruth Parr, Commissioning Editor, History, and to Anne Gelling, Kay Rogers, Dr LynnChildress, and the cartographer of the Press for their professional services. Finally, a special word of thanks is due to Linacre College for material assistance and fellowship.

C.N.Oxford, Hilary Term, 2002

Preface and Acknowledgements ix

Contents

List of Figures and Table xiii

List of Maps xiv

List of Abbreviations xv

Introduction 1

part i . indian states

1. Trade and Dependency 19

2. Reversal of Status 27

3. Clients and Brokers 47

4. Rulers and Raj 56

part ii . north africa

5. Egypt and Sudan 79

6. Morocco 90

part iii . sub-saharan africa

7. Western Africa 101

8. East-Central Africa 125

9. Southern Africa 137

part iv . maritime south-east asia

10. Malaya 149

part v . pacific islands

11. Hawai‘i 183

12. Fiji 216

13. Tonga 240

Conclusion 256

List of Sources Used 285

Index 307

xii Contents

List of Figures and Table

FIGURES

1. Presidency finances 31

2. Northern Nigeria, revenue and expenditure 115

3. Revenue, Malay States, 1875–1896 160

4. Hawaiian government revenue and expenditure, 1852–1890/92 199

TABLE

The Kamehameha Dynasty and Kaukau Ali‘i 193

List of Maps

1. India, late eighteenth century 28

2. India, States and Provinces, early twentieth century 66

3. Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, late 1930s 87

4. Morocco, early twentieth century 91

5. Gold Coast and Nigeria, 1912 105

6. States and societies of the Great Lakes 127

7. The Malay States, late nineteenth century 153

8. The Hawaiian Archipelago 184

9. Pre-colonial Fiji: Confederations and Chiefdoms 217

10. The Tongan Archipelago 241

Permission from the British Library to reproduce the watercolour of Resident Sir JohnHadley d’Oyly and Nawab Mubarak-ud-Daula at the Murshidabad Darbar from theOriental and India Office Collection, Add. Or. 3205, is gratefully acknowledged. Map7 has been adapted with the permission of the Department of Publications, Universityof Malaya. Other Maps have been adapted with the permission of Oxford UniversityPress from their publications. Permission to examine and quote from the Papers of Edward John Arnett in Rhodes House Library is also gratefully acknowledged.

List of Abbreviations

ASR African Studies ReviewBLO Bodleian Library, OxfordCEHI The Cambridge Economic History of IndiaCHA The Cambridge History of AfricaCHBE The Cambridge History of the British EmpireCHI The Cambridge History of IndiaCHSA The Cambridge History of Southeast AsiaCO Colonial OfficeCP Contemporary PacificCSSH Comparative Studies in Society and HistoryFO Foreign OfficeHJH Hawaiian Journal of HistoryHSA Hawai‘i State ArchivesJAH Journal of African HistoryJAS Journal of Asian StudiesJCAS Journal of Contemporary African StudiesJCCP Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative PoliticsJEH Journal of Economic HistoryJHSN Journal of the Historical Society of NigeriaJICH Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth HistoryJLAO Journal of Local Administration OverseasJMH Journal of Modern HistoryJPH Journal of Pacific HistoryJPS Journal of the Polynesian SocietyJRAI Journal of the Royal Anthropological InstituteJSAS Journal of Southern African StudiesJSO Journal de la Société des OcéanistesJWH Journal of World HistoryMAS Modern Asian StudiesNCHI The New Cambridge History of IndiaNZJH New Zealand Journal of HistoryOHBE The Oxford History of the British EmpirePEB Pacific Economic BulletinPHR Pacific Historical ReviewPS Pacific StudiesRHL Rhodes House Library, OxfordWHQ Western Historical Quarterly

Introduction

There will . . . be a Nabob with an Allowance suitable to his Dignity andthe territorial Jurisdiction will still be in the Chiefs of the Country, actingunder him, and the Presidency in conjunction; though the Revenues willbelong to the Company.

(Governor Baron Robert Clive to the Court of Directors, 30 Sept. 17651)

When Clive informed the directors of the East India Company that govern-ment of their new conquests in Bengal could be carried out cheaply and effec-tively through a stipended Indian ruler, his claim was as old as empire, thoughnot as straightforward as he made it sound. In the absence of sustained coer-cion, the relationship between imperial powers and subordinate societies hasalways been a rich field for compromises in human interaction. In the longterm a degree of cooperation in the interests of social survival makes subor-dination bearable, if not agreeable. There might be established, as the Britishin India found, a mutual dependency between officials and local service gentry. As Clive indicated, divided jurisdiction over British subjects and sub-jects of the prince in the Bengal example was a usual and necessary concessionto local law and custom. Access to resources for the paramount power wasexplicit.

Nevertheless, as the British were to find, there were ambiguities in sub-ordinate cooperation between the first and second orders in the imperial hierarchy—between alien over-rulers and a subordinate elite responsible forinternal administration. Prescribing a new order did not entirely remove active opposition or sullen tolerance existing between a subject nobility withits own traditions of authority and loyalty and incoming military or civilianofficials with their own preconceptions of how indigenous society was run.Consequently, the historiography of imperial expansion, occupation, andwithdrawal contains numerous euphemisms to disguise gaps in cultural un-derstanding and to encapsulate the strategies of survival within one culturepurposefully influenced by another—at arm’s length, rather than by assimila-tion. The terminology of subordination includes ‘paramountcy’, ‘protection’,‘subsidiary alliance’, ‘indirect rule’, ‘collaboration’, drawn mainly fromBritish experience in India and Africa. In sociological terms the voluntary or

1 Cited in Frederick Madden, ed., with David Fieldhouse, Select Documents on the Con-stitutional History of the British Empire and Commonwealth, iii. Imperial Reconstruction1763–1840: The Evolution of Alternative Systems of Colonial Government (Westport, 1987),156.

involuntary hierarchy may also be expressed as a patron and client relation-ship with its roots in the classical clientelae established by Roman rule overthe Hellenes and in North Africa, on the model of domestic bargains arrangedbetween a protective superior and a steward for benefits in kind.2 At all levelsthe long history of clientage or ‘clientelism’ between states, individuals, andcorporate groups has a large literature of its own.3 Within a wide variety ofcultural contexts, political scientists and sociologists have identified forms ofdependency in labour and land use, wage employment and protection, debtservicing, ranging through ‘tenurial systems in Egypt, Thailand, Cyrenaica;the politics of rotten boroughs in India; disbursement of loans and scholar-ships in Colombia, debt-peonage in Bolivia; city hall contracts for kickbacksimmigrant votes for food and jobs in the United States’.4 The common fea-tures are held to be differences in socio-economic status between dependantsand their patrons, favoured by a compliant and patron-dominated system oflocal or national government.5

Imperial historiography covers much more than the semantics of adminis-trative and socio-economic ‘systems’, but there is common ground betweenthose examining dependency and hierarchy at local levels and those studyingthe larger hierarchy of imperial and territorial dependencies. Interaction anddiscourse between rulers and ruled, it is argued here, have been fundamen-tally concerned with the politics of status rivalries, competition for office, andaccess to resources, rather than mere blueprints for orderly conduct in a colo-nial territory. For this reason, perhaps, there was little meeting of minds in thefirst half of the twentieth century between those specializing in the adminis-trative operation of empire with emphasis on the views of metropolitan officials and officials in the field and those whose main interest lay in the dy-namics of political and social change in colonial societies. That gap began toclose after the Second World War, when sociologists and political scientistsfollowed the lead of anthropologists into the politics and administration ofAsian, African, and Pacific societies, as imperial rule came to an end.6 The ini-tial divide between historians and other social scientists was one of sourcematerials and methodology, rather than any intrinsic difference in the need toexplain the ways in which imperial hierarchies functioned and their subordi-

2 Introduction

2 E. Badian, Foreign Clientelae (Oxford, 1958), 117, 125, 159.3 James C. Scott, ‘Political Clientelism: A Bibliographical Essay’, in Steffen W. Schmidt, Laura

Guasti, Carl H. Landé, James C. Scott, eds., Friends, Followers and Factions: A Reader in Political Clientelism (Berkeley, 1977), Part viii, appendix.

4 Colin Newbury, ‘Patrons, Clients, and Empire: The Subordination of Indigenous Hierarchies in Asia and Africa’, JWH 11 (2000), 227–63, esp. 228.

5 Scott, ‘Political Clientelism’, esp. 493–6, for sources on ‘Machine Politics’ and ‘Bureau-cracy’; Christopher Clapham, ed., Private Patronage and Public Power: Political Clientelism inthe Modern State (London, 1983).

6 For the background to this development, S. N. Eisenstadt and Louis Roniger, ‘Patron–ClientRelations as a Model of Structuring Social Exchange’, CSSH 22 (1980), 44–77.

Introduction 3

nate rulers survived, or not, into the period of decolonized administration bynew elites. Anthropologists (sometimes in the service of imperial rulers) had,moreover, supplied a rich collection of case materials on state-like structuresincorporated into European dominion in the wake of an earlier band ofscholar-administrators.

Much of that material was discrete, unique to particular social and politi-cal systems and, with few exceptions, little concerned with the interaction ofimperial rule and subordinate chieftainship.7 It supplied no answers to thequestion that occupied imperial historians, namely, how was it that so fewcould rule so many without general revolt for so long. To which two answerswere suggested by historians themselves. One relied on the notion of degreesof control in the imperial context with the implicit subtext of recourse to forceby the imperial state, if required. The text was more appropriate to BritishIndia, where the Raj was backed by considerable coercive power, than to thearmed police and small battalions of the protectorates and colonies of Africa,Malaysia, the Pacific, where military power was in short supply after initialperiods of conquest and occupation.8 The idea of a gradation of applied authority still has its advocates in the early and impressive typology of themodes of intervention to be found in cases of ‘indirect rule’ within the BritishEmpire, explored by D. A. Low, harking back to the degrees of supervisionexercised by political officers in the princely states under the aegis of ‘para-mountcy’.9 In the history of a settler society the technique has been kept aliveby another historian seeking to make sense of myths and realities of imperialincorporation in early New Zealand by resorting to the notion of a ‘spectrumof empire’ passing through stages of ‘false’, ‘loose’, and ‘tight’ controls ap-plied by the Pakeha state to its Maori subjects.10 The image moves from themailed fist to the velvet glove. The initiative for finding the correct applicationlay with the imperial over-ruler. But the typology of measured control is unhelpful in the broader imperial context which requires an explanation whyintervention was necessary in the first place and an account of the politicalchanges in the status of subject leaders that flowed from it.

A second approach to the exercise of imperial power was closer to ‘client-age’ in its recognition that after the initial impact of European agencies—

7 For an overview, Georges Balandier, Political Anthropology, trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith(London, 1970); Michael Banton, ed., Political Systems and the Distribution of Power (London,1965); for the relationship with imperial administrations, Jack Goody, The Expansive Moment:The Rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918–1970 (Cambridge, 1995).

8 Lawrence James, The Savage Wars: British Campaigns in Africa, 1870–1920 (London,1985); Donald Featherstone, Colonial Small Wars (Newton Abbot, 1973).

9 D. A. Low, Lion Rampant: Essays in the Study of British Imperialism (London, 1973),8–14; Terence Creagh Coen, The Indian Political Service: A Study in Indirect Rule (London,1971), chap. 3.

10 James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement tothe End of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1996), 249.

11 Madden, ed., Select Documents, iii. 271, 274, 353, 367; and iv. The Dependent Empire andIreland 1840–1900: Advance and Retreat in Representative Self-Government (Westport, 1991);Newbury, ‘Patrons, Clients, and Empire’, 230–1.

12 S. J. R. Noel, Patrons, Clients, Brokers: Ontario Society and Politics, 1791–1896 (Toronto,1990).

13 Arthur McMartin, Public Servants and Patronage: The Foundation and Rise of the NewSouth Wales Public Service, 1786–1859 (Sydney, 1983); and for Latin American examples, Sidney M. Greenfield, The Patrimonial State and Patron–Client Relations in Iberia and LatinAmerica: Sources of ‘The System’ in the Fifteenth Century Writings of the Infante D. Pedro ofPortugal (Amherst, Mass., 1976).

14 Madden, ed., Select Documents, iii, p. xxxvii.15 For a thoughtful discussion of the reasons for a change of attitude by the 1870s, Robin

Hallett, ‘Changing European Attitudes to Africa’, in CHA, v. c.1790–c.1870, ed. John E. Flint(Cambridge, 1976), 458–96; and for European dependency and ‘informal empire’ in WesternAfrica as a feature of humanitarianism, Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas andAction, 1780–1850 (Madison, 1964).

4 Introduction

commercial, missionary, military, and administrative—‘traditional’ leader-ship, followed by an educated and emergent elite leadership, acted in sym-biosis with the authority structure of the colonial state by ‘collaboration’ with administrative and representative institutions, until contesting for a monopoly of political power prior to decolonization. Indeed, there wasprecedent for this approach in examples of ‘colonial compacts’ within theolder empire of the ‘Ancient’ West Indies, where planters endured commer-cial subordination for protection, or in the ‘family compacts’ arranged byNova Scotian and New Brunswick oligarchs with patron governors.11 One innovative historian of Canadian settlement fastened on tenancies granted tothe Loyalists of Ontario as the basis of a political patronage system thatevolved from essentially personal bonds into political networks by the periodof Confederation.12 There were examples, too, of patronage by preferment inrecruitment by ‘private recommendation’ within the nascent civil service ofNew South Wales, showing that a widespread practice of social advancementin the Old World was flourishing in the New.13

That was one type of empire based on kinship and fealty, derived from thepattern of settlement already in process before the early nineteenth centuryand leading to a devolving dependency in Canada, Australia, South Africa,and New Zealand. But there were other forms of political and economic de-pendency also implicit in colonial hierarchies and explicit in treaty relations,after the loss of the American colonies. Frederick Madden argues for the diffusion of power, rather than its concentration at the centre of empire,throughout a heterogeneous collection of company investments, capturedterritories, and remnant slave colonies from the early nineteenth century.New possessions acquired in the course of external wars were managedthrough ‘forms of benevolent tutelage’ as Crown colonies.14 Within thesecases there lay a recognition that eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century officials and settlers exported with them a keen awareness of status and hierarchy mediated by military, civil, and ecclesiastical patronage that conditioned their relations with status groups in Asian or African societies.15

16 For early examples of political intervention in West Africa (contrary to Colonial Office policy), C. W. Newbury, ed., British Policy towards West Africa, i. Select Documents 1786–1874(Oxford, 1965), 247–9, 261; and in factional politics in Madras, see below note 40.

17 Ronald Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for aTheory of Collaboration’, in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe, eds., Studies in the Theory of Impe-rialism, (London, 1972), 117–42; ‘European Imperialism and Indigenous Reactions in BritishWest Africa, 1880–1914’, in H. L. Wessling, ed., Expansion and Reaction (Leiden, 1978),141–63; C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of BritishExpansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, 1983), 21.

18 J. D. Hargreaves, ‘Western Africa, 1886–1905’, in CHA, vi. From 1870 to 1920, ed. G. N.Sanderson (Cambridge, 1985), 257–97, 280; T. O. Ranger, ‘Connexions between Primary Resistance Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism in East and Central Africa’, JAH9 (1968), 437–54; and for an evaluation and critique, Wm. Roger Louis, Imperialism: TheRobinson and Gallagher Controversy (New York, 1976), 36–7, 101–2, 202–3, 219–20.

19 Carl A. Trocki, ‘Political Structures in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, inCHSA, iii, ed. Nicholas Tarling (Cambridge, 1999), 75–126. It is admitted, however, there is little ‘to distinguish systems’ so categorized: 80.

20 Peter Woodward, Sudan 1898–1989: The Unstable State (Boulder, Colo., 1990), 7.

Introduction 5

On the borders of British influence, it was a short step from trade agreementsto favouring one ruler or another in succession disputes and war.16

To encompass all these examples and periods the boldest model attemptedby historians has been one of ‘collaboration’ between elites and imperialrulers, held to apply to both European settler societies in their formativestages and to the indigenous hierarchies of tropical territories.17 Never devel-oped with much precision or detail, the model did not explore very far thebenefits extracted by either side. But in the hands of its principal exponent,the late Ronald Robinson, it had the merit of locating much of imperial government in Africa and Asia in pre-imperial structures and, secondly, in demoting the archetype of ‘indirect rule’ from its Nigerian pedestal. For thesereasons, ‘collaboration’ was seized on as a useful shorthand for surveys of imperial methods, especially in Africa; and it complemented a literaturewhich emphasized the elements of ‘resistance’ in the colonial period.18 It stillhas currency in summaries of European imperial government, along with thestereotypes of ‘Direct’ and ‘Indirect Rule’.19

Such labels did not formulate detailed answers to puzzles about thestrength and weakness of imperial rule or about the political gains or lossesfor the protagonists. As one critic noted, historians failed to make use of par-allel advances in social science methodology: ‘for what to them was collabo-ration, anthropologists and political scientists were already discussing asclientelism, including the imperial period.’20 While this was not completelyaccurate (historians of Central and East Africa did draw on other disciplinesdealing with clientage in the inter-lacustrine kingdoms), much of the anthro-pological contribution laid bare a central theme of government in patri-monial states, where offices and appointments flowed from the authority of a ruler or rested on hereditary titles. There were, and still are, qualificationsto be made about this theme which owed much to Max Weber’s original distinction between ‘traditional’ appointments made through kinship and

21 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, trans. A. M. Hendersonand Talcott Parsons (London, 1947), 315, 342–54. See, too, The Religion of India (New York,1958), for Weber’s classification of indigenous rule as ‘patrimonial-bureaucratic’; and for an‘unashamedly arbitrary’ classification of types of clientage into Patrimonial, Feudal, Mercantile,and ‘Saintly’, René Lemarchand, ‘Political Clientelism and Ethnicity in Tropical Africa: Competing Solidarities in Nation-Building’, in Steffen W. Schmidt and others, eds., Friends, Followers, and Factions (Berkeley, 1977), 100–22, esp. 103–8.

22 L. A. Fallers, Bantu Bureaucracy (Cambridge, 1956); A. I. Richards, ed., East AfricanChiefs (London, 1960); M. G. Smith, Government in Zazzau: A Study of Government in theHausa Chiefdom of Zaria in Northern Nigeria from 1800 to 1950 (London, 1960); but for amore categorical distinction, see Peter C. Lloyd, ‘The Political Structure of African Kingdoms:An Exploratory Model’, in Banton ed., Political Systems, 91–2.

23 Jack Goody, ed., Succession to High Office (Cambridge, 1996); Bronwen Douglas, ‘Rank,Power, Authority: A Reassessment of Traditional Leadership in South Pacific Societies’, JPH14 (1979), 1–27; and for an overview, Timothy Earle, ed., Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology (Cambridge, 1991).

24 Pamela G. Price, Kingship and Political Practice in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1996), 9.

6 Introduction

‘bureaucratic’ offices held by non-kin from outside patrimonial sources onthe basis of loyalty to the ruler.21 And it has to be said that Weber himself hadlittle, if any, first-hand observation of government in the patrimonial states of his day in the Near East or North Africa. In studies by Fallers, Smith,Richards, Mair, and others, the distinction between kin loyalty and that ofoutsiders ‘raised from the dust’ is less sharp.22 This would agree, too, withwhat we know of the formation of centralized states in the Hawaiian islands,Tonga, and Fiji, where indigenous and foreign clients were incorporated intothe structure of lineage-dominated governments.

These examples and others in India’s princely states and the Malay statesdemonstrated that the working relationship between a ruler, or patron, andhis officials, or clients, was predicated on differences in status and on recip-rocal access to resources, not simply on degrees of affinity. The study of hier-archies pointed up, too, the central problem of succession to paramountcyfrom within a variety of descent groups, leading to factionalism, a tendencyto make offices hereditary; and it acknowledged the importance of achieve-ment and support from military and civil clients in conditions of successionrivalry.23 Important, too, has been the perception that such ‘elements of pre-colonial polity . . . had an impact on the development of elite engagementafter colonial pacification’.24

Underlying much of the anthropological discussion about classification of‘stateless’ and other societies from the 1940s on was a search for a reconcili-ation between the study of kinship systems as forms of social organizationand a need to explain the formation of state-like structures in which leader-ship by ascription was one factor among others in political organization. Oneanthropologist, M. G. Smith, stood outside the debate over ‘stateless’ soci-eties and state formation by arguing that ‘in any political system policies aremade through a process of competition between segments of the society andthat decisions are carried out through a hierarchy of administrative roles.

25 Lloyd, ‘The Political Structure of African Kingdoms’, 68; M. G. Smith, ‘On Segmentary Lineage Systems’, JRAI 86/ii (1956), 39–80.

26 For the distinction between segmentary states and segmentary societies of collateral groups,unranked and lacking leadership hierarchies and offices, see Smith, ‘On Segmentary Lineage Systems’; Balandier, Political Anthropology, 51–77.

27 For example, Earle, ed., Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology, esp. 2–13.

Introduction 7

Thus all political systems have their segmentary and hierarchical aspects andthese concepts cannot be exclusively used for stateless societies and states respectively.’25

The great value of Smith’s incisive and comprehensive article, particularlyfor historians, lay in its emphasis on the dynamics of competition within andbetween societies based on lineages of persons claiming genealogical relationsby descent. Lineage groups segment over time from a common core and exhibit both internal cohesion and external opposition to other groups as ter-ritorial units. This cohesion has been a mark of ranked lineages in segmentarystates typical of the African, Asian, and Pacific examples considered below;and it is fundamental to the patterns of leadership that have emerged in hered-itary succession, oligarchic councils of nobles, and ancillary offices at the centre and periphery of state authority.26 On the whole the model of segmen-tary politics has proved durable, useful, consistent with the social structuresand economic behaviour of political hierarchies, and easily accommodatedinto more recent investigation of the origins of chiefdoms, their internal dynamics and external alliances.27

Several points follow from this seminal argument which have a bearing onthe ways in which an incoming (alien) administration had to cope with boththe politics of lineage competition as well as the administration and authorityof the existing chiefly hierarchy. One is that attempts to limit leadership in achiefdom to defined administrative offices (in the manner of Weber’s ‘bureau-cratic’ offices by role prescription) as ‘native authorities’ were doomed to runinto the problem of active participation by alien administrators in favour ofone political faction or another, one office-holder or his rivals. The same ob-servation also applies to missionary endeavours, as rival sects, or sometimeswithin the same sect, to enlist and convert a leading political figure as patronof a new religion. The more obvious example of merchant-traders cultivatingindigenous merchants and brokers for exclusive advantage is well known.The connection between political and administrative action could not beavoided, though it might be formally denied. Over-rulers and lesser agencieswere part of the political dynamic of segmented states. Secondly, in complexhierarchies such as the emirates of Northern Nigeria, the Indian princelystates, Malaya, and some Pacific kingdoms, the recruitment of non-kin by adoption or appointment and use of political and economic forms of clientage was an integral technique of political leadership at many levels, alsoapplied to incoming Europeans.

28 They are discussed in passing in Balandier, Political Anthropology, 60–3; and more extensively in Lemarchand, ‘Political Clientelism’, 103–8.

29 Smith, Government in Zazzau, 8. 30 Cf. Balandier, Political Anthropology, 95.31 Ibid. 95–7.32 Lloyd, ‘The Political Structure of African Kingdoms’, 91–2; Balandier, Political Anthropol-

ogy, 54–63.33 Smith, ‘On Segmentary Lineage Systems’, 63.34 For a survey of conflict between ascribed status in lineages and appointive recruitment to

the highest office in a state, Goody, ed., Succession to High Office, introduction; and for a de-tailed survey of similar conflict in a Pacific segmentary state, Douglas L. Oliver, Ancient TahitianSociety, 3 vols. (Honolulu, 1974), i. 1024–48.

8 Introduction

The ramifications of this departure from kin recruitment need not be fol-lowed here.28 The importance of clientage in patrimonial regimes was partic-ularly emphasized, however, in the early 1960s, by Smith in the context of hisstudy of one of the Hausa-Fulani emirates and defined as ‘an exclusive rela-tion of mutual benefit which holds between two persons defined as sociallyand politically unequal, and which stresses their solidarity’.29 In this way thefundamental connotation of patron–client relations as a face-to-face (dyadic)relationship for beneficial exchange of resources located one of the main-springs of political behaviour in many indigenous hierarchies. Political clien-tage was not merely an optional extra added to the institutional structure of a segmentary state, but a way of obviating kin rivalries by creating loyalfollowers.30 Nor does it help in understanding Asian or African statewidegovernment to pursue an analogy with European feudalism, rejected fairlydecisively (for African cases) some time ago.31 The main point is that in a widevariety of chiefdoms the political elite recruited outside immediate kin (some-times by adoption and marriage) from among other lineage heads and fromslaves, favourites, ritual, and craft experts. Such advancement might well betemporary without permanent claims to offices or land. More usually, withinclosed hierarchies protected by practices of endogamy, land allocation orother rewards in status recognition were features of the reciprocity that un-derlay the bargain of loyalty, service, and access to resources on both sides.32

It is not too difficult (as Smith argued) to extend this concept to the politicaland administrative relationship between the Fulani and British hierarchiesfrom about 1900, when they began to operate as a ‘contraposition of co-ordinate units’, meaning a protectorate government of aliens and indigeneswithin a ranked system.33 A further consideration arising from this dynamicmodel of lineage segmentation and state formation (though it was not developed by Smith) is that there is a fair consensus that ritual and secularleadership in chiefly hierarchies has rarely been a product of simple rules ofsuccession for very long. In competition for office both suitability by descentand ability by achievement are relevant criteria; and this latter criterion was of considerable interest to imperial administrators in their search for legitimate and effective clients of their own.34

35 S. N. Eisenstadt and L. Roniger, eds., Patrons, Clients and Friends: Interpersonal Relationsand the Structure of Trust in Society (Cambridge, 1984); Robert Kaufman, ‘The Patron–ClientConcept and Macro-Politics: Prospects and Problems’, CSSH 16 (1974), 284–308; James C.Scott, ‘The Erosion of Patron–Client Bonds and Social Change in Rural Southeast Asia’, JAS 32(1972), 5–37.

36 Ralph W. Nicolas, ‘Rules, Resources and Political Activity’, in Marc J. Swartz, ed., Local-Level Politics: Social and Cultural Perspectives (London, 1969), 300–2; Jean François Medard,‘The Under-developed State in Tropical Africa: Political Clientelism or Neo-Patrimonialism?’, inClapham, ed., Private Patronage and Public Power, 162–92; Naomi Chazan, Robert Mortimer,John Ravenhill, Donald Rothchild, eds., Politics and Society in Contemporary Africa (Boulder,Colo., 1992).

37 René Lemarchand, ed., African Kingships in Perspective: Political Change and Moderniza-tion in Monarchical Settings (London, 1977), 291–2.

38 J. L. Comaroff, ‘Rules and Roles: Political Processes in a Tswana Chiefdom’, in L. Bonner,ed., Working Papers in Southern African Studies: Papers Presented at the A.S.I. African StudiesSeminar, African Studies Institute (Johannesburg, 1977), 280–323.

39 Douglas, ‘Rank, Power, Authority’, 1–27; G. M. White and Lamont Lindstrom, eds., ChiefsToday: Traditional Pacific Leadership and the Postcolonial State (Stanford, Calif., 1997); Price,Kingship, 14–18.

Introduction 9

There were, moreover, wider applications of the patron–client model takenup by political scientists, harking back to examples from Mediterranean societies, and located elsewhere in Latin America, North America, and Asia.35 With justification, too, the model was increasingly applied to Africanand other successor states to account for the pattern of civil and military leadership in command of state resources in conditions of weak democraticand legal institutions in the post-colonial period.36 Such applications stressedcontinuities between pre- and post-colonial political structures which the period of foreign administration had disguised rather than eradicated. Forpolitical scientists like René Lemarchand contemporary clientelism derivedfrom pre-European political hierarchy as an ‘exchange relationship betweenactors commanding different resources’ and operated as part of redistribu-tive functions within African systems of kingship. Such resources extended beyond cattle and slaves to public office and were used to defuse opposi-tion to paramount chiefs through manipulation of competing clients.Lemarchand also made the important point that patron–client relations canbe reversed: ‘Resources may gravitate into the hands of his clients to such anextent as to make the royal patron a captive of his subordinates.’37 Otherswho have deployed the concept have emphasized the importance of competi-tion and personal achievement, as against ascriptive status, even in societieswhich have nominal rules of succession.38 This distinction has its parallels,too, in more recent analysis of ‘chieftainship’ in Pacific societies consideredbelow.39 Competitive and factional elements in colonial urban society havealso been discerned in early East India Company relations with Indian mer-chants and their client artisans in Madras, where, it is argued, patrimonial ob-ligations to arbitrate, bestow ‘honours’, and settle disputes were transferred

40 Niels Brimnes, Constructing the Colonial Encounter: Right and Left Hand Castes in EarlyColonial South India (Richmond, 1999), 1–13, 68, 69.

41 Formalized by the ‘Bond’ of 1844 between the Governor of Cape Coast and Fanti chiefsagreeing to a measure of criminal jurisdiction. See David Kimble, A Political History of Ghana1850–1928 (Oxford, 1963), 195–215, for the consequences.

42 Chazan and others, eds., Politics and Society, 160–8.43 Eisenstadt and Roniger, ‘Patron–Client Relations’, 44–77; Alex Weingrod, ‘Patrons,

Patronage and Political Parties’, CSSH 10 (1968), 377–400, esp. 379.

10 Introduction

from local rajas to reluctant company officials.40 Thus, like their counterpartsin the early nineteenth century in Niger Delta markets or at the Gold Coastforts foreign entrepreneurs and judicial assessors found themselves interven-ing in parochial rivalries that were important to their commerce. In this way,‘Courts of Equity’ applied European and African rules of trade in the 1830s;and Gold Coast merchants through an irregular jurisdiction created an infor-mal protectorate within neighbouring Akan states as clients, rather than im-perial subjects.41

For historians the utility of the patron–client model may have been ob-scured, however, by the post-colonial location of many of the case studiestaken up and expanded by political scientists in the 1960s with little in-depthtreatment of the pre-colonial and colonial phase. In their effort to classifypost-colonial regimes, especially in Africa, political scientists have drawn on a confusing variety of ‘leadership styles’, including ‘neo-patrimonial’,‘charismatic’, and even ‘princely’ in the manner of former traditional chiefs.42

But ‘styles’ do not indicate precisely how power at the top was exercised in themanner of chiefs, or whether these have simply been replaced by political ‘bigmen’ with chiefly and dynastic aspirations. For this reason, perhaps, therehave been serious conceptual differences between ‘structuralist’ anthropolo-gists sensitive to the status and limited powers of chiefs by ascription and political scientists more interested in the operation of political parties and the actions of leaders by achievement.43 There exists in the literature, too, ahigh level of social science abstraction in proportion to the amount of historical evidence useful for an understanding of how clientage operated in the administration of former imperial dependencies. The problem of com-munication between disciplines can be confronted, however, by explorationof historical cases from a variety of imperial territories and societies. For reasons of imperial chronology and because of advances made in interpretingthe contribution of pre-colonial structures to colonial governance, Indian historiography illustrates best the points raised above.

Initially, the bridge between administrative history and the dynamics of political clientage was constructed first in the case of India because of a needto provide better explanations for the decline and transformation of the Indian Mughal Empire and its successor states under pressure from Europeans from the mid-eighteenth century. As in other imperial spheres Indian historiography has moved between two images of empire—British

44 Robert E. Frykenberg, ‘India to 1858’, in OHBE, v. Historiography, ed. Robin W. Winks(Oxford, 1999), 194–213.

45 Ian Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes: Paramountcy in Western India,1857–1930 (London, 1987); C. A. Bayly, ‘Patrons and Politics in Northern India’, in John Gallagher, Gordon Johnson, and Anil Seal, eds., Locality, Province and Nation: Essays on IndianPolitics 1870–1940 (Cambridge, 1973), 29–68; id., Rulers, Townsmen and Baazars; Michael H.Fisher, A Clash of Cultures: Awadh, the British and the Mughals (Riverdale, Md., 1987); RichardB. Barnett, North India between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals and the British 1720–1801 (LosAngeles, 1980); Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘India, 1858 to the 1930s’, in OHBE v. 214–30.

46 Edward S. Haynes, ‘Rajput Ceremonial Interactions as a Mirror of a Dying Indian State System’, MAS 24 (1990), 453–92; and Chap. 3 below.

47 Robin J. Moore, ‘Imperial India, 1858–1914’, in OHBE, iii. The Nineteenth Century, ed.Andrew Porter (Oxford, 1999), 428.

48 Barbara N. Ramusack, The Princes of India in the Twilight of Empire: Dissolution of a Patron–Client System, 1914–1939 (Columbus, Ohio, 1978).

Introduction 11

and Indian—towards a greater synthesis with less on justification and admin-istrative method and more on the exercise of power at lower levels.44 Olderideas of ‘oriental despotism’ were revised in an exploration of patrimonialismand clientage in the structures of successor states to the Mughal Empire. In particular, the growth of a ‘service gentry’ during this decentralizationthrough the mechanisms of military support, revenue collection, and thegradual reversal of status in the relationship between autonomous states suchas Bengal and Awadh and the East India Company suggested a different ex-planation for the transformation of Company raj into British raj. There is stilla big gap in knowledge of the internal workings of such states, though im-portant inroads have been made by Ian Copland who was among the first todescribe in some detail the co-option of a patrimonial system in westernIndia.45 More recent research, too, confirms the important role of the courtdarbar (formal council) as an institution of princely government and a cere-monial occasion for defining status among royal kin and other officials. For itwas into this institution that British political officers were incorporated andmaintained it to influence rulers and chiefs.46 It is also clear, too, that forms ofloyalty in the Indian army in post-Mutiny reconstruction mattered more thanthe rules and regulations of the Company’s army.47 At the period of maturityand decline in British power in India, moreover, one historian made a pioneering application of the patron–client model to the final phase of rela-tions between the Raj and Indian princes that has not really been taken up byhistorians of the end of empire elsewhere.48

It was tempting, of course, to label much of the reversal of status betweenold and new rulers (in the manner of the Nawab of Bengal and Clive) as ‘indirect rule’ and impose a pattern on structures through operation of a ‘residency system’. Some historians provided a more variegated picture ofprincely states, balanced between autonomy and near annexation. Othershave latched on to a term derived from British experience in Northern Nigeria (and owing nothing to Indian precedents) to provide a template for

49 Michael H. Fisher, ‘Indirect Rule in the British Empire: The Foundation of the ResidencySystem in India (1764–1858)’, MAS 18 (1984), 393–428; Fisher, ‘The Resident in Court Ritual,1764–1858’, MAS 24 (1990), 419–58; Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System 1764–1858 (Delhi, 1991).

12 Introduction

‘the entire structure of indirect rule India’.49 A better case may be made for theinfluence of Indian precedents on British administrative practices in Ceylonor the Malay states. But, in general, the argument of this study is that therewas no overall policy or practice governing British relations with indigenoushierarchies, though there frequently was a typology of personal relations andbargains struck between paramounts and political officers, according to advantages sought by both sides. African (especially Northern Nigerian andCentral African) practice owed more to a local political culture in which patron–client relations were an integral part of an administrative hierarchythan to any other imperial model.

Indian historical studies strongly suggest, too, a phased chronology whichis applicable to other regions in which a patron–client model makes sense ofthe historical material at each stage. First, it is abundantly clear that initialcontact through maritime trade left the East India Company in a condition ofdependency on Indian rulers, brokers, and financiers until the last decades of the eighteenth century. Enclaves were enlarged only slowly, beginning with Bengal, in conditions of international rivalry (or patron rivalry), partlythrough alliances and treaties. Secondly, reversal of this dependent status involved a dramatic shift in effective power, as the maritime company becamean agency with a commercial and strategic stake in the internal affairs ofnorthern and southern Indian states. Again, the fortunes of war were supple-mented by diplomacy, access to resources, and a mix of administrative proce-dures that involved indigenous rulers and subordinate layers of client officialsand commercial intermediaries. It has to be remembered, too, that this dra-matic period of empire-building was also a product of internal competitionfor power within and between major Indian states that failed to combineagainst a commercial and military agency constructing a monopoly controlpiecemeal over a subcontinent. That phase merged, amidst resistance andcompromise, into a third phase of consolidation and debate from 1857 to theimperial zenith of the late nineteenth century and the growth of a new set of political brokers and rivals for power at local levels. On the whole, theprincely lineages preserved their internal status. But there were ambiguities inthe status of princes and officers of the Raj, particularly in the numerous middle-ranking and smallest states. Would one style of government controlimpinge on the other and make minor princes and chiefs redundant? Eitherway, administrators and indigenous leaders performed what Gluckman oncetermed ‘inter-hierarchical roles’, subject to conflicting pressures from above

50 Max Gluckman, ‘Inter-Hierarchical Roles: Professional and Party Ethics in Tribal Areas inSouth and Central Africa’, in Swartz, ed., Local-Level Politics, 69–94.

51 Richard Joseph, Democracy and Prebendel Politics in Nigeria (Cambridge, 1987); David E.Apter and Carl G. Rosberg, eds., Political Development and the New Realism in Sub-SaharanAfrica (Charlottesville, Va., 1994); Subrata K. Mitra, ed., Power, Protest and Participation:Local Elites and the Politics of Development in India (London, 1992), 90–1, 216–19; WilliamReno, Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone (Cambridge, 1995); Pearl T. Robinson, ‘Tra-ditional Clientage and Political Change in a Hausa Community’, in Pearl T. Robinson and Elliot

Introduction 13

and below, so that political bargaining was not excluded from an administra-tive relationship at the zenith of imperial rule.50

It was at this point, too (from the period of the First World War) that thebrokerage functions of the viceroy and officials had to take into account theexpanding constituency of party politicians at local council level—a pointreached, sooner or later, at local and national levels in other dependencies.What were the implications of limited representative government for un-elected state councils and their patrimonial rulers? Because of the possibilitiesfor change in the roles of patrons and clients, the model does not assume arigid hierarchy according to regulation and prescription; and it allows forcompetition between clients, on the one hand, and administrative patrons,backed by imperial power, on the other. It is assumed on the basis of histori-cal examples that both sides have an interest in accessing the resources andrevenue of the pre-colonial and colonial state. But no such mutuality of inter-est guarantees permanent political stability, an absence of human failure oradministrative breakdown between rival factions within the hierarchy of gov-ernment. Moreover, a period of cooperation with traditional elites could not prevent the emergence within a colonial system of a new political eliteseeking other forms of patron support for their particular aims. This lastpoint is of importance for the subsequent fate of indigenous hierarchies in theperiod of party formation and transfer of political power to the leaders of adecolonized state.

Chronology differs in examples discussed below. But the main phases are European dependency followed by reversal of status between incom-ing administrators and indigenous leaders engaged in political dialogue,client rivalries between conservative patron-chiefs and urban party-patrons,leading at the end of the imperial period to either accommodation or prolonged struggles for control of central and regional government in newstates.

The aftermath of colonial rule in Africa has been particularly fruitful incase analysis of patron–client relations. Older stereotypes of ‘charismatic’leadership of nationalist movements gave way to a more incisive, if disillu-sioned, account of the use of state resources to hold together political fac-tions, military displacement of civilians, and the onset of ‘prebendel politics’through conversion of public offices into private assets.51 A few political

Skinner, eds., Transformation and Resiliency in Africa (Washington, DC, 1983), 105–28; AmosPerlmutter and Valarie Plave Bennett, eds., The Political Influence of the Military: A Compara-tive Reader (New Haven, 1990).

52 Catherine Boone, Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal, 1930–1985(Cambridge, 1982); Lemarchand, ed., African Kingships in Perspective; John W. Grotpeter andWarren Weinstein, The Pattern of African Decolonization: A New Interpretation (Syracuse Uni-versity, Program of Eastern African Studies, May 1973).

53 Sandra T. Barnes, Patrons and Power: Creating a Political Community in MetropolitanLagos (Manchester, 1986); Olufemi Vaughan, ‘The Impact of Party Politics and Military Rule onthe Traditional Chieftaincy in Western Nigeria, 1946–1988’, D. Phil. thesis (Oxford University,1989); Richard Rathbone, Nkrumah and the Chiefs: The Politics of Chieftaincy in Ghana1951–1960 (Oxford, 2000).

54 Richard Feinberg and Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo, eds., Leadership and Change in the Western Pacific: Essays Presented to Sir Raymond Firth on the Occasion of his Ninetieth Birthday (London, 1996); Stephanie Lawson, Tradition versus Democracy in the South Pacific:Fiji, Tonga, and Western Samoa (Cambridge, 1996); id., The Failure of Democratic Politics inFiji (Oxford, 1991).

55 Simon C. Smith, British Relations with Malay Rulers from Decentralization to Malayan Independence 1930–1957 (Kuala Lumpur, 1995), esp. ‘Kingship within the British Empire’,12–33.

56 Arthur Grimble, A Pattern of Islands (London, 1952), 11; B. Macdonald, ‘Local Govern-ment in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands’, Journal of Local Administration Overseas, 10 (1971),280–93.

14 Introduction

scientists have been careful to trace the continuities of patronage politics fromthe colonial and pre-colonial past in Senegal, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and Burundi, and former High Commission territories in South Africa.52 We nowhave detailed and pioneering studies of the decline and survival of chieftaincyin Nigeria and Ghana, unmatched by comparable work in other states ofAfrica.53 In a different region of over-rule and decolonization in the Pacific thefocus has been on change in the structure and function of ‘chieftainship’ anda critical review of the notion of ‘tradition’ as a basis for ascribed leadershipin Fiji, Tonga, and elsewhere.54 One of the more perceptive studies of the political survival of indigenous rulers in Malaysia also summarizes reasonsfor British support for paramounts in Transjordan, the Arab Emirates, Iraq,and British colonial Africa in terms of the reciprocal advantages of legitimacy,political stability, monopoly over foreign relations, dynastic succession, andparticipation in improved revenue for minimal expense.55 Most of thosethemes, though not all of the cases, will be developed below.

There are questions about the explanatory value of the concept of client-age, however, which have not been completely resolved. In an imperial hier-archy not all governors or subordinate officials have acted as ‘patrons’ in theabsence of subordinate social and political hierarchies. In some segmentarysocieties chiefs had to be invented, not co-opted; draconian codes of rules andregulations did not allow the emergence of administrative reciprocity. In oneoutpost of empire a resident commissioner thought it essential to remember‘who were the prefects and who the fags’ and made few concessions to localleadership.56 In some colonial states it might be argued the function and

57 Martin Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order (Cambridge, 1985); Peter Flynn, ‘Class,Clientelism and Coercion; Some Mechanisms of Internal Dependency and Control’, JCCP 12(1974), 133–56.

58 Kaufman, ‘The Patron–Client Concept and Macro-Politics’, 284–308.59 For an instructive example of this kind of analysis, L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan, The

Rulers of British Africa 1870–1914 (Stanford, Calif., 1978).60 As an example the Arnett Papers, Rhodes House Library, MS Afr. s. 952, contain some

striking references to the education of a Northern Nigerian resident and lieutenant-governor inthe limits to his power to change ‘the administration of ancient custom’. ‘Handing Over Notes’,Box 6/3, fos. 118–19. For a similar case of the consolidation of chiefly guardianship of Fijianlands in the face of official efforts to establish ‘tenure’, Peter France, The Charter of the Land:Custom and Colonization in Fiji (Melbourne, 1969), 169–74.

Introduction 15

status of chiefs were made more secure by imperial rule, while in others theybecame mere agents of local government. A second uncertainty, therefore, is the place of rules and rule-making in prescriptive systems of law which codified official behaviour at higher and local levels of government and introduced parallel and appellate courts alongside indigenous courts. Thedistinction between the judicial functions of administrators and the role ofjudges has not always been clear in British and other territories, even as indigenous recourse to law has been a feature of the politics of an emergentelite. An endeavour will be made to come to a conclusion on the basis of thelimited evidence available at the end of the survey. Another doubt is about the place of coercion, which has worried some political scientists more thanAfrican or Asian patrimonial rulers with a variety of sanctions and rewards at their disposal.57 The place of prescription and force will also be touched on in the sections below, as well as other objections that are treated in theConclusion.58

One method of examining these two points basic to the conduct of admin-istrative officials has been through prosopographical research into their social background, education, and careers, in order to assess the methods andquality of their administrative service. While the technique yields valuable insights into the ‘paternalism and good manners’ (it is claimed) of British district officers and governors, it carries with it a severe limitation. Only thetop layer of the colonial hierarchy is examined in this way, without assess-ment of social mobility through the ranks of indigenous administrative serv-ices, where these existed. Lacking, too, is an account of European officials’education through field experience with indigenous leaders, the influence ofthe ‘fags’ on the ‘prefects’ and the kind of dialogue taking place betweenthem.59 One remedy for that shortcoming is to engage with the personal papers, rather than the public reports of political officers. To do so is to be struck immediately by the ways in which officials of the subordinate hierarchy in Malay states, Northern Nigeria, or a Pacific territory such as Fiji worked with and on European officials, by yielding to policy while pre-serving pre-colonial ‘practice’ in areas of government defended as essential tothe status and authority of a chief.60

61 James Davidson, ‘Problems of Pacific History’, JPH 1 (1966), 1–25; Toyin Falola, ‘WestAfrica’ in OHBE, v. 486–99.

16 Introduction

It is hoped, therefore, that an extensive and comparative treatment of over-rule and chieftaincy which exceeds the confines of rulers’ biographies willmake a contribution to the notion of imperial ‘discourse’—in its political,rather than its literary sense. That topic has been dominated by ‘orientalism’long enough, at the expense of forgetting that in Pacific as in African studiesreassessment of the interaction of indigenous with imperial officials and otheragents was already well under way in the 1960s.61 Some of that revision un-doubtedly stemmed from academic sympathy with ‘nationalist’ perceptionsof the immediate past as a transitory preface to a new (indigenous) politicalorder. But underneath (as later historians have demonstrated) lay, too, a concern for a better understanding of the politics of colonial over-rule as exchange, argument, continuity, and transformation in a dialogue that couldnot be so easily explored from pre-independence sources.

Part I

Indian States

1 Trade and Dependency

From their earliest merchant ventures in the seventeenth century, theEnglish prospected the markets of the Indies as international competitors anddependants on the grace and favour of the Mughals, their provincial gover-nors and local officials. William Hawkins who commanded the third voyageof the chartered East India Company carried a letter from King James to the emperor and was royally received at Agra in 1609 by Jahangir and co-optedinto temporary service. Rival Portuguese clients discouraged this imperial patronage, but the English company retaliated by using sea-power and re-spectful diplomacy to secure a foothold at Surat on the north-west coast.1

Granted a licensed monopoly for England’s India trade in eastern waters, thedirectors and their factors learned by experience that privileges were easier tosecure than to enforce on provincial authorities who exercised their own con-trols over foreign merchants. In 1615 the embassy of Sir Thomas Roe fromJames I to Emperor Jahangir raised the level of client supplication throughfive years of patient diplomacy for further privileges in Gujarat but no generaltreaty covering concessions in northern India. Temporary cooperation withDutch merchants helped to establish posts on the eastern Coromandel coast,but could not breach a Dutch trade monopoly with the Nawab of the Carnatic. Anglo-Dutch rivalry, therefore, encouraged an accommodation between the English and Portuguese by a treaty in 1635 that allowed trade intheir settlements. As a further concession Portugal ceded Bombay to CharlesII and the Company took it over in 1665.

By such manoeuvres the Chartered Company operated as one foreign entrepreneur among several, technically and financially able to profit fromlong-distance trade, but unable to penetrate Indian markets very far. Themain advantage derived by the Company, its servants, and Indian merchantswas exploitation of regional coastal trade. To this end Fort St George wasbuilt at Madras in 1641, as a concession from a minor Hindu ruler for a shareof customs duties. Posts extended northward along the coast into Orissa, tothe port of Hugli and the important market of Kasimbazar in the Gangesdelta and inland along the Ganges to Patna. Company servants in privatetrade exploited access to new sources of cotton piece-goods, Bengal saltpetre,

1 Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘The Mid-Eighteenth Century Background’, in CEHI, ii.c.1757–c.1970, ed. Dharma Kumar, with Meghnad Desai (Cambridge, 1983), 3–35; K. N.Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760(Cambridge, 1978); Susil Chaudhury, Trade and Commercial Organization in Bengal, 1650–1720 (Calcutta, 1975).

and sugar, as the public joint-stock venture met with financial difficulties andnear-loss of monopoly to rival ventures after 1688.

In terms of commercial strategy, Indian posts were worth much more thanthe relatively insignificant amount of trade passing through them in the sev-enteenth century. They gave access to a regional mercantile system with ad-vanced techniques of credit, financial instruments, insurance, shipping, andbrokerage. Footholds in India opened a way to trade with Persia throughKandahar or to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The Eastern Archipelago,too, was part of the region, if traffic could be wrested from the Dutch. The potential for expansion was great as early relations in 1620 with the PersianEmperor demonstrated; and so was the possibility of armed conflict with rivalclients. English attention, therefore, concentrated on tapping the markets of northern and western India in the upper Jumna and Ganges valleys and inGujarat. Staple exports were indigo, cotton goods, saltpetre and pepper, rawand finished silk, in return for English broadcloth, tin and lead, and a varietyof exotic and luxury items from Africa and Europe. Trade was balanced forthe most part by importation of Spanish specie and bullion for Indian mints.Before the full potential of the region could be exploited, however, the statusof the Company had to change in terms of official backing in England andcommercial and fiscal advantages in India.

There were internal monopolies to contend with, varying weights andmeasures, duties levied in towns and states, extortion by officials at ports. Toreduce these costs, imperial edicts were some help, but constant cooperationwith Indian brokers, bankers, and malleable officials was essential. To accesslocal markets for manufactures and exportable staples local networks ofprincipals and intermediaries operated through advances of imported goodsand specie, a mix of bribery and trust. Low salaries encouraged factors andsoldiers to trade on their own behalf or through Indian names—to such an extent that in 1661 the Company confined its monopoly to direct trade be-tween England and India and relaxed its control over trade in specified goodsby its servants. At the same time the Royal Charter of 1661 renewed Com-pany privileges and reinforced its authority to administer through governorsand councils at the principal posts (Bombay and Fort St George), seize inter-lopers, wage war and make peace with non-European princes. Subsequentpolitical battles to defend this status and see off rivals led to parliamentaryconfirmation of privileges in 1708 in return for a contribution towards national finances.

During the period of relatively prosperous trade in the second half of theseventeenth century, company factors consolidated their base factoriesgrouped round Surat, Bombay, Madras, and the Hugli as European enclaves.Bombay governors attracted Indian merchants and craftsmen and adminis-tered courts for English subjects, without need to ask the permission of aprovincial ruler. But the port did become involved in Mughal and Maratha

20 Indian States

warfare. An unwise venture into military and naval operations by GovernorJohn Child in 1688 ended in ignominious defeat by Mughal forces. Madras,too, structured its settlement into a municipality in 1688 and administeredtaxes and courts. There, however, the Council negotiated extension of fac-tories with a Maratha chieftain and with the Mughal’s military official for theCoromandel coast. Such arrangements were insecure. Villages purchased toenlarge Madras boundaries were resumed by Mughal officials and had to berecovered later by imperial edict. Trade in the Ganges delta markets creatednew factories administered from Madras; but these, too, existed with the ap-proval of the Emperor’s local officers in Bengal. Increasingly, too, companyofficers were drawn into factional disputes to the extent of favouring one sideor another for the purposes of trade and bestowing ‘honours’ in the mannerof local rulers.2 Commercial success, therefore, depended on constant bar-gaining for customs privileges from local officials and precautionary defence.Bengal factories were moved to the Ganges mouth, abandoning the Hugli inthe face of a Mughal attack.3 There, Fort William was constructed on the siteof Calcutta, which became the seat of a presidency over dependent factoriesin 1700, following the practice already adopted by Madras and Bombay.

To safeguard these scattered enclaves the Company obtained a new im-perial farman in 1717, securing improved rights to trade through the provin-cial governors of Hyderabad, Gujarat, and Bengal (including Bihar andOrissa). Duties at Surat and in Bengal were commuted into an annual sum; afew rented villages were added to Madras.4 The edict promised redress forstolen goods and delivery of debtors to factory chiefs as a form of commercialjurisdiction. Company coinage minted in Madras was allowed to circulate inBengal. These prescriptive rules were, of course, concessions—a privilege accorded by a patron to foreign clients. In practice they simply affordedgrounds for continuous dispute with provincial officials.

Those who placed their faith in the power of imperial edicts, therefore,were doomed to frustration. Europeans may have respected Emperor Akbar’sfame as founder of a ‘conquest state’ that continued to expand until the endof the seventeenth century.5 There was much less reason for them to be im-pressed by the reign of the Emperor Farrukhsiyar who issued the farman of1717. The empire was moving rapidly into financial and political decline. Thereasons are much debated. Specifically, the ‘war state’ had reached the limit ofexpansion in northern India and was no longer able to control new and strong

Trade and Dependency 21

2 Brimnes, Constructing the Colonial Encounter, chap. 4.3 Not as a means of seeking ‘redistributive profits’ either at Calcutta or earlier at Madras.

Cf. K. N. Chaudhuri, ‘European Trade with India’, in CEHI, i. c.1200–c.1750, ed. Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib (Cambridge, 1982), 392.

4 Sukumar Bhattacharya, The East India Company and the Economy of Bengal from 1704 to1740 (Calcutta, 1969), 20–1.

5 Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘The State and the Economy’, in CEHI, i. c.1200–c.1750, 172; Barnett, North India between Empires.

states formed by Maratha chieftains in central India.6 The basis of patrimo-nial empire in the reign of Akbar—namely, an assertion of paramountcy overall religious hierarchies and revenue systems—could no longer be taken forgranted. Much of its structure lingered on in the organization of successorstates and in formal legitimization of official appointments. But the share ofrevenue obtained from agricultural production and other imposts was in-creasingly retained by warrior-landholders; and this squeeze on revenueavailable at the centre failed to meet the aspirations of nobles and the officialclass that maintained the empire. Rural production and taxation did not keeppace with the demands of the ‘war-state’ as mediated through oppressive of-ficials holding fiefs and local zamindars caught between imperial demandsand a reluctant peasantry.7

This argument is qualified by other evidence of more widespread commer-cial prosperity in the early eighteenth century and, perhaps, entrenchment ofzamindars as a class of estate managers and estate owners less open to coer-cion from above.8 Whatever the balance of historical opinion about failure orinability to access resources, at least two factors in the Mughal patrimonialstate had weakened: ‘These were the ties of emotion and interest that boundthe nobility to the throne and those contractual ties buttressed by self-interestthat linked the rural warrior aristocracies to the empire.’9 Weakness in mili-tary terms at the frontiers compounded loss of confidence in the usefulness ofthese patrimonial bonds. A series of succession wars, 1707 to 1720, de-stroyed faith in the efficacy of central authority. The ‘huge system of house-hold government’ began to fail its clients.10 The shadow of imperial forms andprotocols remained with the imperial court, while the substance of powerpassed to a set of tributary kingdoms composed of hierarchies of Muslim andHindu overlords and lesser land managers. Between the Persian invasion of1739 that exposed the weakness of the Mughals in the north and the defeat ofMaratha chieftains by Afghan invaders in 1761, there was a power vacuumin central India.11 Successors included Hindu Rajputs and military Brahminswith strong clan organizations; Marathas, Sikhs, and Jats to the west of theupper Ganges who defied Mughal revenue collection; Muslim states createdby Afghans and Rohilla mercenaries; and, not least, Muslim provinces takingadvantage of Mughal weakness—Bengal, Awadh, Hyderabad—who fol-lowed a patrimonial model ‘attaching support by the manipulation of kinshipties, by direct patronage and favour of personal dependants and eunuchs, orby cash grants and pensions’.12

22 Indian States

6 John F. Richards, NCHI, i/5. The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, 1993), 283.7 Ibid. 291; Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (London, 1963).8 Raychaudhuri and Habib, eds., CEHI, i. 244–9; John R. McLane, Land and Local Kingship

in Eighteenth-Century Bengal (Cambridge, 1993).9 Richards, The Mughal Empire, 292. 10 Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 10.

11 Ibid. 15; Bhattacharya, The East India Company, 213.12 Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 26.

13 Bhattacharya, The East India Company, 38–9.14 J. C. Sinha, Economic Annals of Bengal (London, 1927), chap. 1; P. J. Marshall, ‘The British

in Asia: Trade to Dominion, 1700–1765’, OHBE, ii. The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall(Oxford, 1998), 487–507; P. J. Marshall, NCHI, ii/2. Bengal: The British Bridgehead. EasternIndia 1740–1828 (Cambridge, 1987).

15 Raychaudhuri, ‘The State and the Economy’, 192.

Trade and Dependency 23

Such was the variety of local powers foreign traders had to do business withfrom the early eighteenth century. If anything, their dependency increasedwhen they tried to reinterpret and to abuse the reciprocal rules of patron–client relations. For, the Company and its factors had been incorporated intothe practices of India’s regional trade by a century of experience. Freedom totrade inland meant finding reliable brokers who could negotiate with Indianbankers and tap into sources of production. Excessive advances to Indianmerchants on behalf of the Company created liabilities that the Companycould not always meet and that the broker might refuse.13 In practice, too, thepromise of the 1717 farman to allow Madras rupees to pass in Bengal ran intodetermined opposition; and a further promise to allow the English use of theMurshidabad mint in Bengal was firmly ruled out by the Indian bankinghouse which had a monopoly in coining money and control of exchangerates. Company reliance on an extensive service gentry of bankers and brokers (‘banians’), moreover, created similar risks for unofficial privatetrade by Company servants. On the other hand, Company factors in their official and private deals exploited the advantage of ‘passports’, or dastaks,allowing goods imported or exported by sea to pass free of duties in theprovince of Bengal.

The nawab/viziers and officials who rose to authority in Bengal in the earlyeighteenth century and founded their own dynasty from the governorship ofMurshid Kuli Khan (1717–27), encouraged foreign trade, but saw plainlythat the abuse of imperial licences by foreigners deprived the state of revenue.This loss contrasted with the rapid growth of commerce at Calcutta and itsfactories where, by 1756, the annual value of total trade amounted to over £1million.14 As this trade was seasonal, shipping found employment in cabo-tage, financed by Europeans and by Indians; and for these ventures, Companypassports used by Company servants were instruments for avoiding duties.Indeed, they could be bought and sold, loaned to surrogate traders, and theywere an additional means of hiring brokers to tap into inland sources of manufactures and staples, in return for trading duty-free on their own ac-count. Abuse of dastaks invited interference by Bengal officials; and suchpractices did nothing for the long-argued case for allowing Madras rupees tocirculate at face value in Bengal, instead of at a discount. One historian hasseen in this potential conflict arising from threats to Indian merchants and tolocal revenue a political challenge that the nawabs of Bengal could not ignore:‘By the 1740s, the road to Plassey already lay open.’15

There were wider reasons, too, for a trial of strength in Bengal by

16 Bussy to Dupleix, 26 Feb. 1754, cited in CHI, v. British India 1497–1858, ed. H. H. Dodwell (Cambridge, 1929), 139.

17 Edward Ives, A Voyage from England to India (London, 1773) cited in Fort William–IndiaHouse Correspondence, i. (1748–1756), ed. K. K. Datta (Delhi, 1958), p. xvi. Apart from thestandard work by S. P. Sen, The French in India 1763–1816 (Calcutta, 1958), other works haverevised in detail commercial, military, and diplomatic interaction in Jean-Marie Lafont, IndikaEssays in Indo-French Relations 1630–1976 (New Delhi, 2000), esp. chaps. 3, 7; K. S. Mathew

24 Indian States

mid-century. An increase in the numbers of foreign rivals and the local conse-quences of European wars made the coastal enclaves more difficult to defend.The effects of European conflicts on Indian interests were felt mainly in theCarnatic where French were set against English for a decade after 1744 and,again, from 1756 to 1763. During that period much turned on the personalpolicies of Joseph-François Dupleix, as Governor of Pondicherry, and RobertClive, a Company soldier, contending, respectively, for rival influence withthe Mughal subadar or governor of the Deccan and for promotion of theNawab of the Carnatic who aimed at territorial expansion and hereditaryrule free of Mughal influence. Both territorial princes, nizam and nawab,moreover, were under threat from the Marathas to the North who succeededin extracting tribute, but did not establish a permanent presence. Dupleixcaptured Madras; and when it was handed back to the Company its tenure rested not on rents paid to the nawab, but on the terms of a Europeantreaty.

Thus, commercial and imperial rivalry turned the minds of both sets of foreign officials to regional politics. Employment was found for troops in the service of local princes, in return for access to interior markets and a defensive perimeter to shoreline factories. Dupleix played a better game byexpanding French territory around Pondicherry and had established, by1751, a useful influence over the subadar, Salabat Jang, giving the Frenchentry into the Deccan through Hyderabad in central India. Clive’s reply wasto seize and defend Arcot as capital of the Carnatic for his client nawab, Mohammed Ali. Further skirmishing reduced French territory at the coast,but not their influence in the Deccan where their position in Hyderabad wasstrengthened by the diplomatic skills of Dupleix’s lieutenant, Charles Bussy. Bussy defended the nizam’s state against the Marathas, made peacewith their paramount peshwa in 1752, and extracted sufficient revenue to maintain his army. Absorbed with the idea that alliances with strong prin-cipalities in central India would help their struggle with the Company on thecoast, Bussy and Dupleix intended to manage the region ‘according to theAsiatic manner’,16 until Bussy was recalled to the Carnatic and defeated in1760.

The political lessons of this experience in the hinterland of Madras werenot lost on the English, however, who pondered on the fact that the French‘had Been so artful as to form connections with the most powerful princes’.17

and S. Jeyaseela, eds., Indo-French Relations (Delhi, 1999), for Dupleix’s experience of tradeprivileges, banking, extortion by officials, and French dependency at the Murshidabad court inBengal, 1731–9.

18 Fort William–India House Correspondence, i. 158–60. 19 Ibid. 915.20 P. J. Marshall, East India Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century

(Oxford, 1976), 232–3.21 David Rannie, Causes of the Loss of Calcutta (1756), cited in Sinha, Economic Annals of

Bengal, 10–11.

Trade and Dependency 25

The price of such influence was high in military manpower and diversion oftrading revenue. By 1751, the Company had increased its military establish-ment to five companies of infantry and one of artillery; the government sent asquadron of six vessels and a regiment of infantry, on condition that the Com-pany paid for stores for all land forces. At the same time, war reduced profitson trade; dividends on Company stock fell from 8 to 6 per cent in 1750. TheCalcutta Presidency was reprimanded for failure to separate civil from mili-tary accounts, for ‘faulty and defective’ records of expenditure, and wasurged to ‘improve the Revenues of the Presidency . . . without oppression’.18

Consignments of treasure from Madras in 1755 did little to ease the burdenon Calcutta, ‘being scarce . . . sufficient for the investments of our [produc-tion centres]’.19 As usual, the Calcutta Council and private traders resorted toborrowing to meet increasing costs of mercenary politics, war with rivals,civil expenses, and the annual need for advances to brokers and Indian merchants.

The obscurity of Company accounting that defeated efforts of the directorsto end hand-to-mouth methods has also defeated historians. Although Bengal factories under Calcutta supported the largest returns on the importand export trade, there is no way of knowing before the 1760s just how civiland military costs were shared among the three presidencies. Returns fromtrade were diverted into private ventures, and, at the same time, were re-quired to meet growing defence and administrative costs. Although privatefortunes continued to be made as the evidence of remittances by Companyservants shows in the period from 1731 to 1756, the risks were higher thanever and personal debt and bankruptcies greater.20 These factors need to beadded to the concerns of the Bengal government and the evidence of a break-down in the reciprocal relationship between patron-rulers and client tradersleading to a sense of injustice:

The injustice to the Moors consists in that, being by their courtesy permitted to live here as merchants, to protect and judge what natives were their servants, and to trade customs-free, we under that pretence protected all the Nabob’s subjects that claimed our protection, though they were neither our servants, nor our merchants, and gave our dustucks or passes to numbers of natives to trade custom-freeto the great prejudice of the Nabob’s revenue, nay, more, we levied large duties upon goods brought to our districts from the very people that permitted us to tradecustoms-free.21

In a society where politics and patronage were indistinguishable, construc-tion of a commercial network by an intrusive maritime company and its servants offended some vested commercial and political interests, while encouraging others. The network of gift exchange, bribery, and outright contravention of the terms of licensed trade was evidence of a new source of patronage desperate to cover costs and with military resources available as a result of war and politics in the Carnatic. Having absorbed the lessons of regional trading techniques in the provinces of a patrimonial society, Company officials had a considerable stake to defend against French and Indian political rivals. Their methods by the mid-eighteenth century relied nolonger on the waning authority of imperial decrees, but on applying the mixof force and diplomacy Indian princes themselves deployed at regional levels.

26 Indian States

2 Reversal of Status

Whatever term is applied to extension of Company authority inBengal—‘revolution’, ‘a world turned upside down’—when the sea power be-came a land power, there were still considerable continuities in social and po-litical organization. Perhaps ‘inversion’, as used by an Indian historian, ratherthan a root-and-branch overthrow of the old order, fits the case best.1 Fromthe perspective of Bengal history the discontinuity is more striking because of the eventual demise of indigenous rulers and officials in that state, thoughnot the intermediary layers of notables and landowners. In wider perspective,however, the ‘bridgehead’ did not lead immediately to conquest of the sub-continent, but to a more selective search for clients and allies in the context ofa costly war with France and internal warfare between Indian states.

The search for subordinate clients from 1756 to 1760 arose from the needto protect the Calcutta base at Fort William. At the death of the Mughal governor of Bengal and Bihar in 1756 his nominated successor and great-nephew, Nawab Siraj-ud-daula, made war on rivals, seized the British factoryat Kasimbazar, and marched on Calcutta. Explanations for this aggressionsuggest a pre-emptive strike against an imperial agency as well as deep re-sentment of the ways in which Company and private trade threatened Indianmonopolies and diminished sources of state revenue. Unlike the coastal fortsand factories, the Bengal capital at Murshidabad was in no way a foreign enclave; but there was probably an awareness that the Company posed a political threat in conjunction with internal rivals for power in a weakly ad-ministered state.

Calcutta was relieved soon enough in January 1757 by Clive as Deputy-Governor of Madras; and a treaty with Siraj-ud-daula confirmed trade privileges, restoration of plunder, and despatch of a resident to Murshidabad.There, Resident Watts, like his French counterpart, intrigued within the seatof government (darbar), taking advantage of the nawab’s need for protectionagainst Durani Afghans who had invaded northern India. He also conspiredwith Hindu nobles, merchants, and bankers threatened with dismissal fromoffice and anxious to preserve commercial links with Company traders.Those alienated among the court nobility included the military paymaster,Mir Jafar, who was to become a useful agent in the build-up to a palace revo-lution. In preparation for this event, the Calcutta Council laid down terms for

1 Rajat Kanta Ray, ‘Indian Society and the Establishment of British Supremacy, 1765–1818’,in OHBE, ii. 509; Marshall, Bengal.

28 Indian States

Map 1. India, late eighteenth century

Reversal of Status 29

an alliance, including all privileges for Company trade in Bengal and paymentfor British troops. The likely replacement for the nawab was sworn to thetreaty by Watts in June 1757 and a march began on the capital. The nawab’sforces were routed at Plassey and Mir Jafar was installed in his place by Clive. For one of the empire’s ‘great’ victories the event lacked the dash anddevastation of many imperial wars. Clive had some seven hundred and eightyEuropean infantry and artillerymen plus two thousand sepoys, facing perhaps five thousand infantry and Pathan cavalry and a large number of fieldpieces directed by French artillerymen. In the end, losses were remarkablysmall for a battle won as much by intrigue, bluff, and luck as by disciplinedtactics.2

Intrigue continued, as Watts installed his official allies in the nawab’s administration. Through him, Clive negotiated with the new dewan or finance minister, Ramnarayan, to secure treaty compensation, in return forconfirmation in office and a substantial share of revenue collection. In short,a circle of clients—in the main Hindu officials—was built up at Murshidabad,beholden personally to Clive, when he became Acting-Governor of Calcuttain 1758. The nawab, too, was protected against the future emperor, ShahAlam, who had fled Delhi to Awadh in 1759 and had designs on Bihar andBengal territory. In return for this protection, Clive was awarded a jagirprivilege for personal revenues from a fief. Above all, in the manner of Indianmilitary conquerors, the Company took a massive compensation and tributeequivalent to £1,750,000. At the same time a faction of the Calcutta Councilhostile to Mir Jafar plotted with his named successor, Mir Kasim, to makehim deputy subadar in return for eventual cession of three districts (Burdwan,Midnapur, Chittagong) and their revenues. Mir Jafar was forced out in 1760and retired to Calcutta on an allowance, to be restored as convenient, fol-lowing defeat in 1764 at Buxar in Awadh of a coalition of Mir Kasim, theNawab of Awadh, and the forces of Shah Alam.

Arguably a more important battle than Plassey, Buxar set the stage for alimited military penetration of the upper Ganges and changed the regionalpower balance by improving the Company’s access to revenue. Moreover,Clive by appointment as President and Governor of Bengal in 1764 was in astronger position to command civil and military factions in the CalcuttaCouncil through an inner committee of trusted friends and officials. He restrained wilder elements from a march on Delhi to capture the emperor;and he persuaded his committee to reinstate Shuja-ud-daula in Awadh, in re-turn for an indemnity and an alliance by treaty. A further treaty with theNawab of Bengal reinforced supervision through a resident, set limits to hisarmed forces, extracted further compensation for English losses, favouredCompany monopoly of the salt trade and continued the established practice

2 Michael Edwardes, The Battle of Plassey and the Conquest of Bengal (London, 1963).

of assigning revenue for British military posts. At his death, his son, Najm-ud-daula, was installed in 1765, along with his chief minister appointed as aCompany client.

Thus, Clive on his return to the governorship of Bengal found the nominalheadship of the province occupied by a figurehead and the way open for influence in Awadh through restoration of its nawab. The Awadh town anddistrict of Allahabad he regally bestowed on the emperor for his use. Moreimportant, he demanded and got from Emperor Shah Alam administration of the dewani financial administration of Bengal, implying, too, control ofdiplomatic relations with foreign powers.

The Company, therefore, won territory and exercised influence by com-merce and by a mixture of Indian and British methods of organization yielding access to resources.3 Apart from Calcutta and the other presidenciesacquired by rents and by European treaties, the provinces of Burdwan, Midnapur, and Chittagong in Bengal were held free of rents from 1760.Around Calcutta the twenty-four parganas (administrative areas) granted in1757 were held as a zamindari title by Clive (a privilege he managed to retainuntil 1785). Emperor Shah Alam’s grant of the dewani was in the same style—a personal agreement with an imperial exile by a patron governor—disguisedas a Mughal concession. Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa provinces were now controlled through the mechanism of financial administration, in return fortwenty-six lakhs of rupees and thirty-two lakhs to the Bengal nawab (orabout £580,000 from a revenue estimated at just over £4 million).4

In this way Calcutta became paymaster for the other two presidencies (seeFig. 1). In addition, the Home government took a share from duties on Indiagoods and re-exports and an annual ‘rent’ of £400,000 from the Company tothe Crown, 1765–73. The primary income of the Company remained cash forbills or bonds sold in India to meet the cost of war materials and expandingadministration.5 Imports of bullion continued, because of the long-standingtrade imbalance on visible goods and invisible services and remittances. Ontrade accounts, therefore, the Company was technically bankrupt because ofthe large amount taken by the state and because the Company used land revenue to fund commodity exports. This system of administrative subsidyfor commercial transactions (‘investment’) continued till 1813 to meet the re-quirements of shipowners and shareholders and ‘home’ debts arising mainly

30 Indian States

3 McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal; Amales Tripathi, Tradeand Finance in the Bengal Presidency 1793–1833 (Calcutta, 1979); Ranjit Sen, Economics ofRevenue Maximization in Bengal, 1753–1793 (Calcutta, 1988); Sinha, Economic Annals ofBengal, 102; Banerjea, Indian Finance, 25–82.

4 W. K. Firminger, ed., The Fifth Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons onthe Affairs of the East India Company, 1812, 2 vols. (London, 1917), ii, appendix, 476.

5 Holden Furber, John Company at Work: A Study of European Expansion in India in theLate Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), 305–6.

£'000

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

1765-66

1766-67

1767-68

1768-69

1769-70

1770-71

1771-72

1772-73

1773-74

1774-75

1775-76

1776-77

1777-78

1778-79

Revenue

Expenditure

Bombay

£'000

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

1765-66

1766-67

1767-68

1768-69

1769-70

1770-71

1771-72

1772-73

1773-74

1774-75

1775-76

1776-77

1777-78

1778-79

Revenue

Expenditure

Madras

£'000

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

1765-66

1766-67

1767-68

1768-69

1769-70

1770-71

1771-72

1772-73

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1774-75

1775-76

1776-77

1777-78

1778-79

Revenue

Expenditure

Bengal

F ig . 1 Presidency financesSources: Banerjea, Indian Finance, 78–81; Sinha, Economic Annals of Bengal, 79–80; Sen, TheEconomics of Revenue Maximization in Bengal 1757–1793, chap. 1; Firminger, ed., The FifthReport from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Affairs of the East IndiaCompany, 1812, ii, appendix. From the Company’s pargana lands and villages the CalcuttaCouncil received some £100,000 to £120,000 annually, 1760–4. After award of the diwani, thisform of income expanded to £1.3–£1.5 million annually in net collections, 1768/69–1771/72,but was divided between purchase of exportable goods and civil and military costs. Other totalsunearthed at random estimated ‘revenue realized’ for Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa in 1765 at theequivalent of £4.2 million plus £60,000 from Hyderabad and the Northern Circars.

6 Furber, John Company at Work, 224, 313–14.7 Banerjea, Indian Finance, for financial records, appendix D; and for military costs, 340.8 Clive to Pitt, 7 Jan. 1759, in Madden, ed., Select Documents, iii. 148–9.

32 Indian States

from wartime expenditure. Debts in India arising from local wars piled up toover thirty million pounds by 1814, when the practice of raising Indian loansbegan. That came too late to remedy earlier confusion of administrative andcommercial finance that left Company governors desperate to access re-sources to pay for the cost of the civil establishment, 1776–84, amounting tonearly £1 million annually and for annual military expenditure of over £4million, 1793–1807.6 At the renewal of the Company Charter in 1813 thearmy stood at 200,000 men and the military establishment absorbed abouthalf of annual receipts.7

Such was the background to the Company’s ventures into alliance and conquest. How did ‘inversion’ operate in Anglo-Indian relations? Was therea disjunction in Company methods from the 1760s and much greater will-ingness to turn to military solutions? Or were the techniques of court intrigue,the bazaar, and the battlefield simply complementary methods applied by acommercial agency turned imperial administrator? In commercial affairsthere was continuity based on an understanding of the techniques of clientageand brokerage that made Company men in their official and unofficial capa-cities a part of Indian internal trade networks. In the 1760s, the Companywas not a sovereign power in the land, but still a chartered agency with au-thority to make peace and war and accept or restore territory. Control couldstill be acquired and legitimized by Indian methods. To take over Bengal,Bihar, and Orissa, however, as a grant from the emperor in a kind of sub-in-feudation was a change in scale, as Clive admitted.8 He hesitated at first to ac-cept this offer made for a share of taxes to Emperor Alamgir II. But by thePeace of Paris in February 1763 agents of the European powers assumed theright to make political settlements for influence and control through the suc-cessor states of the Mughal Empire. The results of what was a European formof partition (though no boundaries were laid down) had a bearing on subse-quent relations between the Company as an imperial agency and the ‘countrypowers’. More ominously, there was an assertion of prescriptive rules in theform of treaties and agreements that replaced imperial edicts. Treaties to ob-tain trading privileges in return for rents extended into support for a Muslimor Hindu prince in return for greater concessions and a share in administra-tion of resources.

The more apparent disjunction lay in the administration of Bengal’s re-sources compared with more usual forms of accommodation with regionalstates elsewhere by a mixture of military and diplomatic methods. Even so,the change after Buxar was not abrupt. Power was taken to ‘supervise’ theprovinces of Bengal, leaving ‘the management to the Old Officers of the

9 Clive to Court of Directors, 30 Sept. 1765, in ibid. 155.10 See Clive to Verelst and Select Committee, 16 Jan. 1767, in ibid. 157. 11 Ibid. 158.12 Nawab Saif was stipended generously at over £500,000; and his brother Mubarak (the last

nawab/nazim) at over £300,000. In 1869 the titleholder retired with his family to England andin 1880 the titles associated with the office ceased to exist.

Reversal of Status 33

Government’.9 Accordingly, the local land revenue system remained in placeunder the nawab with three appointed Indian advisers and a resident to supervise accounts. With the exception of Burdwan, Chittagong, Midnapurestates, exploited directly by the Company, this improvisation of a patrimo-nial financial administration left a layer of zamindar intermediaries as clientbrokers between landholders and the Company. For a period, the British inBengal followed the idea of a protected state not a ceded state, as a barrieragainst foreign rivals, and not as a model for further direct administration inIndia.10 ‘Protection’ was not used as a legal form at this date. Clive’s term‘dual system’, meant a demarcation of functions in which commerce and factories came under the Calcutta Council, while diplomacy, defence, and thedewani were administered by a resident and the Calcutta Committee of gov-ernor’s appointees. General ‘political affairs’ were said to be divided with thenawab. At the heart of this thinking, however, lay a reversal in the politicalstatus of the nawab in favour of control by Company agents, although the ter-minology of this form of imperial over-rule had yet to be refined.

While it lasted, it was a finely balanced form of clientage in which materialadvantage shifted to the patron-power. This proved to be a major weaknessin the bargain for the nawab, giving substance to Clive’s belief in 1767 thatthe prince had ‘but the Name and Shadow of Authority’.11 The Company, inreality, was the new subadar, or imperial governor, paying a stipend to the oldone to keep up appearances for a ruler diminished in political functions, butretaining judicial authority outside Calcutta. In the face of Company monop-oly of internal resources the client had little left to bargain with. From 1766the nawabs of Bengal went into obscurity as stipended chiefs.12

More immediate issues, however, were not the theoretical perfection or jus-tification for a method of imperial administration, but the containment ofthreats and resistance from third parties—foreign merchants who refuseddues and rents to English ‘usurpers’. To counter this challenge the directors,in 1772, ordered an end to the smokescreen of ‘dual control’ and open responsibility for financial administration in Bengal in terms of sovereignty.Accordingly, the administrative capital was moved to Calcutta from Murshidabad; the Company ceased to pay a share of tribute to the emperor.Warren Hastings came from Madras to carry this monumental changethrough. By a Regulating Act of 1773 the status of the Company for manage-ment of territory and revenues in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa was confirmedunder a governor-general and council with power to supervise the other twopresidencies and with primary responsibility for relations with Indian states.

13 For the background to British domestic politics and the problems of privilege and empireposed by the Company, H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757–1773 (Cambridge, 1991); and ‘British India, 1765–1813: The Metropolitan Context’, in OHBE, ii. 530–51.

14 Bowen, ‘British India, 1765–1813’, 546.

34 Indian States

A Crown court was introduced with civil and criminal jurisdiction overBritish and Indian subjects in the ceded territories.

That was yet another kind of ‘inversion’, leaving no role for the formerruler. It is no part of this study to follow the outcome of British over-rule inBengal. Debate about the Company did have a bearing, however, on the waysin which the second choice of methods to access resources and influence rulerswas applied.13 Reactions to expansion and change of company status were amixture of national cupidity for a great source of revenue and unwillingnessto tamper with a specialized agency operating in a system of strange valuesand political customs. If there was no case for reform of monopoly withoutsecuring the new source of revenue to the nation, then only modification of practices was politically possible before the 1790s. ‘Reforms’ fell short of declared aims of Crown management. At most, in the passion of debateministers achieved some supervision of the Company’s executive machineryby administrative consolidation under a governor-general and through aSupreme Court with Crown judges at Calcutta. Political attacks continuedagainst the alleged failings of a patrimonial and unaccountable system for ac-cessing resources and as an appeal for better standards of administration forthe benefit of Indians. For this failure Warren Hastings became the scapegoatuntil his acquittal in 1795. By then, Pitt’s India Act of 1784 had made a compromise of supervision through a board of control linked to Privy Coun-cil, leaving property, territory, and directors’ powers of patronage intact. TheAct intervened in the relationship between Company and princes by subject-ing the power of making wars and treaties to the prior consent of the direc-tors. More specifically, the directors were to examine Company relationswith rulers in the Carnatic and the whole question of rents paid through rajas,zamindars, and their officials.

But in practice neither Whitehall nor Leadenhall Street could settle localdetails at such a distance. It was difficult to make greater claims to authorityby extension of Crown sovereignty, or to separate commerce from adminis-tration, while much of the cost of military forces came from Company revenues. Even a reforming governor-general, Lord Cornwallis, argued theCompany should be left in place.14

It is not surprising, therefore, that subordination of the rest of the Indiansubcontinent from the early 1770s to the first decades of the nineteenth century repeated earlier techniques tried out in Bengal and extended to theprincipalities and lesser states of Awadh, the Carnatic, the Maratha Deccan,Hyderabad, and south India from Company bases in Madras and Bombay.

15 Ibid. 70.

Reversal of Status 35

Played out against the background of European wars, that complex andlengthy establishment of a commercial and political monopoly in territorialterms contained elements of internal conflict between Indian states in whichCompany forces and officials appear as extras, rather than dominant players,before the 1790s. Thereafter, strategies applied from Calcutta turned localtactical manoeuvres into a wholesale realignment of territories wholly orpartly under Company management and influence, some absorbed into‘British India’, some left under their nominal rulers.

This imperial progress extended first from Bengal into Awadh. Awadh wasimportant because of close relations between its nawab/viziers and the impe-rial dynasty at Delhi; it was strategically situated on the frontiers of Marathaand Afghan-ruled states, and it commanded sources of revenue and trade on the upper Ganges. Following the failure of the Awadh–Bengal–imperial coalition at Buxar in 1764, the nawab, Shuja-ud-daula, fled into Afghan-controlled territory, leaving his principality vulnerable to occupation or disposal by agreement with the emperor who prudently surrendered to theCompany’s forces.

The peace settlement, however, did not establish a protectorate or a sub-sidiary political system outside Bengal. The immediate aim of the Companywas compensation and a defensive buffer against other invaders from thewest and north-west. To that extent there was a degree of mutuality in thetreaty terms with Shuja who was induced to return and open negotiations inMay 1765. The Calcutta Council could hardly control him while his armywas still largely intact; and the pecuniary advantage was limited as long as he refused any concession to the Company on trade duties. At most, the Company could hope for reimbursement for the war and cost of stationingany troops in Awadh. To achieve this limited aim Company agents infiltratedin small numbers the network of allegiances centred on Allahabad. They usedthe authority of the emperor as a cloak of legitimacy, as far as the directorswere concerned, and they were backed by garrisons stationed at Lucknowand Faizabad in the Awadh heartland. At Faizabad, General Carnac quicklylearned how to play this diplomatic game by appropriating ‘Shuja’s mansion. . . for his personal residence, held court for a month in the nawabi style, andallowed local chiefs and officials to come and offer obeisance’.15

This ideal existence did not lead to over-rule. But the experience of using asecond-order group of clients from outside the nawab’s immediate entourageand drawing on the services of a senior minister held precedents for lateragents. Moreover, Shuja (to his surprise) was cordially received with appro-priate deference into the company of his military occupiers. Meetings withClive at Benares in 1765 confirmed him as Nawab in Awadh. Companytroops were withdrawn in return for a war indemnity of fifty lakhs, exclusion

16 Barnett, North India between Empires, 89; for finances and loan dealing, see FortWilliam–India House Correspondence (Foreign and Secret), xv. (1782–1786), ed. C. H. Philipsand B. B. Misra (Delhi, 1963), 159, 298–9, 439–40, 697.

36 Indian States

of other foreigners and a promise of duty-free trade. For the first time, the useof prescriptive terms to settle conflict, instead of seizures of territory andproperty, provided a lien on future diplomacy. Shuja quickly paid off his wardebt and reduced his army to some 30,000 men.

More important from a Company viewpoint was the opportunity for itsservants and private traders to exploit the commercial advantage of duty-freeaccess to upper Ganges markets using Indian intermediaries. For the nawabthere was a serious loss of income and drain of specie made worse by virtualforeign monopoly over some exports such as saltpetre and indigo. Hastingswho got on well enough with Shuja restored a kind of commercial order bypersonal agreement to end tax-free privileges in 1773. He also tried to put astop to subversion of resident officers through gifts and honours by payingthem a salary of £3,500 a year plus allowances. But it would be too much toclaim that these measures prevented Company penetration. Indeed, the pat-ronage available to both the governor-general and nawab ensured continuedprivileges for a handful of commercial clients; and Hastings’ withdrawal ofthe official residency in 1774 for appointment of his personal agents ensuredthat some goods and markets continued to be cornered with the assistance of Indian money-lenders. Just how far this went was revealed in 1783 whenResident Bristow exposed a contract for a loan to the Company for seventeenlakhs of rupees (£170,000) from the Indian bankers Gopaul Doss on the security of the nawab’s revenue receipts. Governors and nawabs were wellaware that financial instability could undermine political stability in a strate-gic buffer state. The Company existed on mammoth debts, and Awadh couldnot survive without retaining the services of a hierarchy of nobility and land-managers. Both systems were weak in internal defences against entrepreneurswho could use Indian service gentry to their own advantage. In the end ‘thepatrimonialism of the indigenous regional command economy . . . proved itsown undoing’.16

This came about because a high turnover among official residents ensuredthat supervision of private traders from Calcutta was minimal, as successorsexploited their opportunities. Faction-fighting in the Calcutta Council in-creased the dependency of the earliest officials—Middleton, Bristow, Palmer,Harper—on distant patrons who demanded their share. There was a steadystream of complaints from the nawab about residents’ interference with courtcommercial and financial practices. The death of Shuja in 1775 and succes-sion by his inexperienced son, Asaf, exposed the limits of the Company’s au-thority in a province where it had only a handful of official spies at court, andmilitary contingents that were outnumbered by the nawab’s forces. The new

17 The treaty of Faizabad acknowledged Asaf as free and independent in authority, increasedthe military subsidy to the Company and extended the Bengal practice of assigning revenue landsto cover debts. The Benares raja was confirmed in this zamindari in 1776 subject to payment of tribute. In 1794 the zamindari was commuted to a stipend and revenues were collected by Bengal officers. For Company diplomacy, C. U. Aitchison, ed., A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries, 14 vols. (Calcutta,1909).

18 Company patronage of the begams was confirmed by treaty with the nawab in 1775 whenAsaf agreed, for settlement of debts, to maintain Bahu Begam in her estates at Faizabad. In 1801Bahu Begam arranged further protection by settling part of her will on the Company which became a legal successor at her death in 1815, along with the nawab and other pensioners.

19 Barnett, North India between Empires, 131.

Reversal of Status 37

ruler was not a willing client, though some of his ministers were open to influence. Apart from treaty prescriptions, the Company had no way of accessing fiscal resources except through the layers of revenue-farming al-ready in place and by exhortation to pay arrears of tribute. Company defenceof Awadh against external enemies increased these obligations, but createdno sense of loyalty to Calcutta on the part of the nawab.

Moreover, the nawab’s succession exposed the weakness of a patrimonialsystem in a transition period. Status groups providing court administratorsand solders risked displacement during a dynastic transfer of authority. Asafbought support from lesser courtiers and appointed his own minister/client,Mukhtar, while alienating most of his father’s supporters. Mukhtar was unwise enough to support Company demands for expulsion of rival European clients and agreed to an increased subsidy for troops and Companycontrol of territory around Benares in a new treaty in 1775.17 Increased debtsallowed Resident Bristow to play court politics, while contributions towardsarrears were squeezed out of Asaf’s mother and grandmother as custodians ofthe Awadh treasury, which they kept out of his hands.18 The influence of theresident through construction of his own network was now strong enough forBristow to broker a peace between rival factions and end a plot to dethroneAsaf, when sections of his army mutinied in 1776.

For the last half of the 1770s British influence depended, therefore, on residents’ ‘ability and style’19 in the absence of personnel for a parallel administration. Bristow as placeman of a faction in the Council managed wellenough, after a debatable attempt at converting the nawab’s debts into abanker’s loan to the Company. Middleton as Hastings’ man was better attuned to managing Asaf and defending him against the consequences of hisown weaknesses, though he was dangerously exposed to enemies in Calcutta.At court it was not difficult to find a good dewan, or finance minister, as theopportunities for patronage were immense. But few cared to serve Asaf inother senior capacities, until he appointed Haider Beg Khan and his brotherHasan Reza Khan in 1777 as chief ministers on the advice of Bristow. HaiderBeg was literate and able enough to become a second-level client for Calcuttathrough the resident who acted as broker, trader, arbiter, and intelligence

20 Barnett, North India between Empires, 144–5; Fisher, Indirect Rule in India, 382.21 Barnett, North India between Empires, 191.

38 Indian States

officer. Without this advice and stiffening of the nawab’s resolve there was adanger others would take over the darbar.

In turn, Middleton was backed by Hastings to achieve the main aims—access to revenue and reduction of the nawab’s army. To this end Hastingsmade Asaf banish disloyal elements at court and favour trusted friends of hisfamily. But how far could Calcutta push a client state? Continuous extortionimposed a strain on the whole system of revenue assessment and collection inAwadh over which Calcutta and its agents had no direct control. Between1765 and 1780 the total imposition of lump sums and annual charges can be estimated at some R63 million over fifteen years, or about £6.3 million.20

Because of arrears not all of this reached Calcutta. Pressure from Calcuttaand residents increased to the extent that assignment of revenues from somedistricts for support of the brigade of troops and for outstanding debts wasagreed by Asaf in 1775. Military officers enthusiastically enforced these obligations on the zamindars and officials responsible. By 1779, arrears andthe cost of using the military as a blunt instrument for collection had in-creased Company claims to about half of assessed land revenue, estimated atR23.5 million (£2.3 million).

Faced with this unrealizable claim, Resident Purling who had experience as a collector in Bengal talked his way into researching Awadh’s financialrecords. For the first time the Company was able to make a detailed assess-ment of internal revenue and state costs. The largest land holdings were theruling family’s jagirs providing 37 per cent of total revenue lands, followed bycourt favourites, administrators, and officers. Collection relied less on alanded aristocracy than a handful of professional contractors who farmedtaxes for a fixed period and used their own private army, much as officers of the English brigades did. Indeed, Hastings secured one such farm for an officer.

This revelation of how the revenue system worked left the Calcutta Council and the residents with a better appreciation of the limits of exhorta-tion for ‘reform’ and the impossibility of saddling this friable patrimonialstructure with further arrears. Relief was afforded by converting a third of theAwadh debt into bonds at 12 per cent, which was much lower than borrow-ing from Indian bankers. Asaf, his officials, and the tax farmers also defendedthemselves by keeping as much as possible out of sight of the supervision ofresidents who could change nothing without threatening the whole hierarchyof interests that made collection possible and served to redistribute resourcesthrough revenue farmers and local patronage networks.21

Accordingly, Hastings acknowledged the impasse and visited Lucknow in1784, where he lived like an Indian noble for five months and struck a new

22 Fort William–India House Correspondence (Foreign and Secret), xv. (1782–1786), 298–9.23 Cornwallis to Dundas, 14 Aug. 1787, in Madden, ed., Select Documents, iii. 195.24 Ibid. 196 note. But Edward Ives was resident in Awadh at this period (1785–94): Fisher,

Indirect Rule in India, 379.25 Fort William–India House Correspondence (Foreign, Political, and Secret), xviii.

(1796–1800), ed. Revd Father H. Heras (Delhi, 1974), 29–31.

Reversal of Status 39

deal to relieve some of the financial burden by lowering exchange rates withthe Bengal rupee, writing off defalcations incurred by Resident Bristow(£140,000), reducing the annual charge for troops, and ending the resident’smonopoly of the saltpetre trade.22 Much of the outstanding debt was writtendown by some £500,000, leaving the contractors in place and ensuring a period of better relations with the Calcutta Council under Lord Cornwallisand Sir John Shore. It helped, too, that Resident William Palmer was patronand friend of Haider Beg Khan, chief minister.

Yet political supervision increased. This came about because Cornwalliswas highly critical of the methods of extending British influence outside thepresidencies.23 Advice, influence, and control of defence and external affairs,but not internal revenues, were to be the limit of a resident’s authority, ac-cording to Cornwallis’s instructions to Jonathan Duncan on his appointmentto Benares. It is possible to see in this prescription a model for a ‘System ofResidents’ developed from the 1790s to keep watch over the rulers of otherstates and, indeed, to control the emperor through a resident at Delhi.24

Whether this gave the Company any sovereign power is doubtful. The ques-tion was, perhaps, beside the main point of political influence in a relation-ship between unequal parties where the mediation of the resident officialcould not really be prescribed so accurately. Clearly, it is evidence that Cornwallis was feeling his way towards an administrative method and divi-sion of authority that depended on rules, rather than on daily operations be-tween two personalities—prince and resident. Whether such rules could beapplied to distinguish between two systems of influence and control in neigh-bouring states and in the presidency remained to be seen.

In practice, actions mattered more than prescribed policy. At the death ofHaider Beg, Cornwallis and the resident formally approved the appointmentof new ministers. In 1797 Sir John Shore visited Lucknow to secure the dis-missal of a dewan and the appointment of an approved candidate, HussainKhan. At the death of Asaf in 1797 the resident appointed his son, and thenchanged his mind in favour of Asaf’s brother, Saadat Ali Khan, in return for anew treaty and a very big increase in subsidy to the Company which effec-tively raised Bengal ‘investment’ in exported goods for 1798 to 105 lakhs.25

Important families began to look to the resident and Calcutta to protect theirinheritance from the nawab.

The effect of twenty years of treaty relations, therefore, was to lay re-sources open to Company inspection, grant a monopoly of foreign trade and

26 Fisher, A Clash of Cultures, 87.27 McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal, 13.

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military support. Politically, this association created a supervisory role for thegovernor-general through the residents. Rules were made to settle disputesover debts and trade; and compromises worked until the end of Asaf’s gover-norship, while there was ‘a regular and diffuse unofficial European presencein Awadh during these years’.26 The risk for Awadh’s ruler was failure to comply with the patron’s further demands. Mounting costs of war duringRichard Wellesley’s governorship raised the subsidy to its highest rate at £1million a year in 1800. In September 1801 Wellesley forced the surrender of Rohilkhand, Gorakphur, Doab—or about half of Awadh territory—to Company administration, thus ending subsidy and alliance at a stroke andsurrounding what remained of the nawab’s territory on three sides. Treatyterms were rephrased to describe the relationship as subordination in 1801and the nawab’s status as one of ‘reserved dominion’ in 1802 under a resident-adviser who assisted in revenue collection. The nawab’s son was ap-pointed as a minister and the ruler retained internal jurisdiction at this stageunder the Company raj who had become ‘the transcendent power’.27

There were lessons in this example applied in the broader strategy of influ-ence and conquest. But it would be mistaken to see in the example of Bengalrelations with Awadh a template for relations between the Presidencies andthe states and societies of central and southern India. The element of com-mercial penetration was much more limited. The military power of Madras,Bombay, or Surat factors was not comparable with forces stationed in Bengalor Awadh. Instead of an infiltration of residents to tap resources from the1750s there was an unsettling export of internal conflicts that turned Company enclaves into dependants rather than arbitrators in events outsidetheir control.

A major reason was the existence of the Maratha ‘confederation’ that layacross central India. If the Company was a political factor to be reckonedwith in northern India by the 1760s, its closest rival was the set of Marathastates that predominated in Maharashtra and extended their action and influence into west-central and southern India. Their rise under Baji Rao I aspeshwa coincided in the 1720s with the Mughal decline. By the 1740s, theywere thrusting into the Carnatic and raided Bengal; they threatened to undermine French influence in Hyderabad in the 1750s; and they occupiedDelhi in 1771, where Shah Alam fell into their hands. They had to be removedtwice from Rohilkhand in 1772 and 1773 by Afghans with some assistancefrom Bengal forces. No other imperial factor among the successor states tothe Mughal Empire wielded such erratic and unpredictable territorial power.

Definitions of that power in institutional terms encounter the difficulty ofdescribing a ‘conquest’ alliance of chiefdoms centred on the Deccan and held

28 Stewart Gordon, NCHI, ii/4. The Marathas 1600–1818 (Cambridge, 1993), 1–9.29 Ibid. 179; André Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics under

the Eighteenth-Century Maratha Svarajya (Cambridge, 1986).30 Gordon, The Marathas, 182. An important factor in the stability of patrimonial states: see

Goody, ed., Succession to High Office, Introduction.

Reversal of Status 41

together by loyalties to a patrimonial paramountcy in terms of structural confederation.28 No such formal structure existed. Later historians have alsoplayed down the ‘factional conflict’ seen as inherent in Maratha politics inolder books, in favour of an ideal ‘co-sharing’ of power between military elitefamilies holding land rights and a bureaucratic and dynastic centre.29 Thisconception goes some way towards explaining linkages and revenue flows between families of chieftains and a hereditary paramountcy, though not theinner circle of bureaucratic power nor the adherence of Maratha communi-ties to their state heads or chieftains. In the end, powerful chieftains revertedto ‘factionalism’ on a grand scale, in the 1780s and 1790s, by fighting eachother, the peshwa and the Company. Possibly the most straightforward wayof describing the Maratha polity by the 1770s is to regard it as the product ofa coalition of states whose leading families were clients of the peshwa paramount and court at Poona. Leaders within the inner circle were the Sindia family (of Gwalior), the Holkar (of Indore), the Gaekwad (of Baroda),and the Bhonsla (of Nagpur), as representatives of the more independentstates. Others were Brahmin administrators, sometimes with landholdingrights, personal administrators for the peshwa, and army commanders. Allcould change allegiance as rival claimants to the peshwa title emerged. The coalition, therefore, based on loyalties and perceived advantage wasstructurally unstable in what was a patrimonial organization achieved byMuslim dynasties accommodating with Hindu cultures. The peshwa period-ically reaffirmed the loyalty of military commanders at court; and he tookcare to promote younger clients to administrative and field commands rewarded by land assignments. None of that prevented disputed successions,in the absence of prescriptive rules,30 leading to periods of civil war on threeoccasions in the eighteenth century, whenever the main power centres—the Poona court, the Sindia and Holkar family chiefdoms—backed rival candidates.

The Company had very cautious relations at first with the peshwa and hisregional officials. The Maratha threat was sufficient to frighten the BombayPresidency into a treaty in 1775 with the ex-peshwa, Radunath Rao, offeringmilitary assistance in return for islands in the vicinity of Bombay port andpart of Gujarat. In return, the regent counted on support in an internal fac-tion fight, but this petered out, when the Bombay army was kept at bay. In anycase, the Calcutta Council disapproved and sent an envoy of its own to nego-tiate at Poona in 1776. The resulting treaty concluded with the peshwa’s

42 Indian States

court ministers brought the Company into central Indian politics; and Hastings made a show of strength by sending a force across India to assistBombay by taking Gwalior fort in 1780. Further negotiations with the youngpeshwa and leading chieftains resolved both the internal crisis and British relations in the treaty of Salbai in 1782 which restored territories all roundand had an important bearing on Madras policies in the Carnatic. Salbai provided a basis for an alliance in 1783 between the peshwa, Sindia, and theCompany for an offensive against the state of Mysore.

In southern India, Company treaty relations dealt mainly with commercialconcessions, and there were no formal alliances until all sides—Indian,French, and British—began to use diplomacy as a weapon of war from the1740s. The more usual techniques of continuing European warfare throughIndian allies resulted in French influence in the Deccan and increasing Britishcontrol of the Carnatic and Malabar coasts. The advantages were by nomeans one-sided. Company relations through Madras with Muhammad AliWalajah, as Nawab of the Carnatic, were not based on trade privileges, buton loans to the ruler—to the extent that the debtor could manipulate his European creditors who acquired great influence in running the MadrasCouncil. Unlike Calcutta, the Madras Presidency was not a land power in theCarnatic. This position changed when the Madras Council took up an offerof the northern Circars, as a grant from Salbat Jang, Nizam of Hyderabad, in1759, confirmed by Shah Alam and by treaty with Jang’s successor, Nizam Aliin 1766. Terms specified an alliance and financial support for a British forceequivalent to nine lakhs annually.

The Nizam of Hyderabad was not a secure ally. He ruled a relatively au-tonomous state, while acknowledging his subordinate status and loyalty tothe Mughals. French officers, on the whole, had better relations with thenizam’s court than the Company. For most of the late eighteenth century, inany case, the Madras Presidency was insufficiently funded to pledge militaryassistance. As an alternative, the Madras Council concentrated on construct-ing alliances to secure Mysore, a Hindu kingdom that had fallen under theMuslim warlord, Haider Ali and his son Tipu. By 1766, Haider controlled theMalabar Coast, and Madras made a defensive treaty with him as part of apeace settlement in 1769, in return for commercial privileges. For some of the period of the 1760s therefore, Madras was dependent on the goodwill and forces of both friends and enemies, especially the nizam who used twoMadrassi battalions to capture Bangalore in Mysore and then joined Haider to invade the Carnatic. In this kaleidoscope of conflicting aims no firm pattern of clientage was established as each side manoeuvred for advantage.

So trade and politics in central and southern India turned less on access tointernal markets than control of ports protected by British sea power andused for a valuable coastal trade. Internally, the shifting balance between the

31 Council members were later tried and fined for this coup.

Reversal of Status 43

Marathas, Hyderabad, Mysore, and the presidencies called for greater central control over policy and funding from Bengal resources. Madras didnot fare well on its own. Employed by the Nizam of Hyderabad to annex thesmall state of Tanjore on his behalf, the Madras Council fell victim in 1776 toa series of intrigues engineered by Muhammad Ali Walajah and his creditorswho succeeded in removing the governor.31

The failure of his successor to keep up good relations with Hyderabad provoked Hastings into taking over Madras policy-making by sending a resident to the nizam’s court to represent Calcutta directly. That did not pre-vent Haider Ali from turning to the French for help and attacking the territoryof the Nawab of the Carnatic and Madras in 1780. Madras was again savedby financial assistance from Bengal and by an expedition to contain Haider inhis western provinces until his death in 1782. Throughout the early 1780s,therefore, the hold of the Company on Madras looked tenuous, until Hastings secured a measure of stability in the interior by the 1783 Salbaitreaty with the Marathas and until peace negotiations in Europe removed the threat of a closer alliance between Tipu Sultan of Mysore and Frenchforces.

The period demonstrated, too, that without assured sources of financeMadras could not hope to get the better of Tipu Sultan or influence the politics and coalitions of central India. Cornwallis took the situation in handin the context of the renewed struggle with France. He began to form his owncoalition from 1789, when Tipu attacked Travancore whose raja was aBritish ally by treaty. The new campaign, underpinned by alliances with the nizam and the Marathas in 1790, used revenues from Bengal and the Carnatic to purchase greater influence in south India. It ended in the transferof half of Mysore territories to Indian allies, while the Company took posses-sion of the Malabar Coast. In the absence of a new legitimizing central authority to replace the Mughals, piecemeal acquisitions by an increasinglypredatory commercial and military agency built up regional power centredon Bengal and operating through subordinate presidencies in Bombay andMadras. This change in the power structure of the Company (assisted by regulating Acts of 1773 and 1784), allowed greater authority to RichardWellesley on his arrival as governor-general in 1798 to play Indian politicsand counter a continued French threat to the British position.

Wellesley focused at first on Mysore and the destruction of Tipu and initiated further expansion in the name of a European war fought for localand imperial ends. When Tipu died in the assault on Seringapatam in 1799,the way opened for further partition of Mysore territory between Marathas,the Company and the nizam. The Company now had a swathe of territory between Malabar and Coromandel to defend the sea ports of southern India.

32 A power removed from the Emperor Akbar Shah by treaty in 1806.

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There was also a closer alliance with Hyderabad and support for an enlargedsubsidiary force of six battalions. By a further treaty, in 1800, more territorywas assigned to the Company in payment for forces and, for the first time, afixed boundary between Hyderabad and Madras was laid down. The nizamwas acknowledged as ‘sovereign’, but was precluded from separate relationswith other states. When Nizam Ali was succeeded by his son in 1803, the pro-tocols of ceremonial installation were still confirmed by Shah Alam in Delhi.32

In 1804 the ruler of Hyderabad, Sikander Jah, received back all territoriestaken by the Marathas.

In Mysore, too, there were rewards as well as obligations. A grandson ofthe last Hindu ruler deposed by Haider was selected by the Governor ofMadras, though administration remained in the hands of a Brahmin minister.Treaties confirmed the new order, in return for seven lakhs of star pagodasand a British ‘reserve’ on the state, and laid down formal boundaries. Regular subsidy to the Company and control of foreign relations in Mysorethrough a resident at Seringapatam and a detailed survey of regional agricul-ture brought Madras policy on seeking out interior resources into line withBengal.

The end of the war against Tipu also brought to a head the status and per-petual debts of Muhammad Ali, Nawab of Arcot and the Carnatic and withclaims over neighbouring Tanjore. He was a client who confounded allwould-be patrons. The Board of Control in England ordered complete resti-tution of revenue, assigned temporarily to Madras. At his death in 1795 thegovernor pressed in vain for agreement with his son for civil and military con-trol of mortgaged districts in the Carnatic. When Tanjore succession becamean issue, the Governor of Madras obtained a new treaty recognizing theclaimant, but relegating the status of the Raja of Tanjore to a figureheadunder British administration. Similarly, because the fall of Seringapatam hadrevealed correspondence about the treachery of Muhammad Ali, the Britishfelt free to reduce his successor in the Carnatic to the same subordinate statusin 1801.

Interpretation of the final phase of the struggle between the Marathas andthe British turns on perceptions of the aims of leaders of the principal statefamilies. By 1792, there was only a young peshwa as nominal paramount anda set of rival ministers and local warlords to hold the coalition together. Thisendured into 1802, when the peshwa came to terms with Calcutta in the formof an alliance and was restored to Poona as a client by Wellesley for the usual‘subsidies’ and some cession of territory. Campaigns against Sindia, the Rajaof Berar, and Holkar established a British authority in central India and partitioned more territory between Calcutta, the nizam, and the peshwa.Maratha princes were left in place over former tributaries in Rajputana,

33 Including Dutch factors at Surat. Holden Furber, Bombay Presidency in the Mid-EighteenthCentury (London, 1965), chap. 3 and 69–70.

34 Banerjea, Indian Finance, 266.

Reversal of Status 45

Rohilla, and Bundella. The Gaekwad of Baroda was brought into the net,after a succession dispute, in 1802. Orissa was taken under control. But therewas little supervision of these states, leaving many of them open to plunder by irregular troops. The final disaggregation of the Maratha chiefdoms wasstarted by treachery against a British client (the gaekwad) assassinated in1814 in Poona. A further treaty that stripped the peshwa of all status andpower in 1817 was followed by attacks on the residencies in Poona and Nagpur and a short campaign against the remnants of Maratha armies. In1818 the peshwa was removed as the last Maratha houses were turned intoprincely states.

By the end of the eighteenth century the Company, then, had moved towards supervised forms of ‘protection’ in the ‘subsidiary’ treaties of the dayfor a variety of reasons. Not least was the need to play out in the hinterlandof Bengal and Madras the strategy of defending positions already won by amix of concession and outright conquest. To those ends, closer relations withAwadh and the states of the Carnatic, Hyderabad, and Mysore drew gover-nors and soldiers into a network of shifting Indian alliances and conflicts. Butnot all enclaves followed this pattern. Bombay and Surat factors made veryfew commercial or political treaties. For the most part, they wielded influencethrough a profitable cabotage and by cultivating commercial interests withParsi, Hindu, and Muslim merchants.33 That position of comfortable com-merce began to change, when Bombay became a client of a faction within theMaratha court at Poona in the early 1770s and drew in other would-be patrons within Warren Hastings’s Calcutta Council, where there was greatexperience of how to make states pay for protection and how to cultivateministers and other service gentry. The aims were commercial, financial, andstrategic in the context of a continuous struggle with French rivals using similar methods. But the methods were ‘Indian’ by employment of residentsas a kind of wakil or envoy/assistant, part adviser, part spy in the court of an-other power; by the prolixity of negotiation and subterfuge of the kind thatsurrounded the battle of Plassey or ran through Calcutta’s relations withAwadh, the Afghan Rohillas, and the Marathas in the early 1770s; and, notleast, by British awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of systems of patronage in government and trade, leading to the kind of corruption thatCompany servants were themselves accused of.

There were good grounds for this accusation. The fundamental reason lay in the period of rapid expansion in the numbers of Company officials inthe 1770s and 1780s because of ‘excessive use of patronage’.34 By 1781covenanted servants of the Company numbered 252—‘many of them the

35 Banerjea, Indian Finance, Hastings to Dundas, 5 May 1781, 267.36 L. S. S. O’Malley, The Indian Civil Service (London, 1965), 26–31. For the effects of reform

and the ‘Permanent Settlement’ of 1793 on Bengal land tenure and finance, McLane, Land andLocal Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal, 24 and chap. 17.

37 D. A. Washbrook, ‘India, 1818–1860: The Two Faces of Colonialism’ in OHBE, iii. TheNineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford, 1999), 395–421, and map. 18.1.

46 Indian States

sons of the first families in the kingdom of Great Britain and every one aspir-ing to the rapid acquisition of lakhs’.35 Parliamentary inquisition into patronage and corruption and a need for better revenue management in Bengal forced into being a reformed civil service with prescriptive regula-tions. Hastings and Cornwallis began to separate trade from administration,reform the judicial system, and entrust management of revenue and justice toofficers in the Bengal districts as a system of ‘paternal despotism’, rather thanpaternalistic obligation in return for services.36 It is not part of this study tofollow up the consequences of closer administration in ‘British’ India. Cer-tainly at the opening of the nineteenth century, prescriptive methods were stillin formation and different techniques were applied in Madras compared withBengal. Most of the subcontinent by 1818 still consisted of a vast range ofstates and polities, only some of which were ‘bound to Britain by treaties’.37

It is the nature of that ‘bondage’ and other forms of subordination that concern us here.

3 Clients and Brokers

Incorporated into a treaty system by alliance and extortion theunannexed Indian states were considered to enjoy separate political statusunder British protection.Rearrangement of administrative boundaries recog-nized to some extent older spheres of Mughal and state authority. Mostly, itdid not and presented a flexible framework encompassing diverse resourcesthat could be added to states, or denied, by assigning revenue to pay for military occupation and arrears of debt. In extreme cases, districts could beamalgamated into neighbouring British-administered territory. Certainly,there was no central plan ever formulated by the Company or by a governor-general in Calcutta that met the permutations of political relations betweenadversaries and allies whose status had changed. In time responsibility forprincely states, large and small, fell on central and regional agencies of theGovernment of India and its Provinces.

It is possible to analyse the princely states according to the type of formalrelations their rulers had with these agencies. Or, the analysis can be made interms of the early and post-Mutiny debate about the status of rulers under theRaj. Neither method furthers understanding of the issues at stake betweenquasi-independent states and the government of India, unless the role of ad-ministrative brokers—British and Indian—is taken into account.1 On thewhole it seems preferable to deal with issues of brokerage first, if only becausethey go back to the earliest experience of residents at courts of governmentand continue over the whole period of rule by Company and Raj. At the heartof this variable relationship between official agents and rulers lay questions ofstatus and control. At important periods of change, immediately before andafter the Mutiny, and at the onset of a reappraisal of the relationship betweenrulers and the Raj in the following century, there were also issues of definitionof status debated by the over-rulers and by the princes themselves. But legaland political questions of governance were probably secondary to the opera-tion in practical terms of the extraordinary subordination of nearly six hundred ‘states’ of many types and conditions outside the formal frameworkof government in British India.

From the outset, even while annexations were still possible, individualagents fashioned the main elements of this subordination in central India,Madras, the Deccan, Rajputana, Sind, and southern India without too muchthought for legal definitions. The region they covered was geographically vast

1 For the changing relationship between states and the Raj, in formal and informal terms,Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes.

and culturally complex. The heartland of the Maratha chieftaincies in Malwaand Gwalior, Bhonsla territory, became the seat of a supervisory administra-tion—the Central India Agency—cutting a great swathe of territories withnew boundaries across the subcontinent. Rajputana states fell under similarseparate agencies; and the Punjab ex-Maratha states were further divided byboundaries and administrative methods, after the Sikh wars of the 1840s, on either bank of the River Sutlej. For a period, Awadh constituted an inter-nally autonomous state sited uneasily between Bengal and Sikh, Punjab andAfghan territories. Delhi and Agra territory, like the neighbouring Doab, hadbeen cut away from Awadh and annexed to become eventually part of NorthWest Provinces. In the south, Mysore and some minor states were surroundedby territory annexed to Madras, while the nizam’s territory in a slightly en-larged Hyderabad sat as a solid block of semi-autonomous lands under aMuslim prince amidst a Hindu culture.

It is not difficult to isolate the essential issues between state rulers, their ministers, and resident officials. The basis of the relationship, whetherdefined by treaty or not, was essentially one of qualified ‘subordination’sometimes titled ‘independence’ in agreements, more usually ‘friendship andalliance’, ‘protection’, ‘subordinate co-operation’, and even ‘close adminis-tration’ by a council or a set of commissioners. However graded, the status ofa ruler was one of clientage arising from acceptance of defeat and, more usually, from a grudging admission of advantages to be secured from a risingimperial power. His immediate patron was harder to find. After a flourish oftreaty-making by senior generals, high-ranking envoys, and occasional gov-ernors over the long period of sporadic warfare, 1775 to 1819, British authority was mediated through brokers whose own status was full of ambi-guities. The style of their operations at the prince’s darbar (open court) was,at first, closer to residents’ experience in Bengal and Awadh in the eighteenthcentury than to the peace settlements worked out in the first two decades ofthe nineteenth.

To begin with, residents were not paid salaries until after 1798. Their roleas exclusive envoys to a state was difficult to enforce and harder still to fundin a style in keeping with a diplomatic post. Residents required funds for local influence in addition to a show of status in a residency building. To supervise they were required to set up ‘a parallel administration’, but few had funds to do this.2 Prohibited from trade, residents were not always over-bearing authorities who managed imperial clients. In self-defence, as much asthrough political influence, they turned occasionally to rulers for financialsupport.

Properly speaking, they were envoys not administrators; and one of theirfunctions was to provide a unique channel of communications. Isolation

48 Indian States

2 Fisher, Indirect Rule in India, 107.

from other rulers clearly changed a prince’s status. Although he could bringto bear on a ruler the raw military power at the disposal of the Raj, in prac-tice the resident’s predicament was not easy to resolve by force. Rulers soughtto circumvent efforts to close off information and the possibility of outside alliances. The Company never entirely got rid of Indian diplomats (wakils),because rulers were permitted to post their own representatives to a presi-dency. Those sent to Calcutta occasionally reported back confidential secretariat instructions, before they were received by a resident.3 Until mat-ters were resolved by force, the Marathas, Hyderabad, and Mysore, played adiplomatic game of counter-alliances without much influence from residents.From 1792, the Company tried to obtain exclusive rights of representationfrom all treaty states. By 1840, thirty-one rulers had formally complied,though few observed the obligation to the letter.4

The issue of representation was secondary, however, to the main point of subordination. For the princes the advantage of British over-rule was con-firmation of their status and dynastic succession at the head of a revenue-producing hierarchy of officials, landowners, peasantry, and merchants.Paradoxically, this privilege benefited the dynasties of former enemies as wellas allies. Descendant rulers of the Holkar family continued the line. By treaty,the status of Malhar Rao Holkar from 1818 was that of a prince under Britishprotection through the Indore Residency, guaranteed tributary revenues fromRajput rulers and landowners according to Sanads, or deeds, negotiated earlier. In Gwalior, Daulat Sindia was of ‘independent’ status, 1817–18, withtribute guaranteed from Rajput states. In return, he surrendered forts and assigned revenues for occupying forces and all tribute from the states ofJodhpur, Bundi, Kotah. Freed from overlordship of the peshwa in 1818, athird group of states was centred on Nagpur, where the Bhonsla was brought into alliance and managed by a resident. During the minority of a new Bhonsla, the resident was in charge till 1826, when territory was restored tothe ruler in return for ‘subsidies’ to the Raj.

Former tributaries of dominant states were sometimes promoted in status,sometimes reduced by neglect. They came to look on the agencies as their‘overlords’. In Rajputana most minor states under maharajas were formallyrecognized as independent, while paying some expenses and tribute to gov-ernment. Western States agencies followed a similar pattern. Nawabs werereplaced by rajas who retained tribute and often escaped all demands. In residencies and agencies there were, too, numerous smaller chiefdoms payingregulated and unregulated tribute from ‘mediatized’ chiefs who had no for-mal agreements with the Raj before the 1860s. In Punjab it was difficult to

Clients and Brokers 49

3 Ibid. 278.4 The Raja of Benares, for example, did not agree to forgo separate diplomatic representation

until 1911.

conclude any agreement with Sikh clans that did not protect lower orders ofchiefs from Maharaja Ranjit Singh, former Persian governor of Lahore andoverlord of states of the upper Indus, including Kashmir and Peshawar.5

Exaggerated views about the value of Indus navigation and the felt need forbuffer states against Afghans (and possibly Russians) inspired conquest ofSind and the Punjab. After the first Sikh war in 1845, nine states retained sov-ereignty on the north side of the River Sutlej; some such as Patiala on thesouth bank were rewarded for loyalty along with the Jat chief of Furidkot. Annexation of much of the Punjab in 1849 left Kapurthala state under a rajacreated for his services, but with civil and police jurisdiction in British hands,while the state of Bahawalpur remained under a nawab in ‘subordinate co-operation’ as absolute ruler without British jurisdiction. By contrast, a resi-dency in Nepal resulted in no Company control. In 1800, when the reigningraja abdicated in favour of his son and took refuge in Benares, Wellesley senta mission to negotiate a treaty, to post a resident and guarantee an income tothe abdicating ruler. Thereafter, Nepal remained in diplomatic alliance, butmanaged its own foreign relations and kept the resident isolated within theNepalese court.

Thus, there was a full range of imperial possibilities—from benign neglectto outright cession. In the case of Baroda, the gaekwad had been graduallyeased out of tributary relationship to the peshwa and agreed to a subsidiaryforce for protection in return for ceding Surat in 1802. A supplementarytreaty guaranteed the positions of his ministers, their relatives and successors.The Bombay government paid off ‘Arab’ (Omani) mercenaries, in return foran increase of ceded territory in 1805. Following the assassination of thegaekwad and restoration of a lineal descendant in 1819, state debts were underwritten by the Company. In return, Baroda state was bound to makeregular payments of revenues and tribute from fifteen districts until 1832,when a new settlement was reached with Indian bankers.

On the other hand, there were no treaties with Kathiawar, Junagarah andother states, the Rao of Kutch or the state of Cambay, all formerly tributaryto Baroda. Local nawabs collected their own revenues and shared them withthe Bombay government and the gaekwad. A resident took complete controlof Kutch during a minority succession for a period from 1834. In the Suratagency princes were left in authority without formal engagements. In the caseof nearby Sind treaties from 1809 with amirs dealt with commercial mattersand exclusion of the French. From 1839, troops were stationed there for asubsidy, but there was no British jurisdiction before annexation in 1843.

Whatever their guaranteed status, dynasties were still prey to successiondisputes. These provided an occasion for intervention. There were early ex-

50 Indian States

5 For the complex intrigues between Persians, Afghans, Ranjit Singh in the early nineteenthcentury, CHI, v. British India 1497–1858, ed. H. H. Dodwell (Cambridge, 1929), chap. 28.

6 Fisher, Indirect Rule in India, 192, table 4.

Clients and Brokers 51

amples in Awadh in the particular circumstances of financial and military re-lations with the Company. Such rulers could be looked on as puppets, but theadministration required to enforce rule through British officials was lacking.Rather, they remained nominal rulers and were bypassed, while governorsand residents used other intermediaries. In the early nineteenth century, too,more frequent use was made of commissions or regency councils, when aminor was enthroned. The Company tried to settle a large number of dis-puted successions, 1798–1839. The manner of intervention differed fromcase to case; but the succession could not be left to chance, if there was a riskof civil conflict. It was necessary, as residents and agents learned, to reassuredependent clients among court nobility, ministers, and landowners.

On the other hand, there was little stipending of rulers. Such a technique,applied in colonial protectorates later, was a departure from the more usualCompany practice of taking a cut of revenue for military costs and allowingthe ruler to keep the rest. Occasional stipending arose from buying out orpensioning off a ruler. From the example of stipends and pensions for the financial year 1827–8 supplied by Michael Fisher, cost of this largesseamounted to R10.9 million, or about one-tenth of gross revenues extractedby the Company from the states.6 In many cases, rulers or ex-rulers also re-tained revenues from state lands outside Company control. It does not follow,however, that the Company refrained from annexing the remainder of statelands because of a high regard for Indian sovereignty. Quite large territorieswere involved in this self-denial; and altogether they would have requiredmore manpower from the Bengal, Bombay, or Madras presidencies than theCompany was prepared to finance and defend against inevitable Court andparliamentary objections.

The case of Mysore demonstrated the two central aspects of relations with rulers—succession stability and revenue. The choice of a young boy asmaharaja in 1799, in return for payment of a regular subsidy, provided an op-portunity to appoint a former minister as dewan who kept subsidy paymentsup to date. In 1811 the resident formally handed over administration to theruler who clashed with the dewan over access to surplus revenue. A new resident, James Casamajor, allowed the young ruler to build up his own net-work of senior clients and bring the state into debt. Governor-GeneralBentinck sought to redress this loss of influence in 1831, citing ‘moral au-thority’, rather than the 1799 treaty as justification. He ordered British offi-cers into Mysore to run the administration and pensioned the ruler off with alarge income (R350,000 plus 20 per cent of net revenues annually). The resi-dency was abolished in 1843, despite the protests of the raja who regarded theresident as a status symbol and a source of support against other British administrators. It is possible to see in this episode an example of decline in

7 Fisher, Indirect Rule in India, 414.8 Ibid. 196, table 5. Figures represent aggregates of treaty obligations, rather than moneys

paid over or assigned from revenue lands. The obligations of some of the Rajputana maharajasseem to have been omitted from the count.

9 B. R. Ambedkar, The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India (London, 1925), 18;Statistical Abstract Relating to British India from 1840 to 1865 (London, 1867).

52 Indian States

respect for rulers.7 But opinions on the subject were divided, and much stilldepended on whether resources could be tapped without the expense of formal administration. The Mysore dynasty was not restored till much laterin 1881. In the meantime, it was discovered that the unannexed state could be run more profitably by a chief commissioner.

Mysore was an unusual case for its outcome, influenced by the demands ofMadras finance and by reluctance to go through the process of formal an-nexation. But the fundamental issues were common enough within the gen-eral pattern of over-rule and revenue extraction. Treaty subsidies and tributehave been calculated for nine of seventeen states for the year 1832.8 Some likeBengal had been absorbed into Company administration; but apart from thatcase, seven states paid nothing for ‘subsidiary forces’. Of the remaining nineAwadh and the Raja of Gwalior were big contributors—R13 million and R15million, or some 36 per cent of the total of net subsidy (£4.3 million) paid overto the Raj. By any count, this was a substantial impost arising from treatiesgoing back to the last decades of the eighteenth century. In all, the subsidyamounted to over 40 per cent of the Company’s military costs in these se-lected years. After 1833, when there was a better system of accounting, totalsof ‘tribute’ from states look less impressive at a little over £500,000 annually,or 2 to 3 per cent of revenues from land, customs, salt, and opium monopo-lies.9 But there were other resources yielded. Nagpur ceded districts in trustfor the support of military forces in 1853. The ports of Baroda were takenover as ‘Indian’ ports; and the maintenance of local police and a contingent ofcavalry was forced from the state under threat of sequestration of districts.Territory was taken from Gwalior in 1844 for support of forces and paymentof debts. In 1853 the Nizam of Hyderabad assigned districts to pay for a localsepoy force—the ‘Hyderabad Contingent’—under British command. Barodaled the way in making over lands for a railway in 1856, a practice that becamestandard after the Mutiny. Altogether, the patron power exercised a highly arbitrary right to levy payment for troops, tribute, lands for revenue, andsome control over debts, in return for treaty guarantees.

Not surprisingly, therefore, face-to-face relations between rulers and im-perial agents were frequently hostile, however disguised by protocols. Rulerscould resist demands by prevarication; they could yield; and they could retireinto idleness. Whatever the outcome, residents and agents tried to build up their own network of second-order clients ranging from senior officers ofstate down to merchants, brokers, and bankers. The technique derived from

10 W. Ross Johnston, Sovereignty and Protection: A Study of British Jurisdictional Imperial-ism in the Late Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC, 1973).

11 Fisher, Indirect Rule in India, 202. This was not ‘extraterritorial jurisdiction’ leading to trialbefore a consular or British court, but a simple extension of clientage to protection of claimants.

12 Ibid., for examples, 206–7.

Clients and Brokers 53

protection of Indian clients in the vicinity of Company forts, though it couldnot be legally extended to the subjects of a ruler or subjects of the Raj, with-out treaty concession. For their part, many Indians found aspects of importedEnglish legal practices useful and a safeguard (particularly for inheritanceand commerce) against the exactions of a ruler. The privilege of protectionwas far from straightforward, however, and not to be confused with ‘extra-territorial jurisdiction’ in the nineteenth century.10

One result was to make it easier for private traders to escape the con-sequences of any breach of state customs and duties, in the absence of anycommercial treaty. Protection of Indian employees created a beneficial eliteamong the service gentry attached to a residency or agency, excluded from thejustice of rulers by clientage, rather than by change of nationality or residencein an annexed territory. Furthermore, a large number of Indian employees enjoyed rights of petition at a ruler’s court, backed by the resident. Petition-ing and intercession could become a privilege to be rented out for payment tonon-employees.11 For the same reason, protection of client nobility by a resi-dent built up a constituency at court or in territorial administration, in returnfor safeguarding inheritance claims or the interests of favourites of one ruleragainst a change of personnel by his successor. In short, one patronage systemwas used to counteract a more traditional one. Payment of pensions to members of a loyal nobility adapted a common practice to the ends of an un-commonly intrusive Company.12 The technique was particularly valuable insecuring the services of senior ministers.

The status of a recognized minister or a dewan was then advanced by defi-nition of his functions and power to ‘reform’ the state, usually in matters ofrevenue, but occasionally disguised as protection of ‘the people’ against aruler. In Hyderabad and Travancore there were protracted struggles to havethe resident’s nominee as dewan accepted. Death of the Travancore ruler in1812 opened the way for an approved successor and created a role for the resident as minister-in-chief, receiving reports weekly from subordinates. In1814, a trusted chief minister was transferred from service in Mysore. Fromthen on, till 1829, Travancore administration remained firmly under residentsupervision.

Resident ‘intervention,’ however, is a loose term. It might mean anythingfrom advice and exhortation to active organization of revenue collection. Although the struggle over status and resources can be analysed in terms ofstrategies and tactics, the basis of the ruler’s state power through patrimonialappointment and the existence of subordinate layers of clientage has to be the

13 Fisher, Indirect Rule in India, for the case of Resident John Collins at Lucknow and DavidOchterlony at Delhi. See too Fisher, ‘The Resident in Court Ritual, 1764–1858’, 419–58.

14 Fisher, Indirect Rule in India, 331, 337–8.

54 Indian States

focus of a resident’s success or failure to achieve Company goals. One de-fence, of course, was to immerse the resident in court life, in other words, toturn the broker into a client. Bribes by rulers could bring results, especiallywhere residency expenses were paid locally. As late as 1829 a resident inAwadh was proved to be corrupt. The venalities of the earlier period—tradeprivileges, money-lending to rulers—were outlawed ; but the creation of ob-ligations between ruler and resident was not stamped out. As in other soci-eties, gifts were the currency of mutual cooperation. Employment of friendsand relatives of officials incurred another kind of debt leading to rights of succession to a ministerial post. The earliest residents moved easily into suchtransactions by acceptance of titles, quarters for Indian wives.13

Much of that co-option was evidence of a certain style common to officersand company servants, a fashion for ‘orientalism’, as well as a duty to proto-cols that became less personalized and more formal by the 1840s. For effec-tive influence the resident had to construct his own client network. Within aresidency, use of assistants created a parallel administration from a mix ofHindu and Muslims and some Europeans in the ‘language’, intelligence, andtreasury offices of the residency and among its medical staff. Service assistants(munshis) could, of course, serve two masters and act as brokers rather thanBritish clients, to be suitably rewarded at end of service by the ruler. But munshis did not become ‘civil servants’ easily, because the residency system‘tended to function on the basis of personal bonds’.14 Personally appointedstaff members followed their patron to a new residency. At the end of servicethey might be rewarded by a tax-free land grant. Fisher notes that the pre-dominant characteristic of the first period of British over-rule in the nativestates was this subordinate clientage between resident and Indian assistants,and, secondly, subordinate recruitment of relatives by assistants. At this level,the munshis became minor patrons using their status to further kinsmen’s careers and lay claim to hereditary rights to senior positions. By the 1830s,there was more insistence on formal qualifications with the appearance ofcandidates who had passed through Delhi College.

An even more delicate service was performed by assistant treasurers. In thisposition, there were openings for members of Indian banking houses arrang-ing transfer of funds and keeping a check on exchange rates. Such appointeesworked on a commission basis, acquiring status for their banking familieswith opportunity to sell the office of treasurer at a later date, or pass it on toan heir. Such a service left residents vulnerable to withdrawal by a client or todefalcations, if faced with dismissal. Accordingly, much of this area of Com-pany access was in the hands of an Indian banking sector using the techniquesof bills of exchange and a network of correspondents to facilitate transfers of

15 Ibid. 264.16 Burton Stein, A History of India (Oxford, 1998), 216.

Clients and Brokers 55

‘subsidies’ and test the value of the Company’s credit in the interior markets.As sums grew in importance, the Company brought in treasurers to handlelarge transactions in return for a salary and pensions.

Although the main lines of power, compliance, or opposition within theprincipal states can be described, it is less easy to reach a conclusion about thereasons for the political fate of subordinate states in general. Altogether, be-tween 1841 and 1857 there were some twenty-two states or groups of statesin treaty relations. Of these, six were annexed in that period (and Mysoremight as well have been). They made up, in 1841, over half of the territory ofIndia, decreasing to about one-third by 1857; and they contained just underone-third of the population of over 200 million. As Fisher rightly concludes,‘The British themselves never settled on any specific official number ofprincely states: at various times the official number of states appeared in therange of 500 to 700. Thus, indirect rule proved more an ideal type than a precise category.’15

One can only agree with the imprecision of a term that was never appliedbycontemporary soldiers and officials. They held divided opinions about themajor states, covering their use as strategic necessities or satraps to a Mughalsuccessor power. In the main, however, they dealt with them on an ad hocbasis; and their fate was conditioned by traditional norms of behaviour be-tween superiors and subordinates, by the personalities of rulers, agents, andgovernors, and by the changed circumstances of the Company after 1833. Forone historian, therefore, the legacy of officials of the Company period con-sisted of both a perpetuation of the past accompanied by a dramatic shift inpower and status at the highest levels of government:

the reasons for this non-doctrinaire pragmatism are obvious. These men and others oftheir time were impressed by the institutional framework which they discovered be-neath the shell of the Indian regimes they defeated. The first generation of Companyadministrators found these institutions efficient and the elite strata of Indians whomanaged them capable, responsible and responsive to the political tasks of the Company.16

To a greater or lesser extent that pragmatism applied in both the states ofprincely India and in annexed provinces where princes were retired leaving,however, zamindars, clan heads, and other local magnates as beneficiaries ofthe new order.

4 Rulers and Raj

Throughout the period of conquest and consolidation, the Indianstates were treated as practical problems in frontier security and as sources ofrevenue for military posts. As outlined above, this ad hoc approach entailedvariable relations between rulers, brokers, and governors, leading, in mostcases, to a working arrangement guaranteeing status and succession in returnfor subordination and finance. At the same time there was uncertainty and debate about Company and Crown relations with rulers. Soldiers and gover-nors expressed contrasting views about alliance or annexation, depending ontheir experience of warfare and diplomacy. Sometimes actions through an-nexation contradicted a proconsul’s propensity to preserve states.

But their status as patron-administrators was never in doubt. The reasonswent beyond security on the frontiers and finance for presidency treasuries.Generals and governors operated in a political and social environment wherethe privilege of patronage was jealously guarded as a characteristic of rank;and their experience in India reinforced their view that on an imperial fron-tier the right to confer or withhold office was the best safeguard against toomuch interference from a distant Court of Directors or a Board of Control.Only in this way could they keep the respect of subordinates and preservecontrol over public servants. Transfer of the administration of patronage toLeadenhall Street or Whitehall would leave the governor as a ‘useless cipherwithout power, authority or respect’.1

Although no parallel was ever drawn with similar challenges to a ruler’scontrol over appointments within a patrimonial system, administrators had agood understanding of how ‘interference’ could create rival allegiance withincourt politics. Residents, agents, and their masters, therefore, worked to ‘reform’ a system judged to be inefficient—even morally harmful. Hence thecontradictions in many of the opinions expressed. The dilemmas inherent in ‘subsidiary alliances’ were summed up by Sir Thomas Munro, veteran of Mysore, Madras administration, and Maratha diplomacy. Patrimonial government was inherently weak; stationing subsidiary forces made itweaker. Bad regimes were liable to be propped up: ‘The usual remedy of a badgovernment in India is a quiet revolution in the palace, or a violent one by rebellion, or foreign conquests. But the presence of a British force cuts offevery chance of remedy, by supporting the prince on the throne against

1 Marquis Wellesley to Addington, 10 Jan. 1802, in A Selection from the Despatches, Treaties,and Other Papers of the Marquis Wellesley, K.G. during his Government of India, ed. Sidney J.Owen (Oxford, 1877), 690–3.

Rulers and Raj 57

every foreign and domestic enemy.’2 One remedy was to appoint Indian officials, risking opposition from the ruler and further resident ‘meddling’.The larger risk was creeping annexation as a drastic cure for breaches oftreaties.

The problem of over-rule through a patrimonial regime was most evidentat the highest level. What was to be done with the Mughal? His status re-mained honourable, while his executive authority was nil. Styled as ‘king’,but forbidden to grant titles from 1832, Bahadur Shah was still venerated byprinces and treated with caution by governors.3 A ‘paramount’ chief he cer-tainly was not; but his appeals to directors and despatch of a personal repre-sentative to London caused embarrassment. His position was made moreanomalous by the tendency of the Company to look on its own titles in gov-ernment as a succession from the emperor, before the Charter Renewal Act of1813 reinforced privileges without prejudice to Crown rights. The fiction ofadministering Delhi in his name through a resident fell out of favour. In theabsence of any clear definition of Crown ‘sovereignty’, where princely stateswere concerned, a vague doctrine of ‘paramountcy’, confirmed by the facts ofconquest, took root in the minds of soldiers and governors.4

One consequence of ever-wider military control through annexation, asMunro presciently observed, was risk of rebellion by an Indian army. Furtherconquests, in Munro’s opinion, would only debase a subject people. He was supported by Henry Russell, Resident of Hyderabad, and by other re-formers, including James Mill, who gave evidence against the system of ‘subsidiary alliances’ to a parliamentary committee in 1832. Former gov-ernors—Mountstuart Elphinstone, Sir John Malcolm—joined the chorus of‘preservationists’ who saw states as a useful refuge for unwanted dissidents in British territory.5 Yet, even those opposed to annexation, like Governor-General Lord Bentinck, took Mysore under British control, annexed Coorgand threatened the Nawab of Awadh with deposition. If anything, the bluntalternatives of ‘reform’ or relegation applied more rigorously in the decadebefore the Mutiny, when Dalhousie who refused to sanction princely adop-tion of successors and took over five Maratha states abolished pensions andtitles of former rulers. In 1856, he resolved the long contest between two patrimonial systems run by nawab and resident by annexing Awadh in thename of good government.6 There had been warnings from Resident W. H.Sleeman in Lucknow of a collapse of authority in the state; but Sleeman wasagainst annexation on the grounds that an idle and disaffected Indian armymight revolt.

2 Munro to Wellesley, 12 Aug. 1817, in Owen, ed., A Selection, 795.3 Edward Thompson, The Making of the Indian Princes (Delhi, 1943), 279–81.4 Coen, The Indian Political Service, 13.5 S. R. Ashton, British Policy towards the Indian States 1905–1939 (London, 1982), 11–16.6 Fisher, A Clash of Cultures.

7 Coen, The Indian Political Service, 52–3. 8 Ashton, British Policy, 6.9 Sir William Lee-Warner, The Protected Princes of India (London, 1894); The Native States

of India (London, 1910).10 Coen, The Indian Political Service, 5.

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The Mutiny confirmed the warning, when a reactionary leadership thathad lost titles and pensions in the more recently annexed states of MarathaIndia and Awadh found common cause with a Bengal army in rebellion. Thiscomplex and momentous set of events underscored how dangerous it was totamper with princely India by threatening vested interests, without creatingnew inducements in their place. Yet, the other lesson of the Mutiny was thatmost of the states remained loyal; and this reaction, too, had an impact on future relations. Most immediately, loyalty was rewarded by restoration of territory and relaxation of tribute. Annexations were ruled out on the authority of the India Office; and dynastic succession was assured through‘Adoption Sanads’ that respected Hindu custom. A new order of knight-hoods—the Star of India—was instituted. In 1858 the monarch confirmed byRoyal Proclamation that the ‘rights, dignity and honour of the native princes’would be preserved within the British imperial hierarchy. If anything, thesepersonal links to the Crown increased and were carefully exploited by princeson tour from the 1870s into the next century.7

Left with a doctrine of paramountcy that coexisted uneasily with treatyrights, the Government of India felt freer to redefine its relationship with thestates. Interpretations of the basis for British authority in the states remainedfluid. Only a small proportion of states still retained treaty rights from theCompany by the end of the nineteenth century, and only twenty of these hadreceived assurances their rulers were ‘sovereign’ over subjects and adminis-tration. In any case, by then, the British interpreted paramountcy not as a setof prescriptive obligations ‘but a concept of growth’ that developed andchanged with circumstances.8 Constitutional pundits shied away from closerdefinition and looked to practice and usage.9 From the early period of con-quest to the longer period of patronage and guidance after 1857, interpreta-tion of the substance of over-rule in the states was pragmatic rather thandoctrinaire.

But supervision became more complex as responsibilities were shared between provincial governments and the central government. The centralgovernment’s Foreign and Political Department maintained relations eitherdirectly through residents in major states, or through political agents in Cen-tral India, Rajputana, and Baluchistan. A second category of states was supervised through provincial governments. Among these, Bombay had itsown Political Department with responsibility for over thirty-five states.Provincial supervisory officers were termed commissioners or collectors, buttheir function was political and they, too, corresponded with the Governmentof India.10 One consequence of this division of advisory authority in Indian

11 Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes, 300. 12 Ibid. 117.13 Though not on the basis of the findings of a judicial commission, but on grounds of ‘gross

misgovernment’. Ashton, British Policy, 18–19.

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states was patron rivalry between Bombay, Madras, and the Political Department at the centre. Another was that distinctions between ‘directly’ or‘indirectly’ ruled states were frequently obscured in practice. They were too many for prescriptive generalizations—some 600 or so polities and kingdoms that survived into the twentieth century, though only 284 were important enough to retain privy purses after 1947. Protected as they were by the self-denying Act of 1858, nevertheless, insolvency and succession problems could lead to suspension of autonomy. For the mid-1870s, one historian found twenty-eight Bombay states—over half the area of the presidency’s princely charges—were under direct British management; and few escaped entirely from periods of ‘interregnum’. For this reason, as Copland puts it: ‘we may need to revise our ideas of what constituted “indirect” rule, certainly within the Indian context.’11 The main working dis-tinction was political. For the central government, large states were an embarrassment if badly managed; and, eventually, they were seen as a pos-sible counter-weight to Indian nationalism. For the provinces, however, stateswere exercises in the politics of persuasion and diplomatic management onthe borders of territory run by different rules and precepts. Fundamentally,there was a deeper issue of centralization of policy towards the states or alarge measure of devolution of responsibility to residents and agents. Themain issues in management remained fairly constant: dynastic succession, re-ciprocal access to resources, and the creation (on both sides) of a cadre of use-ful and loyal officials to preserve patrimonial interests or to see reformsthrough.

Although rulers were protected from annexation from 1858, lineage suc-cession was not guaranteed, and they were exposed to deposition and formalacceptance of chosen heirs. Sometimes the succession could be managed byincluding relatives of the deceased in the minority administration, or ‘inter-regnum’, as was done in two states, Limbdi and Rajkot in 1867 with somesuccess.12 In other states of the Punjab the Maharaja and some of the chiefs ofPatiala agreed to codified succession rules and regency councils in order toavoid this hiatus. Deposition was, however, fairly rare. The most infamouscase was that of the Gaekwad of Baroda. Accused of attempting to poison a resident, Malhar Rao was suspended, arrested and exiled to Madras in 1875.13 Lord Lytton saw to it that an adopted son of his more loyal predecessor, Khandi Rao, was installed in his place in 1881 with full honoursand titles.

What the Raj took away, it could restore. Doubts about ‘sovereignty’ overMysore, taken under British management from 1834, sustained the view thatthe original treaty of 1799 aimed at finding a Hindu dynasty to rule on

condition of good government. From 1868, during the minority of a suitablemaharaja, revenues and a civil list were administered in trust, until the ruler attained his government in 1881. There were strict conditions.14 A protocolrequired allegiance and subordination to the Queen Empress and support forthe British Army. A large subsidy and some territory, including Bangalore,were handed over in return for Seringapatam Island. A resident was appointed to supervise a draconian list of lesser requirements on revenue as-sessment, coinage, extradition, lands for telegraph lines and railways, and jurisdiction over British subjects. Altogether, these prescriptions representedin detail the aims of the Political Department in many states, where it was notpossible to revise treaties. During Lord Curzon’s viceroyalty, some fifteenrulers were either deposed or temporarily deprived of their powers. Despitethis show of zeal by a viceroy antipathetic to the whole idea of princely states,most rulers remained in office, subject to creeping derogations from their‘sovereignty’ (as they saw it) of the type applied to Mysore. After 1910, whenthe system of graded states and rulerships had taken hold, there were still nu-merous cases of investigation into ‘misgovernment’, but the punishment wasdemotion and loss of ceremonial salutes and honours.

There were compensations for such interventions. Access to financial andother resources on the part of rulers improved by removal of the risk of revoltby lesser landowning nobility. The basic premiss of giving and receiving trib-ute as a formal acknowledgement of patrimonial power did not disappear,though it was open to reinterpretation and definition. In wide areas of BritishIndia, as in the states, the idea of kingship resisted prescription, as effectiverulers sought new techniques to protect their authority and control. TheHindu prince may or may not have regarded himself as a ‘god incarnate’; buthe was, in Indian terms possessed of izzat, or prestige, and an inner source ofpower. Indian states were still largely patrimonial in terms of centralized authority. There was close mutual support, for example, between maharajasand Sikh leadership in Patiala, a form of religious and secular clientage muchapproved by the British.15 Whatever the religious basis for a ruler’s status, insecular terms preservation of a dynasty’s prestige through defence of privilegeand through government from the darbar as an administrative court was acentral issue between ruler and British overseers.16

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14 ‘Instrument of Transfer’, 1881, in Aitchison, ed., A Collection of Treaties, ix. 232.15 Barbara N. Ramusack, ‘Punjab States: Maharajas and Gurdwaras: Patiala and the Sikh

Community’, in Robin Jeffrey, ed., People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politicsin the Indian Princely States (Delhi, 1978), 170–204. For a case study exemplifying this theme inTamil Nadu, Price, Kingship and Political Practice in Colonial India.

16 Study of the internal structures of princely states is very uneven. I have drawn heavily on sets of case studies by Ian Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes; Jeffrey, ed., People, Princes and Paramount Power; Robin Jeffrey, ‘The Politics of “Indirect Rule”: Types of Relationship among Rulers, Ministers and Residents in a “Native State” ’, ‘JCCP 13 (1975), 261–81; John McLeod, Sovereignty, Power, Control: Politics in the States of Western India, 1916–1947 (Leiden, 1999); Richard G. Fox, Kin, Clan, Raja, and

Rule: State-Hinterland Relations in Pre-Industrial India (Oxford, 1971); see, too, for a casestudy of a ‘feudatory state’ in Central India with minor rebellions in 1876, 1910, Nandini Sundar, Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar, 1854–1996 (Oxford,1997).

17 Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes, 113.18 Aitchison, ed., A Collection of Treaties, iv. 3–7.19 Rajat K. Ray, ‘Mewar: The Breakdown of the Princely Order’, in Jeffrey, ed., People,

Princes and Paramount Power, 205–39. The ‘breakdown’ of Maharani Fateh Singh’s personalpower did not happen until 1916.

20 Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, ‘Rajputana under British Paramountcy:The Failure of Indirect Rule’, JMH 38 (1966), 138–60.

Rulers and Raj 61

At lower levels of state administration, therefore, the weight of past historywas important. Relations between rulers, their nobility, and the British pre-sented a delicate and complex set of variables in which the overriding ten-dency was to support princes’ claims to tribute from subordinate landowners.Exceptionally, in Bikaner state in 1871, the nobility took refuge in British ter-ritory to avoid the maharaja’s taxes and remained in open rebellion, until arbitration settled their case. More usually, chiefs were upheld in terms of apatrimonial system. It required a keen sense of history to carry such media-tion through, especially where ties of fealty had dissolved, because nobles nolonger had a military role. Copland cites examples from Cutch, where arbi-tration supported chiefs against subordinate nobles by giving them unlimitedlegal jurisdiction over local landowners.17 The India Office took the view that this settlement undermined historic bonds with chiefs of neighbouringKathiawar. Accordingly, the Office inspired a scheme in 1870 for arbitrationthrough a court of chiefs meeting under a British president. By such mecha-nisms, where nobles were not represented, ties of fealty were reinvented witha line of power passing through British agents to support paramounts whowere elevated in status, classified into grades and protected in their honours,lands, and freedom from military revolt. Agency police dealt with any dis-orders and were paid for by the darbars. Many of the minor tributaries inCentral India passed through a similar confirmation of their dependency asguaranteed or ‘mediatized’ chiefdoms. In Gwalior Residency, seven smallchiefdoms paid tribute to Maharaja Sindia in this way.18 Within Indore Resi-dency, some thirty-one mediatized chiefs and minor rajas had agreements laying down the amounts of their tribute to the Holkar and Sindia rulers. Onthe other hand, the Rajput Agency rulers retained tribute formerly paid to the Marathas.

But arbitration was not always successful. Long-standing tensions betweenthe Maharani of Mewar, holders of jagirs (revenue lands) and lower orders ofpeasantry were only partially relieved by codes of rules and boundary sur-veys.19 The Maharaja of Jaipur took the process further by claiming ‘historic’powers to vary nobles’ tribute assessments and reduce their local jurisdic-tions. In the 1930s, he used a British official to uncover reasons for enforcingthis lower level dependency.20 Gradually, therefore, many darbars won wider

21 Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes, 167.22 Statistical Abstracts for British India, Cd. 7078 (London, 1813); No. 2136 (London, 1928);

Cmd. 6441 (London, 1943).23 Aitchison, ed., A Collection of Treaties, iv. 3–7; appendices, iv, xxxii, for railway agree-

ments with chiefs of Indore.24 Rudolph and Rudolph, ‘Rajputana’, 142, 148.

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powers in relations with feudatories and jagirdars. Kolhapur Darbar re-trieved a right of appeal in criminal jurisdiction in 1903. Gwalior ‘guaran-teed’ feudatories who lost protection by the Government of India. The changehas been noted as one of the reasons for greater confidence among the princesby the 1920s.21

Confirmation of tribute was only one aspect of larger changes in bargainingfor a share of state resources. Direct tribute to Company and Raj, of course,was no longer an issue for most states, but it was still present in the annual accounts of the central government and tended to rise to over £1 mil-lion annually. It needs stating, however, that the amount of tribute paid to cen-tral government after the end of the century hardly amounted to more than 1per cent of ordinary gross revenues; and it decreased to half that proportion inthe 1930s.22 Much of this was not for support of troops, but in the form of interest on loans and for settlement of dues from customs and the manufac-ture of salt and opium in some states. From 1875, Hyderabad arranged a special salt agreement to keep this item out of British territory. An opiumagreement in 1883 prohibited cultivation and manufacture for the benefit ofimports from Indore state, although Hyderabad made considerable revenuefrom duties. In the same year, the nizam started a State Railway Company,regulated by agreement with the Government of India. Valuable coal and goldconcessions were leased to the Hyderabad (Deccan) Company Limited in1886, after a scandal concerning shares purchased by the nizam’s secretaryhad been sorted out in court. These examples were followed in other stateswhere most had railway agreements with the Raj by the end of the century,raising loans in return for ceding jurisdiction within cantonments. Mysorestate went further, from 1902, into mining, water supply, and electricity de-velopment in cooperation with Madras. In addition to concession of lands forroads and railways, Maharaja Sindia of Gwalior made a loan of 150 lakhs tothe Raj for infrastructure in the 1880s and a much larger loan of 3.5 crores ofrupees (£3 million) in 1887. Smaller states within the Central India Agencywere also in receipt of repayments for interest, salt compensation, loss of pasttribute.23 In Jodhpur and Jaipur states the central government took a lease onlocally manufactured salt in 1879 for £125,000 a year, plus transit duties. InRajputana, however, the biggest change may have been in revenue accountsthat separated private estate management by nobles and rulers from publicfunding. The idea that privy purses should only be a small proportion of staterevenue spread, even as personal government continued to exist.24 On the

25 Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes 30. 26 Ibid. 132.

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other hand, some small states in Gujarat had to be taken over as bankrupts tomanage their debts in 1907. Like the early cases of Awadh and Kathiawar, theaim was solvency and appropriation of sufficient revenue to pay tribute anddues. This may explain the leniency with which a currency Act of 1876 wasapplied, allowing many states to operate their own mints and strike their owncoinage. One other resource to be tapped was manpower. A revived ImperialService scheme that had begun in 1885 allowed some princes to upgrade theirtroops to Indian Army standards.

But in the absence of detailed studies of state finances, it would be unwiseto make judgements about general solvency, state wealth, or poverty. ForMysore we do have a good account of internal development and it is excep-tional. States enjoyed a great deal of financial autonomy, compared with theirsituation before 1857; and that point had a bearing on attitudes to constitu-tional and political change after 1918.

British supervision of state resources, therefore, was limited, unless therewere contractual agreements for concessions or infiltration of court govern-ment through Indian officials. The complexity of darbari government in thelatter half of the nineteenth century weakened the executive authority ofrulers who failed to keep up with the demands of financial management andstrengthened the service gentry. Among these, the authority of the dewancould be enormous, unless a mere court favourite and not a man of literacyand capacity. Outstanding examples earned British admiration and carriedthrough their policies of financial rectitude. For, within the court, access to re-sources was a key to personal power, ‘depending on how well the incumbentavailed himself of the opportunities for peculation which abounded in thepatrimonial system’.25

There was, at first, no certainty of tenure for court officials. The usual defence lay in building up a client personnel by installing relatives and caste-followers. Approval of a ruler’s appointments was a fair guide to the qualityof relations with agents of the Raj and an indication of a political officer’s supervision. Following the Mutiny, administration of the state of Gwaliorwas conducted through a minister, Dinkar Rao, as a trusted client of the po-litical agent. When Maharaja Sindia asserted himself sufficiently to install hisown ministers and dewans, they were approved and honoured by the Raj fortheir services. Other rulers were backed up from unexpected quarters. When,in 1876, the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar dismissed his dewan and replaced himwith a man out of favour with the Kathiawar Agency, the Home Governmentallowed this to stand against the wishes of the Bombay Government.26 Rulers’patronage of some gentry over others could be divisive. In Rajput Alwar, the Maharaja favoured Brahmins until the 1890s, when a new ruler intro-duced a language qualification that helped promote Hindu, rather than

27 Edward S. Haynes, ‘Alwar: Bureaucracy versus Traditional Rulership: Raja, Jagirdars, andNew Administrators, 1892–1910’, in Jeffrey, ed., People, Princes and Paramount Power, 32–64.

28 Karen Leonard, ‘Hyderabad: The Mulki-Non-Mulki Conflict’, in Jeffrey, ed., People,Princes and Paramount Power, 65–106.

29 Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes, 31.30 Bjorne Hettne, The Political Economy of Indirect Rule: Mysore 1881–1947 (London,

1976), 64–79. He fell out with the British in Delhi over use of funds for promoting industrial de-velopment in wartime; and he fell foul of the non-Brahmin political movement based on Madras.

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Urdu-speakers.27 A strong dewani administration emerged in Hyderabad, in-dependent of the nizam, and kept in power a layer of older Mughal nobilityas a check to Parsis, Hindus, and Muslims recruited by the dewan from out-side the state. Thus, Dewan Salar Jung was able for forty years to play off fac-tions against each other and isolate residents.28

In the course of time, too, senior posts within the darbar administration acquired stability of tenure and rights of succession. When the Gaekwad ofBaroda was restored, the Political Department brought in Sir T. MadhavaRao as dewan from Indore state. The young ruler was placed in the hands ofan English tutor, F. A. H. Elliot, who competed for influence with the dewan,until both were removed and dewans again ran the state government till1944. In Hyderabad, Sir Salar Jung presided over a Council of Regency untilhis death in 1883. When the new nizam came of age he was invested by theviceroy, and, at the same time, the son of Salar Jung continued his father’s office, but favoured western-educated officials and broke with his father’s patronage of nobles. Thereafter, from 1901, an administrative lineage ofSalar Jungs, educated in the nizam’s school and at Eton, continued to serve.

In general, then, British influence through Indian ministers was wide-spread. Court officials at the highest level were favoured for literacy and easeof communication and as a foil against autocratic rulers. ‘As a result manydarbari officials came to depend for their livelihood on the patronage of theimperial authorities.’29 Where the darbar was split between factions, as in thecase of Junagadh state after 1900, the nawab played off their leaders againsteach other, until one court official curried favour and recognition from a former governor to give an impression of higher patronage. In Mysore suchfactionalism was not easily resolved. Three maharajas over the period1881–1947 saw off eleven dewans (five of whom were knighted for services).The fundamental division in the court politics of this state was between offi-cials from Mysore who were clients of the ruler and outsiders from Madras.Appointments could go either way. Madrassis were sometimes favoured by the resident and, by 1918, they were on the increase. Thereafter, a capable Brahmin was replaced by a finance minister of the same caste as the maharaja.30

Despite efforts to educate the sons of princes, many rulers came to rely ontheir officials. The agencies and residencies, too, became more bureaucratic,as measured by the sheer volume of paper communicated in English and in the

31 Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes, 199, table 5.1.32 Ibid. 211. 33 Lee-Warner, The Protected Princes of India, 30.

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vernacular languages and the use of the telegraph.31 After Curzon’s example,patronage became more centralized as viceroys visited princes. At the sametime, there was a trend towards administrative prescription through the issueof enormous volumes on political practice in the states and manuals of de-partmental procedures. Residents and agents were moved more frequentlybetween posts, diminishing some of the influence of long-tenured brokers, infavour of court officials. To a great extent, the system of supervision began toossify at the end of the century. Something emerged called ‘Indian PoliticalLaw’—‘a strange mixture of contract, usage, interpretation and legislation’.32

In essence, this codification was an attempt to find a legal basis for the patri-monial practices taken over by Company and Raj. Doubts arose as to how farActs could be applied in smaller states, where there were no treaties, to dealwith opium manufacture, for example, without consent of the inhabitants.Appeal was made to Foreign Jurisdiction Acts; and in 1879 a version of thesewas applied to areas outside British India where the Governor-General inCouncil was deemed to have power and jurisdiction acquired by ‘usage andsufferance’. By Order-in-Council provincial governors were accorded similarpowers in 1902. Despite such legalism, Sir William Lee-Warner, a keen ob-server of princely states, perceived in each one of them ‘a political commu-nity’ at the outset of his own long and very legalistic argument for regardingthem as ‘semi-sovereignties’.33 Possibly his initial definition was closer to thestructure of a ‘native state’, with its own hierarchy, factions, loyalties, and de-fections that were at variance with administrative practices taught by the Raj.

Application of a very limited jurisdiction and methods of financial audit, towhat were historical survivals, therefore, can be regarded as papering overthe widening political differences between princely states and British India,where the issue of political representation at local government and provinciallevels posed questions that could not be resolved by prescriptive regulation.More importantly, as the Raj faced the huge political problem of reform andrepresentation in British India leading up to the Montagu–Chelmsford Report of 1918, the division between provincial agencies and the central political department became less justifiable. The states moved closer to theRaj and away from supervision by provinces whose governments were to begiven a large measure of political responsibility. From 1924, new states agencies directly under central government took over from local govern-ments. Political officers were now part of an Indian Political Service.

Nevertheless, by the second decade of the new century the status of princeshad improved, at least in British eyes, however much administration in theirstates had come to be dominated by cliques of officials. This change is some-times attributed to the more liberal views of Harcourt Butler, as head of

34 Ashton, British Policy towards the Indian States, 42–4; and for limits to central governmentcontrol, McLeod, Sovereignty, 69–70.

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Map 2. India, States and Provinces, early twentieth century, after The ImperialGazetteer of India, xvi (Delhi and Edinburgh Geographical Institute, 1931)

India’s Foreign Department, and his patron, the Viceroy Lord Minto. Bothfavoured the states’ ‘simpler executive form of government’, compared withthe ‘scientific system’ [sic] of British India.34 ‘Conservation’ and ‘non-interference’ became the watchwords from about 1910. There was a breakwith the past. Isolation certainly ended with periodic conferences from 1913,though not all princes welcomed meeting in conclave with others they re-garded as inferior in standing. Some were, by then, better educated and moreoutward-looking.

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Princes had their own agendas. These were narrowly defined in oppositionto the growth of ‘political law’ that enmeshed them (as they saw it) in arbi-trary interference. Those who had treaties wished to see them reaffirmed as a basis for patrimonialism. In 1919 they won a right of appeal through aviceroy’s commission against removal or dismissal. As Indian politicians andpress showed less respect for princes, the Raj hastened to shield them fromcriticism by a Protection Act in 1922. Such victories were important, butsmall, in the scale of pending constitutional changes. The princes gave littlethought to reforming representation in the variety of state councils and as-semblies that they had learned to manage since the 1890s. Rather, they turnedto their own ‘trades union’ in the Chamber of Princes, encouraged by the col-lapse of the non-cooperation movement begun by Congress and by a short period of prosperity and rising revenue from customs and railways. Theywere optimistic, therefore, about using a new viceroy, Lord Irwin, for theirown ends and generally welcomed the Indian States Committee set up underButler in 1927 to examine their relations with central government.35

Publication of the committee’s report two years later illustrated how far thestatus of princes was an ambiguous factor in the Raj’s overall responsibilitiesfor a measure of political advancement. Old treaty rights were not enough.The committee admitted that action would not necessarily be taken to protectrulers against popular opposition. Faced with the more arduous task of con-taining Indian nationalism, the patron power was having second thoughts.True, there was much reinvention of ‘Indian India’ in the Butler report as anexample of Hindu ‘traditional’ political organization. The states, however,were really on trial; and protection of the princely ‘Order’ by the Political De-partment was conditional on finding a place for the states in more generalconstitutional reform. For the moment, it was conceded that princes’ rela-tions were primarily with the Crown and that paramountcy would not betransferred to new Indian governments without consent. Behind these blandassurances lay a realization there was a new dispensation in the making,though its advent could not be predicted. Some day the Political Departmentwould be taken over.

There was a sharp division of views about the consequences of such atakeover. For some officials the states were distinct, politically and adminis-tratively, from the provinces and could not join any all-India federation. Onthe whole, the Raj inclined to this view through the late 1920s and longer.Others in the Political Department and the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, who had akeen sense of the dangers of endlessly antagonizing the more forthright na-tionalists, favoured a ‘united’ India. Irwin, therefore, set in motion a series ofround table conferences in London to convince princes and Indian politicians

35 Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes, 277–9; Ian Copland, The Princes of Indiain the Endgame of Empire, 1917–1947 (Cambridge, 1997), 65–71.

36 Copland, The Princes of India, 119; McLeod, Sovereignty, 47.37 James Manor, ‘The Demise of a Princely Order’, in Jeffrey, ed., People, Princes, and

Paramount Power, 306–38; and for ‘attachment’ of small to larger states, McLeod, Sovereignty,133.

38 Copland, The Princes of India, esp. chap. 6 and 274.39 Leonard, ‘Hyderabad’, 105–6. 40 Ramusack, ‘Punjab States’, 204.

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that compromises were possible. In the end, most did not agree to join any all-India federation, though about half of those princes who replied to theviceroy’s offer of seats in an upper house in 1939 were in favour. This wouldhave meant doing battle with Congress during the last phase of nationalistprotest; and there was no sign princes had any stomach for such a politicalfight. On economic grounds, as outline plans for settlement of states’ balancesdemonstrated, there was little to be gained, either, for the eleven states con-sidered important enough to deserve seats.36

The opinions of historians are also divided on whether it was possible for aset of the largest states to sustain a constitutional identity of their own withinan Indian federation. James Manor’s conclusion is that most of them were‘doomed’ from early in the century; and the smallest were in a nigh ‘hopeless’position after 1935.37 That view has been echoed by India’s politicians, suchas Nehru, who viewed them as an anachronism. No ruler wanted to sharepower with elected politicians; and few ministers would have stayed in office.Even Mysore, in the vanguard of expanded representation, baulked at re-sponsible government through popular sovereignty. On the other hand, IanCopland has made a case for a less predetermined outcome, blaming theLabour government and its viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, for not taking afirmer line, 1945–6, to defend the treaty rights of the states.38 It is a difficultargument to sustain from international law. What sort of status did treaties,never formally approved by Parliament or by Order-in-Council, have a cen-tury later? For nineteenth-century law officers they were, at best, second-classagreements. For twentieth-century officials they held no unbreakable prom-ises and, in any case, did not apply to all the states.

In studies of particular states the outcome was less straightforward. From1911, when the Nizam of Hyderabad took over the running of the state, ceding little to political representation, cultural nationalism merged with aDeccani nationalism and a concept of regional Muslim sovereignty.39 Such aconcept existed in tension with local political organizations formed in Hyderabad districts and in touch with politicians who pressed for responsi-ble government within the state. Eventually, the politics of communal oppo-sition would take over, leaving no room for compromise. In Patiala, however,the maharajas who acted as patrons to Sikh religious communities succeededin maintaining this accommodation through the early years of partition andindependence; and for this Sikhs were rewarded with a large proportion of state jobs after 1947.40 An older view of the Rajput states, faced with direct

41 Rudolph and Rudolph, ‘Rajputana’, 138–41.42 Hettne, The Political Economy of Indirect Rule, 202–367. 43 Ibid. 336.44 John R. Wood, ‘Rajkot: Indian Nationalism in the Princely Context: The Rajkot Satyagraha

of 1938–9’, in Jeffrey, ed., People, Princes, and Paramount Power, 240–74.45 Sir Conrad Corfield, The Princely India I Knew: From Reading to Mountbatten (Madras,

1975); McLeod, Sovereignty, 283.

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action inspired by Congress in the 1930s, lays emphasis on internal divisionsbetween Brahmins ‘dependent on the court for trade and other patronage’and literate groups based on local committees. But when these states rejectedfederation, local committees stayed their hand; and by the time Rajputana’stwenty-two states admitted popular representation, they were amalgamatedpeacefully into Rajasthan.41

On the other hand, Mysore, where there was increased elite political par-ticipation in government from about 1912, illustrated how little danger therewas of its ruler facing serious opposition from representative institutions. Ifanything, his status increased and his personal power flowed downwardsthrough client groups in the Executive Council and Legislative Council.42

Mysore supported all-India federation (as a way of getting rid of tribute),and, ironically, a local demand for Swadeshi, based on a prosperous eco-nomic Mysorean ‘nationalism’, opposed to external merchants and immi-grant workers. There was no sympathy in Congress, however, for the ‘Mysoremodel’ of industrial progress. It is for this reason, too, that Mysore’s sepa-ratism (the state kept out of the Chamber of Princes) was important for lackof political party formation among the princely states. Lines of patronagefrom rulers, rather than party leaders prevailed. But Congress, after 1947,continued to control local distribution of development resources through aMysore nobility, through a ‘patronage structure’ reaching down to local de-velopment boards and village panchayats.43 Elsewhere, too, it was very diffi-cult for Congress to penetrate the politics of a state before independence. Thisis well illustrated by Gandhi’s failure to prevail in a trial of strength with theThakore of Rajkot, 1938–9.44

In the end, the policies of Mountbatten, not the Political Department, car-ried the day.45 The fate of Indian princes was left to Congress and ministerialimplementation of promises made in the Instrument of Accession in 1947 torespect rulers’ administration, except for defence, foreign affairs, and com-munications. These were easy to break, on the grounds they could not bemade to work. Threats and blackmail brought the princes to capitulation andno constitutional alternatives were offered. Most states resisted until the endand were dismantled, rather than reformed or included constitutionally intothe new federal India.

Historically, their case is instructive for the perils of encouraging ‘tradi-tional’ status in isolation. Princes were permitted to enjoy a greater measureof autonomy in the 1920s and 1930s, encouraging resistance to political

46 D. A. Low, ‘Laissez-Faire and Traditional Rulership in Princely India’, in Jeffrey, ed., People, Princes and Paramount Power, 372–87.

47 David C. Potter, India’s Political Administrators 1919–1983 (Oxford, 1986), 39.

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change. They made tactical errors in not using the Chamber of Princes to better purpose as a unified negotiating body. They did not build up a politicalbase from within the states to contest local elections through a widened fran-chise. They refused to join in an all-India federation; and by the time that theMuslim League held out for Pakistan from January 1947, the imperial patronhad gone. It may well be that the states’ service gentry and dewans did nothave local roots and could not adapt their roles towards fashioning politicalmachines headed by rulers.46 This begs a number of questions about financeand experience in running elected local government councils. There is littlereason to think that dewans could assist in forming patron parties, whenprinces showed little enthusiasm for legislative reform or concessions to fed-eralism. Within darbari government, if the traditional patrons did not assertthemselves (and many did not against their ministers) such parties did notemerge. In their absence the idea of princes as a ‘counterweight’ to Congressfound no political organization within and between states.

The states, however, were not simply surrogates for British power in re-serve, symbols of autocracy imported into India. They were also products ofIndian social and political organization, difficult to reconcile with economicand political change envisaged by nationalists in the twentieth century, andindeed, by some of the princes themselves or their ministers. Contrary tosome views, there was no ‘contract’ between Crown and princes. There wereprescriptions and protocols, but the basis of the relationship, before and aftermilitary conquest, was for mutual advantage between unequal partners. Theonly way the princely clients might have dissolved the arrangement wouldhave been to construct bridges with Congress. For the British, when therewere no further advantages to be had for a retreating power, dissolution of thelong and chequered alliances was the most likely outcome.

Patrimonialism left its own legacy. There are now sufficient studies to sug-gest that the politics of patronage were firmly entrenched in Indian societyand continued after 1947. The administrative divide between British Indiaand the princes was not hard and fast. Experienced administrators occasion-ally transferred between the Indian Civil Service and the Indian Political Ser-vice. Within the district administration under the ICS, collectors often drewsupport from zamindars and a landed class; and if these were loyal ‘they wererewarded with honours, invitations to official functions, and other favours inthe power of the Collector to dispense, such as tax concessions, and jobs forrelatives and friends’.47 Earlier residents and political officers would havebeen familiar with such bargains. So, studies of ‘clientelism’ have a certaincontinuity, recognizing that much in the relationship between resident or po-

48 Coen, The Indian Political Service, 76; and for clientage in India, Mitra, Power, Protest andParticipation, 90, 216–19; and for a close analysis of patron–client relations behind ‘indirectrule’ in the case of Pudukkottai state in Madras, Nicholas B. Dirk, The Hollow Crown: Ethno-history of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge, 1987), pp. xxv, 331, 349. Dirk’s useful phrase ‘thepolitical economy of honour’ denotes the share out of revenues between princes and subordinatechiefs on the basis of loyalty and efficiency, rather than a Civil List.

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litical agents and the rulers was based on a mutual search for reciprocal ben-efits—dynastic support for a monopoly of access to ‘subsidies’, trade, andtroops—summed up as ‘the political economy of honour’. Even such an in-strumental compromise was not without close personal friendships and useful advice.

But though undoubtedly many Rulers in their heart of hearts resented the whole set upof paramountcy to an extent which made them look upon their Political Agent as theiropponent, it would be wrong to suggest that there were not many instances of the reverse. Often, a close personal friendship, analogous to that which sometimes arisesbetween a Head of State and a foreign ambassador, existed between a Ruler and hisP[olitical] A[dviser]. Again and again a Ruler would ask his P.A. privately for adviceon some grave matter like federal negotiations, and it was a tribute to the service thatthe Rulers, as a whole, trusted the word of their P.A.s and, even when the matter atissue was some controversy with Government, would fully confide in them.48

The case of the Indian states, because of their chronological precedence,raises more general questions for the historiography of later over-rule of pat-rimonial regimes. Were methods arrived at for isolating and dealing with amultitude of local hierarchies studied and applied elsewhere? Any answer hasto take into account emergent forms of administration in British imperial pos-sessions in conditions of imperial rebellion, global warfare, industrial andcommercial expansion, from the last quarter of the eighteenth century to thetransfer of responsibility in India from Company to Crown. The whole ofthat turbulent period saw the loss of one set of settler colonies and the re-tention of others, soon to be augmented by annexation and settlement in Australia, New Zealand, the Cape of Good Hope, and Natal. Over the sameperiod, there was both expansion of autocratic power in Company posses-sions in India, as well as experience of ‘dual administration’ and utilization ofprovincial hierarchies in states covering about a third of the subcontinent. Atthe imperial centre coordinated policy-making through secretaries of statecommon to the Home Office, the War Office, Trade and Plantations and theBoard of Control gave a certain cohesion to British commercial and wartimestrategies. But the major lesson applied abroad to the government of imperialremnants and new acquisitions, especially in colonies where foreign or in-digenous populations predominated, was adaptation of an autocratic chainof command to a measure of respect for local customs and leadership. Both inQuebec and Ceylon in 1791 and 1801 the despotism of Crown Colony gov-ernment was tempered by representative institutions in the one case and by

49 Vincent Harlow, ‘The New Imperial System, 1783–1815’, in CHBE, ii. The Growth of theNew Empire 1783–1870 (Cambridge, 1940), 131–87, 165.

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separation from the over-rule of Madras in the other. Slowly it was learnedthat in the new Asiatic empire: ‘the art of ruling native races is a thing of infi-nite variety not amenable to standardisation’.49

Consequently, a historical example of infiltration and control by an im-perial trading company in the internal politics of Indian states provides agrand scenario of progression to over-rule through a mix of conquest and alli-ance, commercial subversion and financial extortion. But it does not providea historical template for methods applied later in other parts of Asia, inAfrica, or in the Pacific. The main reason is that other hierarchies were notthemselves replicas of Indian states. There was a considerable difference inthe scale of the Company’s financial and military commitment to alliance, in-vestment, and administration, compared with piecemeal ventures in tradeand conquest in Africa, Southeast Asia, or the Pacific The creation of a vice-regal government responsible through a secretary of state in the India Officeto Parliament from 1858 demarcated the British imperial experience in Indiafrom other responsibilities handled by the Colonial Office or the Foreign Office. There were no parallels elsewhere with subcontinental dominion overpopulations that amounted to some 70 per cent of the late Victorian empire’sfour hundred millions. There were certainly Indian influences on other partsof that empire in terms of strategic communications to be safeguarded in theNear East and around the Cape, in Indian emigration overseas, and, not least,in the deployment of the Indian Army for Imperial defence. There was also areciprocal influence on Indian politics, as leaders of Congress and the nation-alist movement aimed at internal self-government and Dominion status in theearly twentieth century. But it is unwise to look to British experience in Indiafor guidelines in such a disaggregated collection of dependencies and spheresof influence, as the cases discussed below.

summary

Early English contact with India was through the chartered East India Com-pany. From the early seventeenth century Company factors were highly de-pendent on the patronage of Mughal authorities for the privileges of tradeand settlement in restricted enclaves at Surat, Bombay, Madras, and on thelower Hugli River in Bengal. The insecurity of Company factories was com-pensated by access to imperial licences granting relief from tolls and duties, bythe services of Indian brokers, merchants, and bankers, and by participationin the local and regional commerce of India. In the early eighteenth century,as the central authority of the Mughal patrimonial empire declined, political

relations with the princes of successor states turned on the potential for assis-tance from a maritime power and the drain on local revenue arising from fis-cal and trade concessions by official and private factors. The Company couldbe supportive or subversive. The fortification of some posts and a measure oflocal protection and jurisdiction created, moreover, beneficiaries among Indian service gentry. By development of trading operations the Company en-listed clients of its own and, at the same time, created a potential cause of localconflict by abuse of privilege in Bengal.

In addition, the status of the Company as a mercantile power and a factorin regional politics was further advanced by open conflict with French com-mercial and military interests the 1740s and 1750s in the context of interna-tional wars, succession politics in south India and local rivalries betweenIndian states. The struggle for political influence, revenue, and manpower todefend established enclaves was fought out against the French in the Carnaticand Hyderabad state in southern and central India. Both sides competed ‘ac-cording to the Asiatic manner’, as clients to powerful patron-princes and withminor clients and allies of their own.

By the 1750s, the strain on the finances of a chartered company that be-came a national institution increased its vulnerability to debt, disruption oftrade, and diversion of profits from investment into the hands of its own em-ployees. Financial crisis became a political crisis between the Company andthe government of the Nawab of Bengal and committed the maritime agencyto the use of force and diplomacy in the internal affairs of princely states.

The immediate occasion for the Company’s change of policy arose from thedefence of its base in Calcutta against the Bengal governor, Nawab Siraj-ud-daula, 1756–7, in ways that set a precedent for compensation and employ-ment of resident agents at the Bengal capital of Murshidabad. Over thefollowing half-century the maritime agency became a land power on the sub-continent. Parallel with the advancement of the Company’s commercial andfiscal aims in its Bengal ‘bridgehead’, the Calcutta Presidency and the othertwo presidencies of Madras and Bombay interacted with neighbouring statesin ways that sometimes resulted in the subordination of their Muslim orHindu rulers and at other times resulted in uneasy cooperation. Such rela-tionships were never static, as treaties defining commercial privilege, pay-ment for troops, debt recovery were made and broken. At the same time,assignments of territory by states to each other and to the Company increasedin ways that reshaped internal boundaries and demarcated territories underCompany control and influence. From the mid-eighteenth century India wasbeing imperially partitioned.

The Company’s actions in Bengal also taught its Calcutta administrationmuch about the use of clientage to build up a network of Hindu officials andmanage land revenue and tribute. Further defence of this interest against acoalition headed by the Nawabs of Bengal, Awadh, and Emperor Shah Alam,

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74 Indian States

changed the regional balance of power in northern India at Buxar in 1764 byextending the policy of alliance and indemnity into the upper Ganges. As theCompany’s hold over its client state in Bengal tightened through the MughalEmperor’s transfer of state finances and external relations, the CalcuttaCouncil was in a better position to fund its policies of war and diplomacy on behalf of the Madras and Bombay Presidencies. A brief period of power-sharing with the Bengal nawab until 1766 was followed by exclusion of theruler and changes in the structure of Company rule under a governor-general.Gradually, official reformers separated trade from administration, extendedthe Calcutta judicial system, and managed Bengal’s revenue-producing estates through Company officers, as a model for the annexed territories of‘British’ India.

Meanwhile, in ‘Indian’ India older techniques were applied in Awadh, theCarnatic, the Maratha Deccan, and the states of south India to secure politi-cal influence and access to resources for Madras, Bombay, and Surat. Awadhwas successfully infiltrated financially and commercially by resident agentswho used ministers and court factions to create a client state with a controlledline of succession and transfer of land revenue by the 1790s. The Company’sagents had less success in influencing the chieftains of the ‘confederation’ ofMaratha states dominating central India. At most, treaty-making in 1776 and1782 secured support for its objectives in southern India. There, the MadrasPresidency began to consolidate its influence over the Carnatic through alliance with Hyderabad to defeat French rivals and to remove Muslim overlords from the Hindu state of Mysore. By the early 1790s, the com-plex pattern of backing allies and defeating enemies had secured Mysore,Travancore, Malabar, and the Coromandel and effectively repartitioned ter-ritories between the Company, the Marathas, and Hyderabad. The practiceof stationing Company troops in return for tribute was well entrenched. Recovery of debts from subordinate princes resembled a gigantic protectionracket in the minor principalities, where rulers were guaranteed subordinatestatus at a price. When the major ruling houses of the Maratha chiefdoms re-fused to pay that price at the end of the eighteenth century, military cam-paigns and treaties dismantled one empire in central India and replaced itwith a Company paramountcy that left most of the rulers in Maharashtra andthe Punjab with fragmented domains and subordinate status under a new dispensation.

Defining the terms of that paramountcy over some six hundred major andminor states in a good third of India occupied the central and provincial gov-ernments of the Company and the Raj for the rest of the nineteenth century.Annexations and amalgamations continued up until the Mutiny in 1857.Guarantees of preservation under the Crown the following year kept the bulkof the states outside the jurisdiction and administrative methods of British

India. Precedents set under the Company, rather than prescriptive regula-tions, influenced the role of political officers as envoys, agents, and advisersto maharajas and chieftains of client states. In practice they were brokers formore distant patrons located in the executive of regional agencies, the Foreignand Political Department and in the Viceroy’s Council. The basis for a ruler’ssurvival was straightforward enough: in return for recognition of status andterritory, internal sources of revenue, lineal succession and an autonomouscourt, and the exclusion of alien jurisdiction over Indian subjects, the patron-power controlled foreign relations and supervised the good conduct of inter-nal affairs. Some states had treaties to this effect; most did not. A few wereeffectively subsumed for greater or shorter periods into more formal Britishadministration under commissioners. But most survived into the early periodof India’s independence as historical anomalies alongside an increasingly self-governing set of regional states.

The methods of supervision through political officers included time-honoured creation of a network of clients of the resident, especially if theservices of a finance minister could be secured. Succession disputes providedanother entry point for influence and a measure of control during minorities.A very large number of arbitrations were concerned with the tributary rela-tions of former vassal communities and the degree to which they could be re-garded as clients of the Raj. Some states continued to pay tribute until the endof the Company period and yielded other resources in terms of loans, rents,territory, railway, and mineral concessions. As in all patron–client relationsthere were disputes, bargaining for advantage, willing loyalty, and sullen op-position. Some rulers were deposed. But for most rulers, especially in thelarger states, imperial honours, tours abroad, and a measure of improvementin the internal administration of patrimonial courts secured their statuswithin the imperial hierarchy, free from the challenge of nationalist politics atlocal government and regional levels in British India.

That status came under threat in the early twentieth century, even as the position of a beneficial and aristocratic elite improved under the protection of the Government of India’s Foreign Department. Periodic conferences ofrulers promoted mutual self-interest, but did not inspire a common politicalprogramme on treaty rights or reform of state councils and assemblies. Fromabout 1927 there was less certainty that official patronage for princes woulddefend them in the face of political and constitutional change. In any case,most states did not agree to join any all-India federation. Opinions are di-vided on whether the princes might have won, or even deserved, a constitu-tional role in the face of Congress hostility. In the end, the states were amongthe casualties of partition: it was easy enough to dismantle them from 1947,though it has not been so easy to end the legacy of patrimonialism in the formof deference to elite status and the politics of patronage. That legacy was

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inherited from the social and political structures tolerated and utilized by Company governors and their successors in conditions of over-rule throughpolitical officers acting as intermediaries between two hierarchies. Such con-ditions were not exactly replicated elsewhere. Nor did the India Office orother imperial departments of state seek to apply such a model to other possessions.

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Part II

North Africa

5 Egypt and Sudan

In North Africa assertion of imperial strategic and commercial in-terests by European Powers led to the co-option and conquest of Islamicstates. The Khedivate of Egypt and the Sultanate of Zanzibar were also entrypoints to the Upper Nile and East-Central Africa. For the British, moreover,Zanzibar was a political agency of the Bombay Presidency, transferred to theGovernment of India in 1872; and Egypt, after occupation in 1882, was in-fluenced by men who saw in the decline of the Ottoman Empire an older par-allel with the provinces of the Mughals. Morocco, however, escaped Turkishdomination at any period before France, late in the nineteenth century, tooka commercial and strategic interest in the management of Moroccan govern-ment as a reinforcement for imperial power in the Maghreb and naval poweron the north-west coast of Africa.

For contrasting reasons Egypt and Morocco are prime examples of patri-monial clientage. The first, because of the ways in which foreign powers tookover debt-servicing before the British occupation, and then used the khedive’sCivil List to construct a new patronage network of civil and military ap-pointments. The second, because the sultan’s headship of Morocco’s civil andmilitary elite survived French construction of a parallel government under aprotectorate. There are differences in chronology and in the historical cir-cumstances that created these two imperial hierarchies, not least, the diplo-matic complications surrounding the occupation of Egypt as a province of theOttoman Empire. In the end, too, the Moroccan dynasty revived politically inthe post-colonial period, while the King of Egypt was overthrown by a mili-tary coup in 1952. It is not intended here to pursue the comparison in his-torical terms throughout the half-century of French and British over-rule.Rather, the structures of two patrimonial systems utilized by foreigners willbe examined in an effort to lay to rest simple categorizations in terms of ‘direct’ or ‘indirect rule’.1

While much attention has been to given to European rivalries and motiva-tions during the extended crisis over Egyptian finances from the 1860s, inter-nal administration under the Khedivate has been treated as a source ofweakness and corruption, rather than a structure exploited by foreign

1 For application of the term ‘indirect rule’ to Egypt and Morocco, see Francis Robinson, ‘TheBritish Empire and the Muslim World’, OHBE, iv. The Twentieth Century, ed. Judith Brown andWm. Roger Louis (Oxford, 1999), 407–8; C. C. Stewart, ‘Islam’, in CHA, vii. From 1920 to1942, ed. A. D. Roberts (Cambridge, 1986), 202.

controllers.2 Contemporaries were equally concerned with safeguarding theirinterests through internal reforms to end what some considered an ‘orientaldespotism’, in anticipation of the benefits of European governmental models.The Foreign Office and its agents in Constantinople and Cairo regardedEgypt as a tributary pashalik of the Ottoman Empire, which had considerablecommercial and financial autonomy from 1867 with a recognized dynasty,raised to the status of a khedivate. After 1867, Egypt was still tributary toConstantinople, but its Turkish (‘Circassian’) rulers and notables operatedthe state as a tax farm, while Khedive Ismail borrowed heavily to invest inpublic works, companies, and agriculture. Revenues from land tax did notkeep pace with expenditure and debt-servicing. By 1876, Egypt was officiallybankrupt.3 Schemes devised by foreign creditors to ensure interest paymentsand borrow more on the security of land revenue overestimated the yieldfrom taxes in a society where the richest landowners were unwilling to bearheavier burdens. Egypt, like Turkey, became a mediatized state, first, by es-tablishment of an international Caisse to manage a proportion of revenue directed towards debt repayment under two British and French controllers-general, and, second, by management and reform of landholding as a securityfor loans and by changes in the incidence of taxation. Diplomatic pressure in1878 insisted on two European officials in the Khedive’s Council to overseethese measures and run the ministries of Finance and Public Works.

There was more to intervention, however, than a search for financial pro-bity. Whenever reform of finances encountered internal opposition, diplo-matic reaction put the blame on the ‘autocracy’ of Khedive Ismail. From thereports of the British controller, Stephen Cave, it is clear that khedival obsti-nacy or incompetence was not the central factor. The period 1876–9 saw astruggle between foreign supervisors and the khedive for control over pa-tronage within the ministries of state and especially the Ministry of Finance.The contest of wills had something in common with the efforts of residents inIndian states to secure the clientage of a dewan against the wishes of a ruler.In Egypt, the stakes were much bigger and offices more numerous. Cave sawthat intervention to control the Civil List called in question a whole patrimo-nial system stemming from the khedive’s entourage and family. Governmentappointments secured loyalties: ‘from the Pashas downwards every office is a tenancy at will’ kept by intrigue and used to control subordinate layers ofemployment.4

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2 For the debate on motives, A. G. Hopkins, ‘The Victorians and Africa: A Reconsideration ofthe Occupation of Egypt, 1882’, JAH 27 (1986), 363–91; Alaf Lufti al-Sayyid-Marsot, ‘TheBritish Occupation of Egypt from 1882’, in OHBE, iii. 651–64.

3 Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy 1800–1914 (London, 1981), chap. 5;Lord Tenterden, ‘Memorandum’, 10 Oct. 1881, British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reportsand Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Prints, ed. David Gillard, Series B (New York,1984), ix. 8–9.

4 Stephen Cave, n.d., British Documents, viii. 202.

When an international commission of enquiry was set up by the financialcontrollers in 1878, it soon discovered how the chain of government and per-sonal patronage subverted Egyptian revenue collection and distorted meth-ods of raising short-term loans at every level from village sheikh to provincialgovernor to minister.5 The lack of reciprocity between a grasping Khedivateand oppressed taxpayers threatened to break down the intricate network of loyalties and obligations by failure to apportion resources equitably. Government employees and pensioners were not regularly paid; the army wasunderfunded and officers on half-pay; provinces were subjected to forcedlevies; ministers raided the endowments of religious institutions. The com-mission insisted on tackling patronage at the top by withdrawing the admin-istration of Crown lands from the khedive and requiring the cession of someof his family lands as a basis for further credit; equalization of land taxes wasadvocated to end privileged exemptions by landowning notables; and man-agement of the khedive’s Civil List was placed under the foreign-controlledMinistry of Finance.

Khedive Ismail accepted the commission’s report and authorized his primeminister, Nubar Pasha, to form a new ministry that included Sir Rivers Wilson and the Comte De Blignières to run Finance and Public Works fromNovember 1878. But he did not accept attempts to exclude him from theCouncil of Ministers; and opinions were divided among European agents onwhether he was an obstacle to further reforms or essential to the cohesion ofthe Egyptian government. That government, moreover, was increasingly atrisk from aggrieved notables faced with equalization of land taxes, fromsheikhs and peasantry who would bear the brunt of increased taxation, andfrom army officers without salaries. A short-lived army mutiny in Cairo inFebruary 1879 brought about the resignation of Nubar Pasha and indicatedthat the Khedivate required outside support as much as internal reform.

One explanation of events in 1879 is that Ismail planned to head off foreignadvice by installing a ‘parliament’ (chamber of notables) to demonstrate loyalty and allow taxation as usual to meet all debts. The charade did notwork; and the money was not raised. In the meantime, the composition andpresidency of the Council of Ministers under Prince Tawfiq was agreed and the khedive was restrained in his control of appointments. Behind this intrigue lay efforts of notables to avoid increased taxes on their lands. Consequently, Ismail used this strong feeling to replace the ministry and pre-sented his own financial plan, in opposition to that of the commission of1878. He appointed Cherif Pasha to head a new Council, composed of thosewho were clients of the khedive in order to call into being a loyal chamber;and he dismissed his two European ministers.6 No mention was made of aCivil List.

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5 Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt, 2 vols. (London, 1908), i, chap. 4. 6 Ibid., ii. 110–48.

The response of the European powers was to demand reinstatement oftheir ministers in the government, which the khedive refused; and for this hewas deposed and replaced by Tawfiq in June 1879 through formal interven-tion by the Ottoman sultan. Tawfiq kept the Council of Ministers under hisown presidency and called in Riaz Pasha as prime minister. The sultan had tobe pressured to allow a return to a measure of Egyptian autonomy, but thekhedive’s right to contract loans was not restored. Baring and De Blignièreswere appointed once more as controllers in a system of joint Anglo-French supervision. A Commission of Liquidation consolidated the Egyptian debt inJuly 1880, maintaining repayment as a heavy charge on the state, but provid-ing some relief for cultivators. The consolidation of land taxes was formallyinstituted, thus ending the tax privileges of notables.

With a form of control established through the Law of Liquidation, theprocess of manning departments by appointment of Europeans expanded. Infiltration of European officials had two results. One was a share-out of government departments to the fellow-nationals of French and British con-trollers and appointment of lesser officials as revenue collectors: ‘England has the principal share in regard to the Heads of Departments, the Port ofAlexandria, the Customs, Post Office and Lighthouses being administered byEnglishmen, while the Octroi [municipal tax] is under a Frenchman.’7 Inshort, Europeans displaced ‘the old Turkish party’ and dismissed Egyptiansfrom the lower levels of Customs. The second result was a political shift inpower from the Khedivate to foreign officials at the level of European minis-ters and the consuls-general. The shift increased dependency on outside sup-port and left the khedive more vulnerable to opposition from status groupscentred on army officers and Turkish/Circassian notables and landowners.

Of the two groups, the army looked the more dangerous. Two army mutinies in February and September led by Colonel Urabi forced the resigna-tion of the minister for war. Disagreement between Constantinople, France,and Britain raised the spectre of the sultan’s intervention as Urabi’s patron, although the army was not in favour of Turkish command and control. Atmost, France and Britain tolerated the dispatch of Turkish representatives.Urabi agreed to move his troops from Cairo to Suez. Britain and France senta few vessels to Alexandria and withdrew them when the Turkish envoys leftin October 1881. The episode revealed once again the difficulty of using thekhedive as a client, when he was formally subordinate to the sultan. Of twomethods of external control, the French were in favour of an Anglo-Frenchoccupation by this date, while the British preferred a Turkish occupation, ifrestricted by prior agreements with the Porte—which was firmly rejected byFrance.

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7 Tenterden, 10 Oct. 1881, British Documents, ix. 22; Currie, ‘Memorandum’, 17 Sept. 1881,22–5.

8 Dufferin to Granville, 18 Nov. 1882, in Madden, ed., Select Documents, v. 721–3; Tenterden, ‘Egyptian Civil Service’, British Documents, ix. 279–83.

Egypt and Sudan 83

Internally, Cherif Pasha favoured using the Chamber of Notables andkeeping it detached from the army and other sources of Egyptian discontentwith foreign influence. The colonels, however, drew on the power of popularacclaim, and Urabi was appointed under-secretary for war, in January 1882,to keep him under government scrutiny. With Léon Gambetta briefly inpower in France, there was more incentive for backing up Tawfiq by con-trollers, though Sir Auckland Colvin, as a controller-general, thought thatmanifestations of ‘nationalism’ were more anti-Turk than anti-European.The main risk was that any extension of financial powers to the Chamber thatclaimed the right to vote a budget would impinge on financial control underthe Law of Liquidation. A British and French Joint Note, therefore, sentthrough their consuls-general, aimed at keeping the khedive’s powers intact,as allowed by agreement with Turkey.

The Note alienated both army and notables still further. There was no in-crease in the military budget. The Chamber pressed for overthrow of the min-istry and for a ‘national’ government; and delegates succeeded in naming newministers, including Urabi as minister for war. Again, the khedive and CherifPasha considered asking for Turkish intervention, to prop up one crumblingpatrimonial regime by another. In the political confusion that followed theformation of a ministry under Urabi, February–May 1882, the powers of thecontrollers were reduced to nothing. Administration of the provinces brokedown. At this period of resignations and reinstatements, official opinion inLondon and Paris moved towards dispatch of a joint squadron to back thekhedive and form a new ministry. In May and July 1882, attacks on Europeans and other foreigners in Alexandria resulted in bombardment anddisembarkation of British forces, the formation of a new ministry underCherif Pasha, dismissal of Urabi, and defeat of his army at Tel-el-Kebir. Thereluctant controller had become the reluctant occupier.

A formal protectorate was not possible (the example of French protec-tion of Tunisia in 1881 showed that diplomatic negotiations to modify extraterritorial rights for subjects of other powers were problematical). The British Ambassador at Constantinople, Lord Dufferin, arrived to adviseon the new order; and he began by arranging a trial, sentence, and exile for Urabi. Dual control lapsed and France went into opposition to a Britishpresence in Egypt until 1904. Dufferin saw the presence of Europeans in government would continue to be a condition of financial reform, but underBritish occupation. He regretted not being ordered to set up the equivalent of an Indian state under a resident and advocated a Council of State with limited powers and representation.8 To oversee this reform and manage the civil service on the lines advised by Lord Tenterden at the Foreign Office,

9 Owen, The Middle East, 134–5.10 Cromer, Modern Egypt, ii, chaps. 36 and 43 (‘The Workers of the Machine’).

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Sir Evelyn Baring was called back from India and appointed agent and consul-general.

Thus far, British occupation was a result of failure to satisfy vested interestsamong Turco-Circassians, Egyptian notables, and the corps of army officers.Replacement of the khedive in 1879 and military intervention in 1882 endedthis opposition, when the mediatized state became a client state under aBritish agent backed by a reformed Anglo-Egyptian army. Within the legalframework provided by Ottoman Turkey and a majority of European Powers, the consul-general ran his system within the ‘veiled protectorate’ byusing loyal Copts, Circassians, and Englishmen to control key departments—the Daira, Domains, the Railway Board, and, above all, Finance. Europeanofficials already numbered some 1,300 in 1882 and continued to expand.9

Egyptian officials and the Khedivate were familiar with such a system. Thenew service elite was analysed in detail by Baring, according to their resist-ance to corruption and loyalty to the new patron.10 Lord Dufferin’s blueprintto satisfy constitutional reformers was enacted in 1883 by Tawfiq to retainthe Council of State under the khedive with an advisory Legislative Counciland Assembly. Formal authority remained concentrated in the entourage ofEgyptian ministers, while power was exercised through departments with theadvice of Anglo-Egyptian officials.

In the short term, this combination of Egyptian and British patrimonialismsatisfied the need for financial management of a surplus by 1888–9, which pleased European creditors and left something over for public works,agriculture, and communications. With the exception of France, interna-tional acceptance of the occupation was legitimized by Turkey in the Convention of 1885, which formally partitioned authority over the Khedivate. On the other hand, a Mahdist revolt in the Sudan ended Egyptiancontrol and destroyed the army, until a frontier force of retrained Egyptianand British regulars was formed in the manner of India under a British sirdar,or commander-in-chief.

Possibly, experience of India raised false expectations. There were many old India hands with influence, including Baring, Auckland Colvin, andmany officers of the Nile Frontier Force. In India, the states were, to a greatdegree, isolated from the mainstream of Indian political development. InEgypt, this was never possible. Flaws in the ‘old system’, as Baring (LordCromer) termed his behind-the-scenes influence under Tawfiq, began to appear from January 1892, when the 18-year-old, French-educated Abbassucceeded his father as khedive. Cromer was still in no doubt that he operateda patrimonial state ‘as a sort of unrecognised Prime Minister’. But he was

11 For the period, Afaf Lufti al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer (London, 1968); AlexanderSchölch, Egypt for the Egyptians (Ithaca, NY, 1981).

12 Bodleian Library, Milner Papers dep. 23, Scott to Milner, 26 Feb. 1893.13 al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer, 68, 180–1.

Egypt and Sudan 85

increasingly unsure of his ability to make the ‘system’ work in the 1890s, because of a clash of wills with the khedive over appointments to the highestoffices of state.11

There was always a possibility, too, that the khedive might try to lead anynationalist movement to increase his own authority and prestige. Cromersought to head this off by keeping his own clients in ministerial office. In1893, however, Abbas dismissed the pliable Turkish prime minister, MustafaFahmy, in favour of a client of his own and made a number of other appoint-ments disapproved by Cromer who feared that forced resignation of Britishofficials might follow. Backed by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Rosebery,Cromer vetoed the appointment, but lost the cooperation of a compromiseprime minister, Riaz, who joined his khedive in pressing for autonomy in run-ning Egyptian departments and excluding those favourable to the British.12 Itbecame clear that much of the Egyptian official class was behind him; and themove for more autonomy surfaced in Legislative Council demands for reallo-cation of resources in the budget from army expenditure to education andpublic works. Tension was increased by khedival criticism of British officersthat infuriated the sirdar, General Kitchener, until an Egyptian under-secretary in the War Department was offered in sacrifice. Nevertheless, thekhedive and his ministers became, if anything, more autocratic, putting abrake on further constitutional reforms and forcing out of office ministerswho disagreed. Parallels can be drawn with the courts of Indian states. Theapparatus of Egyptian government was, however, much more complex thanan Indian state, where there was no similar command of financial resourcesby a resident.

More importantly, in Egypt, from the 1890s, a nationalist movement re-vived under the leadership of the moderate minister, Saad Zaghlul with thesupport of Khedive Abbas. Cromer’s claim to ‘govern through the governors’sounded less convincing, after his resignation in 1907, when less-talentedconsuls-general, Gorst and Kitchener, tried to run a patrimonial regime in the manner of a colonial dependency.13 In 1914, the ‘veil’ was lifted and a protectorate formally declared under a new ruler. The constitutional mix of Anglo-Egyptian cooperation, executive autocracy, and limited representa-tion was underwritten by the development of exports that enlisted supportfor the regime from merchants and landowners who profited from the production of cotton. Sale of Daira lands (formerly owned by the khedivalfamily) added to the class of landlords and notables dependent on improvedirrigation, fiscal management, and a stable government. Smaller landholders

14 M. W. Daly, ‘Egypt’, in CHA, vii. 742–54. Though the Wafd and the court were left to determine their place in the constitution, Britain did intervene again in 1942.

15 For the case of clientage in the administration of the ‘garrison state’ of the Anglo-EgyptianSudan, Newbury, ‘Patrons, Clients, and Empire’, 247; Woodward, Sudan.

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fared less well, squeezed out of production as rents rose; and state debt in-creased after the occupation, but was better funded at the expense of furtherinvestment in industry and social overheads.

The regime survived the change into protectorate status under Sultan Husain Kamil Pasha because there was no well-organized political party before the emergence of the Wafd, led by Zaghlul in 1918. His exile and apopular uprising in 1919 marked a prolonged period of opposition to the au-tocracy of King Fuad. Proposals for talks on constitutional reform were re-buffed. In the impasse, High Commissioner Lord Allenby arranged for adeclaration of Egyptian ‘independence’ in 1922; and a new constitution waspromulgated for a bi-cameral legislature with considerable executive powerfor the head of state. Excluded from parliamentary action, however, were im-portant reserves concerning the security of the Canal, judicial privileges forEuropeans, control of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and protection of foreigninterests. As the British political grasp loosened, hold over strategic and financial investments tightened. The pattern of change settled into politicalmanagement of elections by moderate parties to keep power in the hands ofKing Fuad’s executive and a running argument with nationalist politiciansover matters reserved in 1922. A series of short-lived governments made amockery of ‘constitutional monarchy’, as parliaments were prorogued andthe Wafd was kept out of office. When the British pressured for a return toparliamentary government, the way was opened for a clearer distinction be-tween the safeguard of strategic interests in a Treaty of Alliance and a greatermeasure of independence to the Egyptian state under King Farouk in theAnglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936. Unlike India, the alliance was not a ‘sub-sidiary’ one: the high commissioner was an ambassador to a country that en-tered the League of Nations.14 Significantly, too, recruitment of an Egyptianarmy and the formation of an elite through a military academy opened theway for the resurgence of a status group that had been a political force beforethe occupation. The officers’ revolt that brought General Neguib to power in1952 confirmed the political importance of their revival.

sudan

Reconquest of the Sudan, 1896–8, from the Mahdiyya established British control of the Nile headwaters, disguised as an Anglo-Egyptian Condominium.15 To that end, Egypt was used as a client state for inter-national recognition; but the model of over-rule was Turco-Egyptian, as

Egypt and Sudan 87

Map 3. Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, late 1930s

16 Governor-General Wingate, cited in Woodward, Sudan, 20.17 Woodward, Sudan, ‘Collaboration’, 29–39; and see G. N. Sanderson, ‘The Anglo-Egyptian

Sudan’, in CHA, vii. 755–62.18 Woodward, Sudan, 38.

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interpreted by British military officials. Until 1924, the Sudan was run as amilitary fief by governors-general who were also sirdars, leaving untouchedreligious courts administered by cadis. Over time, the ‘garrison state’ found it necessary to expand into civil administration through a government secre-tary and create the Sudan Political Service in 1900. The model, therefore, wasautocratic in operation, but applied by an elite of university graduates—a mix of ‘intensely personal supervision’ with ‘strong regimental overtones’.16

A secondary level of Egyptian ma‘murs supplied an executive grade, foster-ing the belief for much of the population that little had changed from the pre-Mahdist period.

The belief was compounded by recruitment of a new service gentry fromtraditional leadership within the sedentary Arabized and nomadic tribes ofthe northern Sudan—Omdas, Shaykhs, Nazirs—who acted as clients for thecivil administration in tax collection and petty justice. At the same time, therewas an accommodation with post-Mahdiyya religious leaders as props to theCondominium. Those who have used a patron–client model to analyse thisco-opted hierarchy emphasize the strong ethnic identity of the chiefs and big men who built up the influence of their own lineages.17 Thus, among theKababish nomads of the Kordofan, the Nazir, Ali al-Tom, emerged as brokerand paramount over clan chiefs, in return for farming taxes, and was eventu-ally knighted for his services. At a higher level of patronage, the son of theMahdi, Abd al-Rahman, was cultivated to counter Ottoman influence duringthe First World War and presented his father’s sword to King George in 1919.It helped, too, to keep taxation light, tolerate domestic slavery and supportthe endemic hostility of northern Sudanese to Egyptian claims. As trade ex-panded moderately, Sudanese merchants and petty traders established newnetworks and gained a vested interest in a strongly hierarchical, if tolerant,regime. The southern Sudan, however, was largely excluded from thesechanges which had begun to create a new kind of Sudanese state out of ‘an es-tablishment of favoured chiefs and sufis’ and traders associated with religiousleaders.18

This clientele was loyal enough for the regime to survive a depression, a re-bellion by Sudanese troops and the effective end of Condominium in 1924.The political fate of the Sudan remained a matter of contention with Egypt;but Sudanese replaced Egyptians, and Abd al-Rahman headed rural andtribal notables against an ineffective urban intelligentsia. Although some of-ficials looked to Northern Nigeria for a model of ‘indirect rule’ in the 1920s,in practice it was Governor Sir John Maffey’s misapplication of his experi-ence in the Indian states that encouraged further promotion of new clients of

19 Sanderson, ‘The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan’, 771–5.20 Michael Asher, Thesiger (London, 1994), 125–31. 21 Woodward, Sudan, 49.22 Ibid. 236.

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the regime, rather than resurrection of long-vanished polities.19 One resultwas to put a brake on production of potential bureaucrats who mightthreaten ‘traditional’ regimes. Another was to bolster the financial, legal, andexecutive functions of the miscellany of tribal and nomadic leaders, so as toisolate rural Sudan from further change. For exceptional individuals ‘who re-spected traditional hierarchies and detested democracy’, such as the restlessprobationer, Wilfred Thesiger, it was an ideal political environment in whichto recruit loyal personal retainers and cultivate a talent for exploration witha minimum of bureaucratic constraint.20

By contrast with Egypt, therefore, no patrimonial state existed in theSudan, merely a centralized civil and military hierarchy that made use of ad-ministrative clients in some regions of the northern village and riverain com-munities. In southern Sudan, incorporation of segmentary communities intothe state had hardly begun and was resisted by Nuer and Dinka as examplesof ‘acephalous egalitarianism rather than baronial power’.21 Despite thismajor division in the state, there were signs in the 1930s that Abd al-Rahmanmight become a serious contender for power as patron of a politicized intelli-gentsia through a modernized Mahdism. But when this movement took theform of the Umma Party, it remained a hierarchy based on clientage and reli-gious faith, not a ‘national’ coalition, to contest for political power throughlegislative and executive council reforms and elections held immediately before independence in 1956. Government devolved instead to a NationalistUnionist Party favouring re-union with Egypt, until this winning coalition fellvictim to the intense rivalry between religious factions that dominated partypolitics from the outside. The rapid departure of British officials exacerbatedthe rush to control central ministries, widened the gulf between governmentand southern politicians, and left the state fragile and vulnerable to the con-tinued involvement of Muslim sects in transient political coalitions in gov-ernment. The state had, indeed, been built on military over-rule and patron–client relationships. But clientage encouraged rivalries between factions inSudanese society, without a patron-power strong enough to replace Britishmilitary and civil power. As Woodward concluded, at the end of the 1980s:‘the heterogeneity of Sudan has been emphasised rather than modified by the necessity for state-building on clientelistic bases, even to the point of thedeliberately marginalised attachment of the southern Sudan.’ As a result the state itself was soon threatened by military successor regimes.22

6 Morocco

Extension of French imperial control westwards from Algeria in thelate nineteenth century was the culmination of a longer involvement in theMaghrib, occasioned by factors common to intervention in Egypt. Europeancommerce and judicial privileges created foreign enclaves at the coastal ports;loans to the sultanate government and low revenue led to French control overdebt repayment in 1904; scattered resistance forced the abdication of the sultan and his replacement by Abd al-Hafiz within the ruling Alawite dynasty. Further revolts forced a new sultan to seek French support againstGermany. The crisis was resolved by diplomacy and by a protectorate treaty in 1912. French control was, however, tenuous outside the coastal region, until tribal paramounts of the middle and southern Atlas were eitherdefeated or brought into alliance.1

But at the beginning of the protectorate the organization and authority of the Moroccan sultanate had changed little over two centuries. Its pur-pose was to collect taxes, run the army, and maintain control of the blad al-Makhzen (zone of government), based on seaport towns and the fertilecoastal plain. Allegiance outside this region in the blad as-siba was endlesslyrenegotiated with Arab and Berber leaders of tribes who provided military recruits, but few taxes, in what one political scientist terms ‘a stable system of continuous violence’.2 Weak urban government and divided tribes left the sultanate revered in principle, but contested for its revenue operations. The Sharifian government of late nineteenth-century Morocco illustrates the distinction between patrimonialism as an ideal type and the realities ofpower through political clientage and access to resources from taxes andtrade:

In theory, appointments to official administrative posts—ministers, customs agents,governors, judges, market inspectors, administrators of pious endowments, preach-ers, prayer leaders of Friday mosques and even mosque teachers—emanated directlyfrom the sultan. In practice, recruitment resulted from decisions taken by governmentofficials at one of many levels, and usually on the recommendation or intervention ofan official or trusted individual from the same city as the appointed individual. Allthese appointments were ratified by decree of the sultan.3

1 Michael Brett, ‘The Maghrib’, in CHA, vii. 267–328; John Waterbury, The Commander ofthe Faithful: The Moroccan Political Elite—A Study in Segmented Politics (London, 1970).

2 Waterbury, The Commander of the Faithful, 16–17.3 Kenneth Brown, ‘Changing Forms of Patronage in a Moroccan City’, in Ernest Gellner and

John Waterbury, eds., Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies (London, 1977), 317.

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Map 4. Morocco, early twentieth century

Fundamentally, power, as far as it was exercised, was built on this systemof subsidiary offices and on financial resources and recruitment of a perma-nent military force and military levies. The central makhzen administrationconsisted of the sultan’s court and retinue administered by a grand vizier and a minister of finance. Over time, external contacts required ministers forforeign affairs and for war. Three or four regions were placed under khalifamembers of the royal family with their own courts and troops. Elsewhere,tribes submitted names for appointment of district chiefs (caids) and paid to have them recognized and installed as brokers and tax-farmers under regional governors. Town quarters were supervised by pashas with similarfunctions. Courts were administered by cadis, as judges in Shar‘ia law. As in other patrimonial regimes the most dangerous challenges to power camefrom within the leading family and resulted in civil war in 1907, when SultanMoulay Hafidh survived with the support of religious leaders. Succession,too, was a time of power contests, despite the practice of designating a son to

4 Waterbury, The Commander of the Faithful, 66–8. Waterbury follows M. G. Smith whotreated segmentary lineages as a system of political relations or ‘competition in power’ betweengroups or persons: see Smith, ‘On Segmentary Lineage Systems’, 48. See, too, William Zartman,Destiny of a Dynasty: The Search for Institutions in Morocco’s Developing Society (Columbia,1964); and compare Fox, Kin, Clan, Raja, and Rule, 57.

5 For the French occupation, Albert Ayache, Le Maroc: Bilan d’une Colonisation (Paris,1956).

6 Waterbury, The Commander of the Faithful, 34.

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rule. Confirmation was required by the grand vizier, regional judges, and governors. In regions outside the makhzen, caids negotiated with a new rulerfor relief of taxes, in return for allegiance.

Analysis of the structure of modern politics in Morocco, therefore, con-cedes a large place to continuity of patrimonial rule from above through thesultan’s dynasty, complemented by forms of lower-order clientage, as a wayof defending the interests of competing groups and securing access to re-sources. As in the explanation for patron leadership by Indian rajas, empha-sis is laid on segmentation within agnatic descent groups as the foundationfor ‘shifting alliance patterns’, movement between groups, and defenceagainst endemic conflict.4 This condition of competition in a political culturesuch as Morocco was temporarily controlled by foreign over-rule, then increased after decolonization.

French ‘protection’ was initially a mixture of military conquest and preser-vation of the patrimonialism of Moroccan political organization. But the sultan was displaced by the resident-general. Outside the traditional region of government in the makhzen, Marshal Lyautey made use of the paramountcaids of the High Atlas against resistance in the south, relieving the French ofclose administration of much of central Morocco, at first, and promoting thestatus and regional power of leaders centred on Marrakesh. Little of this wasby formal treaty or prescription of the administrative roles of tribal leaders.By 1919, expanded roads and colonization in the coastal plain had broughttwo-thirds of the country under French control, leaving the rest to be subduedin the Middle Atlas, by the mid-1930s, at considerable military cost. Chief-tains in the Rif, bordering Spanish Morocco, also became allies, as denial ofresources changed minds and access to grain supplies created loyalties. Con-centration of investment and colonization in the coastal region left much ofthe mountainous interior patrolled, rather than administered, preserving thedivision between the makhzen and regions outside government tax con-trols—a division equated loosely with ‘Arab’ and ‘Berber’ in French per-ceptions. Inexorably, a long period of ‘pacification’, 1912–30, absorbed the tribes of the interior, ended the need for a Moroccan army, and fixed theresidence of the court in Rabat.5

In Rabat, the French introduced a parallel system of government staffed byFrenchmen—‘an exogenous and basically exotic creation’.6 By contrast withother imperial hierarchies, Moroccans were not co-opted into the new struc-

7 Ibid. 39. 8 Brett, ‘The Maghrib’, 290.

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ture at an executive level. The protectorate treaty stipulated reforms througha resident-general, as representative of France and the sultan, by takingcharge of foreign affairs, defence, and finance. To save face, the sultan’s authority was not delegated to the resident, but to the grand vizier; and fromhim it was willingly or unwillingly delegated to leading officials of the Frenchadministration. Thus, as in Egypt, Europeans quickly manned the key publicoffices; but they did not recruit a Moroccan staff. ‘Once the administrationwas staffed by the French, it tended to stay that way.’7 Although certain Moroccan offices were maintained for Estates, Education, and Justice, theresidency appointed its own officials in all ministries and the three Moroccanones were supervised by the Direction of Sharifian Affairs. Legislation wasdrawn up by a service attached to the Secretariat for signature by the sultan.Superficially, the façade of the old makhzen under a sultan was preserved;parliamentary representation was excluded. Real power lay with the Interiorand Political Affairs, Finance and Public Works, run by French officials,rather than a service gentry of Moroccans; and behind these lay the influenceof chambers of agriculture and commerce and French banks.

On the other hand, despite this administrative hegemony at the centre, theFrench conquest provided security and some development of the infrastruc-ture. French military ascendancy diminished the independence of the tribes inthe blad as-siba. Seven regions were administered by chefs de région with aFrench staff and many of the powers of a metropolitan Prefect. French civilcontrôleurs supervised areas of French settlement, agriculture, and com-merce, while officiers des affaires indigènes occupied strategic market centreswith military forces, but interfered little with the three hundred or so caids in charge of provincial sub-divisions. The system worked well enough to promote French settlement and changes in land tenure, while consolidatingadministrative patronage in the interior by the mid-1930s. ‘As the French introduced caids into districts where they had never been known before, or simply recognised the representative of each group, the process apparentelsewhere in Morocco was extended into the mountains. Power, wealth andinfluence came to be dependent upon a special relationship with the newregime.’8

During the protectorate, new social groups emerged—an urban workingclass susceptible to recruitment by a religiously orthodox nationalist move-ment and a small group of intellectuals formed by a French education. Thenationalist movement had its roots in Salafism, for Islamic reform, which became linked with other minor nationalist groups from families of notablesaiming at expulsion of foreigners. The maintenance of Berber areas as sepa-rate juridical units exacerbated the polemic of betrayal and failure to protectthe sultanate and Islamic institutions. But not till the founding of Istiqlal in

9 Nationalists used the title ‘king’ from 1934.10 Compare Brett, ‘The Maghrib’, 328, and Zartman, Destiny of a Dynasty, 2–13.

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1944 was there a movement bringing together urban workers, peasantry, andthe commercial class with the covert backing of the sultan. Istiqlal, moreover,remained tied to the traditional concept of monarchy, as represented by Sultan Muhammed ben Yussuf and did not proclaim republicanism. The alliance of sultanate and nationalists narrowed the options for post-independence nationalist groups. By 1944, the movement had his support,without commitment to constitutional monarchy. By the early 1950s, theking’s identification with Istiqlal was complete.9 The hotly contested issue ofMoroccan and settler co-sovereignty in municipal elections and the forma-tion of a mixed Council of Ministers for French and Moroccan citizens endedin his deposition and replacement by Muhammed ben Moulay ‘Arafa of the Alawite family. But King Muhammed ben Yusuf returned from exile as a national hero in 1955, after military resistance in the Rif (at the period of the Algerian uprising) resulted in French capitulation to Moroccan demands.From then on, the king and his successor, Hassan II, served as a focal point for other groups outside Istiqlal; and his bargaining power increased as a protector of French interests against some of its aims. The formation of a government ‘of national union’ in 1956 admitted other clientage groups andplaced the king above political organizations as Head of State.

On the whole, then, the conservatism of Moroccans, as much as the pa-tronage of French over-rule, preserved the influence, if not the authority of thesultan sufficiently to keep at bay a more militant nationalism in the style of theEgyptian or Algerian press and Muslim brotherhoods. For most of the period,nationalist activists were limited to a French-educated elite without a party orrepresentative institutions to match the Wafd or the constitutional monarchyof Egypt. While Egypt became an independent state after 1936, the grip of French firms and banks on the Moroccan economy increased. French construction of a parallel and separate administration marginalized, but preserved, the sultanate. Morocco, therefore, despite significant changes inEuropean settlement that brought in some two hundred thousand farmers,miners, and urban workers and changes in the occupational structures of Moroccans, remained outside the nationalist movements of the Maghrib inthe 1930s. Opinions are divided on whether or not local leadership mighthave ‘captured mass support’ without constructing a patron party centred onthe sultanate.10 In Moroccan eyes ‘sovereignty’ under Islam lay with the ‘com-munity’, and it was difficult for secular leaders to contest the sultan’s secularauthority over this community, even after a political party was formed late inthe day.

Consequently, since independence in 1956, the monarch has supplied central leadership in conditions of increased factionalism, as a spiritual and

secular politician. Moreover, in the wake of French monopoly of central in-stitutions, patrimonialism has revived through state enterprises in the econ-omy, offering jobs and lands to members of the royal family and a loyal elite.Royal strategy has balanced competing alliance groups through favours be-stowed on political leaders, even opposition leaders—missions abroad, con-sultations, honours. Secondly, the monarchy has kept its distance from anymajor group. For this policy to succeed, the monarchy itself cannot tolerateattack from any faction or an ideology based on popular sovereignty can-vassed in the press. The king has not yielded control of the army or ultimatedispensation of justice. As spiritual patriarch and representative of a familydynasty ultimately descended from the Prophet, the king commands a widerallegiance, even outside Morocco, than any politician. As secular patron, theking has appointed a large number of relatives in administration. Havingwritten the rules of the Constitution, the patrimonial monarch was in an un-usually strong position to deploy patronage, ensuring that the rules have beenkept by the elite, taking advantage of splits in Istiqlal after 1956 and keepingcontrol of army, police, and regional administration.

summary

In North Africa there are contrasting examples of European over-rule in pat-rimonial states. Egypt’s Khedivate was gradually detached in the 1870s fromnominal subordination to the Ottoman Empire for the purposes of Europeandebt-servicing and management of its civil service. The Sultanate of Moroccofell under French control in 1912, as a colonial protectorate, based on anagreement promising both conservation of the sultan and administrative reform decreed in his name. In both cases the politics of intervention and control by patron-powers secured allies and created opponents of the new im-perial hierarchy and produced very different successor governments at inde-pendence. In Egypt supervision of public finance and control of the Civil Listby British and French officials undermined the stability of Khedive Ismail’sgovernment and he was deposed in 1879 in favour of his son, Tawfiq. Stricteradministration of Egyptian debt repayment and European infiltration of gov-ernment departments exposed the khedival government to active oppositionfrom notables, landowners, and army officers. When the government crum-bled, 1881–2, Britain intervened unilaterally to make Egypt into an informalprotectorate under a consul-general. Within the client state a measure of constitutional reform restrained vested interests groups for the time being;the joint hierarchy of British and Egyptian officials improved state financesand infrastructure; a new model Egyptian army came under British commandand began the reconquest of the Sudan from 1895 to secure the headwaters of the Nile. An intricate political game played out between Lord Cromer,

Morocco 95

Khedive Tawfiq, and his son, Abbas, aimed at securing ministerial clients andpower over public offices. As nationalist opposition coalesced around a po-litical party, the British and Egyptian executive cooperated to preserve theirown strategic, commercial, and dynastic interests in a formal colonial protec-torate from 1914. Until the 1920s, the Anglo-Egyptian Government securedsufficient support from mercantile and landed notables to keep in being the autocratic rule of the king against the increasing militancy of the Wafd opposition. In 1936 Britain ended this political and constitutional balancingact, while retaining responsibility for the defence of the Canal and the ad-ministration of the Sudan as reserve powers which bedevilled relations with anewly-sovereign state until the abolition of the monarchy by a military coupin 1952.

As part of the legacy of the period of British over-rule of the Egyptian clientstate, the Sudan was reconquered, 1896–8, and administered as a joint responsibility. Effectively, it was run by British military officers who createdan elite Political Service, using Egyptian auxiliaries till 1924, and, thereafter,Sudanese clients recruited from sedentary and nomadic tribes to administertax collection and courts. A parallel hierarchy of religious leaders and anurban elite competed for status and political followers in the period of partyformation in the 1930s and 1940s and emerged as heirs to the institutions ofa civil and military regime which preserved and excluded the segmentary societies of the Southern Sudan. As part of an Anglo-Egyptian settlement in1956, Sudanese parties opted for independence for a seriously fragmentedand divided state.

By contrast with British attempts to ‘govern through the governors’ inEgypt, the French Protectorate Government of Morocco exercised powerthrough ministries which largely excluded Moroccan officials. The sultanateprovided little more than legitimacy for the regime and administration of strictly Sharifian responsibilities for religious courts, private estates, andeducation. Outside the coastal zone, where European settlement was encour-aged, the French enlisted the services of traditional caids in central Moroccoand the chieftains of the Rif, in the wake of a prolonged military conquest.The sultanate, although excluded from real power, maintained a covert andultimately open support for nationalist opposition and the Istiqlal party from1944. Consequently, the deposition of King Muhammed ben Yussuf and hisrestoration in 1955, against the background of a more general revolt in NorthAfrica, marked a period of French concessions to demands for independence.Morocco left the French Union the following year with a Constitution largelyfashioned by the royal house and approved by referendum. Accession of the king’s son, Hassan II, in 1961, preserved the delicate balance between the patrimonial rule of a leader of the Islamic community and his secular control over ministerial appointments, the police and the army, in a system

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that placed a high value on allegiance and loyalty, in return for redress ofgrievances and a measure of public welfare. Thus, a patrimonial Islamicregime was re-created and maintained through its head of state by playing offpolitical and administrative factions against each other, by patronage overappointments and by royal interpretation of the constitutional rules within aculture of political clientage.

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Part III

Sub-Saharan Africa

7 Western Africa

Forms of economic clientage in relations between agriculturalistsand pastoralists and within extensive trade networks have long been recog-nized as a part of hierarchical political systems in western and East-CentralAfrica. Examples of access to resources in terms of manpower and surplusproduction, in return for protection by military aristocracies, are well docu-mented. Political structures among trading states have been categorized according to the type of accumulation achieved through taxation, cattle own-ership, and long-distance trade.1

In western Africa not all clientage networks resulted in centralized states;and even where African states did arise, the degree to which formal bureau-cracies displaced informal and patrimonial systems of appointed office-holders is still open to debate. Although furnishing evidence of trade expansion and creation of networks by big men in the early nineteenth cen-tury, Sierra Leone had very limited consolidation of political authority in theimportant market centre of Kambia, in the borderland between Mende,Temne, and Limba kingdoms.2 Port Loko, by contrast, was the capital of acluster of chiefdoms and the seat of an important commercial, military, andreligious elite who constructed alliances with other elites in the hinterland.‘Landlord–stranger’ alliances gave way to more stratified combinations ofhereditary paramountcies among the Temne-speakers, later seized on bycolonial officials as administrative brokers and clients.3

The example of pre-colonial Sierra Leone is typical of general features com-mon to the theme of ‘trade and politics’ on the western coast and much of theeast coast of Africa:

Clientship was one of the means by which chiefs or kings maintained their authority.It also presented the possibility of challenging that authority. Trade opened yet another avenue to the accumulation of wealth and therefore to the acquisition of support, provided by clients and slaves, widening the opportunity for political leader-

1 I. M. Lewis, Social Anthropology in Perspective (Harmondsworth, 1981), 189; David Birmingham, ‘The Forest and Savanna of Central Africa’, CHA, v. 222–69; A. C. Unomah and J. B. Webster, ‘East Africa: The Expansion of Commerce’, ibid. 270–18.

2 Allan A. Howard and David E. Skinner, ‘Network Building and Political Power in Northwestern Sierra Leone, 1800–65’, Africa, 52 (1984), 2–28; Elliot Skinner, ‘Strangers in West African Societies’, Africa, 33 (1963), 307–20.

3 For pre-colonial chiefdoms, alliances, and tributary relations, political (‘secret’) associationsand ‘war boys’, Kenneth Little, ‘The Political Function of the Poro’, Africa, 36 (1966), 62–72.

ship, which was often in dispute in African societies because there was commonly uncertainty about succession.4

During this transformation European coastal traders remained subordi-nate to African merchant chiefdoms and those who controlled access to inte-rior resources. This status changed very gradually in the early nineteenthcentury, as the anti-slave trade campaign encouraged export of tropical sta-ples that increased the volume of transactions and the level of dependencycreated through extensive credit. More recent historiography tends to playdown the hegemonic features of the ‘imperialism of free trade’ that saw the es-tablishment of a small number of British colonial forts and posts between the1840s and the 1880s, in favour of a more measured appreciation of the limitsto British authority.5 For commercial purposes there was much ‘collabora-tion’, but ‘mutual collaboration, if taken to its logical conclusion, is the re-verse of imperialism’.6 Foreign traders in the major region of the palm oiltrade, for example, were dealing not with a centralized state, but a series ofkin corporations among the Efik, Ibibio, Ibo, Kalabari, and other peoples ofthe Niger Delta who constructed trading ‘houses’ based on free-born statusgroups and household slaves.7 ‘Power in this system depended on wealth, butonly if used to secure the support of others, and those without wealth couldwithdraw their support from those who had it if this wealth was not used totheir ultimate advantage.’8 Chiefs could be deposed, as several cases in the1840s and 1850s demonstrated, usually in the presence of foreign consuls,but not because of consular intervention. Combinations among foreign mer-chants for price-fixing were difficult to sustain. Even the ‘Equity Courts’which arbitrated and fixed rules for trade prescribed traditional methods ofevaluation and fines. ‘Traders looked to local chiefs as “patrons”, marriedlocal women in order to give themselves a place in local networks of kinshipand influence, and bought titles in local so-called “secret societies”.’9 Notuntil 1885, at the beginning of a more active period of imperial intervention,did consular command of courts of equity, backed by limited naval support,serve to bring about the fall of the African merchant, Ja Ja of Opobo, for at-tempting to enter the import trade. Thereafter, in the Niger Delta more formal authority was exercised through courts and native councils under a

102 Sub-Saharan Africa

4 L. Wickins, An Economic History of Africa from the Earliest Times to Partition (CapeTown, 1981), 238.

5 Martin Lynn, ‘The “Imperialism of Free Trade” and the Case of West Africa,c.1830–c.1870’, JICH 15 (1986), 22–40; John E. Flint, ‘Britain and the Scramble for Africa’, in OHBE, v. 450–62.

6 Lynn, ‘The “Imperialism of Free Trade” ’, 35.7 G. I. Jones, The Trading States of the Oil Rivers: A Study of Political Development in

Eastern Nigeria (Oxford, 1963). 8 Ibid. 168.9 Martin Lynn, ‘Law and Imperial Expansion: The Niger Delta Courts of Equity, c.1850–85’,

JICH 23 (1993), 58.

protectorate that was proclaimed in 1891, but was not fully established in the 1890s.

During the period of change in the supply of staples, from the 1830s to thelate 1880s, when European factors traded, but did not usually displaceAfrican trade chiefs, there was ample opportunity to observe several patri-monial and military regimes close to the coast. Of these, the Asante confeder-acy and the kingdoms of the Yoruba provided examples of the politicalextension of local clientage, while the trading state of Dahomey exhibited fea-tures of a more autocratic and military regime (closer to the Zulu Kingdom).10

Nearby Lagos society was dissuaded from slave trading and accepted a clientchief installed under consular supervision in 1851 as a bridgehead into south-ern Nigeria. But Lagos chiefs were minor characters, like those subordinateto Dahomey at Porto Novo, and hardly comparable with the Yoruba statesthat emerged into European perspectives as major obstacles to commercialpenetration of the interior. Extension of influence from Lagos Colony lookedmore like diplomacy than conquest, when treaties were arranged for tradepromotion, railway building, and settlement of disputes. From the period ofGovernor Glover’s administration in the 1860s and early 1870s, the Britishrepresentative acted as broker, intervening in conflicts, stipending headmenof outlying villages to keep open trade routes and creating his own networkamong leading Yoruba chiefs. Such techniques used to make peace and endstoppages followed the market networks already established between a risingtrade centre and the Yoruba interior.11 In the 1890s, after armed actionagainst the state of Ijebu, this informality became more formal in the rela-tionship of officials with the oligarchy of Egba chiefs at Ibadan, the para-mount Alafin of Oyo, and the Oni of Ife.12 But by contrast with the militaryimperialism of the Royal Niger Company’s inroads to Akassa and Ilorin,1896–7, which brought it into conflict with the Sokoto Caliphate, adminis-trative control in the southern protectorate of Nigeria was relatively light.Under Governors McCallum and MacGregor direct taxes were avoided infavour of revenue from trade and internal tolls from which Yoruba statestook their share. Diffusion of authority within Yoruba states and clanschecked autocratic Obas and made them amenable to treaty obligations andcourts under district commissioners, beginning with Ife, Ibadan, Oyo, and

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10 W. J. Argyle, The Fon of Dahomey: A History and Ethnography of the Old Kingdom (Oxford, 1966); and for the emergence of a royal administration among ‘large-scale bandits’,Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750 (Oxford, 1991). L. Mair, African King-doms (Oxford, 1977), 74–9.

11 Barnes, Patrons and Power, 29–36; C. W. Newbury, ed., British Policy Towards WestAfrica, i. Select Documents 1786–1874 (Oxford, 1965), 356–73.

12 Olufemi Vaughan, ‘The Impact of Party Politics and Military Rule on the Traditional Chief-taincy in Western Nigeria, 1946–1988’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford University, 1989), chap. 2; C. W.Newbury, The Western Slave Coast and its Rulers (Oxford, repr. 1973), 169–71, 199, 201–3;Peter Morton-Williams, ‘The Yoruba Kingdom of Oyo’, in Forde and Kaberry, eds., WestAfrican Kingdoms, 36–69.

Egba in 1904. Gradually they were absorbed into the Southern Nigerian pro-tectorate by reducing the judicial authority of paramounts and employing aloose system of indigenous councils and a Central Native Council. Relationswith the Lagos government were variable. In areas close to the southern cap-ital, Yoruba chiefs retained little judicial or executive autonomy, thoughstipends were paid; in the larger states the executive authority of chiefs overtitles, land, and customary justice was maintained along with paramount andsubordinate lineages, orders of nobility, and offices of state.13 In the northernprotectorate proclaimed in 1900, however, the view was taken that the Sultanof Sokoto had surrendered sovereignty to the Niger Company by treaty; nostipends were paid; and after military occupation of Kano and Sokoto in1903, the organization of jurisdiction and administrative authority lay withthe High Commissioner, Sir F. D. Lugard.14

In the Gold Coast there was a similar contrast between British relationswith coastal states and the Ashanti region. More recent research on Dutchand British contacts confirms the tributary position of European factors, atleast to 1874, and revises older portraits of the Asante ‘bureaucratic’ state infavour of a patrimonial model closer to other African hierarchies.15 The Asante paramountcy operated as a patrimonial system based on an inner corecentred on Kumasi and its royal clan with an outer protectorate over townsand provinces under quasi-autonomous chiefs with their own patronage links to subordinate clients. The satellite empire of the Asante stretched toMamprussi and Grunshi in the north, Gyaman and Gonja, and to the coastalAkan and Fanti states. In conquered territories chiefs remained in authority‘at the allegiance of their own vassals and slaves’, but under an Asante resi-dent chief serving as patron (adamfo).16 Three such overseers were posted tothe Danish, Dutch, and English trading forts in the eighteenth century. On the authority of the core lineage of the clan that supplied royal candidates, officials were recruited from other senior clans and appointed as clients of theAsantehene, not as a hereditary aristocracy, and were controlled by inform-ants. There was less control over military resources, but army reform in 1800built up new formations of mercenaries and household troops ‘dependent

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13 For an outline of Yoruba authority structure in relatively urbanized societies under kingsand councils of chiefs, P. C. Lloyd, ‘The Yoruba Lineage’, Africa, 25 (1955), 235–51; and The Political Development of Yoruba Kingdoms in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries(Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Paper, No. 31, 1971).

14 For Lugard’s initial system of Native Courts, Political Secretariat, and provincial adminis-tration, 1901–6, Newbury, British Policy, ii. 339, 344, 354–5.

15 See Larry W. Yarak, Asante and the Dutch 1744–1873 (Oxford, 1990), 68–69; Ivor Wilks,Ashanti in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order(Cambridge, 1975); and compare Wilks, ‘Ashanti Government’, in Forde and Kaberry, eds.,West African Kingdoms, 206–38; and T. C. McCaskie, State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante(Cambridge, 1995), for a survey of the theory (including Weber) behind Asante patrimonialism,esp. 250–67. In this study ‘Asante’ denotes the people of the ‘Ashanti’ region.

16 Brodie Cruickshank, cited in Wilks, ‘Ashanti Government’, 221.

Western A

frica105Map 5. Gold Coast and Nigeria, 1912, after Directorate of Colonial Surveys No. 5830, Lagos

17 Wilks, ‘Ashanti Government’, 227.18 Lord Hailey, Native Administration and Political Development in British Tropical Africa

(Confidential, Colonial Office, London, 1940–2), 85.19 K. A. Busia, The Position of the Chief in the Modern Political System of Ashanti (London,

1951), chap. 8.20 Ibid., chap. 6, 164.21 G. E. Metcalfe, ed., Great Britain and Ghana: Documents of Ghana History 1807–1957

(Legon, 1964), 600–4.

106 Sub-Saharan Africa

upon royal patronage’.17 The army was strong enough, in any case, to see offforeign invaders, until the sack of Kumasi by the British in 1874. Thereafter,removal of the Asantehene in 1896 and annexation in 1901 reduced the king-dom to its core clans around the capital. Over the same period the region ofthe Northern Territories was secured by a series of ‘trade and protection’treaties for the adherence of Mamprussi, Mossi, Dagomba, and other par-tially Islamized chieftaincies. From the late 1920s some of these headshipswere recognized as secular paramounts with powers to promote or removesubordinate chiefs, thus creating ‘opportunities for favouritism and even forcorruption’.18 In 1934 a limited confederacy was restored to the Asante leav-ing the Asantehene paramount only over the Kumasi clan chiefs. The rulingpower imposed a large and unwieldy Confederacy Council of chiefs and nom-inated members as guardians of ‘native law and custom’. This body acted asan electoral college for central representation, a constitutional court to safe-guard the position of chiefs, but had limited legislative powers and no powersof direct taxation.19 K. A. Busia found that Asante chiefs, while conservingtheir status as religious leaders in the 1930s and 1940s, required official pro-tection in the face of pressure for de-stoolments arising from secular disputesover land and taxes.20

Thus, there was a division between the Gold Coast Colony, the interiorconfederacy, and the northern chiefdoms. Akan (Fanti and Akim) and otherchiefdoms in the coastal interior were ruled with a fairly light hand withoutdirect taxation or land concessions, following repeated political opposition inthe late and early nineteenth centuries. At most, municipalities were given ameasure of local representation; and in 1926 the problem of securing repre-sentatives from rural villages and the Akan states of the Colony was tackledby using three provincial councils made up of traditional chiefs as electivebodies for an expansion of unofficial African membership of the LegislativeCouncil.21 On the other hand, it was difficult to incorporate into statutorylocal administration the disparate collection of some sixty chiefly stateswhose heads were open to frequent de-stoolments from below, whenever theywere thought to be acting autocratically with the backing of the colonial gov-ernment. Stool-holders with authority over populations ranging from fivethousand to fifty thousand were awkwardly placed as brokers between theirown supporters and rivals and colonial administrators in what was ‘essen-tially a structure of personal relationships’, rather than a territorial unit with

22 Lord Hailey, Native Administration, 98.23 Rathbone, Nkrumah and the Chiefs, 13–14, 22–3.24 Jarle Simensen, ‘Jurisdiction as Politics: The Gold Coast during the Colonial Period’,

in W. J. Mommsen and J. A. de Moor, eds., European Expansion and Law: The Encounter of European and Indigenous Law in 19th- and 20th-Century Africa and Asia (New York, 1992),257–77; Kimble, A Political History of Ghana, chap. 11.

25 Chiefs in the Northern Territories with a population of some 750,000, for example, collected no direct taxes until 1936; and revenue yielded only £65,000 for 1938/9, of which one-third went towards emoluments. Hailey, Native Administration, 87.

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prescribed authority in local government.22 One view of Akan chiefs, there-fore, is that their effective authority was permitted to grow by default, be-cause they still deployed their ‘considerable powers as patrons in a decidedlypartisan fashion’ to lease and sell lands and advance kin and followers by jobs and favours.23 On the other hand, such favouritism alienated untitled commoners (‘youngmen’) and exposed chiefs to pressures for de-stoolmentwithin a power struggle between chiefs, ‘coastal activists’, and disaffectedrural peasantry in the 1930s. At issue were traditional methods of curbing autocratic chiefs and the larger question of how to provide quite ordinary social amenities for an economically depressed region. Were chiefly councilsup to the task?

From 1927 the state councils had clearly defined judicial functions in mat-ters of customary law, but very restricted executive functions for public worksor welfare in the absence of a general local tax to fund stool treasuries. Withimpressive political ability stool chiefs defended privileges in conjunction withan educated elite through a vigorous press and Legislative Council which de-feated the colonial government on land and other issues.24 Led by Nana OforiAtta, Omanhene of Akyem Abuakwa, they defined their own prerogatives inorder to bolster their patronage roles. ‘Custom’ was upheld on grounds of ‘in-herent rights’ against the claims of colonial legislation and courts. In particu-lar they took legislative power to control immigrant Africans, raise rents fromimmigrant farmers, and access income from land sales and mining conces-sions. In other words, some stool chiefs reinterpreted ‘landlord–stranger’forms of clientage to take advantage of new market opportunities. But none ofthat filtered down to improvements in roads, education, health. From 1937,Colony chiefs and councils were promised a consolidated chiefdom tax andtreasuries, as statutory ‘native authorities’ with government backing to pre-vent de-stoolment. But nothing was done for three years, during an unsettledperiod of cocoa-marketing disruption; and in the end no direct tax was imposed and few treasuries were established or audited.

It is hard to see the provincial chiefdoms, the Asante Confederacy Council,or the Northern Territories chiefs and councils as mere ancillaries of territo-rial administration, except in matters of customary law, because of their extremely restricted power to use such taxes as they collected for local gov-ernment.25 This limitation was aggravated, particularly in the southern chief-

26 For a detailed survey of issues and constitutional changes in the 1940s and 1950s, RichardRathbone, ed., Ghana, British Documents on the End of Empire, Series B, Parts i and ii (London,1992); Metcalfe, ed., Great Britain and Ghana, 661–743.

27 ‘Report of the Commission’ (Aiken Watson KC, Keith Murray, A. L. Dalgleish) in Metcalfe,ed., Great Britain and Ghana, 682–4.

28 Ibid. 685. For a critique within the Colonial Office of the commissioners’ ‘prejudice . . .against Chiefs’ and ‘amateurish’ suggestions for expanding the powers of regional councils,Rathbone, ed., Ghana, Part i, 80–9.

29 Ibid. 276–9. 30 Rathbone, Nkrumah and the Chiefs, chap. 3.

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doms and in Ashanti, by economic depression and by impoverishmentthrough endless litigation over stool lands. Few in administration or amongthe coastal elite had any faith in chiefdoms as local government agencies by the 1940s. Gradually, therefore, the issue of defining the powers of ‘tradi-tion’ by giving prescriptive rights to chiefs was overtaken by a much larger debate over representation in central government. The cause of reformed local government administration yielded to the cause of control over a unitary state.

As a beginning, two Africans—Nana Sir Ofori Atta and the barrister, A. K.Korsah—were elected to the Executive Council in 1942. From 1944 the rolesof State Councils were restricted to ritual, and local councils with a propor-tion of elected members were projected. To head off demands for ‘DominionStatus’, Governor Burns forced the pace of political change in 1946 by yield-ing an unofficial majority on the Legislative Council; and some of theseAfrican representatives were indirectly elected through a Joint ProvincialCouncil in the Colony and the Ashanti Confederacy Council.26 From then on,the status of traditional authorities in a new dispensation was at best debat-able and certainly at risk, after a constitutional commission made radical pro-posals for representative and responsible government in 1948, finding that‘the star of rule through Chiefs was on the wane’.27 The basis for this conclu-sion lay in the commissioners’ perception of ‘an intense suspicion that theChiefs are being used by the Government as an instrument for the delay if notthe suppression of the political aspirations of the people’.28 Such views did notpass unchallenged—in London, rather than in the Gold Coast. But after theall-African Coussey Commission had prepared the way for elections andeventual control of regions through a Ministry of Local Government, main-taining a role for chiefs looked like a rearguard action, rather than a viablepolitical programme. Once Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Partywon a majority of seats in the new Assembly in 1951, only the governor’s re-serve powers and an amendment to the Gold Coast (Constitutional) Order inCouncil preserved for a time the position of chiefs, stool property, and defini-tions of chiefly hierarchy under customary law.29 From that date until inde-pendence in 1957 chiefs in the Colony lost status and authority to electedlocal councils, to African officials at regional level and to party-appointedpanels of judges in Native Courts.30 As the number of de-stoolments in-

31 Rathbone, ed., Ghana, Part i, 337.32 For parallel action by ‘patron’ parties, see below and Ruth Schachter Morgenthau, Political

Parties in French-Speaking West Africa (Oxford, 1964).33 Cabinet Memorandum, 2 Mar. 1956 in Rathbone, ed., Ghana, Part ii, 238. For subsequent

relations between the independent government of Ghana and traditional authorities, see Rathbone, Nkrumah and the Chiefs, esp. chaps. 7 to 11.

34 Margery Perham, Lugard: The Years of Authority 1898–1945 (London, 1960), 186.35 Robert Heussler, The British in Northern Nigeria (London, 1968), ‘List of Officers’, pp.

xiii–xxiii.

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creased because of the action of youngmen’s associations, the Colonial Officewas made aware how far chiefs had been abandoned ‘to the wolves’.31

Belatedly, the chiefs as a corporation centred mainly on the Asante took action similar to that of paramount hierarchies in other territories. Theylaunched a ‘National Liberation Movement’ as a pressure group opposed tothe threat of bureaucratic centralization under the CPP.32 In terms of regionalorganization the NLM was sufficient to worry Nkrumah and his ministersover the issue of ‘federation’, but too weak to defeat a more ruthless party ma-chine in territorial elections. And it made tactical errors by refusing to debatefederation in detail in the Assembly or before a visiting commission in 1955.In all, the chiefs’ Opposition failed to make the independence Constitutionunworkable, though they may have slightly delayed the date of that event. Butthe battle lines were laid for a later struggle over the place of State Councils,a customary judiciary, control of stool revenues, and the role of chiefs, if any,in local government. Belatedly, too, the governor and the Colonial Office dis-covered that old treaties of protection for the chiefs of the Northern Territor-ies would have to lapse, as the former patron-power followed a course ofretreat from its obligations ‘comparable to the line taken with the Princes ofIndia and the Shan States in Burma’.33

Meanwhile, the search for administrative prescription within a patrimo-nial system had gone further than anywhere else in the Northern Nigerianemirates. Reinterpretation of chiefly powers under British over-rule by Lugard and his successors provided an autocratic solution to the problems ofincorporating a huge area with little British manpower or revenue and, at thesame time, a legitimizing ideology, applied, misapplied, and used as short-hand for over-rule in quite different societies and periods. To his credit, Lugard himself did not look to an Indian model and admitted in 1908 that hehad no ‘accurate knowledge’ of the resident system in Indian states.34 Indeed,very few of the administrators of Northern Nigeria, except two or three witharmy backgrounds, had any experience of India and its systems of govern-ment.35 They agreed, however, on a common norm of administrative conductto keep in place the patrimonial structure of the Hausa–Fulani emirates withthe manpower available, especially for fiscal and judicial functions of gov-ernment. Rebellion would be stamped out; corruption and inefficiency, over-bearing oppression, and slave dealing would be reformed or abolished. As

36 Perham, Lugard: The Years of Authority, chaps. 5, 6; Heussler, The British in NorthernNigeria, 26–7; D. J. M. Muffat, Concerning Brave Captains (London, 1964), Parts i and ii; andLugard’s despatches, Newbury, British Policy, ii. 154–6.

37 Lugard, Colonial Reports: Northern Nigeria, cited in Newbury, British Policy, ii. 344–5.38 Appointed ‘Chief Clerk’, 1903, and Political Secretary, later. Perham, Lugard, ii. 417–

18.39 Girouard, 15 Oct. 1908, in Newbury, British Policy, ii. 354–6; F. D. Lugard, Political

Memoranda (London, 1919) 77; The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (London, 1922);A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, The Principles of Native Administration in Nigeria (London, 1965).

110 Sub-Saharan Africa

High Commissioner of the Protectorate, Lugard’s military campaign began,therefore, with restoration of the Niger Company’s puppet chief in Nupe andan expedition against slave raiding in Kontagora on the upper Niger, 1900–1.He reinstated the Kanemi lineage in Bornu, on the eastern marches of the emirates, after the French had driven out their conqueror, Rabeh; and he completed the campaign with an assault on Kano and Sokoto, 1902–3, andinstalled a new sultan.

Whatever the justification for the campaign, it supplied a legal basis in theeyes of the new conquerors.36 Northern Nigeria was established by conquest,not by treaties, though ruled as a protectorate from 1900. The rulers ofSokoto and Gwandu were considered to have forfeited their ‘sovereignty’,just as the Habe (Hausa) kingdoms had lost theirs to the Fulani from the earlynineteenth century. From the outset, it was assumed the new governmentwould hold rights in land, as the Fulani had done, including minerals and fiscal resources. Faced with the task of administering fourteen provinces,some as large as Scotland or Wales, with fewer than a hundred political offi-cers, Lugard adopted the practical programme of leaving emirs and their sub-ordinates in place, as appointments under a new hierarchy. Successionswould be recognized, if approved, and a line of power established to preservedynastic and judicial office-holders in place, subject to obedience, termina-tion of slave dealing, and mitigation of judicial sentences.37 At the apex of thepyramid of authorities, the details of executive government were concen-trated to excess in his own hands through a Political Secretariat consisting ofLugard and his brother.38 Lugard’s successor, Sir Percy Girouard, abolishedthis nepotism in 1907. By then, the main principles had been circulated in Lugard’s ‘Political Memoranda’ and accepted as guidelines for ‘rulingthrough the native authorities’ in provincial administration, after reallocat-ing villages to districts and requiring heads to reside there, rather than at anemir’s court. Lugard further insisted on definition of duties for British andNigerian rulers and a knowledge of local languages, and restricted powers ofthe Supreme Court in Northern Nigeria, leaving Islamic courts in place andjudicial powers for executive officers.39

Lugard’s successors and lieutenants venerated his doctrines, but operatedaccording to their own experience of the hierarchies they were workingthrough in provinces and districts widely separated from each other and the

40 Mary Bull, ‘Indirect Rule in Northern Nigeria, 1906–1911’, in Kenneth Robinson andFrederick Madden, eds., Essays in Imperial Government (Oxford, 1963), 47–88.

41 C. S. Whitaker, The Politics of Tradition: Continuity and Change in Northern Nigeria1946–1966 (Princeton, 1970), 33; Smith, Government in Zazzau; Peter Tibenderana, ‘BritishAdministration and the Decline of the Patronage-Clientage System in Northwestern Nigeria,1900–1934’, ASR 32 (1989), 71–95; and ‘The Making and Unmaking of the Sultan of SokotoMuhammaud Tambari: 1922–1931’, JHSN 10 (1977), 91–134; Alhaji Mahmood Yakubu, AnAristocracy in Political Crisis: The End of Indirect Rule and the Emergence of Party Politics inthe Emirates of Northern Nigeria (Avebury, 1996).

42 William F. S. Miles, ‘Colonial Hausa Idioms: Towards a West African Ethno-Ethnohistory’,ASR 36 (1993), 11–30.

43 Smith, Government in Zazzau, 288.44 Resident Festing, 9 Nov. 1908, cited in Heussler, The British in Northern Nigeria, 37.

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capital at Zungeru.40 As later studies have revealed, they found themselvesnot so much in a society run by Fulani ‘feudalism’, but in an intricate set ofpolitical and social networks governed by patrimonial principles. Fulani‘kingship’ was not despotic within a single lineage, but revolved between lin-eages and was subject to frequent succession disputes. Hereditary officesfilled with an emir’s approval were the norm. Others held by state officials, re-ligious, legal, and occupational notables and craftsmen were chosen fromHabe and Fulani status groups. Vassals of a ruler held estates and were usu-ally heads of a political unit. Officials and vassals were styled as barori, orclients of the ruler, even as the ruler of an emirate was a client of the rulers ofSokoto or Gwandu. ‘Clientage, a relationship of personal loyalty’ existed be-tween superior and subordinate at all levels of the hierarchy, as a basis forconfirmation of offices and titles.41 In common with other areas of Hausa andFulani governance, the principles of pre-European administration that sur-vived the overlay of British or French rule in the region were ‘part of the clien-telistic dynamic which in Hausa culture defines the relationship betweensocial superior and inferior and between political ruler and ruled’.42 Thisstructure of kinship and political clientage was the source of so-called ‘indi-rect rule’; and it continued to flourish, with important changes, until the endof British occupation:

Appointment in the Native Administration [observed M. G. Smith for the 1950s] isnot governed by merit or technical qualifications, but by ties of loyalty in a situationof political rivalry where the stakes are considerable. Consequently, in much the sameway that the Emir appoints his own supporters and kin to office, or the Chief Judgeappoints his kinsmen to judgeships, so do the departmental and territorial chiefs allocate office on bases of personal loyalty and solidarity to themselves.43

Appreciation of the political system came slowly and in the language of‘feudalism’, rather than clientage. There were changes wrought by the newrulers. Notably, emirs were deposed and officials dismissed at first in Kano,Katsina, Bornu, Yola Provinces, where residents did not regard themselves asmere advisers but as ‘big men’—certainly bigger than an emir.44 The role of British officials in the wake of conquest was that of patron-rulers not

45 Bull, ‘Indirect Rule’, 47–62.46 The term is used by Heussler, The British in Northern Nigeria, esp. chap. 2; and is adopted

by Adamu Mohammed Fika, The Kano Civil War and British Over-rule 1882–1940 (Ibadan,1978), among Nigerian historians. There is support for Heussler’s interpretation in John Smith,‘The Relationship of the British Political Officer to his Chief in Northern Nigeria’, in MichaelCrowder and Obaro Ikime, eds., West African Chiefs: Their Changing Status under ColonialRule and Independence (Ife, 1970), 14–22.

47 Arnett Papers, Box 6/1, fo. 79; Lord Hailey, Native Administration in the British AfricanTerritories, iii. West Africa (London, 1951), 47–82.

48 Arnett Papers, Box 2/1, fo. 66. M. L. Liddard to Arnett, 10 Nov. 1912.49 Analysed in detail in Hailey, Native Administration, iii. 1–22, 45–50, 63–98.

112 Sub-Saharan Africa

managers at arm’s length of a system taken over and kept running. Departingfrom Lugard’s centralizing aims, his successors devolved responsibility ontoemirs and residents especially in matters of finance and police and in ways dis-approved by Lugard on his return in 1912.45 Personalities counted for much.The work of one resident could be changed by another, especially in the period before 1914, when officials were feeling their way. In time, both sidesunderstood that they worked for compromises for their own benefit—an orderly government, defined as ‘Anglo-African’ by some historians, and underwritten mainly from local resources.46 Not all agreed with Lugard on payment of tribute to rulers or followed the opinions of superiors on appointments of successor emirs. In conditions of poor communications, patron–client relations were worked out locally. But officers adopted agraded system throughout the northern provinces—a kind of league table ofcompetence and reliability that classified emirates, emirate courts, and, notleast, the political officers themselves according to their experience. Laiddown in 1916 by Lieutenant-Governor C. L. Temple the system allowed agreat deal of flexibility and discretion for both Hausa–Fulani and British offi-cials over levels of local salaries, reallocation of funds, and initiatives for localexpenditure. Accordingly, too, the role of political officers as advisers, super-visors, and rulers in the hierarchy varied according to the ways in whichprovincial emirs were judged as administrators and to the degree of politicalorganization in terms of councils, official posts and hereditary offices, anddistrict headmen.47 Much of the business of British officials lay in tours of in-spection, court work, verification of assessments and collection, and, notleast, in the political management of appointments and successions amongemirate subordinates of a ruling house. Their sanctions were ‘Depositions,Fines and Talking’. And in the pioneering phase, when they were feeling theirway into emirate politics, residents sometimes felt that ‘Talking’ was ignored,when they hesitated to ‘jump on an Emir’.48

Nevertheless, gazetting ‘Native Authorities’ and their employees estab-lished a new legitimacy with prescribed clientage and rules for tax-collectingthrough fief-holders, rather than through slave officials.49 Much depended onhow both sides in the hierarchy accessed an improved revenue system and this

50 For an overview, Paul E. Lovejoy and Jan S. Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery: TheCourse of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936 (Cambridge, 1993).

51 Fika, The Kano Civil War. 52 Ibid. 119, for details of collection.53 C. N. Ubah, Government and Administration of Kano Emirate, 1900–1930 (Nsukka,

1985), 156–87.54 Ronald Cohen, ‘The Kingship in Bornu’, in Crowder and Ikime, eds., West African Chiefs,

196.55 Arnett Papers, Box 2/1, fo. 38. Gowers to Arnett, 25 May 1912, for the early system in Kano

Province; Box 5/1, fo. 41, Hopkins to Arnett, 6 June–9 July 1914, for an explanation of Lugard’sso-called ‘reimbursement-in-aid’ from treasuries to central government, reserved by his succes-sors for specific provincial expenditure where collected. Not even Lord Hailey is clear on how thetreasuries evolved. Hailey, Native Administration, iii. 70. The whole topic would repay furtherresearch.

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advantage, in turn, entailed a more detailed management of village officialsand productive resources worked by free and servile labour.50

Consolidation of fiefs under overlords posted as district heads to collecttaxes on their estates involved considerable reorganization of districts andsub-districts within provinces and continued well into the 1920s.51 Similarly,village units were amalgamated, entailing the appointment of recognized vil-lage heads. Thirdly, treasuries funded the emirs’ Civil Lists and served as col-lection points for a revised system of taxation. Cautiously, Lugard hadapplied new licences and tolls and claimed for the civil administration a shareof revenues collected from emirate chiefs or non-Muslim communities in‘pagan’ provinces. Revenue proclamations of 1904 and 1906 defined accessto resources on both sides of the British and Nigerian ruling hierarchy, thoughmost taxes stayed in the emir’s treasury, as long as cowries remained officialcurrency. In practice, reform of district headships and revenue collection wereinextricably bound together; and while the administration was hard-pressedfor cash, emirs were still able to appoint members of their family to fief hold-ings, in return for speedy collections and hefty commissions.52 A more closelysupervised revenue system was pioneered by Resident C. L. Temple in KanoProvince and by H. R. Palmer in Katsina Emirate where the first ‘Native Treasuries’ were set up.53 In Bornu, for example, the emir’s traditional pre-rogative over all revenue was simply abolished and all former sources of rev-enue were combined into a single tax applied to peasant agriculture andcollected through the hierarchy of headmen and district heads for the emi-rate’s central treasury from 1914.54 By the 1920s, this prescription was inte-gral to the system as supervised by British officers and it meant that an emircould influence the ways in which a good half of revenue was spent as a ‘Native Share’, as distinct from ‘Government Share’, and retained at a subdi-visional level. In short, ‘revenue’, or ‘tribute receipts’ as recorded at a provin-cial capital was a matter of counterfoils and bookkeeping, rather than aconsolidated sum collected and allocated by British officials.55

The treasuries were a cornerstone of the ‘Anglo-African’ system of rule andresulted (for the first time) in cash payments for public works labour in silver

56 Cohen, ‘The Kingship in Bornu’, 201.57 Girouard, ‘Memoranda on Land Tenure’, 2 Nov. 1907, in Newbury, ed., British Policy, ii.

580–1; Jan S. Hogendorn, Nigerian Groundnut Exports: Origins and Early Development (Oxford University Press, Nigeria, 1978), 68–9; Lovejoy and Hogendorn, Slow Death forSlavery, for new clientage relations (sharecropping) between landowners and former slaves.

58 Fika, The Kano Civil War, 178–87; Smith, Government in Zazzau, 217–21; Tibenderana,‘British Administration’, 83–4.

59 Fika, The Kano Civil War, 271; Tibenderana, ‘British Administration’, 84.

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coin, which replaced cowries during 1911. Fief holders appointed by emirscollected rents for government; and this was easily expanded into a land tax by assessments from 1910, complete with a corps of Hausa and Fulanisurveyors and clerks. From 1914 fixed salaries for district heads were neverless than 20 per cent of all expenditure and larger surpluses encouraged in-crease of salaries in the inter-war years. By 1936 some sixty-three treasuriesunder Ma‘aji treasurers systematically funded the reciprocal bargain of shar-ing power in a hierarchy headed by the British. By then, too, emirs were wellpaid (the Emir of Kano had a salary of £6,000 and an establishment al-lowance of £2,500) and exercised considerable local control over spendingon emirate public departments (medical, education, public works, police andprisons, judiciary).56

The rapid rise in Northern Nigerian revenues still left the protectorate a fis-cal dependency requiring grants-in-aid, prior to amalgamation with SouthernNigeria in 1914; but the establishment of treasuries ranks as the most impor-tant single basis for underwriting the authority structure envisaged by Lugardand his successors. A second factor was toleration of servitude on estates oftitled owners and the unexpected ability of Hausa farmers with usehold rightsto increase their holdings and profit from a boom in groundnut exports. For-tunately, too, official plans for land ‘nationalization’, were not fully imple-mented, but more efficient tax mechanisms were.57

Although emirs and chiefs were paid fixed salaries, these were nowhere suf-ficient to meet their obligations to kin and clients. Additional disposable in-come was collected through officials responsible to a waziri, or ministerapproved by the British, with greater possibilities for embezzlement and ex-tortion from the peasantry.58 Early in British over-rule, the talakawa peas-antry were supported by British officers in their complaints and chiefs weredisciplined, but for a substantial period, 1924–33, this right was officiallydiscouraged, in the interests of tax collection. By the 1920s, according toFika’s study of Kano Emirate, there were considerable reserves on hand in-vested in capital projects; and Tibenderana suggests increased revenues owedmuch to ‘unprecedented extortion and oppression’. Further reorganization ofemirate treasuries in the 1930s expanded this efficient mechanism for collec-tion and redistribution in ‘staggering proportions’59 (Fig. 2). The lot of the talakawa improved marginally from 1934, when their right to bring com-plaints against chiefs was restored and forced labour was formally ended.

60 On this point, see John N. Paden, ‘Aspects of Emirship in Kano’, in Crowder and Ikime,eds., West African Chiefs, 162–86.

61 Tibenderana, ‘British Administration’, 71–95; and ‘The Making and Unmaking of the Sultan of Sokoto Muhammaud Tambari: 1922–1931’, 91–134.

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0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 27/28 29/30 31/32 33/34 35/36 37/38 39/40 41/42 43/44 45/46

Years

£'000

Revenue

Expenditure

F ig . 2 Northern Nigeria, revenue and expenditureSources: Nigeria: Northern Provinces Estimates (Kaduna and Lagos, 1923–51); NorthernRegion. Reports of the Accountant-General (Kaduna, 1952). Rhodes House Library, Oxford.From 1943/44 totals include development funds and reimbursements from Southern Nigeria.

General improvement of access to resources had consequential effects onthe status of emirate leadership. At that level, however, there were contradic-tions between British withdrawal of patronage or support for dynastic repre-sentatives, according to performance or political considerations, and theopportunities of emirs and their officials to build up their own patronage networks through beneficial appointments. Succession became as much amatter of politics as dynastic inheritance.60 For example, in the SokotoCaliphate, the sultan was demoted, as far as his own sovereignty was con-cerned, from 1903. Thereafter, the fate of sultans depended less on efficiencyor corruption than their loyalty to the British in their anxiety about Mahdistconspiracies originating in the central Sudan. Thus, Sultan Maiturare was kept in office (1915–24) by Governor Sir Hugh Clifford and Resident H. R. Palmer, despite serious charges of abuse of patronage brought againsthim, and there was a promise of lineal succession for his eldest son. All the de-tails of this affair, including manipulation of an electoral council and events leading to Tambari’s eventual abdication, need not be followed here.61 Butthere were repercussions in the relationships between officials at the British

62 Heussler, The British in Northern Nigeria, 47.63 The whole episode is usefully reviewed in Arnett Papers, Box 2/2 and 6/2. The inconsisten-

cies over appointments are discussed by Smith, Government in Zazzau, 224–45.64 Arnett Papers, Box 6/3, fo. 102. The ostensible cause of the rift was Arnett’s initiative in

approving the new emir’s salary and allowances and remission of taxes to his supporters (which Palmer and Clifford censured).

65 A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, Adamawa Past and Present: An Historical Approach to the Devel-opment of a Northern Cameroons Province (London, 1958), 143–7.

66 Heussler, The British in Northern Nigeria, 140.

116 Sub-Saharan Africa

end of the hierarchy in ways that suggest considerable misgivings on the partof some officers at the primacy of politics over administrative efficiency.

Some had more patience with incompetence than others. For example, awayward emir such as Aliyu of Zaria was brought down only after twodecades of exhortation to reform; and his extortionist sons were sacked,when Fulani subordinates sided with an exasperated resident.62 Like theforced resignation of the Sultan of Sokoto, this episode began with Aliyu’sdeposition in 1920 on a mix of charges including forced labour, seizure ofplantations and town properties, forcing slave girls into his harem. Under-neath lay more serious issues in a political battle with British officials over ap-pointments to the emir’s Judicial Court, to Emirate and district offices.63

At stake were powers of patronage—Fulani or British style—not least in se-curing the services of a suitable waziri, or principal minister. At stake, too, asthe case rumbled on through several administrative enquiries, were relationswithin the British hierarchy, particularly between (Acting) Lieutenant Gover-nor Palmer and Resident Arnett, accused by Governor Clifford of failing to‘set a salient example of loyalty to his new Chief’ (whose job he had failed toget).64

Nevertheless, what the new patron rulers created they could undo—at theperiphery of the emirates, as well as at the centre. Of the seven emirs ofAdamawa Province under British rule, 1901–53, four were overturned, andthree cooperated with approval (one was awarded the CBE).65 Residents (ordistrict officers as they were termed from 1926) and governors, therefore,wielded great power in legitimization of succession to office at different levelsof an emir’s administration and over the emir himself.66 On the whole, newrules of succession within a single dynasty prevailed over rotating successionsbetween lineages. To that extent, ‘royalty’ was redefined for the benefit of a narrower segment of the most senior status groups. So, despite some decentralization of Native Authority powers to district heads and the end of slave officials in royal households, installation of relatives in senior postscontinued:

The net result of these changes was that the emir further strengthened the dynastic position of his family at the emirate capital without necessarily weakening it at districtlevel. The mutual collaboration between emir and District Officer in effecting thesechanges illustrates an aspect of Indirect Rule in Northern Nigeria, namely that an

67 Fika, The Kano Civil War, 228.68 For debates on policy, Heussler, The British in Northern Nigeria, 66–7; I. F. Nicolson, The

Administration of Nigeria 1900 to 1960: Men, Methods and Myths (Oxford, 1969).69 Hailey, Native Administration, iii. 14–16, 82; Omoniyi Adewoye, The Judicial System in

Southern Nigeria 1854–1954 (London, 1977), 228–9, 233.70 Hailey, Native Administration, iii. 124, 145.71 Smith, Government in Zazzau, 272–5.

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emir, even an unjust emir, could get away with almost anything provided he was ongood terms with the British political officers.67

Policy, however, in the later decades of British rule revolved around Northern Nigeria’s place in an evolving structure of government in the rest ofthe country, following Lugard’s attempt to extend his system to SouthernNigeria. Other governors put their own gloss on Indirect Rule, especiallyGovernors Clifford and Cameron.68 But these were swings of mood and thereal issue was preservation of a system of clientage reinforcing the power ofBritish officials and emirs, or integration with a more bureaucratic, depart-mentalized form of government run from Lagos. Cameron did have a point inattempting to mitigate the autocracy of the native authorities by broadeningrepresentation in emirs’ councils. Ordinances of 1933 and 1934 replacedprovincial courts for protectorate courts under magistrates and made thetreasuries subject to audit from Lagos. But, in fact, little changed in the line ofpower between an elite corps and a Fulani–Hausa hierarchy based on client-age. And in practice appelate jurisdiction to a Supreme Court hardly touchedjurisdiction of the emirate Alkali courts, and African lawyers remained ex-cluded, as they did in most Native Courts throughout Nigeria.69

By the 1940s, the northern provinces had 119 native authorities and 113subordinate authorities varying greatly in population and revenue andheaded by emirs and chiefs of various grades, some with councils and somesimply headmen with councils. The emirs’ or chiefs’ councils, moreover, hadtaken on the appearance of ministerial bodies, but with patronage appoint-ments from among notables and royals. District heads were still appointedbecause of connections with a ruling house or leading family.70 Staffing serv-ice departments attached to emirates followed a similar pattern. For, an un-expected result of decentralization of public works, education, health, policeand prisons, and agricultural services was increased employment for Hausaand Fulani in junior posts.71 The prevailing mode was still authoritarian.Practice, as opposed to theory, meant working along the grain of barantaka(political clientage) with a strongly supervisory control.

In the southern protectorate of Nigeria, over-rule had moved at a very different pace through different social structures. Before 1914, althoughcourts, native councils, and commissioners formed the basis for supervisionin the Yoruba states, chiefs’ functions were not prescribed. An experimentwith a Central Native Council of Yoruba chiefs, 1901–13, had limited success

72 Newbury, The Western Slave Coast and its Rulers, 195–8.73 J. A. Atanda, ‘The Changing Status of the Alafin of Oyo under Colonial Rule and Indepen-

dence’, in Crowder and Ikime, eds., West African Chiefs, 219–20.

118 Sub-Saharan Africa

as an advisory body, while an early plan for native councils at village andward levels failed for want of local government funding.72 Lugard had at-tempted to change the system, once southern provinces were established asthe Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria in 1906, by imposingSupreme Court jurisdiction on the Alake of Abeokuta, ending his treaties andsubordinating the great states of Egba, Oyo, and Ibadan under the governorin the manner of the northern emirates. Following the amalgamation of Nigeria in 1914 (for which Lugard was one of the principal architects), west-ern and eastern provinces in the South came under much closer rule throughchief commissioners.

The larger Yoruba states, however, managed to avoid or resist many fea-tures of this wholesale extension of Lugard’s Native Authority system, whilehe was governor of the whole country, 1914–18, except its judicial format, byrejecting his experiment with direct taxation in Yorubaland. Without the fi-nancial underpinning that supported emirs, authoritarian obas and bales didnot emerge in the South, where they continued to be restrained by councils ofhereditary title-holders and age-grade societies. In the populous towns, more-over, administration through ward chiefs and through town councils movedfurther along the road of popular representation than in Northern Nigeria.For a time, it is true, ‘paramounts’ were in favour. The Alafin of Oyo wasraised to this status by Resident Ross over Ibadan chiefs in what one Nigerianhistorian sees as a ‘new Oyo empire’ from 1906 to 1931. Ross and the Alafinare one of the better examples we have of political symbiosis: ‘The intimacybetween both of them became so great that it was difficult to draw the line between official and personal dealings. Both in fact became integrated.’73

Ibadan, in turn, was given a created paramount—the Olubadan. Residentsstill continued to patronize religious figureheads (such as the Oni of Ife), at atime when Governor Cameron questioned the orthodoxy of backing ‘tradi-tional’ rulers and instituted councils of chiefs with judicial functions in 1933.But his administration imposed an unpopular Awujale paramount in thatyear on the Ijebu states and kept him in place until he was eventually broughtdown by the votes of new political elite in 1959. For most of the inter-war period it is difficult to see a consistent pattern to over-rule through commis-sioners and Yoruba chiefs. ‘Indigenous authorities’ in the Yoruba states andtowns consisted of any traditional chiefs whose duties were prescribed only in1933 and in 1940 to cover judicial, executive, and fiscal functions. Until latein the day, the basic intermediary between a British official and Yoruba soci-ety was simply a ‘chief, aided and abetted by his traditional entourage’,

74 John Mackintosh, ed., Nigerian Government and Politics (London, 1966), 205. See, too, E. A. Ayandele, ‘The Changing Position of the Awujales of Ijebuland under Colonial Rule’, in Crowder and Ikime, eds., West African Chiefs, 231–54.

75 Mackintosh, ed., Nigerian Government, 208–11, for the detail of these changes in South-ern Nigeria against the background of the Richards Constitution.

76 Vaughan, ‘The Impact of Party Politics and Military Rule’, 152–202; Lloyd, ‘The YorubaLineage’.

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underfunded for local government purposes and out of touch with many ofthe better-educated urban elite.74

But in the end other representatives and brokers were recognized. By thelate 1930s and 1940s, political pressure from new service groups such as theIbadan Progressive Union and other associations forced more autonomousadministration within large urban agglomerations and promotion for nota-bles by title creation in urban councils under the chairmanship of a resident.Unlike the Gold Coast there were few depositions and wider acceptance ofcouncillors nominated from outside a ruling lineage and its followers. With aregional population of some 3.5 million in the Yoruba Western Provincesthere were some very large units administered internally in this way. EgbaState under a paramount Alake as ruler-in-council also had divisional coun-cils of Obas. Ijebu, Ijebu-Remo, and Ondo Province all had councils com-posed of hereditary title-holders, representatives from small towns and fromthe Nigerian Youth Movement (led by successful traders and merchants).Ibadan under its Olubadan-in-council co-opted titular heads and members ofthe Ibadan Progressive Union. There were no formal ‘native treasuries’ in thestyle of the northern emirates; and councils depended on collection of localfees and licences, court revenue, and allocations from general revenue fromthe regional government in Lagos. Throughout the pre-war period there wasan inconclusive argument about how much of direct taxes and dues, supple-mented by central government allocations, should be retained to coversalaries and allowances, or handed over to pay for services and infrastructure.A tax Ordinance of 1940 came down heavily in favour of central control andincreased allocations; and under the 1947 Constitution, for the first time, afixed proportion of revenue was made over to council treasuries under officialaudit. In return, chiefs and councils served as electoral units for regional col-leges and African representation in the Legislature.75

These changes tended, at first, to marginalize traditional leaders, until theirutility for national politicians was exploited after the formation of the ActionGroup as a major regional party in Yorubaland, backed by ethnic associa-tions and an articulate elite, as the pace of competition for power quick-ened.76 A major blow to an administrative role for chiefs was delivered by therequirement for elected representation at all levels handed down by the Colonial Office in an ‘optimistic and at times naive’ Local Government

77 Mackintosh, ed., Nigerian Government, 210.78 Cited in Martin Lynn, ed., Nigeria, Part i. Managing Political Reform, 1943–1953, British

Documents on the End of Empire, B. 7 (London, 2001), 441.79 Ibid., Part i, pp. lvi, 481–4; Mackintosh, ed., Nigerian Government, 233–4. The signifi-

cance of this shift from chiefs to party clients has been obscured by the constitutional crisis overthe Local Government Bill of 1953 for Western Region and central government relations. Com-pare the failure of local councils in Ghana over the same period: Rathbone, Nkrumah and theChiefs, 80–1, 121.

80 Mackintosh, ed., Nigerian Government, 237–9; M. J. Balogun, ‘Enduring Clientelism,Governance, Reform and Leadership Capacity: A Review of the Democratization Process inNigeria’, JCAS 15 (1997), 237–60.

81 Atanda, ‘Changing Status of the Alafin’, 226. The Alafin was deposed in 1954.82 Ayandele, ‘Changing Position of the Awujales’, 231–54.

120 Sub-Saharan Africa

Despatch of 1947.77 From then on, most of the larger Yoruba states devolvedtheir administrative functions to subordinate councils and committees whichmanaged a regional budget of some £1.6 million by 1951. The fate of chiefsdepended not on their administrative skills (many had none), but on their use-fulness to new political patrons running the Action Group. Those patrons,however, like distant observers inside the Colonial Office, would appear tohave been in two minds about the place of chiefs and elders in local govern-ment. Somehow democratic representation had to be combined with ‘thewell-established institution of Kingship, though enlightened Kingship’ pon-dered one official.78 It was never clear where such enlightened ‘kings’ mightbe produced. The plight of chiefs was made worse, in any case, by the impo-sition of a complex and African-inspired adoption of English county admin-istration in 1953. This proved to be unworkable and power passed to electedparty candidates.79 But revenues in the Western Region more than doubled,largely as a result of government grants to politically favoured councils run bya permanent staff and by nominated committees under the patronage of government ministers. In other words, ‘local government’ became a conduitfor political largesse, increasingly weakened by battles over corruption oflocal agencies and political in-fighting for control of resources and jobs.80 Forsome paramounts these changes were disastrous, especially (like the Alafin ofOyo) if they made the mistake of acting as patron to a party opposed to theAction Group.81 For others, if they had a measure of education and the back-ing of the major party in Yorubaland, there was still a symbolic role in Yorubasociety.82

Ironically, while elected local government failed in the regions of the Southin the early 1960s and chiefs came under threat, the older system of ‘nativeauthorities’ survived for administrative and political purposes in the North.And as long as the politics of constitutional reform were dominated in Nigeria by questions of ministerial succession in central government and byincreasing ethnic tensions arising from consolidation of party control in theregions, there was a reluctance on the part of the Colonial Office and Britishofficials to detract from the powers of emirs. From 1953 the political leaders

83 Lynn, Nigeria, Part i, pp. lix ff.84 Michael Crowder, West Africa under Colonial Rule (London, 1968), 211–33.85 Kenneth Little, ‘Structural Change in the Sierra Leone Protectorate’, Africa, 25 (1955),

9–34.86 Richard Joseph, ‘The Reconfiguration of Power in Late Twentieth-Century Africa’, in

Richard Joseph, ed., State, Conflict, and Democracy in Africa (Boulder, Colo., 1999), 57–82; Little, ‘The Political Function of the Poro’.

87 William L. Rodman and Dorothy Ayers Counts, Middlemen and Brokers in Oceania (AnnArbor, Mich., 1982); but see Alex Weingrod, ‘Patrons, Patronage and Political Parties’, CSSH 10(1968), 377–400, esp. 382 for ‘patron–client ties as a kind of mediating mechanism’.

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of the Northern Region could block further constitutional reform and poseda risk of secession.83

Elsewhere in the Sierra Leone Protectorate and in the Gambia, formal pre-scription of ‘Tribal Authorities’ operated for weaker and divided hierarchies;and provincial commissioners applied moderate jurisdiction and tax collec-tion, but little else, prior to reorganization in 1946 allowing local treasuries.Unfortunately, paramount chiefs were many, but treasury resources meagre.Although it is possible to categorize these and other administrations in termsof ‘indirect/direct’ rule, the model has little explanatory value, unless the de-tailed management of local hierarchies reveals points of similarity or contrastwith a strongly hierarchical model, as in pre-1900 Ashanti or Northern Nigeria.84 There was, however, considerable flexibility in the ways in whichofficials utilized the structures they found in place. Over the course of timeand in the decade prior to independence, it is notable that a more accuratemodel for ‘leadership’ in Sierra Leone is that of a ‘big man’ in Mende orTemne society, combining a mix of ascribed or achieved status with a meas-ure of education.85 Thus, informal leadership might reinforce or bypass a‘Paramount’ chief, harking back to the networks of pre-British political influ-ence and power studied by Skinner, Little, and others, and providing a basisfor later more militant factional leaders who challenged elite politicians.86

Much of British over-rule, therefore, has now to be regarded as a flexiblerecognition of old and new authorities, operating alongside evolving forms ofaccommodation within secular and religious associations, ethnic unions, po-litical parties. Not every society regarded ‘recognized chiefs’ as the most use-ful or appropriate intermediaries between government and local-level eldersand people. That flexibility in intervention may be accounted for better by ac-knowledging that European administrators were also brokers, as well as ad-visers. Few works have considered this aspect of official intermediation; andfewer still have included administrators alongside the ambiguous chieflyfunctionaries caught between nominal subjects and political masters.87

Nevertheless, such an approach gives less weight to lofty prescriptive policiesand more to their execution through officials as appointed civil servants andas co-opted service gentry within indigenous hierarchies. It is, after all, the in-teraction of these two sets of officials and not the ‘directness’ or ‘indirectness’

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of intervention that constitutes the success or failure of civil society in a dependency.

It may be argued, therefore, that there is less of a clear pattern to British orFrench Africa, according to official orthodoxies. Both French and British ad-ministrators made use of titular (‘official’) chiefs, as well as natural rulers; andsome of their successors in Ghana or Guinea had a predeliction for centralgovernment control, bypassing, or even abolishing the role of traditional rep-resentatives.88 There were degrees of intervention which either worked withor against the prevailing tide of social and economic change towards theemergence of educated elites, urbanization, and the spread of wage employ-ment. In the urban and provincial administration of the Gambia, SierraLeone, Gold Coast, and Southern Nigeria, ward and territorial chiefdomswere utilized for control of criminal and some civil justice. This practice pro-ceeded from the treaty system of the 1880s and earlier precedents remarkablysmoothly, except where experiments in direct taxation or acquisition of powers over land were attempted. The Asante, it is true, were occupied andreconstructed; chiefs were created in south-eastern Nigeria and the Gambia.Overall administrative practice tended towards preservation with someadaptation through expansion of chiefs’ councils. By the 1930s, however,faith in ‘Indirect Rule’ had been shaken by the conduct of ambitious stoolchiefs in the Gold Coast and was questioned for its shortcomings in local gov-ernment and its confusion of judicial and political functions. But it was notabandoned. In conditions of financial stringency, before and during the Second World War, conservation prevailed, though chiefs were faced with the challenge of participation in the legislatures of the coastal colonies andprotectorates earlier than in the emirates.

In the emirates the hierarchy of native authorities and British officials managed to fight a successful rearguard action against extension of the powers of the Lagos Supreme Court. The power structure continued to bemanaged through an old elite, until expansion and reform of the emir’s coun-cil by creation of advisory councils from 1952 with a portfolio system andnon-Fulani representation. Even so, the verdict of a number of observers wasthat the emirs’ manipulation of appointments to offices of state, to technicaldepartments and to district headships had substantially increased their au-thority. It was admitted that ‘corruption’ in making Native Authority ap-pointments through emirs was ‘endemic and universal in that system’.89

Emirs and chiefs, therefore, who had played politics in emirate government

88 Crowder and Ikime, eds., West African Chiefs, pp. x–xv. In general Crowder and Ikime areright in noting that French appointed agents were more numerous than ‘natural’ chiefs in theirAfrican territories, though there were exceptions in Mali, Senegal, Niger, and parts of Guinea.

89 Sir Brian Sharwood-Smith, cited in Lynn, Nigeria, Part i, 423; B. J. Dudley, Parties and Politics in Northern Nigeria (London, 1968), for the pre-war views of Margery Perham and Sir Richard Palmer, acting Lieutenant-Governor, 17, 50–6.

90 Dudley, Parties and Politics, 81; for other evidence that the NPC was a patron party by1955, Lynn, Nigeria, ii. Moving to Independence, 1953–1960 (London, 2001), 488–92.

91 Hailey, Native Administration, iii. 124, 145.92 Dudley, Parties and Politics, 220–2. One-quarter of posts were held by southerners and half

by British ‘expatriates’ on temporary contracts.93 For a summary, Richard L. Sklar, ‘Crises and Transitions in the Political History of Inde-

pendent Nigeria’, in Paul A. Beckett and Crawford Young, eds., Dilemmas of Democracy inNigeria (Rochester, NY, 1997), 16–44, esp. 17–20.

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for generations had no difficulty in transferring their skills to competition forpower in regional government. Members of the Northern House of Assemblywho formed the Northern Peoples Congress in 1951 did so to head off moreradical movements and further the election of Native Authority officials, district and village heads, and relatives of emirs. Thus, ‘the party and the tra-ditional aristocracy became welded into a single network.’90

Equally important was the northerners’ need to make up ground in civilservice employment by excluding southerners. In the short term, the initialdrive for a Nigerian civil service seemed to work best in the Yoruba West—aregion criticized by Lord Hailey in 1950 for its ‘untidy’ organization of chieflyprovinces, but praised for inclusion of an elected educated element in NativeAuthority Councils.91 In the longer term it was speedily politicized in all re-gions from 1953. The North had most ground to make up with only a quar-ter of Civil Service posts held by Hausa or Fulani in 1958.92 But from 1959,control of appointments passed to politicians of the regional Executive Coun-cil acting as a ‘Northernization Committee’, with a training programme at Zaria. By 1966, slightly over half of all posts (including former district officerships) were held by northerners, and there were no southerners in aCivil Service increasingly dominated by party appointments.

At the federal centre, however, there were rich pickings without any firmcontrol by an establishment officer. Posts were expanded to some 5,000 by1961, 3,000 of which were held by Nigerians (predominantly southerners).Thus, underlying the tense struggle between exclusively ‘regionalist’ partiesand those parties seeking to campaign in all regions,1960–6, was an exten-sion of local ‘Nigerianization’ programmes into political and administrativecontrol of the ministries of the Federation. The detailed issues of party al-liance and divisions in regional leadership need not be rehearsed here.93 But itshould be remembered that basic failures on the part of politicized civil ser-vants to make an accurate census (on which the political predominance ofnorthern parties was predicated) or to prevent ‘rigged’ elections in the West-ern Region in 1965 did much to undermine the credibility of governmentthrough consensus and coalition. The stark alternatives by 1966 were politi-cal assassination of the prime minister, northern and western premiers, by(mainly Igbo) army officers, followed by a northern officers counter-coup thesame year and descent into massacre of easterners, the Biafran civil war, aproliferation of regional states, and a period of prolonged military rule.

94 For the attitude of Yoruba politicians to status and power, Mackintosh, ed., Nigerian Government, 616.

95 Balogun, ‘Enduring Clientelism’, 244; Dudley, Parties and Politics, 302–3.96 Yakubu, Aristocracy in Political Crisis, 49.

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Throughout the period when constitutional government was on trial in theearly 1960s, there is every evidence that the pattern of clientage set by tradi-tional elites in Nigeria predominated over any semblance of an ‘independent’civil service. But traditional chiefs were not necessarily the main beneficiariesfor very long. In the North, emirs and the new service gentry of the northernpoliticians embraced the challenge of taking power together in regional andfederal offices, but eventually lost lives and functions to military successors.Traditional Yoruba leadership, on the other hand, showed every sign of beingdisplaced by ‘political chiefs’ (some of whom took titles) and who had no hes-itation in monopolizing the benefits of power.94 But they, too, (like ChiefAwolowo) ran the risk of party schism, the breakdown of parliamentary government in the Western House of Assembly, prosecution and imprison-ment, at the hands of regional and federal enemies. One verdict on the suc-ceeding period of government through army officers is that they acted littledifferently. Nigeria’s military elite, like the British before them, took ‘their cuefrom the patron–client culture of the traditional society’ in order to keepthemselves in power.95

This conclusion has been supported by other Nigerian historians, eventhose who base their analysis on an acceptance of the ‘indirect rule’ model.Emirs chose to back NPC candidates, using their Native Authority organiza-tions; and, by 1951, they were the patrons of the party, a position confirmedwhen Ahmadu Bello, Sultan of Sokoto, became Minister of Local Govern-ment in 1953. The price was agreement to elected representation at local gov-ernment level; and those who refused were deposed. On the whole, emirsconformed to civilian directives, or abdicated, as the Emir of Kano did in1963. But from 1966, under a military regime, they lost control of local police and the Native Authority courts. One can agree, therefore, withYakubu’s more general conclusion that chiefs in Nigeria and elsewhere inCentral and East Africa entered into campaigning ‘to acquire new legitimacyin the era of party politics’.96 In the longer term, however, they might not succeed.

8 East-Central Africa

In this region the political hierarchies that commanded the attention ofnineteenth-century missionaries and administrators centred on the GreatLakes. British contacts were filtered through Zanzibar and the Swahili Arabcoast; and familiarity with the Sultanates of Zanzibar and Muscat, as an extension of Omani trading networks, made such contacts an extension ofBritish authority and interests in India and the Gulf.1 It did not follow, how-ever, that political influence was extended with any great enthusiasm. Offersof territorial concessions by Sultan Seyyid Bargash to the steamship magnate,Sir William Mackinnon, in 1877 came to nothing; and the Foreign Office re-fused to act as guarantor for his dynastic succession in 1881. Division of thesultan’s claims to the interior between British and Germans, in 1886, in thecontext of African partition, paved the way for a British protectorate from1890: Zanzibar became at first a client state and then a closely ruled gover-norship, as the sultan’s household was isolated from general administrationand the courts. Transfer from the Foreign Office to the Colonial Office in1913 completed the subordination of this relic of Omani influence to Britishrule under the East African Protectorate.

In the East African hinterland, Islamic models for the structure of govern-ment were overshadowed by indigenous monarchical hierarchies that pro-vided useful templates for territorial consolidation by British and Germanadministrations among kingdoms of Uganda and Rwanda-Burundi. In all,between the eastern Congo, the Sudan, Tanzania, and Kenya, lay eight inter-lacustrine societies qualified as ‘kingdoms’, including, principally, Buganda,Toro, Bunyoro, Ankole, Busogo, Rwanda, and Burundi, and a number ofsegmentary societies influenced by contact with powerful neighbours and bycolonial incorporation into larger states.2 There were certainly other exam-ples of so-called ‘chiefless’ societies in Kenya, such as the Luo or Luyia, wheregenealogical seniority and personal achievement raised a clan leader to para-mountcy over other clans, including those comprised of immigrant clients.3

Like their counterparts in the segmentary societies of the Buganda marchlands, they could be termed ‘big men’, rather than kings.

1 M. Reda Bhacker, Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar (London, 1994); L. W.Hollingsworth, Zanzibar under the Foreign Office 1890–1913 (London, 1953).

2 Richards, ed., East African Chiefs, chap. 15.3 K. R. Dundas, ‘The Wawanga and Other Tribes of the Elgon District British East Africa’,

JRAI 43 (1913), 19–75; G. Wagner, The Bantu of North Kavirondo, 2 vols. (London, 1949), i.66.

The characteristics of the monarchical states included ability on the part ofrepresentatives of a royal lineage to accumulate and redistribute resources,especially where natural endowment and trade contacts encouraged a monopoly in royal hands. Monarchy was legitimized through performanceand myths and subject to review, especially at periods of succession. Aboveall, there was a monopoly of military force, even a standing army, as inBuganda, and an authority to raise to office members of other status groups,or even commoners.4 This ability to reward and create a dependent bureau-cracy based on patron–client principles most distinguished hierarchical king-doms from the restricted authority of big men. Among the reasons for theemergence of such hierarchies was a need to reduce competition for succes-sion within a royal patrilineage by establishing supervisory headships fornon-kin at court and over provinces and local clan chiefs. In time, some ofthese headships became hereditary. In the case of the Baganda, there was agood deal of room for selection of ‘hereditary’ chiefs from within a large pa-trilineal descent group according to ability and loyalty. Ascribed status com-bined with personal achievement for offices of state; and as selection wasgenerally made by the kabaka from among the very young (court ‘pages’),there was time to mould them into servants of the kingdom. In some cases, se-lection from a peasant level could be disguised by fictional incorporation intoa lineage. Many posts among the elite in Buganda, termed ‘hereditary’ in thenineteenth century, ‘were in fact filled by selection from among quite wideranges of eligible persons’, leading to the formation of an ‘incipient gentry’.5

Similar systems have been identified in all the inter-lacustrine states, but no-tably in Nyoro, where pre-colonial clientage through honours, grants of land,and appointments, in return for service by ranked chiefs, stemmed from theperson of the paramount mukama. In turn, chiefs ruled over people who were‘their dependent clients rather than the subjects of an impersonal administra-tion’.6 Similarly, in Buganda, the kabaka was royal patron to client chiefs(bakungu) set over territorial divisions, officers of royal estates, and militarygenerals. In the smaller state of Busoga with links to Bunyoro and Nyoro selection of commoners for headships bound to the ruler by ties of personalloyalty was reinforced by marriage to a princess or marriage of the ruler to a commoner’s sister or daughter.7 Clientage remained ubiquitous. In theinter-lacustrine states, in the mid-twentieth century, Lucy Mair observed thatthe system ‘runs through the whole society from top to bottom, everyone

126 Sub-Saharan Africa

4 Lemarchand, ed., African Kingships in Perspective, 8–14; for a survey of the origins ofGanda kingship and bakungu and batongole chiefs as the king’s clients, Christopher Wrigley,Kingship and State: The Buganda Dynasty (Cambridge, 1996), 208–9.

5 L. A. Fallers and A. I. Richards, The King’s Men: Leadership and Status in Buganda on theEve of Independence (Oxford, 1964), 170–6.

6 John Beattie, The Nyoro State (Oxford, 1971), 133.7 Fallers, Bantu Bureaucracy, 27.

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Map 6. States and societies of the Great Lakes, after Audrey I. Richards, ed., EastAfrican Chiefs: A Study of Political Development in some Uganda and TanganyikaTribes (London, 1960)

except the king being somebody’s client, and everyone except the lowliestpeasant having clients of his own’.8

Between states there was also clientage and alliance: the Buganda ruler re-ceived tribute from Karagwe in Tanzania and from Toro. Europeans were in-cluded in such alliances, and early British administrators, after 1894, foundthemselves acting as brokers to settle disputes between states and princes.Fallers noted: ‘As present-day informants describe these early contacts be-tween Europeans and Soga princes or rulers, it becomes clear that the Sogaviewed the European much as they viewed the Kabaka of Buganda—as apowerful patron with whom they might ally themselves in the traditionalmanner.’9

The arrival of competing religions further complicated the relationship be-tween ruler and clients in Buganda from the 1860s. The task of consolidatingpower was too much for Kabaka Mwanga (1884–97) who created martyrsand united factions against him. With his flight, the kabaka headship waseclipsed by the oligarchy of the bakungu chiefs under the chief minister orkatakiro. Intervention by F. D. Lugard at Kampala as representative of themilitary arm of the Imperial British East Africa Company in 1890 providedsupport for the Protestant faction; a treaty brought in resident agents; and, in1894, Uganda became a protectorate. In the strategy of partition, this collec-tion of large and small states offered a model for management at low cost andcontrol of territory from Kenya and the western shores of Lake Victoria toLake Albert and the White Nile. Defeat and expulsion of the former kabaka,Mwanga, in 1899, led to a redefinition of the status and structure of the king-dom through the 1900 Agreement negotiated by Special Commissioner SirHarry Johnston and the bakungu chiefs.

The basis for this cooperative subordination was unusual in its detail andprescriptions, resting on definitions of succession, legitimacy, jurisdiction,and the eventual loyalty of an infant kabaka to ‘the Queen Protectress ofUganda’. During his minority, the administration was largely in the hands ofthe Katakiro, (Sir) Apollo Kaggwa until 1926. The style and title applied tothe ruler (addressed as ‘His Highness’) placed him nominally in the league of Indian and Ottoman princes. Underpinning the agreement was access toresources. The experienced and educated hierarchy of territorial nobility was rewarded by allocation of some 9,000 square miles to 3,945 chiefs, asheritable property worked by forced labour to increase incomes from cashcrops. The upper levels of the chiefly hierarchy fared best: ‘The position of the bakungu chiefs was further reinforced by the simplification of the paralleltraditional hierarchies which occurred. The bataka chiefs were simply not

128 Sub-Saharan Africa

8 Lucy Mair, Primitive Government (Harmondsworth, 1962), 113–14, 166–70, 176–8,182–9, 236–9, and esp. chap. 7; and Mair, African Kingdoms; Richards, ed., East African Chiefs.

9 Fallers, Bantu Bureaucracy, 145.

10 Lemarchand, ed., African Kingships in Perspective, 207.11 Hailey, Native Administration, 180.12 A. D. Roberts, ‘The Sub-imperialism of the Baganda’, JAH 3 (1962), 435–50.13 Michael Twaddle, ‘Decentralized Violence and Collaboration in Early Colonial Uganda’, in

Andrew Porter and Robert Holland, eds., Theory and Practice in the History of European Expansion Overseas: Essays in Honour of R. E. Robinson (London, 1988), 73.

East-Central Africa 129

recognised, they had little representation in the negotiations, and lost heavilyin the land settlement voted upon by the bakungu chiefs.’10

This dispensation confirmed the primacy of the royal house and a largeproprietory class of divisional chiefs with control over tenant farmers. From this hierarchy was created a bureaucracy of landowners as regional andstate officials responsible to the kabaka (or to a regency council during a period of royal minority).11 The two main advantages for incoming Britishadministrators were territorial consolidation under a recognized para-mountcy and a model for control over neighbouring kingdoms. Bugandadoubled in size and influenced societies with different political structures.There was little difficulty with the Toro, Ankole, or Bunyoro kingdoms whichfollowed the Buganda model and were left to operate under similar agree-ments. But they did not enjoy precisely the same status under the Protectorategovernment of Uganda. Only the Ankole and Toro paramounts and chiefs enjoyed a guarantee of freehold lands. Bunyoro was cut down considerably in size and had no agreement until 1933. They were recognized as native authorities, not as sovereign kingdoms; and their councils of chiefs and nominated officials were not legislative bodies. In all, their local governmentfunctions were limited by lack of resources to official salaries and main-taining a few roads and buildings.

But in eastern Uganda the Buganda kingdom supplied ancillary adminis-trators, as clients of the British and as patrons of local clan leaders. In this office, the Muganda general, Kakunguru, who had carved out a fief for him-self in Bunyoro in 1894, became an outstanding example of the continuity ofBuganda influence in the region.12 In 1900 he was appointed by Johnston ona salary to administer the western half of Bukedi where he set up his own sub-chiefs and exempted his Baganda followers from taxes. Praised by BishopTucker for his encouragement of cash-cropping, he was reappointed in 1904and enlarged his control through the use of Baganda agents to the clan chiefsof Teso. There were, however, tensions in a system in which the African ad-ministrator’s primary loyalty lay with the kabaka and not the district com-missioner. Influence of the Baganda in the minor kingdoms was resented,especially in tax collection, and Bunyoro chiefs rebelled against their advisoryrole in 1907, when they were removed. Elsewhere, in eastern Uganda the useof ‘Buganda-style client chieftaincy’ from 1906 provoked acts of violencefrom clan leaders.13 Accordingly, the practice of making appointments ofclients for a cut of taxes was frowned on, though Kakunguru was adept

14 Joan Vincent, ‘Colonial Chiefs and the Making of a Class: A Case Study from Teso, EasternUganda’, Africa, 47 (1977), 140–58.

15 Ibid. 144. 16 Posted as ‘residents’ from 1935.

130 Sub-Saharan Africa

enough in Busoga to appoint a council of trained assistants to local chiefs paidfixed salaries out of revenue. By 1912, in any case, many of the Baganda offi-cials had transferred their loyalty in the outstations to British official patronswho defined their duties, fixed salaries, but kept in being the district councilsin Teso and Lango districts introduced by Kakunguru.

Client administration of eastern Uganda from Buganda, however, hadlong-lasting results. Among the Nilotes of Teso district, for example,Baganda agents operating through the segmentary clan structure had somesuccess in turning local big men into second-order clients in the west of thedistrict, while others resisted.14 This variable response was overcome by the1920s, as tax and obligatory work produced cash crops and redistribution in the form of increased salaries and multiplication of subordinate offices forcouncillors, elders, and political party patrons in local council elections. Thestructure of power was diffused, rather than concentrated at a court or capital, as the big men of different regions responded to privileged access toguns, labour, and the rewards of a money economy:

The networks of influence and patronage which engendered Iteso Big Manship pro-vided the New Men of Teso politics with the makings of a political machine that wentvirtually unrecognised by the British until it was eventually used against them. BigManship proved not only resilient, but extraordinarily adaptive to the exogenouschanges brought about by colonial rule.15

All the details of subsequent manipulation of the labour force during thecotton boom of the 1920s and 1930s cannot be followed here. Eventually,Baganda agency was thrown off by local chiefs, and Teso’s peasantry, like thepeasantry elsewhere in Uganda, moved into a period of unrest and oppositionto Protectorate administration.

The kingdom of Buganda, therefore, served as both a model and a catalystfor political over-rule and economic change. There was little official interven-tion from the Protectorate government until after the First World War. Regu-lar taxation from 1902 and cotton cultivation increased the level of resourcesat the disposal of the premier and the oligarchy of regional chiefs, even afterthe installation of Daudi Cwa as kabaka in 1914. Closer supervision and approved succession of chiefs followed in the 1920s and 1930s through com-missioners posted to four districts of the kingdom.16 But central governmentin Buganda was left to the central hierarchy of king and his prime minister,treasurer, and chief justice. Affairs of state were discussed in the Lukiiko(Assembly) at the administrative capital, Mengo, among government officialsand a few nominated unofficials. Criticism was open and published in thelocal press. The Assembly had legislative functions and Buganda Africans

17 Lemarchand, ed., African Kingships in Perspective, 210.18 Fallers and Richards, The King’s Men, 152–7; Lord Hailey, Native Administration in

British African Territories, i. East Africa: Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika (London, 1950), 14–15.19 Ibid. 78.

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were subject to its laws with little power of review by the Uganda High Court.Moreover, the kingdom had considerable financial autonomy by the 1930sover its share of Protectorate poll tax, land tax, fines, fees, and grants for public works. At most, its annual budget prepared by the kingdom’s treasurerand finance committee was discussed with a British commissioner. Outsidethis centralized system in which ministers and notables accessed fees fromlabour commutations and administered labour for public works, chiefs withstatus defined by ordinance collected taxes and kept control of customarycourts. But they did not control local treasuries centred on provincial offices.They ran their own assemblies at county level as a bureaucracy of landed pro-prietors, supervised by district commissioners as a channel for other Protec-torate departmental officers, but responsible to the kabaka.

From 1926, when Kaggwa was forced to retire from the premiership, unrest among the peasantry over levels of tribute and labour, turned theBritish over-rulers into patrons on behalf of commoners by restricting obliga-tions to chiefs, though it would be too much to claim that the king and peas-antry were backed against the chiefs.17 At most, chieftainship was graduallyredefined in the direction of prescribed duties for fixed salaries. Treated ashereditary at first, the most senior grades of chiefs were appointed by thekabaka (with official approval) and could be moved to other districts by the1930s. By the early 1950s, all such appointments were made on the basis ofpersonal qualifications from landowners, gentry, and clan heads.18 Assistedby councils of headmen and other notables and with a budget prepared by a central administration treasurer responsible for local government funds, Buganda chiefs began to resemble paid officials, rather than ‘Native Authorities’ in charge of their own finances. Superficially, it seemed as thoughthe older system of appointment through patronage had been superseded byan impersonal bureaucracy, or ‘native civil service’.19 In practice, there was apolitical symbiosis (as in Northern Nigeria) between rulers, ministers, andcommissioner/residents, but with a clearer demarcation between responsibil-ity for taxes, land administration, and customary law by the indigenous hierarchy and its appointed chiefs, on the one hand, and Protectorate admin-istration of social and technical services, on the other.

Moreover, important changes in the central administration of the Protec-torate and in the wider context of Uganda politics called in question Britishsupport for the kingdom. The advent of Sir Edward Mutesa II to the positionof kabaka in 1939 made little impact at first, until the major issue of the placeof Buganda in future constitutional relations with the rest of Uganda’s ma-jority population began to surface. Governor Sir Charles Dundas, 1940–4,

20 D. Anthony Low and R. Cranford Pratt, Buganda and British Overrule 1900–1955(London, 1960), esp. 176–8.

21 Fallers and Richards, The King’s Men, 331.22 David Apter, The Political Kingdom in Uganda (Princeton, 1961), 118; Sir Edward Mutesa

II, Desecration of my Kingdom (London, 1967).

132 Sub-Saharan Africa

encouraged the idea of a federation, devolving powers on the kabaka’s gov-ernment, contrary to prevailing ideas for a unitary constitution based on ex-panded representation through the Legislative Council. Oligarchic rivalriesbetween senior chiefs and disorders arising from commoner discontents con-cerning low prices for cash crops compromised the work of a partly-electedLukiiko; opposition from the older stratum of clan chiefs and African farm-ers created the Uganda National Congress in 1952, threatening to bypass theformal leadership of kabaka, court, and ministers. A further threat to theroyal hierarchy lay in the policies of Governor Sir Andrew Cohen from 1952,when he backed plans for a unitary state that would preserve a role for anelected Lukiiko, but was vague on the role of a kabaka.20 Worse, Bagandafears of inclusion of Uganda within an East African Federation ignited a moregeneral revolt actively headed by Mutesa II with the assistance of the threekingdoms of Bunyoro, Toro, and Ankole and made more explosive byCohen’s arrest and exile of the kabaka in November 1953.

A wave of pro-royalist and Bugandan ‘nationalism’ overshadowed fac-tional divisions and triumphed temporarily with the return of the king in October 1955. Intense bargaining over the place of Buganda in a new consti-tution extracted numerous concessions to paramountcy, including powerover the appointment of chiefs. Neo-traditional privileges were somehowcombined with provisions for a unitary state. Buganda agreed to cooperate inconstitutional change in central government, based on a widened franchiseand a ministerial system, in return for internal autonomy. Not surprisingly,‘the celebrations on the day of the Kabaka’s return proved to be a large-scalerepresentation of the political structure of the traditional monarchy at theheight of its power at the end of the nineteenth century’.21

This was a difficult compromise to apply in practice. Although Bugandahad only about a quarter of the population, its capital Kampala was the seatof government and a patronage structure was deeply entrenched from the1930s. Moreover, the return of the kabaka from exile was followed by apurge of chiefs and the creation of an all-Baganda Appointments Boardchaired by the king who took advantage of the expansion of government de-partments through increased aid and technical assistance to secure jobs forthe Baganda elite. Writing at the time, David Apter thought he detected achange from a patrimonial to a bureaucratic chieftaincy.22 But the historicalevidence suggests that under both the katakiro, Sir Apollo Kaggwa, and thekabaka, before and after exile, transition to any ‘bureaucratic’ system had

23 Apter, The Political Kingdom, 119. 24 Ibid. 361.

East-Central Africa 133

been superficial within the kingdom. The Catholic and Protestant regentswho formed a cabinet of notables and the Lukiiko were subordinate in statusto both the British and the kabaka, as sources of patronage appointments.Apter concedes this point by recognizing the emergence of a new service elitefrom the 1920s for whom ‘the patronage opportunities were enormous’ and‘honour, status and land . . . were distributed by the dominant chiefs to theirsupporters’.23

The clientage system, in short, remained at the heart of the kingdom andtook advantage of ‘modernization’ through expansion of service depart-ments. This was reflected in the large numbers of household retainers and servants of the court, the officials of the kabaka’s estates, in his civil serviceappointments, and in the ‘patronage rules’ applied to postings in departmentsand ministries. Everywhere at provincial, sub-district, and lower chieftaincylevels, where chiefs were paid as much as civil servants, a new establishmentemerged with ‘vast patronage at their disposal in the form of clerkships, mes-sengerships, drivers, and minor technical posts such as auditors and small-scale accountants’. After 1955, with increased financial aid these possibilitiesexpanded enormously into areas formerly the reserve of the Protectorate government, especially medical and veterinary services. ‘Tribalism and localservice appointment were brought together as never before.’24

In the scale of decolonization politics these advantage for the Baganda were short-lived, though the principle remained in force. Most academicswith a working interest in the region had failed to see the emergence of neo-monarchism and Kabbaka Yekka as a patron party, which made an alliancewith the Uganda People’s Congress in 1963, when the kabaka became Chiefof State. For a period regional paramountcy combined with constitutionalstatus. This alliance crumbled as Congress gained a working majority, tookcontrol of the army in 1964, and attracted some Baganda clients amongMembers of Parliament and portfolio holders. Bunyoro which was in disputewith Buganda over territory became a client state of the new prime minister,Milton Obote. The final break came with Obote’s coup in 1966, arising fromcorruption charges against his entourage and leading to abolition of thekabaka’s role, a new executive presidency and destruction of the monarchy inMay 1966.

It was left to an anthropologist to write the epitaph for one patrimonial system in Uganda and the rationale for its survival in other forms. AudreyRichards observed that the notion of chieftainships as a reward for faithfulservice to a ruler continued alongside bureaucratic ideals:

Modern political leaders have certainly demanded that they should elect their ownchiefs, yet both they and the palace party . . . still seem to be thinking in terms of

25 Richards, East African Chiefs, 365.26 J. J. Maquet, ‘Le Probleme de la domination Tutsi’, Zaire, 10 (1952), 1011–16; Wm. Roger

Louis, Ruanda-Urundi 1884–1919 (Oxford, 1963); Newbury, ‘Patrons, Clients, and Empire’,256–7.

27 Catherine Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda1860–1960 (New York, 1988).

134 Sub-Saharan Africa

control of patronage rather than in those of civil service reform. It is not at all impos-sible that ‘self-government’ as an ideal may mean to the people a return to more tradi-tional bases of selection of chiefs rather than the reverse.25

Yet, this mild conclusion underestimated the legacy of power inheritedfrom its colonial ruler by an African state in the 1960s. Standing armies returned to Africa’s new rulers an instrument of military authority and an alternative to the inherited prescriptions of constitutional and statute lawsand courts. What had been abolished might eventually be restored. As a con-cession to the Buganda heartland, President Museveni recognized traditionalkingship in the Republic of Uganda in 1993; and Kabaka Muteba II headed alocal oligarchy, but without constitutional functions.

As the case of Uganda demonstrated, promotion of traditional politicalstructures created political factions that might not prevail after independ-ence. The examples of Rwanda and Burundi tend to confirm this proposition.In these territories anthropologists and historians uncovered forms of de-pendency relationship, styled ‘feudal’ or patron–client, between an older im-perialism of Tutsi immigrant hierarchies and sedentary Hutu.26 The mostdetailed analysis of the various forms of clientship in land, cattle, and militaryservices suggests that German and Belgian rule brought a major change in thedevelopment of state power exercised through the Tutsi monarchy and chiefs,by supplementing access to older resources with new forms of tax and labourcontrol, as chiefs became clients of European administrators.27

There were, however, important differences between the political structures of the two territories. The Germans tried a system of prescribedclientage, mainly through their backing of the Mwami Musinga and appoint-ment of loyal Tutsi over Hutu by conquest of northern Rwanda. By contrast,in Burundi where the ethnic cleavage was by no means so clear-cut, one fac-tion among the royals (the Batare) was singled out for favourable treatment,at the expense of the Bezi and the kingdom was split up.Later anthropologistscame to appreciate that Rwanda monarchy was characterized by the imperi-alism of a royal clan that maintained distinct political and cultural differencesbetween invading pastoralists and sedentary Hutu agriculturalists. As inBuganda, Rwanda kings suppressed the autonomy of local clan heads and re-placed them with loyal retainers. In Burundi, on the other hand, social divi-sions below the royal stratum of office-holders between the Tutsi minorityand the Hutu majority left each group opportunities for advancement and acertain amount of mobility between castes: ‘Many were the Hutu who served

28 Lemarchand, ed., African Kingships in Perspective, 98. 29 Ibid. 81.

East-Central Africa 135

as chiefs or subchiefs in the royal domains . . . even more numerous werethose who served as . . . councillors at the local or provincial levels; then anumber of court offices were traditionally held by Hutu elements recruitedfrom high-ranking patrilineages.’28

In both kingdoms the Belgians made major changes after 1918. In Rwanda,the monarchy of the mwami was ‘secularized’; his powers of life and deathover subjects were abolished; from 1923 his appointments required the approval of the resident. By creating larger regional units under approvedchiefs, the Belgian administration favoured a Tutsi elite. Hostile to both thenew order and the Catholic missionaries, the mwami was deposed in 1931and replaced, as a result of pressure from the Catholic mission, by a younger,more educated man. More importantly, the old system of clientage(umuhueto) serving as a form of imperial control from central Rwanda wascontinued for the benefit of regional chiefs, rather than the monarchy, andwas reinforced in the 1930s by new prestations that fell on the Hutu peasantry. At the same time, the Tutsi consolidated their position by takingadvantage of mission education and government posts: ‘As late as 1959, 98per cent of the chiefs and 95.5 per cent of the sub-chiefs in office were of Tutsi origins; similarly, 94 per cent of the membership of the ConseilSupérieur du Pays consisted of Tutsi elements, and the same disparities couldalso be observed in the lower and middle-rungs of the administration and thepolice.’29

Thus, administrative practice not merely favoured the Tutsi elite, but created a social division close to caste, where previously there had been intermarriage, a single language, and (more especially in Burundi) an oli-garchy of chieftaincies both Tutsi and Hutu. Loyalties were transferred tonew patrons in the Belgian administration and in the Catholic Church. In return, the Church was expected to remain loyal to its clients, while the new mwami, Rudahigwa, was judged to be suitably closer in education to the Tutsi elite and, hopefully, a leader of the service gentry.

In Burundi, where the traditional hierarchy was weak, power at the centrelay in hands of an oligarchy (Ganwa); and the caste cleavage was less well de-fined because of opportunities for Hutu to rise in economic and social scalesas chiefs and sub-chiefs on royal domains. Reversing German practice, Belgian administration co-opted one branch of the royal oligarchy—the Bezi,at the expense of their Batare rivals and conferred patronage rights whichwere reinforced by Bezi control of a regency council in the 1920s. Like thebakungu chiefs in Buganda, they acquired new domains and resources as a result of consolidation of chieftaincies and the use they made of tribute andtaxes in the 1930s. One historian has seen in this preference for ‘customary’chiefs from a segment of the royal lineage a form of ‘neofeudalism’ or

30 Jean-Pierre Chrétien, ‘Féodalité ou féodalisation du Burundi sous le Mandat belge’, in J.Vansina and others, eds., Études Africaines offertes à Henri Brunschwig (Paris, 1982), 367–87,esp. 370–3, 384 and map; Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression, esp. 16–19, chap. 4.

31 Lemarchand, ed., African Kingships in Perspective, 89.

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expanded clientage based on privileged land use and employment of the land-less as economic dependents, assisted by the Belgian administration in thename of both ‘tradition’ and ‘modernization’. An anthropologist has simplyclassified the adapted system as ‘dual colonialism’.30

The rapid pace of Belgian decolonization in the late 1950s left bothterritories without experience in the compromises of democratic politics andwith powerful and antagonistic factions divided ethnically and by class.These divisions were most obvious in Rwanda. There, the Hutu made littleheadway politically, until the 1959 revolution, in the particular circum-stances of Belgian withdrawal and the murder and expulsion of thousands ofTutsis. Hutu republicanism had its roots in historic grievances, in the selec-tion of chiefs and public offices and, in rural areas, in the ‘dissolution of vertical patron–client relationships that once tied the Hutu peasants to theirTutsi overlords’.31 The Hutu began to follow their own big men. Patron–client was redefined as ethnic solidarity between self-made war lords andtheir followers and served as an instrument for political mobilization. In Burundi, ethnic divisions were less distinct; factional conflict within theGanwa was translated for a brief period from 1957 to 1961 into politicalparty competition between Bezi and Batare. The Burundi mwami remainedin office and increased his patronage power by appointments to services apportioned between the main ethnic groups, especially in the army, the gendarmerie, parastatals, and banks. Unable to generate sufficient resourcesto hold the patrimonial state together, the ruling monarchy handed overpower to a predominantly Tutsi army, leading to destruction of Hutu elites in1965 and Hutu rebellion.

9 Southern Africa

The range of examples of the demise or survival of chiefly hierarchiescan be extended to southern Africa. There are marginal and transient casessuch as the patronage extended by Theophilus Shepstone, Natal’s DiplomaticAgent, to Zulu chiefdoms south of the Thukela river outside the Zulu heart-land in the mid-nineteenth century, prior to the Anglo-Zulu war. Overconfi-dence in his ability to manage Zulu encouraged Shepstone as Secretary forNative Affairs and ‘Paramount Chief’ to seek relief for Natal’s land andlabour problems by urging war on Zulu north of the Thukela.1 In that regionthe Zulu patrimonial state and warrior kingdom founded by Shaka was wellversed in the politics of alliance and war, though susceptible to internal frat-ricidal rivalries. By the 1870s, these had been brought under control duringthe long paramountcy of Mpande and his son Cetshwayo, though there wasalways a possibility of inter-generational conflict as well as questionable loy-alties on the part of pre-Shakan chiefdoms such as those that had come underthe protection of Natal.

These ‘client chiefdoms’ served Natal’s interests well enough until the late1870s; and although their judicial authority had been weakened by prescrip-tive regulations, the protected chiefs responded loyally to the defence of theColony at the outbreak of the Zulu war in 1879.2 From one viewpoint, there-fore, that outbreak might be regarded, paradoxically, as ‘the high tide of colo-nial/chiefly collaboration’.3 But on any other count the conflict of 1879 begunby the Cape governor and Natal authorities on the pretext of settling Zuluboundaries with the Transvaal was the nadir of Anglo-Zulu relations, endingin the capture and temporary exile of Cetshwayo and partition of Zululand ina ‘settlement’ that surrounded the core kingdom with the territories of thir-teen ‘appointed chiefs’. The most prominent of these, related to the Zuluroyal house, enlarged on opportunities to consolidate power in their own domains at the expense of Cetshwayo’s followers and the old order of royalofficials, army commanders, and tribute collectors.4 So much so that whenCetshwayo was permitted to return to his capital within a partitioned Zululand in 1883, much of his authority, lands, and cattle had been seized

1 John Lambert, ‘Chiefship in Early Colonial Natal’, JSAS 21 (1995), 269–85; Jeff Guy, TheDestruction of the Zulu Kingdom: The Civil War in Zululand, 1879–1884. (London, 1979).

2 Lambert, ‘Chiefship’, 278; and for the effects of the Native Administration Act of 1875 andthe Code of Native Law 1878, 281–4.

3 Ibid. 284.4 Guy, The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom, 83–94.

by British client chiefs so as to alter the power balance and lead to his defeatand death in 1884. Caught between the demands for land and labour exertedby both Natal and the South African Republic, Zululand was destroyed bycivil war and external pressures. Incorporated into Natal in 1897 the oldkingdom inspired little more than a fruitless rebellion in 1906 and, muchlater, a historical tradition cultivated by Zulu nationalists. Like the kingdomof Dahomey in West Africa, or the Imerina kingdom of Madagascar, the Zulumilitary state was dismembered rather than incorporated politically into anew hierarchy of over-rule.

More pertinently, the three ‘High Commission Territories’ of Lesotho,Botswana, and Swaziland came under British patronage as a defence againstthe predations of the British South Africa Company or settlement by Transvaal Afrikaners in ways that secured the position of their paramount-cies during a half century of benign neglect.

In Lesotho (Basutoland), King Moshoeshoe ran the government as a chieflycorporation appointed by the ruler to the Basuto National Council from1903, in the manner of a traditional pitso (assembly). Few concessions weremade to elected representation until the 1960s, when the Basutoland National Party, backed by chiefs, won pre-independence elections.5 The formation of this patron party was echoed in Botswana, (Bechuanaland) verylate in the day, after a long history of clientage by Tswana chiefs who actively sought protection from the Crown. Moreover, they confirmed theirstatus at an audience with Queen Victoria in 1895. Lightly supervisedthrough the High Commissioner in South Africa, the paramounts refused tribunals and other instruments of ‘indirect rule’. From 1938, they packed anAfrican Advisory Council with chiefs and headmen of the Tswana, Bamang-wato, and Bakwena peoples, and they worked with European settlers in aJoint Council, as a basis for a Legislative Council in 1961. They loyally mo-bilized for war in 1941 in the expectation of earning continued British pro-tection against South Africa.6 Selected by the departing British for ministerialoffices, chiefs dominated pre-independence elections through Khama’sBechuanaland Democratic Party. Finally, Swaziland, although weakened ter-ritorially by mineral and land concessions, survived, after being rescued fromthe Transvaal in 1903, under Sobhuza II as a patrimonial state supervised bya resident commissioner. Sobhuza stayed in power by making his own appointments of princes and a few graduates to offices of state and packingthe Swazi National Council with approved representatives. The endgame of independence was played out with great skill by engineering a mix of

138 Sub-Saharan Africa

5 John Grotpeter, ‘Political Leadership and Political Development in the High CommissionTerritories’, Ph.D. thesis (Washington University, 1965), 117–53; J. E. Spence, The Politics ofDependence (London, 1958), 34–54.

6 Ashley Jackson, ‘Motivation and Mobilization for War: Recruitment for the British Army inthe Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1941–42’, African Affairs, 96 (1997), 399–417.

nominations and elections to the Legislature in order to incorporate a European minority and exclude election of African politicians by universalfranchise. After a constitution was imposed in 1964 allowing expanded rep-resentation in the Legislative Council, the king and the Swazi Council wentinto party politics, forming Imbokodvo, led by Prince Makhosini Diamini,and gained all seats open to election in 1967.

In all three cases in southern Africa, therefore, decolonization provoked abelated move in the structure of internal administration towards conciliarand parliamentary representation; and the response led to a takeover of theinstitutions concerned by traditional oligarchs. For the most part, ‘indirectrule’ was hardly an issue at all in the High Commission Territories.7 The pre-cepts of Lugard’s Dual Mandate were ritually cited very late in the day; butthe fundamental feature of indigenous treasuries was ignored, in favour ofadministrative centralization, easily captured—not by an educated elite, butby the traditional patrons of new parties.

In any case, a debate on administrative methods which ignored the funda-mental origins of the systems utilized by European rule was beginning tosound sterile.8 The anthropologists, Rattray, Mair, Richards, Fallers amongothers perceived (though they were divided on its significance) that the cata-logue of hierarchies taken over and segmentary systems with ‘created’ chiefswere less prescriptive than those who framed regulations imagined and allowed considerable scope for chiefs and administrators as brokers withinthe system.9 After M. G. Smith’s work on Zaria Emirate, moreover, the issueof clientage could not be ignored in favour of ascribed status, and the ramifi-cations of this issue continued into the period of power consolidated underold and new elites, civil and military, from the 1960s, as party patronage andthe praetorianism of ‘new states’.10

It is worth pausing to take stock of past and contemporary debate on theuse of the term ‘indirect rule’ for the politics of those regions where it has hadmost currency. Half a century ago, Lord Hailey, old India hand and defenderof autocratic princely states in the 1930s, commented thoughtfully, but notconclusively, on the prescriptions for ‘Native Administration’ on the eve ofgreat political changes in British Africa. He rejected the direct/indirect dichotomy for imprecision: ‘the loose use of the word is best illustrated by

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7 Hailey, Native Administration, 202, 204, 216–22, 323–5.8 The revisionist literature on ‘indirect rule’ is vast, beginning with M. Perham, ‘A Re-

Statement of Indirect Rule’, Africa, 7 (1934); N. U. Akpan, Epitaph to Indirect Rule (London,1956); H. Deschamps, ‘Et maintenant, Lord Lugard?’, Africa, 33 (1963), 293–306; Nicolson,The Administration of Nigeria; Crowder and Ikime, eds., West African Chiefs. By the date whenC. L. Temple, Native Races and their Rulers (London, 1968) was reissued, iconoclasm hadreached the point where M. Hiskett in his critical Introduction dismissed ‘indirect rule’ as ‘an at-titude of mind’. For continued use of the term, John W. Cell, ‘Colonial Rule’, in OHBE, iv. TheTwentieth Century, 232–54.

9 Gluckman, ‘Inter-Hierarchical Roles’, 69–73.10 Apter and Rosberg, eds., Political Development; Perlmutter and Bennett, eds., The Political

the fact that the Indian States have often been cited as examples of the use ofIndirect Rule.’11 Later, at least one former governor agreed; and few of his colleagues were inhibited much by Lugardian orthodoxy.12 Hailey also ex-pressed doubts about parliamentary institutions for British territories anddiscerned that the absence of a trained indigenous bureaucracy in Africa onthe lines of the Indian Civil Service made nonsense of talk about ‘local gov-ernment’.13 He was wrong to think, however, that ‘Native Authority’ wasonly of historical interest by the 1940s. In the absence of developed legal institutions, which Hailey commented on at length, networks of clientage,personal loyalty, and reciprocal obligations were still the stuff of civil jurisdiction through nominated ‘Native Courts’ and resource allocation by‘Native Councils’, especially for personal emoluments of chiefs. Appoint-ments to such institutions, he admitted, were still made ‘by native custom andusage’, that is by exercise of a modicum of patronage and agreement of elders, clan heads, and, in some protectorates, youngmen’s associations. Forthe bulk of chiefly authorities, however, it is unwise to speak in terms of pat-rimonialism. For, Hailey also recognized the uniqueness of the largest patri-monial states in Buganda or Northern Nigeria; and he made a broaddistinction between appointed native agencies as officials of government,more particularly in East Africa, and agencies that were also indigenous au-thorities in their own right in central and western Africa. From his Indian ex-perience he came to the legalistic and questionable conclusion (close toLugard) that the emirs lacked ‘innate authority’, in relation to a governor,compared with princes to a viceroy.14 In the end, Hailey’s monumental surveyof administrative structures in British African territories rested on classifica-tion of chiefdoms by ‘statutory enactment’, rather than on the ways in whichpower was actually exercised by and through chiefly hierarchies. His percep-tion that ‘indirect rule’ was conditioned by pre-existing African political in-stitutions was never pressed very far to uncover the political reasons forBritish and African cooperation, certainly never with the insights availablefrom contemporary anthropology and history. Today it is the monumentalAfrican Survey of 1957 which is of ‘historical’ interest, because it may bedoubted, for example, whether British over-rule in the thirty-eight Muslim

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Influence of the Military; Oskar Kurer, The Political Foundations of Development Policies(London, 1997), chap. 6.

11 Hailey, Native Administration, i. 9.12 ‘I can see now that it was a pity that the system we chose to follow had been named “Indi-

rect Rule”, for the name was misleading and unfortunately attractive. Misleading because“Rule” connotes the powers and functions of the central government, of sovereignty; and unfor-tunately attractive because it helped to create a cult.’ Sir Philip Mitchell, African Afterthoughts(London, 1954), 127; for cases, Heussler, The British in Northern Nigeria, 185.

13 Hailey, Native Administration, iii. 66–7; i. 47.14 He was to make a similar error about the ‘sovereignty’ of Malay rulers (which he

denied).

15 Smith, Government in Zazzau, 293.16 Caroline White, ‘Makhulu Padroni?: Patron-Clientelism in Shack Areas and Some Italian

Lessons for South Africa’, University of Witwatersrand, CPS Comparative Perspectives, 6(1993), 1–18, esp. 13.

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emirates with a population of some twelve million people had changed verymuch from patrimonialism in appointments of subordinate district and village heads over the period of British occupation. The realities of power, asopposed to administrative precept, were better analysed by Mair, Richards,Nadel, and others, including M. G. Smith who perceived that authoritarianresidents and emirs in Zaria took advantage of constitutional change to revive ‘those political forms which belong to the heyday of empire’.15

In a short period from the 1950s the over-rulers of most African stateschanged to party politicians, bosses, and brokers, a shift that Hailey foresawand disapproved of, because of his belief that African tradition, and what hecalled ‘Africanism’, found popular acceptance through other means thanelectoral confrontation. That partial insight into patrimonialism and client-age is still relevant. Ultimately, the fate of indigenous hierarchies in the post-colonial state depended on demography, resources, constitutional bargainingprior to independence, and on the ability of rulers to adapt in self-defence tothe demands of popular representation. Some of the African examples havebeen swept away, either because of isolation and inability to recruit and fundpatron parties, or because, as in Rwanda-Burundi, they have been crushed byethnic and political rivals bent on unitary forms of state organization. In a fewexamples they have survived by utilizing a politicized civil service and enter-ing the political arena supported by ethnic majorities with exclusive claims toresources and offices.

Where traditional chieftaincy has been displaced, other forms of leadershiprely on status by achievement and access to public resources. What is strikingabout African examples of this displacement is not so much the revelation of‘corruption’ in the work of Reno and others as the long accommodation be-tween big men and their networks of clients, operating along trade routes inearly nineteenth-century Sierra Leone and in twentieth-century diamond dig-gings at Kono. The continuities of protective and exploitative leadership aremore striking than the demise of a chiefly order. ‘Indirect rule’ should beviewed in the historical context of a variety of economic, political, and bureaucratic arrangements between those with ritual and secular power andthose without to secure advantage. Contemporary slums on the margins ofurban and industrialized South Africa, internally managed by ‘shacklords’,are another and later example of protective leadership: ‘because a politicalsystem entirely free of patron-clientelism in conditions such as in today’sSouth Africa, is unlikely if not impossible’.16 The sequence of forms of tradi-tional and neo-traditional leadership has been endless. ‘First pre-colonialchiefs, then colonial officials and collaborative chiefs sought outsiders’ help

17 Reno, Corruption and Politics in Sierra Leone, 108, 128.18 Robert Fatton, Jnr, ‘Clientelism and Patronage in Senegal’, ASR 29 (1986), 65.19 Vaughan, ‘The Impact of Party Politics’, chap. 10.20 Barnes, Patrons and Power; Toyin Falola and A. D. Roberts, ‘West Africa’, in OHBE, iv, ed.

Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis (Oxford, 1999), 527.21 Fatton, ‘Clientelism and Patronage’, 66.22 John F. Murphy, ‘Legitimation and Paternalism: The Colonial State in Kenya’, ASR 29

(1986), 62.

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in gaining access to the benefits of trade with the wider world economy inorder to meet local challenges to their political authority.’17 Fatton, therefore,in the context of Senegal politics, emphasized both the longevity of the systemdominated by Muslim brotherhoods and the corrosive effects of the existenceof ‘a small ruling class capable of obtaining and controlling the resources pro-duced by the masses; [clientelism] is inherently hierarchic, exploitative, andcorrupt’.18 Perceptively, too, Olufemi Vaughan has argued that Yoruba chiefssurvived under Nigeria’s first republic and period of military rule by tradingtitle-creation for posts in government corporations, thus joining the new classof politicians, civil servants, businessmen, and soldiers as influential bro-kers.19 That conclusion confirms the continuity (and informality) of reciproc-ity between new rulers and old leaders in Lagos politics uncovered by SandraBarnes for an earlier period, or in the support of Protectorate chiefs for Milton Margai’s Sierra Leone’s Peoples Party in 1956 and 1961, in return for confirmation of status and stipends.20

In the longer term, therefore, the classification ‘indirect rule’ was simply anadministrative label for political and social structures adopted and adaptedfor a brief period to European purposes. Those purposes were not exclusiveto British imperial methods—a fact which lessens the value of ‘indirect rule’as an imperial model for hierarchies under French, German, or Belgian rule asclients of a ‘patron colonial state’.21 Co-option of local hierarchies, moreover,supplied a ‘legitimization’ for both sides of the power equation—for chiefsand officials—as one historian has observed for the cases of Kenya and otherstates of East and Central Africa:

The colonial state drew its authority from a traditional basis, as the ideology oftrusteeship, with roots in paternalistic and pre-modern authority structures. Its pre-cepts were not the individual political rights of modernity, of an atomised but formallyfree civil society, but those of the non-democratic representation of interest by an elite:it thus referred more to the rights of power, and the moral duties of such power, im-plicit in the reciprocal authority structure of feudal social relations. As one District Of-ficer said: ‘We were an elite corps of an elite system, created for the benevolent exerciseof paternal power.’22

It would not be difficult to extend this observation from the work ofAfrican scholars to patron–client examples cited for Malaysia and the PacificIslands.

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summary

In the region of western Africa widespread practices of economic and politi-cal clientage were fairly easily applied to incorporate traders, merchants, andmissionaries, for as long as Europeans accepted the terms of trade and resi-dence on the coast. The long campaign to end the slave trade and the estab-lishment of fortified enclaves modified this dependency from the earlynineteenth century. Governors and consuls worked to establish a widersphere of influence and control through local African allies, treaty states, anda measure of stipending for chiefs in the interior. Reversal of status in the period from the 1870s to the end of the century followed from greater re-liance on force against the Asante, some coastal states in Yoruba, and throughthe military action of the Royal Niger Company, which combined treaty-making, trade, and administration as far as the Hausa–Fulani emirates. Par-tition of territory with other Powers required small numbers of officials tocome to terms with the chiefdoms and hierarchies they found in place to meetthe obligations of protectorate administration. Chiefs could be deposed; butfor the most part they were utilized for judicial and financial purposes. In eachof the colonial states carved out of West African societies the pattern ofBritish (and sometimes French or German) over-rule was conditioned by thepolitical structures found in place.

In the Gold Coast the Akan and other chiefdoms of the Colony area wereallowed considerable autonomy to continue customary courts and extractrents, but lacked regulated treasuries funded from direct taxes. In the Ashantiregion the king was removed, and then restored as head of a delimited ‘con-federacy’. On the whole, little was done to prepare chiefs and their councilsfor the responsibilities of local government reforms in the 1940s, though arole was found for them in election of African representatives to a central legislature. The pace of constitutional change increased the opportunities for commoners and an educated elite to succeed to political power through adominant party in the 1950s. Chiefs were forced to fight a rearguard action inopposition and lost control of resources and judicial functions, as party patronage created other clients. Much of that pattern of marginalization oftraditional rulers was repeated in Sierra Leone and in Southern Nigeria,though there were considerable differences in the success or failure of chiefsto accommodate with party politicians.

One of the more obvious reasons for the survival of chiefdoms in Yorubastates lay in the demographic size and conciliar structure of chieftaincy inrural and urban society. For a considerable period that structure was respected by British officials, after some disastrous experiments in direct tax-ation. Chiefs’ councils, moreover, with their entourage of client appoint-ments, were forced to widen their membership to include representation from other elite groups. Nevertheless, from the 1940s, Yoruba chieftaincy

was called into question by further experiments in devolved local governmentand central funding which increased the power of political patrons within theWestern Region.

By contrast, British over-rule in the emirates of Northern Nigeria created a joint hierarchy of imported and traditional officials, managed by a mixtureof clientage and administrative prescription. Although qualified as IndirectRule, the system which evolved from 1906 was more symbiotic than bur-eaucratic, more political than prescriptive in its attention to loyalty and reli-ability on both sides of the hierarchy. Restructuring within the emirates,moreover, combined with improved peasant production to ensure funding fora reformed treasury system, regular salaries, and close association of techni-cal departments and personnel with emirate government. For ruling housesthe risk of deposition and the reward of lineal succession and control overlocal government and the judiciary within a ‘Native Authority’ were power-ful incentives to conform with British demands for reform of domestic slavery and a measure of competence within a protectorate government per-meated by patronage.

An unexpected consequence of the relative isolation of the North, judi-cially and politically, from the southern regions of Nigeria was that emirs andchiefs showed little hesitation in funding and running a patron party from1951 to dominate the northern regional government and to secure a share ofcivil service posts in the region and at the federal centre, in competition withsoutherners. Thus, a consolidation of power through traditional leadership inthe Hausa–Fulani North deeply influenced the pattern of regional and ethnicconflict, party competition, and alliance at independence in 1960 and after.

The kingdoms of the Great Lakes in East-Central Africa also provide his-torical examples of patrimonial states utilized and adapted for the purposesof European over-rule. In societies where political clientage was ubiquitousthe Kingdom of Buganda became the archetype for a stable chiefly oligarchywith guaranteed status and lands, as well as a surrogate agency for adminis-tering segmentary clans in the region. The relative autonomy of the kingdomsand the status of their rulers increased to the point where it became difficultto accommodate their political and constitutional position within a unitarystate, as Uganda moved towards an elected successor government in the1950s. The exile of the Kabaka of Buganda and his triumphal return intoparty politics, if anything, reinforced the patrimonial system of allocating offices and resources in the heartland of chiefly administration. For a brief period from Uganda’s independence in 1962 the kabaka became Chief ofState, until he was removed and his state dismantled under the presidentialsystem of Milton Obote in 1966.

A similar policy of protecting and using royal lineages to control and administer a subordinate peasantry was applied by German and Belgian officials in Rwanda and Burundi. By reinforcing the structure of pastoral

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clientage exercised by a minority Tutsi nobility over Hutu agriculturalistswith additional tax and labour services, divisions close to a caste system werecreated in Rwanda. By the 1950s, these divisions were reflected in the pre-dominance of Tutsi in government institutions and services. In Burundi, a sec-tion of the dominant royal oligarchy was similarly privileged, although Hutudid find opportunities for social and economic advancement in ways that intensified the inter-ethnic rivalries that followed on Belgian decolonizationin 1962. In all, the exacerbation of traditional patron–client divisions by administrative patronage could be held to account for the pattern of Hutuand Tutsi revolution and counter-revolution, as both sides turned to militarysolutions to settle historical accounts.

In South Africa, too, within the context of African and settler subordina-tion and politics there are some significant examples of alliance and imperialpatronage. For a period from 1879 Zulu chiefdoms on the borders of Natalwere co-opted for warfare against the core clans of the Zulu kingdom. Simi-larly, an important group of client chiefs were instrumental in bringing aboutthe downfall of King Cetshwayo in a dismembered Zululand from 1883. Bycontrast, Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland became imperial client statespreserved from the Transvaal and the British South Africa Company. Leftlargely to themselves under traditional chiefs and assemblies, they formedtheir own patron parties in the 1960s to protect traditional orders that predominated over small educated elites in successor states that became nominally independent, 1965–6. The politics of patronage triumphed overconstitutional blueprints. The legacy of British over-rule was the reinforce-ment of chiefly oligarchical rule in the former High Commission Territories.Elsewhere, in western and East-Central Africa, however, it has been less cer-tain that leadership by ascription can prevail in the face of rule by political ormilitary chiefs and the resurgence of rural and urban leadership by self-madebig men.

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Part IV

Maritime South-East Asia

10 Malaya

British commerce and regional influence moved south-east from Indiaand Ceylon in the early nineteenth century to found new enclaves and expandnew markets. Consequently, there is a tendency to categorize a nineteenth-century pattern of British administration in terms of British experience in theIndian states. Like that experience, however, contact with the kingdoms andarchipelagos stretching from Burma to Malaya was moulded by local condi-tions for trade, settlement, and rivalry with other powers. There were paral-lels with the eighteenth-century contest for control and influence on the Asiansubcontinent, but the efforts of the East India Company were neither ener-getic nor sustained during the period of Dutch predominance before 1824.Commercial ambition lay in securing a command of the China tea trade byexport of Indian opium; and in that sphere Company servants came at first assupplicants for entry at the Chinese ports, not as builders of forts to defendroadsteads and factories.

Elsewhere in the Indies, Company ventures were tentative. The island ofPenang was leased from the Sultan of Kedah in 1786 as a staging post for theChina trade. A mission led by Lord Macartney to Peking in 1792 failed to secure any concessions. At Penang, the superintendent and experienced‘country’ trader, Francis Light, arbitrated in local disputes, but had no formalpowers of local jurisdiction and relied on the cooperation of Malay chiefs.1

A promise to furnish assistance against Siam was disallowed. When Penangwas ceded in 1791 along with a coastal strip (Province Wellesley), Superin-tendent Light administered through headmen. A plan for a separate presi-dency there on a par with Bombay or Madras came to nothing. The Companyfocused temporarily on Java, 1812–16, occupied by Lieutenant-GovernorRaffles. Restoration of Java to the Dutch led the ambitious Raffles to bargainfor a second entrepôt at Singapore island, ceded by the Sultan of Johore in1819 for support in a succession dispute and administered jointly. From1824, the three enclaves—Penang, Singapore, and Malacca (ceded by theDutch)—were administered as the Straits Settlements, nominally under Bengal.

The Company men, then, came as clients or as administrative brokers formally subordinate to superiors in India. Sultans made concessions on condition of military assistance against rivals. Conquest of Java was on a different scale, and Raffles might well have implanted Indian methods of

1 Captain Francis Light to Sir John Shore, 25 Jan. 1794, in Madden, ed., Select Documents,iii. 218.

administration there, given time. Entry into Singapore, typically enough, en-tailed taking sides in internal politics and then retaining the island as part ofa partition treaty with the Dutch. Against other mainland powers littleprogress was made. Penang merchants obtained few trade concessions fromthe Thai dynasty which dominated the northern Malay states from Bangkok.Calcutta steered clear of involvement in Cochin-China or Siam. The Com-pany was burdened enough by a frontier war, 1824–6, with the ruling dynastyof Burma—‘the fount of justice and patronage, but the target of intrigue andrebellion’.2 The strategies of international rivalry and control of the Bay ofBengal took precedence over ad hoc arrangements worked out by countrytraders. In the one sphere where commercial penetration really mattered theCompany was kept at arm’s length at Canton ‘as persons beyond transfor-mation’, until the British forced an entry during the Opium War of 1839–42.3

On the China coast diplomacy and force led to further treaties to managedebts and disputes through extraterritorial courts and to run a bonded ware-house system that secured revenue and loans for the Peking government. Theprice was financial indemnity, cession of Hong Kong, and a judicial enclave inShanghai. On the whole, foreign influence and control remained informal;and no power gained sufficient preponderance to found another Indian empire.

For the Company this came too late after loss of monopoly in 1833. Theformal links with Calcutta remained intact, but resistance from Europeans in Singapore and the Straits Settlements to this distant tutelage called in question the indifferent supervision of a patron Raj busy consolidating authority in India. Negotiation of the Treaty of Tientsin which opened up additional ports in south China in 1858 supplied a further reason for regard-ing the British enclaves as a group of posts requiring separate government.Another was the difficulty of posting India hands to a different environmentwhere they understood neither Malay nor Chinese. Historic interests ofChina in Siam or Burma were more important than India’s transit trade: ‘Theintimate connection which already exists commercially and socially betweenthe Straits Settlements and China, and the very large resort of the Chinesealike to Singapore, Province Wellesley, and Malacca, are surely strong reasons for withdrawing these Settlements from the control of the Indian government, and for connecting them . . . with our establishments on theChinese coast.’4 After more argument and pressure from local merchants, the British government accepted a minimal and autocratic administration

150 Maritime South-East Asia

2 A. J. Stockwell, ‘British Expansion and Rule in South-East Asia’, in OHBE, iii. 375–6.3 Paul H. Ch‘en, ‘The Treaty System and European Law in China: A Study of the Exercise of

British Jurisdiction in Late Imperial China’, in Mommsen and de Moor, eds., European Expan-sion and Law, 83–100.

4 Governor Edmund Blundell to William Grey, 13 June 1859, in Madden, ed., Select Docu-ments, iii. 521–2.

for the Straits and Singapore, in 1866, which did little to meet merchant aspi-rations for representation and left relations with neighbouring states openquestions.

Much depended on the strength or weakness of patrimonial regimes inthose states, the ability of their service gentry—indigenous or immigrant—tofind outside support, and the calculus of costs and benefits in internationalterms for a patron power. There was no historical reason why British experi-ence in Indian states should be transposed and made to operate elsewhere.Departures from the two Indian solutions to over-rule—by a treaty alliance orby close supervision in the manner of Bengal—had already been made inCeylon, a captured colony with a very small European population and a sub-imperial dependency of the Madras presidency. From 1802, Ceylon was aCrown Colony with its own civil service and courts that owed much to Dutchprecedents. It might well have incorporated the Kingdom of Kandy underBritish over-rule as a subsidiary alliance on the Wellesley model.5 But theKandyan monarchy refused to have its traditional status reversed; and whenthe king was deposed, Kandyan notables became direct clients of the gover-nor in a convention of 1815 which left them with the administration of civiland criminal justice and outside the system of administration in the maritimeprovinces until 1833. Other intermediaries previously used by the Dutchwere to hand. During Governor Maitland’s administration the British turnedto grades of traditional headmen (mudaliyars). Some were ‘attached to thegovernor personally’ as interpreters and minor functionaries; more usuallythey were recognized as territorial and village administrators, or nominalchiefs. Some were honorary headmen rewarded for loyalty and bureaucraticsupport in fiscal, judicial, and land management. The policy was autocrati-cally continued in the 1880s by Governor Arthur Hamilton-Gordon, freshfrom his experience of imperial hierarchy in Fiji, when he favoured mudaliyarrecruitment into the Native Department ‘through patronage of a few familieswith aristocratic pretensions’.6 In all, the enlistment of headmen in Ceylon(Sri Lanka) drew on a local political and social resource, creating a beneficialelite rewarded by forced labour and sale of Crown lands as essential client-brokers and founders of later political patronage networks.7

Elsewhere, the Company made a poor fist of extending Indian state prac-tices. The worst case of mismanaged clientage was that of Burma already

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5 Madden, ed., Select Documents, iii. 688–94.6 Patrick Peebles, ‘Governor Arthur Gordon and the Administration of Sri Lanka,

1883–1890’, in Robert I. Crane and N. Gerald Barrier, eds., British Imperial Policy in India andSri Lanka 1858–1912: A Reassessment (New Delhi, 1981), 84–106.

7 For the status grades of headmen, Patrick Peebles, ‘The Transformation of a Colonial Elite:The Mudaliyars of Late Nineteenth Century Ceylon’, Ph.D. thesis (University of Chicago, 1973),chaps. 3 and 4; Dilish Jayannatha, Electoral Allegiance in Sri Lanka (Cambridge, 1992), 35–45;Hugh Tinker, ‘Structure of the British Imperial Heritage’, in Ralph Braibanti, ed., Asian Bureau-cratic Systems Emergent from the British Imperial Tradition (Durham, NC, 1966), 46.

aggrieved by loss of territory in 1826.8 During a decade of residency repre-sentation, British envoys had no authority and little influence over internalsuccession politics at Ava or Rangoon. The King of Burma replied in kind byestablishing a much larger embassy at Calcutta. The resident was withdrawnfrom the court in 1840; a weak central government under Pagan Min and theeclipse of traditional protection from China made it difficult to find redressfor merchants’ claims and easier to intervene by force in 1852 to annex Rangoon and access teak forests. Even so, the successor ruler, Mindon Min,refused a treaty and forfeited Lower Burma. It proved impossible to create aclient state much before 1867, when Mindon surrendered trade monopoliesand conceded extraterritorial privileges in mixed courts. Outward compli-ance sapped internal authority and status. The regime collapsed in a succes-sion war in 1878. Fear of French advances and loss of trade and investmentled to a total British conquest. But Burma did not become a princely state. Administration was immediately modelled on that of British India; the kingwas deposed; and the religious and secular status groups dependent on royalpatronage—ministers, military generals, Buddhist orders, and local districtheadmen—were dissolved.

Siam fared much better. King Mongkut was a more subtle negotiator and, in British eyes, the very model of an enlightened patrimonial ruler. Heopened his kingdom in 1855 to a measure of consular jurisdiction over British subjects and concluded treaties with a number of powers to regulate trade.More cautiously, he recruited foreign advisers to supervise public works andthe revenue system, while leaving hereditary governors to run his provinces.His successor, King Chulalongkorn, continued this path of reform throughselected clients, using the influence of the British mercantile and bankingcommunity to counter territorial demands from France in Indo-China.British conventions with France and the kingdom, 1896–7, provided patronprotection for a buffer state and preserved the integrity of the Siamese Malaystates.

As heirs to the traditions of a Malacca sultanate dating from the fifteenthcentury, rulers in Malaya operated patrimonial systems based on personalpower and prestige through descent and ability to protect and reward statenobility and chiefs. Historiography stresses the legitimizing role of nominalheadship over powerful regional chiefs in Malay society with little secularcontrol outside royal districts.9 Income from land revenues and immigrantChinese miners ensured a precarious stability for some rulers of the westernstates. The advent of European merchant adventurers offered an additionalform of alliance, if early treaties made with the East India Company could be

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8 W. S. Desai, History of the British Residency in Burma, 1826–40 (Rangoon, 1939).9 Simon C. Smith, British Relations with the Malay Rulers from Decentralization to Malayan

Independence 1930–1957 (Kuala Lumpur, 1995), 2–3; John Gullick, Indigenous Political Sys-tems of Western Malaya (London, 1958).

Malaya 153

Map 7. The Malay States, late nineteenth century, after Emily Sadka, The ProtectedMalay States (Kuala Lumpur, 1968) and Central Survey Office, Kuala Lumpur, MapNo. 226

10 Emily Sadka, ed., ‘The Journal of Sir Hugh Low, Perak, 1877’, Journal of the MalayanBranch Royal Asiatic Society, 27 (1954), 9–31.

11 Madden, ed., Select Documents, v. 535–6. For the suggestion of residents, Sadka, ed.,‘Journal’, 10; Smith, British Relations, 3.

12 Sadka, ed., ‘Journal’, appendix i.

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made to work. Mostly, they could not be invoked, because of Company indifference. British enclaves in the Settlements offered a more proximatesource of support and the risk of subordination.

Descriptions of Perak in the 1860s and 1870s stress internal collapse of authority, particularly over the tin-mining districts of Larut situated near thecoast south of Penang Island and along the lower Krian and Kurau rivers.With a large Hakka and Cantonese population run by Chinese societies andinvestors in Penang, miners paid taxes and rents to a minister—the Mantri of Perak and to headmen, but fell into civil conflict.10 Elsewhere in Perak, asultan and a hereditary nobility had nominal authority over village chiefs andenjoyed a monopoly of tolls and taxes at low levels of collection. Status de-rived from ‘personality and the prestige of office’; but a legitimate heir to thesultanate could be set aside by powerful chiefs for a more popular candidate.When this happened in 1871, Perak had one ruler with a base in Larut and thericher rice-growing areas of the north, and two other claimants, Raja MudaAbdullah and Raja Yusuf who had power bases in the south of the state.

The immediate reasons for British interest in the affairs of Perak or Selangor arose from groups of Penang and Singapore Chinese complaining ofdisorders in the neighbouring states in 1873, supported to a lesser extent bythe ruler of Selangor who invoked Company agreements offering assistance.The Colonial Secretary, Lord Kimberley, in September 1873 ordered theStraits Governor, Sir Andrew Clarke, ‘to rescue . . . these fertile and produc-tive countries’ and uphold states in the interests of a ‘moral protectorate’throughout the peninsula.11 In private, Kimberley agreed that use of residentsas advisers might provide a suitable channel for such ‘protection’. On his own initiative, Clarke prevailed on a suitable client, Raja Muda Abdullah, toinstall a resident, in return for recognition over rivals, in the Pangkor Engagement, 20 January 1874.12

Despite some distortion in its preamble, the Engagement was careful to observe the realities of status and authority in Perak by pensioning off the‘acting sultan’ with a title and confirming the positions of other officers ofstate under Raja Muda Abdullah. At the same time, the obligation to ask aresident’s advice on all matters except religion and customs and make cost ofresidencies a first charge on revenue went well beyond a ‘moral protectorate’.Establishment of a Civil List and collection of revenues gave access to resources and an avenue for control. A second resident was appointed to runthe mining area of Larut and extract compensation for damage. Boundarieswith the Settlements were adjusted. The fact that seven major chiefs of the

13 Madden, ed., Select Documents, v. 547–9.

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state were also induced to sign, in addition to the newly recognized sultan,counted heavily in Colonial Office approval, but the executive functions of aresident were implied, rather than conferred by the ruler. Lord Carnarvoncontinued to stress that only advice was to be given.

The resident appointed to Larut, Captain Speedy, fairly easily displaced theMantri from his fief and administered the Chinese enclave under Europeanofficers and Indian police, with total control of revenue and judicial adminis-tration according to the Indian Penal Code. Apart from this limited success,the allegedly deposed sultan and his supporters refused to be pensioned grace-fully and ignored the Engagement. For most of Perak there was a completedisjunction between Colonial Office views of a mild and beneficial patronageand the realities of local power, where the resident-brokers were authorizedby Clarke, before he left the Straits, to use force to secure revenue. When Resident James Birch set aside custom by claiming a monopoly over dutiesand taxes and encouraged the escape of slaves from their owners he was mur-dered in November 1875 in a concerted revolt that had the support of SultanAbdullah and his chiefs. This disastrous breakdown of relations resulted in abrief military occupation. Both rival sultans were exiled. In 1877, therefore,the new resident, (Sir) Hugh Low, arrived to advise in a political structure thatwas headed only by a ‘Native Authority’, Raja Muda Yusuf, who had doubt-ful claims to the sultanate and who was out of favour with the nobility and regional chiefs.

Recriminations over Birch’s death continued to echo between London and the Straits governors through the early period of British over-rule.13 Onthe ground, there was a considerable expansion in civil administrationthrough treasury, surveys, lands, mines, and customs departments concen-trated in Larut and upper Perak. By 1876, the Colonial Office recognized thatthe residents had political and administrative functions entailing control ofrevenue and some courts of justice. Little thought was given by Straits gover-nors to the place of Malays in the hierarchy—at most, perhaps appointingstipended chiefs and a sultan to an advisory council. Officials justified theiractions, after the tragic events of 1875, in terms of consistency with ‘policy’or necessary departures from instructions. The material is useful evidence ofthe place of prescription in dealings with a political hierarchy; but it is not theessential point which was perception of status differences between governorand ruler, and the consequential acts carried out by administrative brokers, asa result of this change of hierarchy. The mistake of Lord Carnarvon was to be-lieve there was a ‘Residential system’ acceptable to a sultan, when there wasonly a set of working arrangements that broke down, when it proved impos-sible for Birch to have Abdullah acknowledged as a British client. The mistakeof local officials, and especially Clarke, was to push ahead with a system that

14 Sadka, The Protected Malay States (Kuala Lumpur, 1968), 99 and note.15 Ibid. 100 note. 16 Tinker, ‘Structure of the Heritage’, 47.17 Sadka, The Protected Malay States, 105.18 Robinson, memorandum, 29 Apr. 1879, in Madden, ed., Select Documents, v. 546.

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was only experimental in the eyes of the Colonial Office. This, at least, was awiser approach to clientage, when protagonists among the Malay nobilitywere still searching for advantages. The assumption behind the Engagementwas that residents were desired as advisers. It did not follow (as a ColonialOffice minute conjectured) that they would necessarily become ‘virtualrulers’.14 Too much was left for Governor Clarke to rush through; and he waspositive that residents should collect revenue and that the mining enclaveshould be managed entirely through a resident. Wiser counsels pointed out toCarnarvon that it was preferable to carry out public works and revenue im-provement through proclamations issued in the name of a compliant ruler.15

And this position conceded that reversal of status accompanied by structuralchanges in state administration exceeded the advisory tutelage envisioned in‘engagements’. Difficult to classify, the Malay states were brought into ‘an ad-ministrative system which cannot properly be characterized as extending either “direct” or “indirect rule” ’.16

However much the Office might hedge its instructions, it was plain that inthis new sphere of imperial influence residents were more than diplomatic envoys, and that annexations were out of the question. The fundamentalproblem was how to administer through Malays in a hierarchical and patri-monial system modified by foreign and intrusive methods of departmental organization in order to improve communications and revenue. Frank Swettenham, from his early experience in Selangor, appears to have beenamong the first of the new administrators to accept that it was preferable toreinvent the indigenous hierarchy of sultan, district headman (raja), andpenghulu (village chief) to secure revenue and petty justice as a line of powerinto village society, leaving specialist departments to European officers, moreespecially in Larut and upper Perak.17 It was left to Hugh Low to experimentwith the details of this instrumental and pragmatic approach. At the sametime, a new governor of the Straits, William Robinson, perceived, in his gen-eral case against annexations, that there was a condition of reciprocity in supervising through Malay hierarchies, ‘and especially by personally dealingwith every matter of detail in the administration’, to make such a relationshipwork.18 Annexations might, in the end, be inevitable; but, in the meantime,the advantages of protection had to be manifest and compensated by accessto resources. In Robinson’s opinion, men of the character of Hugh Low, asResident in Perak, might broker such an arrangement.

An experienced Malay explorer, botanist, and administrator from the1840s, Low was a client of Raja James Brooke in the government of Sarawakand in Labuan in the 1860s. In Perak, from 1877, his first steps were to curb

19 Sadka, The Protected Malay States, 113.20 Robert Heussler, British Rule in Malaya: The Malayan Civil Service and its Predecessors,

1867–1942 (Oxford, 1981), chap. 4.

Malaya 157

the zeal of the Indian police and to rely on headmen for collections. He madepatronage appointments of hereditary penghulus, in return for collection oftin duties and land rents for 20 per cent commissions, thus restoring their tra-dition of tax-farming; and he restored their powers of jurisdiction in minorcriminal and civil cases. Reciprocity ensured that notables as executives andspokesmen for village communities acquired official status and perquisitesthat went with supervision of government programmes—forestry, planting,roads. Wisely, too, Low did not rely on land revenue or a head tax, but on tin duties, import duties, and gambling licences, paid for by the service eliteand not by the peasantry. He refrained from attempting to abolish domesticslavery till the 1880s. His status was unusual, because Raja Muda Yusuf andother rajas, currently without much following, depended on him for survival.He consulted them frequently; and to that extent they participated in govern-ment without formal executive positions leading, eventually, to ‘the renais-sance of the sultanate’ within the system of over-rule in Malaya.19 In short,Low managed to make his version of the ‘residency system’ work in tandemwith more formal departmental administration by making Malay leadersstakeholders in the material and social benefits of an orderly and modest development.

Before this came to pass, Low built up his own client network among regional chiefs, occasionally taking the Raja Muda on tour to teach him thebusiness of local government. Significantly, he located his headquarters upthe Perak river at Kuala Kangsar, close to major chiefs and Chinese com-munities; he gave away much in personal funding of chiefs and penghulus andhe reformed accounting for taxes from opium farms and duties on opium and tin. He recruited police and headmen, creating loyal officials. Like Swettenham in Selangor, Low found employment for minor rajas and lower-order clients and kept these Malay district chiefs in the hierarchy ofrevenue officers and supervisors of penghulus. Power was diffused, not con-centrated in the hands of an official from the Straits Settlements. In Heussler’sphrase: ‘It was European rule with a native apparatus.’ For this reason, theChinese were included in Low’s system as service gentry, because tin suppliedover half of state revenues, and they ran tax farms producing income for both Malay chiefs and the British. In return for recognition of their com-mercial and financial status, they accepted Low’s duties and taxes on their monopolies.

The early period of British over-rule saw different styles among governorsand residents, as well as very different levels of competence.20 W. B. Douglas,a much-criticized and indifferent Resident of Selangor, 1876–82, has, to someextent, been exonerated by later historians. His massive diary reveals other

21 Sadka, The Protected Malay States, 117.22 H. S. Barlow, Swettenham (Kuala Lumpur, 1995), 257–9, 261–4.

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sides to his character, in particular, an ability to work well with the sultan,good relations with lesser rajas whom he selected for stipends and penghulu-ships. His engineering knowledge was especially useful and rare amongBritish officials. Governor Weld contrasted with most of his predecessors. Insome ways, he behaved more like a resident, enjoying travel, hospitality, andgreat personal authority to dispose of large revenues as he thought fit. As governor, he upheld the continued separation of Perak and Selangor from theSettlements, under a ‘mild, just and firm despotism’ with himself as ruler-in-chief.21 He urged the method should be extended to other Malay states; andhe was instrumental in preparing the way for an extension of British controlinto Pahang. Residents were left in no doubt where power lay—in the handsof a governor responsible for their appointments, salaries, leave, suspension,or dismissal. While on tour, deputations were received, petitions heard;boundaries were settled, forced labour, slavery questions, tariffs, were dis-cussed without reference to Straits councillors or officials. Weld did, however,give competent residents room for manoeuvre, thus complementing his ownhierarchy through the initiative of his subordinates in finding competent sub-ordinates of their own.

Douglas’s successor in Selangor from 1882 was the scholarly and energeticF. A. Swettenham. He had little confidence in the sultan’s State Council. But hetook care to ratify the sultan’s appointment of penghulus, paid out of the rev-enue they collected and chosen from the junior ranks of the state nobility. Intime, the list of this layer of client officials employed to keep the peace, settle land disputes, and collect taxes read ‘like a roll-call of the great, andmostly the good amongst the leading lights of the Selangor Malays’. In theview of Swettenham’s biographer such joint appointments through the patronage of sultan and resident were ‘crucial to the survival of the Malayaristocracy and its eventual transformation into a political elite’.22

Swettenham expanded the practice of making loans to Malays to clear landfor immigrants under the supervision of penghulus. In other ways, he was lessof a broker for the official Malay establishment than the European commer-cial establishment. Like Weld, Swettenham was a developer working througha constituency bent on investing in mines, plantations, and public works, including the Kuala Lumpur–Klang railway. It was no accident that after his retirement, when he continued to head a Malaya pressure group in London,he served on the boards of rubber companies and was awarded the gold medal of the Rubber Growers Association. It was his rival, W. E. Maxwell,however, who introduced the Australian Torrens system of land leasing intothe Straits and into Selangor in 1891. This measure earned rulers’ loyalty bypaying them fixed stipends from rents, while, at the same time, giving peasantsmore secure title and the government a means of assessing and taxing all

23 Heussler, British Rule, 97–8. 24 Tinker, ‘Structure of the Heritage’, 48.25 Lucas, Memorandum, May 1893, in Madden, ed., Select Documents, v. 549–50.

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holdings.23 For the administration, access to a major resource was assuredwithout annexation.

Other administrative pioneers extended the residency system, but had lesssuccess in establishing smooth relations with Malays. Hugh Clifford helpedto coax the ruler of Pahang into a treaty in 1889 and became resident there forten years, later returning to Malaya as governor. Austere and high-minded,Clifford took a rather severe view of chiefs, while remaining a passionate ro-mantic about the country. Saddled with the poorest of the states, there was little he could advise for development, except to curb the predatory conces-sion hunters of neighbouring Singapore and put down outbreaks of rebellion.Negri Sembilan was also difficult to form into a structured state, until Weldadded the territory of Sungei Ujong, in 1889, by the simple expedient of re-moving its chief. Johore State, on the other hand, resisted supervision under atreaty of 1885, as long as its sultan employed an advisory board of retiredcolonial officials as ‘“contact men” rather than overseers’, until replaced bya single adviser in 1914.24

The residents were, therefore, members of a Malay establishment, paid forout of state revenues. They were not servants of the Crown. Indeed, a con-venient fiction maintained that they and subordinate officers were servants ofthe sultan. Patronage over appointments was in the hands of the governorwhich left him as a kind of resident-in-chief, unrestrained by formal govern-ment councils in the Settlements in his dealings with hierarchies in the states.These hierarchies were maintained, rather than controlled closely, by resi-dents, though different views have been taken about the degree of supervisioninvolved.

Judgements about the character of over-rule in states that were neither an-nexed nor formally under protection turn on the status of rulers. If attentionis focused on the early history of the two principal states—Perak and Selangor—then one must agree with Emily Sadka that status was reduced by transfer of executive functions out of the hands of sultans and court officials to residents. That reversal was furthered by the organization of theFederated Malay States (FMS), under a hasty treaty in 1895, without consid-eration of how power was to be shared between state governments and the‘central’ government (in effect, the governor of the Straits at Singapore andthe resident-general or chief secretary at Kuala Lumpur). The need for pool-ing resources had been felt since the late 1880s and was made urgent by the finances of Pahang and Sungei Ujong. The Colonial Office and the governorof the day, Charles Mitchell, envisaged an ‘administrative’ federationthrough numerous departments with responsibilities in both the Settlementsand the states.25 Rulers, it was assumed, would cooperate with each other

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Fig . 3 Revenue, Malay States, 1875–1896Source: Federated Malay States, Administration Reports (Kuala Lumpur, 1909–30); Sadka, The Protected Malay States, 411. Returns for Negri Sembilan include Sungei Ujong and Jelebu.

26 Smith, British Relations, 6–7.27 Sadka, The Protected Malay States, 156; and Gullick, Indigenous Political Systems of

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(Negri Sembilan was composed of several smaller states); and they mightmeet in a common council under a resident-general. In practice, governmentdepartments—treasury, lands, customs, railways, etc.—were easily central-ized. But the rulers were bypassed, separated from the centre of power and ignored—the very reverse of the process of beneficial joint management ofdepartments and the Malay hierarchy at state level. At federal level, creationof a central council in 1909 with very wide powers over finance and other re-sources emphasized this distance by reducing State Councils to nullities andconfining the rulers to ceremonial appearances with little impact on legisla-tion or debate.

At the same date, however, the Unfederated Malay States (UMS) of Kedah,Kelantan, Trengganu, and Perlis were taken over by treaty from Siamese pro-tection in 1909 and fell under a relatively autonomous supervision throughpolitical advisers accepted with many years of delay. To these was added Johore, strategically close to Singapore. Moreover, in important test cases in1894 and later in 1924, the sovereign status of the UMS rulers was upheld.26

While this interpretation may have been a convenient smokescreen to coveractions taken in the name of a ruler in states not formally annexed or pro-tected, it did have the effect of shielding them from further encroachments onexecutive authority; and it left in place a rump of rulers in the UMS well awareof the diminished authority of their counterparts elsewhere and, therefore,anxious to have no part in federation. Conversely, the FMS rulers were ableto appreciate just how much they lost in comparison.

The effects of this disjunction between administrative federation of servicesand the status of rulers were not uniform; and some ground was recovered bythe states in the 1920s and 1930s. Emily Sadka argued that in the late nine-teenth century the decline in executive responsibility on the part of sultanswas relative to the amount of increased government business. In the 1880sand 1890s, they retired into ceremony and formalities; and, in any case, theirscope for action had always been limited by the rights and powers of chiefs.27

In compensation, they were protected against revolt and care was taken to secure (as in India) a suitable successor within ruling dynasties. Unlike India,there were few ‘minority’ governments or depositions. The case of Perakunder a Raja Muda set few precedents. Eventually, even this unpopular can-didate was sworn in as Yang-de-per-Tuan of Perak under the protection of theQueen Empress in 1887, providing his authority remained minimal. HisCouncil of State, therefore, accepted him; Malay nobles and Chinese council-lors looked to British brokerage to prevent any abuse of power. Sultan Idris ofPerak took a similar oath in 1889 as a lineal descendant of one sultan and

28 John Gullick, Rulers and Residents: Influence and Power in the Malay States, 1870–1920(Singapore, 1993), 96.

29 Sadka, The Protected Malay States, 66, 186.

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nephew of another. With Idris, the idea of a constitutional ‘king’ took rootand continued for nearly thirty years.

Outside the area of departmental administration applied in the states, thetwo most important innovations were the use of State Councils for approvalof executive control and the development of a civil service. Councils were notsimply rubber-stamps used by residents. Much depended on the quality andstatus of nobility and ministers. While it is true, as John Gullick has arguedfrom his analysis of the councils, that many of the traditional service gentryheld sinecures by the end of the century, there were opportunities for bettertrained men to rise to high office. The ruler’s private secretary, usually a closeclient and a noble, was not a traditional ‘chief minister’, but he became es-sential to the ruler’s relationship with a resident.28 Similarly, the Raja Muda,as adviser and successor, was usually close kin. As in Indian states, the financeofficer with supervision of taxes, court fines, and labour, was an innovation inthe scope of his office and usually a trained Malay and an outsider. In Pahang,an Indian filled this role in 1887. Senior judges remained appointees of theroyal court.

From the records available, it would appear that State Council discussionsand minutes were brief. Yet, Sadka discerns ‘an enhancement of prestige andnatural authority’ through this mechanism.29 Although it lacked control overa ‘native treasury’, a council could be asked to consider a wide range of execu-tive matters—tariffs, lease of tax farms, pensions and gratuities, agriculturaland mining concessions, public works—in short, the functions of the special-ist departments. There were, too, important concessions to hierarchy by in-clusion of five Malays of the royal lineage and two nobles, as well as theresident. The council was thus inclusive of clients and brokers, but advisory—a meeting-ground for exchanges of views, not a constitutional cabinet. Deci-sions were taken in the name of the sultan; but appeals from decisions were tothe governor. In a sense, the councils continued the traditional assemblies ofroyals and chiefs, but functions and representation changed to take accountof the new hierarchy of governor, resident, sultan, and lesser notables, in waysthat differed from state to state. In Perak, the council expanded, by 1895, toseven Malay title-holders, three Chinese, and two British officers. This movewas consistent with a restoration of traditional Malay titles to descendantsand representation of important economic interests. In Selangor, on the otherhand, the council was dominated from its inception by members of the royallineage who controlled all districts. It was, in effect, a kind of patrimonialcourt in which state officers were heirs to the highest offices in the gift of thesultan.

30 Ibid., chap. 8. 31 Ibid. 215.

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In both states the inclusion of Chinese leaders was more than ‘utilitarian’,as far as they were concerned. They were headmen of societies; and their status was, thereby, reinforced by Malay and British patronage which pro-vided a constitutional title—councillor—for self-made leaders. By contrast,there was no representation for Sumatran immigrant communities mediatedthrough penghulus. Both Perak and Selangor councils had an inner commit-tee of resident and notables for routine business, but the resident usually hadcontrol of the agenda, including the important area of Malay patronage, al-lowances, and jurisdiction. Despite this, sultans’ interventions appear to havebeen effective for pensions and allowances, penghulu appointments, controlof religious matters, and Muslim marriage and divorce. They retained thepower of pardon over capital cases. In general, they opposed transferring col-lection of land revenues from penghulus to Malay clerks. In other words,there was an effort to preserve the position of minor chiefs in relation tolower-order patronage, such as relief from land taxes. In Selangor, executiveauthority on the part of the resident had the effect of displacing a Malay exe-cutive officer (the Tengku), while the sultan, semi-retired at Langat, did littlemore than preside over council meetings. Had he been typical, sultans wouldhave been mere ciphers. In Pahang and in Perak, Tengku Mahmud and RajaIdris, before his accession, took part in judicial administration, a functionIdris continued as sultan. Usually, a British officer was present in court,though the sultan was independent in cases relating to Muslim law. It was notunknown, however, for governors and residents to retry cases and review sen-tences, although they had no formal powers of jurisdiction in the states.30 Forthe rest, the sultan’s formal seal was required for documents of state and forall commissions approved by the resident. So, although Malays did petitionfor appointments, the line of patronage was a dual one, formally acknow-ledged in council.

As long as local government for revenue and judicial purposes was largelyin the hands of Malays appointed as penghulus, they were supervised by European district officers. Perak should not be taken as the general pattern.In Selangor, royals held this subordinate office and saw that their kin also became penghulus. There is no reason to doubt, however, the pervasive roleof the British district official, responsible for a multiplicity of initiatives. Hewas ‘a Resident in miniature’, a general factotum working with, rather thanover penghulus.31 Many of their tasks, in time, fell under specialist depart-ments for public works, land surveys, welfare, and Chinese administration.Everywhere, there was a tendency for residents to administer subordinate European staff through their offices, expanded in Perak and Selangor intosmall secretariats. But the penghulu, as a headman appointed from above,

32 Federated Malay States, Perak Administration Report, 1909 (Kuala Lumpur, 1910), 12.33 Robert O. Tilman, ‘Bureaucratic Development in Malaya’, in Braibanti, ed., Asian Bureau-

cratic Systems, 594, 596 and note; for careers, Heussler, British Rule, 299–305.

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remained indispensable, until the end of the century and longer. Again, therewere differences between states. In Negri Sembilan lineage headmen, not ap-pointed territorial headmen, were more usual. In Sungei Ujong, penghuluswere a novelty and had to be created from village headmen. In Perak and Selangor, their appointments were firmly under the control of the sultan andtheir commissions were issued in his name. They were a feature of state cere-monials and tied by homage which continued, despite the existence of a newline of power from the residency. Many of them were in fact rajas; a few wereSumatran headmen. Their principal business was local justice and order andcollection of some revenues on a commission basis. Land revenues, customsand mining fees and duties were more important and were collected by European officers of the Malayan Civil Service (MCS). But as officials responsible for settlement of immigrant Malays the penghulus had ample opportunity for accepting bribes.

Gradually, they were replaced by literate Malay officials, promoted fromthe rank of clerk and drawn from Malay College at Kuala Kangsar. In 1909,a district officer in Perak lamented their passing as substantial landowners,related to half the people in their district, in favour of men who were oftenstrangers—‘an official not a village patriarch, a subordinate not a landed pro-prietor’.32 The change reflected, both the emergence of a new bureaucracy re-cruited from below and a new Malay elite formed through instruction of thesons of nobles, employed as magistrates, land officers, rent collectors, minesinspectors. They were the foundation of the Malay Administrative Service(State Civil Service in the Unfederated States). A few were promoted furtheras district officers into the predominantly European Malayan Civil Service,an elite cadre that ‘was often as political as it was administrative’ with a sta-tus comparable to the Indian Civil Service. An apprenticeship in the MAS wasregarded as essential, however, for ‘the sons of Malays of the Raja and higherclasses’.33

Reinvention of the roles of sultans, then, curbed their arbitrary power, butpreserved status and respect based on Malay conservatism. Their recommen-dations for appointment of penghulus were accepted; they assisted the spreadof vaccination and some education; and they were important in sanctioningirrigation schemes. A few engaged in mining ventures; and several travelledwidely abroad. Essentially, they legitimized British over-rule which mighthave required annexation or a different treaty system, if they had been pen-sioned off. It followed that the sultans and nobles, by granting access to re-sources in land and revenue, had to be supported financially so as to maintainan establishment and redistribute to lower orders. For a time, rulers and rajaswere impoverished in the 1870s. Later, the rewards system included increas-

34 Cited in Sadka, The Protected Malay States, 277.35 Federated Malay States, Administration Reports (Kuala Lumpur, 1909–30), appendixes;

Parliamentary Papers, C. 6858. Further Papers Relating to the Protected Malay States: Reportsfor 1891 (London, 1893).

36 Colonial Reports, Unfederated Malay States under British Protection (London, 1923), appendixes.

37 Heussler, British Rule, chap. 6. Pickering’s rule lasted till 1914.

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ing numbers of descendants. As in Indian states, rajas had obligations that putthem into debt. State loans on security of salaries and property, arranged withapproval of resident and governor, were frequent. In Pahang and Perak royalfamily members had to be protected from actions for debt in the courts. In thewords of an acting-resident, ‘The influence of pecuniary interest is one of the strongest ties which ensures the loyalty of chiefs to the existing form ofGovernment’.34

Some idea of the steps taken to reward loyalty can be formed from finan-cial reports for the later nineteenth century. Perak and Selangor were rela-tively wealthy states, though often running deficits and supporting the twoweaker federated states from 1896 (see Fig. 3). Revenues more than quadru-pled between 1890 and 1905, mainly from tin duties and land taxes. Up till1928 they would quadruple again.35 At the end of the century, the proportionspent on emoluments and allowances was some 17 per cent of expenditure;and this tended to increase, in proportion to revenue, to about a quarter of ex-penditure until the recession of the early 1930s, when there were retrench-ments all round. Rulers in the Unfederated States were even better off. InTrengganu, Kedah, Johore, and Kelantan, the proportion of expenditure paidfor pensions, emoluments, sultans’ allowances, and other princely chargesranged from 40 to 60 per cent between the 1910 and the 1920s.36

Despite this largesse, Malays and the Malay elite did not benefit from eco-nomic growth in proportion to immigrant groups. By actively farming tin li-cences, in return for the privilege of opium export, sale of spirits, gamblingconcessions, Chinese invested capital and reinforced its returns by an internalsystem of patronage over Chinese clients. The Chinese ‘Protectorate’ was ef-fectively run as a privileged hierarchy of societies under the supervision of oneman in the nineteenth century—William Pickering—known as Tai Jin (BigMan), scholar and patron administrator.37 His methods were personal, basedon a thorough knowledge of Hakka and Cantonese, by arbitration betweenfactions and threat of deportation for those who failed to comply. For otherimmigrant groups, British patronage opened up access to land. Land owner-ship, once vested in sultans, was vested in the states and open to alienation for rent in regulations that made use of the concept of ‘waste land’ and thetechnique of long leases. From 1892, ‘customary’ tenure was thrown open tonon-Malays and new constituencies of settlers expanded. State loans and remission of rents for Malay settlers enhanced further the role of penghulusas essential brokers in this system. In Negri Sembilan chiefs were encouraged

38 The battle may be followed in detail in Heussler, British Rule, 234 ff.

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by similar credit advances to open mines and develop rice cultivation. Muchlarger sums, however, were paid to European planters and Chinese investorsin urban housing in the early 1890s. Thus, state patronage made political dis-tinctions between these constituencies and accepted considerable differencesin the economic return from investment through public works, plantations,or small-scale farming. For the Malays, there was, too, a risk of permanentland alienation. In 1913 the right of sultans to block land sales against non-Malay purchase was restored to prevent the formation of a rural Malay proletariat.

Administratively and politically, however, the issue of enlarged controlthrough federation defined both the loss of status for rulers and their eventualre-emergence as an important factor in the process of decolonization. Initiallyundertaken as a way of supporting poor states from general revenue, federa-tion became equated with administrative centralization and the marginaliza-tion of sultans in the southern Malay states. The issue was a battleground forrival policies in the 1920s and 1930s. Much of the battle centred on a powerstruggle between the most senior administrative patrons; and while it wasfought on grounds of local or central administration, in the background layunresolved issues about the status and authority of rulers in a plural societythat were not resolved until after the war. In the end, the personalities andpride of intransigent administrators mattered less than the remarkable sur-vival of rulers in the face of the challenge of party politics.

For the period of the 1890s until 1919, federal authority remained with theChief Secretary to the Federation in Kuala Lumpur. Rulers were frustrated atloss of what little authority they had, but powerless to change their status.With the appointment of W. G. Maxwell as chief secretary and Sir LawrenceGuillemard as governor and high commissioner in 1919, there was agreementthat a measure of ‘decentralization’ was overdue, together with an increase inthe responsibilities of rulers. In this way, the Unfederated States might be at-tracted into the fold. For seven years, however, there was a struggle over sac-rifice of patron power between Maxwell and Guillemard, between an oldMalay hand and a Whitehall civil servant. Worse, some of the rulers raised thestakes by criticizing the system from within the Federal Council; and theRuler of Perak, Sultan Iskander, visited London in 1924 to make a case to the king and the Colonial Office for restoration of authority. On the whole,the rulers favoured the patronage of the governor as high commissioner,largely on grounds of personality.38

In the end, Maxwell was defeated by in-fighting and was retired shortly before Guillemard. From 1926, rulers were allowed to withdraw from theFederal Council and were entrenched again in their State Councils. Sir HughClifford returned as a governor with high prestige, but little to offer beyond

39 Smith, British Relations, 25; and Simon C. Smith, ‘The Rise, Decline and Survival of theMalay Rulers during the Colonial Period, 1874–1957’, JICH 22 (1992), 89.

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the mild reform already begun. His successor, Sir Cecil Clementi, began in1930 a more serious reappraisal in a changed climate: loss of financial surplusand reserves put an end to some of the largesse of earlier years and madeMalaya more important as a hard-currency earner. Rulers became more, notless, important in a country where Malays were outnumbered by immigrantgroups; and if the issue of political representation was taken seriously, howwould Malay ‘nationalism’ respond? Would a new treaty system be necessaryto redefine the place of rulers? In short, did ‘decentralization’ mean increasedpowers for state local government?

Like the India Office, the Colonial Office viewed any suggestion of revisedtreaties with alarm and any move towards a status similar to that of advisersin the Unfederated States as impossible. The thought that by ‘decentraliza-tion’ Clementi meant ‘union’ called into question the whole disparity in rep-resentation of constituencies in the Settlements and the States. But it wasnever entirely clear that Clementi thought through the consequences of any ofhis proposals for ‘indirect Government’ or decentralization in a plural soci-ety. Resurrecting State Councils offered no solution to the more general prob-lem of representing different interest groups in a system dominated by therulers of one group. Business and plantation interests feared greater taxation.The Colonial Office under Lord Passfield dampened down any enthusiasm onthe part of the governor for demolition of the Federation and allocation ofpublic service administration to State Councils by proposing a timetable offour years. This delay was too much for Clementi who fell out with all oppo-nents of his ideas and was removed from office in 1934.

His successor, Shenton Thomas, quietly set about carrying out some ofClementi’s decentralization over seven years. But, in fact, he did little morethan abolish the post of Chief Secretary to the Federated States, bringing pa-tronage under the high commissioner/governor. State services administrationwas kept out of State Councils. Indeed, no progress was made at all in at-tracting Unfederated States’ rulers into the fold. A protracted succession dis-pute in Selangor which was resolved by the governor’s choice of candidate didnothing to reassure other rulers who, in any case, looked for a clear definitionof federal and state powers in any devolved administration.39 It became clearthat the Sultan of Johore and the Regent of Kedah would not join the modi-fied structure of federation as it existed pre-war. In all, the late 1930s look like a holding operation in Malaya, where officially the Colonial Office ad-mitted to the existence of ‘sovereign and independent’ rulers, but unofficiallydeplored their very existence. The Unfederated States’ rulers rejected sacrifi-cing their autonomy under advisers, just as Indian princes, at the same period,rejected the federal proposals of the 1935 Government of India Act, but for

40 Smith, ‘The Rise, Decline and Survival of the Malay Rulers’, 91.41 A. J. Stockwell, ed., Malaya. Part i. The Malayan Union Experiment 1942–1948 (London,

1995), document 53; 128–9, 137.42 Smith, ‘The Rise, Decline and Survival of the Malay Rulers’, 94–5.43 Stockwell, ed., Malaya, Part i, 128 (for a list of successions and some replacements during

the Japanese occupation); 139–68 (interviews with state rulers).

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very different reasons. In India, the princely states faced heavy political com-petition in any scheme to open their constituencies to campaigning, in returnfor nominated places in a federal legislature. In Malaya, the political and con-stitutional pace of change was not nearly so advanced; and rulers faced a formof administrative demotion under residents whose executive powers ex-ceeded anything they were likely to be granted. In one respect, however, theColonial Office was wrong to reject the idea of Malay rulers’ sovereignty asan ‘ephemeral expedient’ turned into a ‘sacrosanct principle’.40 The roots ofrulers’ status lay in Malay society, not in the labels applied to status accord-ing to European concepts of royalty. Whatever their utility value in legitimiz-ing a system of over-rule that rested not on British conquest or jurisdiction,but on a fiction of continuous consent, the sultanate was still a patrimonialsystem to Malays. Its importance was soon demonstrated in the debate overpost-war decolonization.

The debate began during the war through schemes for a Malay Union, inabsentia, while the country was under Japanese occupation. From 1943, theMalay Planning Unit inside the Colonial Office decided to cut through thecomplexity and expense of administering four different systems by unifica-tion of the States with the Settlements and relegation of rulers to little morethan an advisory role in advance of self-government. Before that political ad-vance, however, post-war reconstruction would be achieved through closecontrol by a restored colonial administration.41 Called in to advise, Lord Hailey viewed the rulers as an anachronism without ‘sovereign’ claims and incompetition with other ethnic settler groups. To give the Crown freedom toreorganize post-war Malaya, the British would have to proceed by turningthe country formally into a protectorate through an application of the For-eign Jurisdiction Act of 1890. For this step, the client rulers would have toagree to new treaties; and (to avoid any invidious comparisons with Indianprinces) the surrender of their jurisdiction was not to serve as a precedent forany similar abandonment of Indian states in the face of Congress demands.42

In the event and however much they welcomed the restoration of British administration, Malay rulers displayed considerable resistance to thepressure exerted on them during the mission carried out by Sir HaroldMacMichael to secure their compliance in 1945.43 Bluff, brusque, and moresuited to browbeating the Amir of Transjordan than brokering a deal withsuspicious and sensitive Malays, the British envoy had only one weapon in hisarmoury. The British could withdraw their recognition, in view of charges of

44 Ibid., p. lviii.45 Ibid., p. lx–lxx, for a discussion of this policy change; and, more generally, R. B. Smith and

A. J. Stockwell, eds., British Imperial Policy and the Transfer of Power in Asia: DocumentaryPerspectives (London, 1988).

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collaboration with the Japanese. As an example, two successors installed bythe Japanese were deposed, and others in the Unfederated States were at risk.So, possibly, was the independently-minded Sultan of Johore who gave hissignature with a display of willing cooperation. Under duress, all the rulerscomplied, though they made it clear they did not agree with the constitutionalproposals for union. ‘At a stroke the mission alienated Britain’s traditionalcollaborators.’44

But the new treaties served their purpose by allowing the necessary legisla-tion to be passed, paving the way for constitutional change. Politically, theywere a miscalculation of the first order, betraying a complete misunderstand-ing of the status of rulers in what was still a patrimonial system. Rural Malayawas deeply shocked by rulers’ loss of jurisdiction. Local opposition coalescedinto a Malay Congress in March 1946 as the founder movement of the UnitedMalays National Organisation (UMNO). In London former imperial pa-trons—Maxwell, Clementi, Swettenham—and business interests added theirvoices to the protest. In the reaction rulers repudiated the treaties as obtainedunder duress. Governor Sir Edward Gent and the governor-general designate,M. J. MacDonald, moreover, began to express reservations about a unitarystate and urged caution over the issue of a single citizenship in a countrywhere some two million Malays made up less than half of the population.Emergent Malay political leaders set about drafting their own federal consti-tution in 1947 which was quickly accepted in the Colonial Office as a basisfor fresh negotiations; and early in 1948 the idea of Union was killed off by rulers’ signatures to State and Federation agreements revoking theMacMichael treaties. Significantly, these agreements were confirmed both byOrder-in-Council and by rulers’ enactments in their states.

There were wider considerations. The need for constitutional evolution tomeet United States’ criticism was a factor, but perhaps less important than theneed for post-war Britain to consolidate, by an equitable and democratictransfer of power, its long predominance in the Malay economy.45 For rulersand Malay politicians there were advantages in a new dispensation achievedthrough negotiation. Pre-war prerogatives and jurisdiction were restored tostate heads. Unexpectedly the Colonial Office raised no objections to a pre-ponderance of Malay unofficial members in a new federal legislature. For theBritish, too, rulers in Malaya were a factor in keeping Malay loyalties duringthe Emergency operations against Chinese communist insurgency. Malay‘nationalism’, however, was to some extent a creation of bungled prepara-tions for a unitary state. When this was evidently not possible, Malay politi-cians and rulers combined to meet the threat of devolved representation and

46 Stockwell, ed., Malaya, Part i, 351. 47 Ibid. 371. 48 Ibid., p. lxx.49 Tilman, ‘Bureaucratic Development in Malaya’, 596.50 Of the forty-five members of the Upper House, twenty-two ‘prominent persons’ would be

appointed by the head of state (on government recommendation). ‘Political Statement’, 25 Sept.1956. Ibid., Part ii, 307–8.

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extension of the franchise. A Rulers’ Conference was organized to examineand approve constitutional proposals; and, in so doing, it was acknowledgedthat citizenship by naturalization might be granted to the subject of a ruler onan oath of allegiance.46 Clearly a new and complex set of bargains was in themaking that would entrench elements of patrimonial rule in a framework forresponsible government.

But in Malaya cooperation was not completely harmonious between rulersand politicians. New political leaders were careful not to reject sultans. ButDato Onn, as a Johore minister and a founder of UMNO, could not simplymanipulate rulers for party purposes, as he discovered, when they refused toaccept his proposals for a Malay deputy-high commissioner in 1949. Onnwas forced out of office in Johore and out of the party.47 The new president ofUMNO, Tunku Abdul Rahman took care to work in tandem with rulers, as ason of the Sultan of Kedah. Displays of homage were organized to secure theiracceptance of an elected majority over nominated members in the FederalLegislature; a higher proportion of Malays to other ministers was secured in the interim government of 1951. Paradoxically, too, the long and expen-sive emergency military and police action against the Malayan CommunistParty ‘reinforced Anglo-Malay collaboration’, by hastening the pace ofMalayanization in the civil service and by inducing a greater level of in-vestment in social services and rural development.48 From 1953, after the for-mation of the Alliance Party (from UMNO and the Malayan Chinese Associ-ation), High Commissioner General Sir Gerald Templer (as controller ofmilitary and civil administration, 1952–4) had no hesitation in accommodat-ing the ambitions of this conservative, broad-based, organization, even as itpressed for self-government. Significantly, too, the Malayan Civil Service wasin 1953 thrown open to local recruitment more especially from the ranks ofthe all-Malay MAS which quickly embraced its ‘sense of tradition and . . .esprit de corps’.49

Moreover, following an Alliance landslide at elections in 1953 and conces-sion of a large measure of internal self-government, Malayan ministers feltconfident enough to allay rulers’ suspicions concerning the future of StateCouncils and the composition of a Commonwealth commission of juristsformed to examine the proposed constitution. In the end, both the BritishGovernment and the commission made it clear in 1956 that the position ofrulers would be respected; and this assurance was emphasized by TunkuAbdul Rahman in his ‘Political Statement of the Alliance’, proposing a MalayHead of State and a part-elected and part-appointed Upper House.50

51 Lord Reid, ibid., Part ii, 326. 52 Ibid., Part ii, 327.53 Tilman, ‘Bureaucratic Development in Malaya’, 597.

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Accounting for the survival of a hierarchy of royal houses as constitutionalguardians within this structure, then, involves more than tracing their for-tunes as necessary adjuncts to a fairly unique form of colonial over-rule, or asa spiritual and ritual dimension to a highly secular modern state. As the headof the Commonwealth commission of jurists noted: ‘It was not usual to havesovereigns as units of a Federation.’51 By the endgame of constitutional bar-gaining that led quickly to independence in 1957, the leading political partyclearly felt rulers to be no threat, because ‘the Alliance controlled all theCouncils of State and loyalty was to the party’.52 Moreover, under the inde-pendence Constitution the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, as paramount ruler, hadthe duty to safeguard the disproportionately high ratio of Malays in the public services and, thereby, guaranteed the ethnic structure and compositionof the MCS.53 At the same time, it has to be remembered that unlike other ex-amples of traditional rulers in India or in Ghana post-war rulers in Malayahad been at the centre of opposition to a cavalier imperial proposal to restoreBritish rule and impose a unitary constitution on the restored state. It was notthe first time, however, that rulers had blocked imperial plans. Resistance byrulers in the Unfederated States undid much of the purpose of the federationof 1895; and the long debate over decentralization did little to resolve thedilemmas of augmenting rulers’ powers in devolved states, or reducing themto nonentities by enforced Union. In the end, their political, rather than theiradministrative, weight was revealed, when their approval was sought for alast legitimization of British rule, in order to set in motion constitutionalchange after 1945. Malay nationalism found a potent and symbolic institu-tion that restored a measure of federal autonomy as a framework for decolo-nization. In the face of a respectful cooperation between senior Malaypoliticians and rulers, the advice of Lord Hailey to dispense with princes, orthe machinations of Sir Harold MacMichael intended to suborn them intocompliance, backfired. In the politics of competitive ethnic representationand government, traditional institutions had their place.

But they were not mere templates of hierarchy from the mid-nineteenthcentury. If anything, the status and powers of Malay rulers had increased bythe 1950s, after they had passed through several phases of demotion andpreservation. The executive responsibilities of residents, operating throughthe State Councils, cut into their independent status, especially in matters offinance. It could be argued, however, that they enjoyed greater stability in suc-cession and more regular perquisites from taxes, compared with their prede-cessors. Their lowest status came with federation, followed by a slow climbback to a measure of restoration by the end of the 1930s. Typically, they sur-vived the Japanese occupation by cooperation and compliance. In the period

54 Stockwell, ‘British Expansion and Rule’, 392–3.55 Smith, British Relations, 12–17.

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of decolonization, they found a new role within one of the first patron partiesin new states. Awkward questions regarding their ‘sovereignty’ kept croppingup—a concept imported with colonial and international law. Education, legaladvice, an appreciation of their bargaining power in the period of the Emer-gency and constitution-making, made them very different political animalsfrom their ancestors two generations previously. They were not Indianprinces to be preserved, or not, from the intentions of Congress leaders. Theywere active participants, as well as symbols of an ethnic nationalism intent onkeeping the patrimonial system for survival and advantage in a competitivepolitical system. There was no such India-wide loyalty for princes, thoughthere was some respect for rajas, even in the provinces. In Malaya, loyaltytested against the British or the demands of UMNO politicians was groundednot in mere sentiment, but in older practices of deference in return for pro-tection. Thus, the basis of patrimonialism continued to survive, reinvented inthe tradition of kerajaan—the condition of having a raja as a communal focusand a defence against political rivals. At the same time elections to StateCouncils outweighed a ruler’s privilege in nominating his chief minister with-out election; and the balance between nominated and elected interest groupsin the Upper House made it clear that traditional leadership was subordi-nated to party management in the independent state. A new kind of collabo-ration between traditional and elected representatives emerged from theolder pattern of administrative management within the hierarchy of residentsand rulers.

The concept of elite ‘collaboration’ is the historical model most usually ap-plied to the interaction of the British with South-east Asian societies.54 Whilesuch a term has the advantage of summing up various degrees of influence exercised in Burma, Siam, Malaya, and Borneo, it does not serve so well foranalysis of closer relations with partitioned societies under administrative supervision. One reason is its lack of precision in defining the respective advantages for incoming rulers and local elites and the complex roles of ad-ministrative brokers on either side of the power equation. Another, is that itis easier to label administrative systems in terms used by European rulers,even where these are imported from quite different regions and historicalcases. Thus, the illuminating discussion of British Malaya by Simon Smithdraws heavily on parallels with Indian princes, ‘monarchical collaborators’ inthe Middle East, and ‘indirect rule’ in African hierarchies (which Swettenhamand others claimed was invented in Malaya first).55 Smith, fortunately, doesnot extend the parallels of Lugard’s ‘Indirect Rule’ to Asian cases, or perceivea ‘residency system’ derived from British practices in India. His general themeof ‘kingship’ in the empire is a useful reminder that administrators had to

56 James C. Scott, ‘The Erosion of Patron–Client Bonds and Social Change in Rural SoutheastAsia’, JAS 32 (1972), 5–37.

57 Ibid. 13. 58 Ibid. 18.59 Nicholas J. White, ‘Government and Business Divided: Malaya 1945–57’, JICH 22 (1994),

251–74.

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make do with what they found, or face the cost of abolishing it for some othersystem.

Yet, the view from Whitehall or Government House does not encompassthe fundamental reasons for the existence and continuity of local hierarchy.Sociologists reviewing changes in peasant societies in the region have taken adifferent approach which has little in common with historical analysis.56 Onejustification for hierarchy, as a traditional order, was informal protection ofland users, through the brokerage of their household leaders and loyalty toaristocratic rulers. In the Malay states, such traditional structures were prob-ably ‘more modest’, resting on the personal capacity of local leaders to mobi-lize a following for the benefit of a regional leader.57 Not the least result of British over-rule was to institutionalize informal bonds into guarantees ofland use, in return for revenue. At the same time, there was a shift in the system of brokerage away from headmen and chiefs with local roots to European supervisors and Malay assistants. ‘Instead of being largely a crea-ture of the locality who dealt with the center [officials] became increasinglycreatures of the center who dealt with the local community.’58 Over the wholecolonial period, increasing pressure for commercialization of agriculture andallocation of land for other uses such as communications and mining dis-rupted the protective nexus between indigenous rulers and local peasantry. InMalay society the division between wealthy and poor villagers had probablywidened by the end of the British period, with the emergence of an official andlandowning class, closely connected through recruitment and training withstate ruling families. From this constituency was built the support for statepatronage through federal politics, as younger sons and relatives of the nobility entered the ranks of the Administrative Service and the MalayanCivil Service.

Another approach to the consequences of preserving hierarchy under acolonial regime and a democratic constitution has been to fix on the advan-tages for the patron power as informal underwriter for its business agencies.59

On the whole, this approach to imperial patronage has produced fairly negative answers for the period of decolonization. In practice, there was a disjunction between interested government departments and companies anx-ious not to devolve control to local representative institutions. The Britishgovernment reacted much more favourably than business to the victory of the Alliance in 1955. Underwriting stopped well short of any official insur-ance scheme for business in the Federation. Individuals, corporations, associ-ations were diverse and not coherent in their defence of interests in Malaya;

60 Gordon Means, Malaysian Politics: The Second Generation (Singapore, 1991), 296. Thisinterpretation is consistent with analysis of patronage politics in conjunction with village elitesand deployment of state resources in Jayannatha, Electoral Allegiance in Sri Lanka, 20–203.

61 Means, Malaysian Politics, 299.

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and they resented paying a high cost for counter-insurgency operations. Theylost their special representation in the Legislature or Senate. The British gov-ernment, not British business, favoured Federation patronage of rubber re-planting schemes for Malay smallholdings and support for Chinese miners.

The verdict is, therefore, that for Malay politicians local lines of powerwere more important than the influence of an old metropolis, though they didnot go out of their way to cut off sources of investment. Malay economic na-tionalists were not curbed by the British, but by local Malayan Chinese Asso-ciation entrepreneurs who restrained wilder schemes for state control andfavoured a vigorous, open economy. Ties with British capital loosened nottightened. The new lines of economic patronage were between the Allianceand Chinese, as major stakeholders, and smaller Malay and Chinese estateowners and miners.

Some political scientists, therefore, have seen in the remarkable economicdevelopment of Malaysia increased power of the Federal government overState governments through taxation and ‘the extensive use of federal patron-age at the state level’.60 At the same time, state autonomy and importance tofederal parties has been preserved and increased through the powers vested inMalay Rulers, as guardians of the politics of land and agriculture, Malay religion, and local government. Rapid Malayanization after independence reinforced an expanded bureaucracy in state service and quasi-public enter-prises deploying greater proportions of government expenditure. Specialrights for recruitment and promotion for Malays enhanced the position ofthese civil service clients of Malay party patronage. Where once British officials dominated in the federal structure at the expense of autonomy in the States, in the 1960s, Malay politicians and civil servants took over the policy-making machinery of the Federation for the benefit of State constituencies.

In the course of time, however, the principal effect has been to centralizeplanning within the Prime Minister’s Department. It is the Prime Minister, aspatron-in-chief, who is ultimately in charge of institutional bargaining; andinter-ethnic bargaining on the part of non-Malay elites has been forced to follow this pattern to survive in politics. Thus, at lower levels ‘patron–clientlinkages often extend beyond ethnic boundaries and can involve multi-ethniccorporations to defend jointly-shared interests’ as, for example, in venturesundertaken by UMNO and the Malay Chinese Association.61 Gordon Meansdiscerns in this politicization of public services the emergence of a ‘Patrimo-nial State’, reinforced by a Malay army, a symbolic and fairly compliant set of‘Rulers’ and ‘Paramount Ruler’. Under Dr Mahathir Mohamed, the patron-

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age system has expanded further than any previous ruler might have daredthrough layers of subordinate brokers, thus increasing obligations from ben-eficiaries and the risks of defection by those whose benefits are reduced. As inany patrimonial system the test of continuity of laws and constitution overarbitrary redistribution for political loyalty will come during a transfer ofpower on succession to the highest office.

summary

The long period of British mercantile dependency on staging posts within thesouth-east Asian archipelagos followed the extension of East India Companycommerce to the markets of China. By the early nineteenth century, experi-ence of war and politics in the region resulted in forced entry into Chineseports and possession of a few coastal strips and islands of the Malay Peninsula, nominally administered from the Bengal Presidency. As the casefor India’s control of the Straits Settlements and Singapore weakened, localgovernors found reasons for coming to terms with local rulers to keep orderin their mines and markets. No Indian blueprint was applied. Precedents hadbeen set in Ceylon for administration through headmen. But in Burma noclient state could be created by treaty and the kingdom was conquered andannexed. The kings of Siam managed foreign agents better, played off theFrench against the British, and were fortunate to be guaranteed independenceas a buffer state under Anglo-French agreements.

British intervention from their base in the Straits into the politics and ad-ministration of Malay states from 1874, however, established a form of over-rule through residents and governors without the formality of a colonialprotectorate. The innovation was flexible in style but accompanied by someof the regulation and services of the Settlements. Experience in managing theMalay nobility and district heads within patrimonial systems of state govern-ment created a form of dyarchy between sultan’s courts and Councils of State,on the one hand, and a resident’s departmental offices, on the other. Malayheadmen and district officers acted as brokers between the two lines of au-thority. In return for legitimizing this method of British control, Malay rulerssuffered a loss of status, but preserved their line of succession, patrimonialfunctions, much of their resources, and their courts and religion. In return,the British and their settler clients gained access to plantations and miningand expanded British trade and investment. From 1895 there was a risk thatthe autonomy of state administrations would be further diminished in favourof centralized federal government. Counter to this trend, four of Siam’sMalay states were taken under British advisorships from 1909, and togetherwith the State of Johore they refused to sacrifice their sovereign status to fed-eral over-rule. Consequently, no simple generalization covers the variety of

political bargaining, personal relations between British and Malay officials,or the opportunities for advancement among the court nobility of the Federated and Unfederated Malay States. Councils were utilized in differentways by sultans and residents. Some were opened up to representatives of theChinese community. Others lapsed and were rarely called in the period before1919, when federal authority was exercised from Kuala Lumpur. Thereafter,there was a long and inconclusive debate about how far federal servicesshould be decentralized. From 1926 rulers were permitted to withdraw fromthe Federal Council and a measure of State Council responsibility was re-stored. In other ways, the patronage exercised through sultans and residentsover district level appointments did not change, as junior relatives of the nobility joined the Malay Administrative Service and began to replace traditional headmen. In both federated and unfederated states, salaries, al-lowances, and pensions underpinned much of the compliance of rulers andtheir followers with British over-rule. At the same time there was a risk thatindigenous Malay rights and territory might be lost to increasing numbers ofimmigrant settlers.

Japanese occupation and the restoration of British over-rule called intoquestion the basis of this combination of annexed enclaves and informal pro-tectorate by requiring rulers to sign away their sovereignty in 1945, in orderto prepare Malaya for constitutional change as a unified colonial state. Rulersjoined forces with other political elites to oppose loss of jurisdiction and therole of State Councils. The idea of union died in complex political bargainingto entrench elements of state autonomy within a federal framework leadingto responsible government and independence in 1957. The broad base ofMalayan party coalition and the rapid pace of Malayanization of the civilservice helped to secure the constitutional position of rulers in the institutionsof central and state government and as Head of State. Thus, traditional lead-ership revived, after decline, as a symbol of Malay nationalism and as a func-tioning element of party and patronage in the new government hierarchy ofindependent Malaysia.

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Part V

Pacific Islands

Historians of Pacific societies have no difficulty finding analo-gous examples of centralized chieftaincies utilized or destroyed by Europeanover-rule. In more recent studies, however, some of the older stereotypes di-viding Melanesia and Polynesia have been modified by re-evaluation of chief-taincy in many forms, so as to take into account leadership by both descentand achievement.1 The topic has come a long way from structuralist concernwith social organization and ‘reconstruction’ of the pre-European period to asearch for evolutionary or cultural principles derived from ecological factorsor status rivalries in the work of Marshall Sahlins or Irving Goldman. Al-though there are still sound reasons for making a distinction between Melane-sia and Polynesia for the way in which Fijians, for example, classifiedkinsmen, other similarities in the hierarchies of central and eastern Pacific so-cieties indicate a common denominator in the criteria for status. ‘While Polynesians . . . were in general committed to the ideology of aristocracy,based on birth, there remained enough latitude in their social values to encour-age attempts by some of them to achieve positions of political power.’2 Overthe broader canvas of systems of leadership it has now been possible to reassessthe typologies Sahlins and Goldman attempted earlier and break down someof the distinction between big man and chiefly status.3 A recent survey of‘chiefly models’ in Papua New Guinea discerns an older linguistic ‘lexicon ofhierarchy’ common to Austronesian-speaking peoples, as well as drawing at-tention to the ways in which European officials later modified this hierarchy.4

With the board cleared of prior assumptions about pathways to rank andpower, kinship systems, and political systems in defined geographical areas, it became possible to see that in some societies (Papua New Guinea, the Marquesas) achievement by competition was the main determinant of status.In more centralized societies (Hawaiian Islands, Society Islands, Tonga) rankand power were correlated, because the ideology of descent was reinforced bysecular power derived from alliances, marriages, and incorporations or‘friendship pacts’.5 It has also been noted that New Caledonian clans and

1 Alan Howard and John Kirkpatrick, ‘Social Organization’, in Alan Howard and Robert Borofsky, eds., Developments in Polynesian Ethnology (Honolulu, 1989), 48–91; Marshall D.Sahlins, Social Stratification in Polynesia (Seattle, 1958); Irving Goldman, Ancient PolynesianSociety (Chicago, 1970); Douglas, ‘Rank, Power, Authority’, 2–27; Feinberg and Watson-Gegeo,eds., Leadership and Change in the Western Pacific; White and Lindstrom, Chiefs Today.

2 Douglas L. Oliver, Oceania: The Native Cultures of Australia and the Pacific Islands, 2 vols.(Honolulu, 1989), ii. 942, 1167–8.

3 Douglas, ‘Rank, Power, Authority’, 18; K. O. L. Burridge, ‘The Melanesian Manager’, in J. H. M. Beattie and R. G. Lienhardt, eds., Studies in Social Anthropology (Oxford, 1975),86–104.

4 Richard Scaglion, ‘Chiefly Models and Papua New Guinea’, CP 8 (1996), 1–31; MauriceGodelier, ‘Sociétés à Big men, Sociétés à Grands Hommes: Figures du Pouvoir en Nouvelle-Guinée’, JSO 91 (1990), 75–97.

5 Douglas, ‘Rank, Power, Authority’, 17, 18, 24; Oliver, Ancient Tahitian Society, i. 120–1;Colin Newbury, Tahiti Nui: Change and Survival in French Polynesia 1767–1945 (Honolulu,1980), 11–12, 20.

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tribes as descent groups and territorial units ‘commonly absorbed unrelatedindividuals and groups, and rationalised the process in kinship terms’.6 Theobservation agrees with other evidence that in the Lau group of eastern Fijithe complementarity existing in the past and today between chiefs (turaga)and the people (iTaukei) of a chiefdom influences the inclusion or exclusionof outsiders (vulagi) as an issue in local power struggles.7

In this revision of earlier typologies, therefore, several points have a bear-ing on the emergence of patron–client systems. One is the growing consensusthat in many Pacific societies the ideology of descent was reinforced by secu-lar power derived from a variety of alliances and pacts close to patronagemechanisms and enlarging a chief’s following in territorial terms. The idea,touched on rather than developed, by Bronwen Douglas, has also been re-viewed by Oliver in his general survey of cultures in Australia and the Pacific.Some of this material deals with the ‘politicization of descent units’, includingthe appointment of officials to manage lands and taxes in the case of Hawai‘i,and the incorporation of non-agnatic kin into the mobile and variable descentunits of Fiji.

Secondly, given the small scale of Pacific societies, closer attention has beenpaid than in many of the Asian or African examples above to the exploitationof limited resources and the results of rapid population growth for competi-tion, warfare, and stratification, more particularly in the Hawaiian Islandsand in Tonga.8 While domination of productive systems was not the only factor explaining hierarchy, nevertheless, archaeology and evaluation of po-pulation densities have thrown considerable light on the rapid evolution ofchiefly corporations to accumulate and redistribute within and beyond islandgroups. Trade contacts and commercialization of local production and serv-ices frequently assisted the construction of chiefly monopolies over such resources.

A third idea which is not explored very far in general anthropological revi-sions is that outside contacts with other islanders or Europeans and access to new cultural technology including education enlarged opportunities for‘politicization’ in titular and territorial terms. It was recognized in RaymondFirth’s earlier work that traditional chiefly systems have changed because ofan ‘external source of authority arising from the need of a small-scale com-munity to draw upon external sources of power and wealth’.9 Chieftainshiphas been in most cases incorporated into colonial administration, though theterms of that incorporation call for a further notion of brokerage by mission-

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6 Douglas, ‘Rank, Power, Authority’, 17.7 Steven Hooper, ‘Who are the Chiefs? Chiefship in Lau Eastern Fiji’, in Feinberg and

Watson-Gegeo, eds., Leadership and Change in the Western Pacific, 239–45.8 Patrick Vinton Kirch, The Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms (Cambridge, 1984); John

Wesley Coulter, Population and Utilization of Land and Sea in Hawaii, 1853, Bernice BishopMuseum Bulletin 88 (Honolulu, 1931).

9 Firth, cited in Feinberg and Watson-Gegeo, eds., Leadership and Change, 22.

aries, officials, and a new elite in the transition from traditional leadership topatron leaders.10

More recent assessments of leadership in the Pacific, therefore, are awareof the historiography devoted to the incorporation of chiefs into state admin-istrative structures. White and Lindstrom make the useful observation thatearlier terminology drew heavily on the notion of ‘kingship’ to describe pre-colonial hierarchies, though they are wrong in thinking ‘kings’ were subsequently downgraded to chiefs as a result of a nineteenth-century reclassification of the appropriate headship of ‘civilized’ or ‘barbarous’ com-munities.11 The reason for their occasional survival as titled heads in the Pacific was partly, as they assert, the emergence of politically consolidated island groups, but also the advent of constitutional and legal prescriptions for defining and defending the interests of ‘kings’ and chiefs.

For, in addition to chieftainship by a mix of ascription and achievement,early nineteenth-century contacts with the outside world added a status byprescription, and with it the possibility of defining other offices of state.12

White and Lindstrom were surely correct not to make too much of the obvi-ous result of European contact, namely, the reinvention of traditional status.As they add, the ‘significant point here is not so much that chiefs are in manyareas an invention of colonial expectations but that their status was emer-gent, fashioned in transactions with outsiders who had come to trade, mis-sionise, and otherwise colonise.’13 A more subtle conclusion from the essaysthey have collected is that chiefs have also been second-level patrons in Fiji, in Samoa and Tonga, and that, indeed, such patronage has been ‘crucial’ forthe maintenance of chiefly status.14

A final point raised by Pacific historiography is whether ‘bureaucratiza-tion’ partially or completely replaced patronage networks in island adminis-tration. There is reason to believe that older forms of informal patronagehave persisted and the implications of this persistence will be examined in the Conclusion.15 More immediately, the cases selected for discussion here(like their Asian and African parallels) cover both the construction of patri-monial systems in island kingdoms (Hawai‘i and Tonga) and the incorpora-tion of chiefly hierarchy in a segmentary state (Fiji) into Crown Colony

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10 Alan Howard, ‘Money, Sovereignty, and Moral Authority on Rotuma’, in Feinberg andWatson-Gegeo, eds., Leadership and Change, 204–38.

11 White and Lindstrom, Chiefs Today, 1–7. ‘Kings’ survived in the terminology of African hierarchies (Dahomey, Asante, Buganda, Morocco) just as rajas and sultans did in Malaya.

12 G. K. Roth, Native Administration in Fiji during the Past 75 Years: A Successful Experimentin Indirect Rule, Royal Anthropological Institute, Occasional Paper No. 10 (London, 1951);Martin Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order (Cambridge, 1965).

13 White and Lindstrom, Chiefs Today, 8.14 Peter Larmour, ‘Conclusion’, in White and Lindstrom, Chiefs Today, 280–1.15 See e.g. Simione Durutalo, The Paramountcy of Fijian Interest and the Politicization of

Ethnicity, South Pacific Working Paper No. 6 (University of the South Pacific, Suva, 1986), 36–7;Peter Larmour, ‘Corruption and Governance in the South Pacific’, PS 30 (1997), 1–18.

administration. All three examples were deeply influenced by techniques ofprescribing for government and authority introduced by missionaries, set-tlers, and administrators. In all cases their indigenous hierarchies have un-dergone different historical experience in reversal of status, subordination,and survival.

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11 Hawai‘i

The historiography of the Hawaiian Islands is dominated by twothemes: the consolidation of a military and political paramountcy by a singlelineage among island chiefs; and, secondly, settler command of the Hawaiianeconomy, leading to annexation by the United States. Taken together thesecentral issues illustrate the total reversal of the authority and status of an in-digenous hierarchy in the space of a century of demographic and economicchange. Such changes were not unique to the Hawaiian Islands, but with fewexceptions the displacement of a political kingdom by a settler oligarchy wasrapid and complete, even by the standards of late nineteenth-century imperialtakeovers in the Pacific.

Seen, therefore, as an example of political subversion largely for economicreasons, Hawai‘i’s history contains an element of predictability in standardworks, beginning with a swift cultural displacement of Hawaiian religiousbeliefs by American and other missionaries early in the century and an evenswifter overthrow of the monarchy by revolution in the early 1890s. The demise at the end is usually explained by settler prominence in Hawaiian gov-ernment at the beginning—a kind of self-fulfilling ‘manifest destiny’ begun inmissionary tutelage which expanded into opportunities for control of a plan-tation economy. Thus, a planter-settler community became annexationistswith the backing of a major Pacific power.

The role of Hawaiians in this dramatic shift in authority is well docu-mented, more so at the beginning of their travail than perhaps after annexa-tion. There has been little on the role of the Hawaiian community in islandadministration, apart from royals who headed the executive. It is argued herethat one of the more persistent myths for the period of intensive contact withoutsiders has been that Hawaiians were mere instruments in haole (whites)hands from the 1840s. The process of reversal of status in the kingdom was resisted more than the overthrow of the monarchy suggests. Indeed, reluctance to cede control may account for the political intensity of the revo-lutionary period 1887–93. The reason for this misunderstanding has beenconcentration on the high politics of Honolulu to the neglect of the moremundane district government of O‘ahu and other islands of the archipelagothrough which the monarchy ran a patrimonial regime with the assistance of haole and Hawaiian executives. The special relevance of the Hawaiian example to this study lies both in the detail of how the hierarchy functionedand settler zeal to reform, incorporate, or abolish one of the Pacific’s ‘nativestates’.

1 Coulter, Population and Utilization of Land and Sea in Hawaii, 1853.

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Map 8. The Hawaiian Archipelago

The origins of that regime have been recounted often. Political consolida-tion of the islands of the Hawaiian group under a single dynasty in the lateeighteenth century coincided with increasing European maritime contact andsporadic settlement. The period of the 1780s was one of intensive warfareconducted by chiefs and warriors from the island of Hawai‘i for the conquestof O‘ahu and other islands of the group. Even so, the hierarchical pattern ofisland chieftainship under paramounts (mo‘i) over sub-districts (ahupua‘a)remained the framework for diffusing power to smaller units supervising andworking demarcated resource zones. The basis for political power over islanddistricts and, eventually, over the whole archipelago, lay in the allocation ofsupervisory rights to followers of the paramount chief, in return for extrac-tion of tribute from tenant producers who farmed their own lots in residen-tial households and accessed as usehold areas of fishing and forest. The eightinhabited Hawaiian islands were intensely cultivated where soils were suit-able for dry and wetland agriculture, supporting a population of at least300,000 by the period of European discovery.1 While population pressure onresources may have been a reason for intense competition between islandparamounts, over a longer period social differentiation through descent andwarrior achievement created a political system of structured classes in whichthe lower order lost genealogical connection with superiors and, therefore,title to most of the lands they worked. Commoners paid tribute in produce

Hawai‘i 185

and labour to the chiefly class of ali‘i, a very large, segmented set of nobles,ranked and graded by descent and by ability to form alliances and wage war.Or, as Douglas Oliver summed it up: Hawaiian society had ‘evolved politi-cally into a number of territorially defined, bureaucratically administeredministates (some of them not so ‘mini’) far beyond the stage reached in anyother Polynesian (or Oceanian) society.’2

In 1795, at the end of a long period of warfare and rebellion among islandali‘i, Kamehameha, as paramount chief of Hawai‘i island, took hold of Maui,Moloka‘i, and O‘ahu; and in 1810 he completed his dominion by possessionof Kaua‘i.3 A developing fur trade between the American north-west coastand China materially assisted this empire-building by traffic in arms and co-option of seamen deserters. But the essential features of Kamehameha’s pat-rimonial kingdom were concentration of kin and other island paramounts athis court as counsellors and allocation of governorships over island estates tolesser ali‘i and followers, including his European companion, John Young.4

Warrior forces from Hawai‘i settled on O‘ahu as tenant farmers; the standingarmy was much reduced; and by the process of sub-infeudation a bureau-cratic taxation structure was established throughout the archipelago. Kamehameha took control of the arms trade, levied duties on visiting shipsand founded a ship construction and repair industry at the beginning of thenext great trade boom in sandalwood which became a chiefly monopoly overthe period 1810–30.

Following the king’s retirement to Hawai‘i island in 1812, management ofthe patrimonial state fell to the corporation of ali‘i in positions of powerthroughout the group. As long as Kamehameha was alive and the sandal-wood trade flourished they were kept under control through island governorsand agents who organized a division of spoils from sales and duties. His min-isters, Kalaimoku, John Young, and lesser chiefs were appointed to overseecollection of taxes and arrange sandalwood shares on O‘ahu. It has been ar-gued that the aggrandisement of ruling chiefs during the sandalwood periodwas accompanied by control through white settlers who reconstructed thekingdom in the 1840s and had command by the 1850s.5 The mechanisms ofthe patrimonial kingdom were not surrendered so easily. Diffusion of powerto a handful of island chiefs as officers of the paramount and the construc-tion of a bureaucracy among the followers of the king’s favourite wife, Ka‘ahumanu, were aspects of a system in which the loyalties of a service

2 Oliver, Oceania, ii. 951; Kirch, The Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms, 257.3 For details, Ralph S. Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1778–1854, 2nd edn.

(Honolulu, 1968); Patrick V. Kirch and Marshall Sahlins, Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1992), i. Historical Ethnography, chap. 2.

4 John Young (Olohana) 1742–1835 along with Isaac Davies was first in a long line of royalclients who intermarried with senior ranking women. Young fathered three sons including JohnYoung (Keoni Ana) 1810–57, who became Kamehameha III’s chief minister and kuhina nui.

5 Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, i. 2–3, 45, 101.

6 S. M. Kamakau, The Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii (Honolulu, 1961); David Malo,Hawaiian Antiquities, trans. Nathaniel B. Emerson, Bernice Bishop Museum (Honolulu, 1951),60–1.

7 Caroline Ralston, ‘Hawaii 1778–1854: Some Aspects of Maka‘ainana Response to RapidCultural Change’, JPH 19 (1984), 23; Stephenie Seto Levin, ‘The Overthrow of the Kapu Systemin Hawaii’, JPS 77 (1968), 420, 430.

8 Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, i. 113. 9 Ibid. 32–3.10 Kanala G. Terry Young, Rethinking the Native Hawaiian Past (London, 1998), pp. xi,

44–5.

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gentry were recruited in return for advancement and revenue. Chiefs pros-pered from the allocation of shares in sandalwood trading, but abused theirposition of power over commoners. In the record and critique of Hawai‘i’shistorians in the early nineteenth century the ideal of commoner protectionby chiefs was contrasted with extortion of labour and produce from a haplesstenantry.6 Both on O‘ahu at the centre of paramountcy and in the outer is-lands authority was imposed through agents in the wake of Kamehameha’sredistribution of offices, and again at his death, in what was effectively a‘spoils’ system: ‘The chiefs who depended on patronage lived with the ali‘i nuior became konohiki in communities where frequently they had no kin.’7

Spoils accumulated in the top segment of society and there is little evidencethat chiefs or stewards redistributed wealth accumulated from trade. On theother hand, there was an end to warfare and no conscription of warrior forcesafter 1804. There is also evidence that many commoners became adept atconcealing and retaining some of the produce of their labour, or migrated (asthey had in the past) to other ahupua‘a to find a new overlord.8

What was not called in question was the Hawaiian notion of a graded hierarchy under king, lords of the land, stewards, tenants, and labourers withobligations to those in positions of superiority. In short, much of the centralpatrimonial authority structure was reduplicated at lower levels and survivedthe early period of trading contacts reinforced by the material trappings ofhigh status.9 Alien white settlers—missionaries, traders, and seamen—werenot exempt from the ties of allegiance and reciprocity that obliged differentgrades of society to treat with superiors. However much they may have re-sented their position, in time the formality of swearing allegiance to monar-chy became part of their status recognition and a prerequisite for a position ingovernment. More immediately in the 1820s, however, at the centre of poweron O‘ahu chiefs and notables were engaged in securing positions as compan-ions and attendants to the royal lineage. A measure of depopulation amongchiefly families and the prescriptions of Christianity reduced the number ofsuitable marriage partners for royals from among siblings or near-siblings.This change of rules left an opening for marriage to members of the ‘servicegentry’—kaukau ali‘i.10 For this reason, Ka‘ahumanu gathered about her atWaialua and at Honolulu a client group, combining chieftaincies of Hawai‘iand O‘ahu, the royal heirs-apparent, Liholiho and Kauikeaouli, and a

11 For Ka‘ahumanu’s antecedents and the position of her relatives on Hawai‘i and O‘ahu, asthe ‘Ka‘ahumanu ma’ (Ka‘ahumanu people), Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, i. 45–9; and genealogyof the royal lineage (table).

12 Levin, ‘The Overthrow’, 425.13 Ibid. 402–30; Hiram Bingham, A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands

(Rutland, 1981), 86–161.14 Char Miller, ‘Rumours and Language of Social Change in Early Nineteenth Century

Hawaii’, PS 12 (1989), 7.

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number of other notables and siblings who were important in the subsequentconsolidation of the royal lineage and its prolongation by title creation.11 In effect, she was co-ruler to Kamehameha until his death in 1819; and she heldher own with the help of loyal chiefs by redividing the kingdom among her of-ficials and her collateral brothers under the nominal kingship of Liholiho forthe period of his short reign (1819–24). Arguably, too, by encouraging the heir-apparent to break with the institutionalized priesthood in 1819 sheinitiated secularization of the kingdom with the effect of ‘making successioncompletely hereditary’ through primogeniture, thus increasing the power ofcentral government.12

Among settler groups missionaries benefited first from co-option into thisservice gentry. Arriving in the aftermath of Ka‘ahumanu’s abolition of Kapuobservances and, therefore, much of the foundation of Hawaiian religion,Hiram Bingham and his companions from the American Board of Missionswere welcomed cautiously by Liholiho, and more warmly by Ka‘ahumanuand her brother, Kuakini.13 They were allowed to land on Hawai‘i and put onprobation for a year until rulers were convinced of the advantages to be hadfrom their teachers, doctors, and printers. It helped, too, for foreign relationsthat a schooner promised by Captain George Vancouver to Liholiho was de-livered on time. An embassy by the king and his spouse to England wasarranged to cement a twenty-year-old tradition of British goodwill and infor-mal ‘protection’, prematurely disrupted by the death of the royal coupleabroad in 1824. By then, some twenty-three chiefs were nominal Christianson O‘ahu, legitimized by a new religion and by association of missionarieswith the secu-lar rulers of a single lineage. With the accession ofKauikeaouli—a boy of 11 years—in 1824 as Kamehameha III, the dualmonarchy continued, but with increasing risk of factionalism and reaction.At issue was the validation of the royal lineage in power as a political orderwhich favoured loyalty above kinship; and to this order the American missionwas an important adjunct. Ka‘ahumanu used conversion (largely throughcontrol of the printing press) ‘to locate an alternate source of authority, dur-ing a time of uncertainty’.14 Precepts of the Decalogue became the law of theland which brought the royal government and its clients into conflict withseamen and merchant settlers backed by dissident notables. In addition, ac-ceptance of Christianity and the more distant patronage of the British Crownbrought recognition and advice on how to rule.

15 Cited in Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1778–1854, 79.16 For the change from royal regent to chief minister with this title, Levin, ‘The Overthrow’,

420.17 Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, i. 110.

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Advice was taken on Hawaiian terms. Boki, as a chief of Maui and gover-nor of O‘ahu who went with Liholiho to England accepted British attentionswithin the framework of his own knowledge of patrimonial government byacknowledging King George IV ‘as my landlord and myself as tenant (or himas superior and I inferior)’.15 Accordingly, when Lord Byron brought back the royal corpses on HMS Blonde together with a British consul in 1825,Kamehameha III and his supporters welcomed his counsel on the value of al-legiance, a system of property leases under chiefly authority, centralization oftaxes and port duties, justice by king in council, as precepts in accord withtheir own ideas about authority and status.

Throughout the 1830s, therefore, following the death of Ka‘ahumanu in1832, the inner circle of royals, notables, and their clients used the technologyof codified prescriptions to come to terms with external powers and to command allegiance as a counter to factionalism from within. KamehamehaIII began to take charge of his own destiny during his sister, Kina‘u’s regency,but made her a senior minister, kuhina nui, as a daughter of Kamehameha I.16 From this point on, foreign advisers became essential as client brokers inconditions of naval and consular intervention and in the internal struggle to retain command of sources of revenue in the last years of the sandal-wood trade and the beginnings of an expanded service industry for whalingfleets.

It is an exaggeration, however, to interpret the outcome of this period of in-stitutional change as a surrender by royalty and chiefs to haole control overgovernment. The process was more syncretic with selection and rejection ofconstitutional and moral advice, reinterpretation of outside models (mostlyfrom Great Britain) to suit Hawaiian nobility’s sense of what was fitting andadvantageous. Moreover, chiefs did not forfeit to outsiders their command oftrade in sandalwood or provisions for whaling traffic. For the moment, inconditions of population decline, their ability to extract resources for theirown conspicuous consumption from trade was remarkable and without lossof lands or sovereignty. Governors such as Kuakini and Ke‘eaumoku ran theirislands as private fiefs well into the 1840s and turned their abilities to sugarmilling and cattle ranching with mixed success.17 They and their counterpartsin trade throughout the group were increasingly in debt, of course, to merchant-importers, and, therefore, subject to the injunctions of consuls andvisiting naval officers. But by 1843, with haole client advice, months ofFrench naval intervention and five month’s of British naval protectorateended with a joint declaration by France and Great Britain to respect the in-dependence of the kingdom. As yet, the United States sought no treaty and

18 W. P. Morrell, Britain in the Pacific Islands (Oxford, 1966), 81–4. 19 Norman Meller, ‘Hawaii: A Study of Centralization’, Ph.D. thesis (University of Chicago,

1955), chap. 5 and 193 ff.; Carol Santoki Dodd, ‘Power through Centralization: Race, Politics,and Education in Hawaii, 1840–1970’, Ph.D. thesis (University of Hawai‘i, 1980), chap. 1;Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu, 1968), 236.

20 Dodd, ‘Power through Centralization’, chap. 1.21 Colin Newbury, ‘Patronage and Bureaucracy in the Hawaiian Kingdom, 1840–1893’, PS

24 (2001), 1–38. There is support for this argument in Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai‘i:The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton, 2000), 35–62, 82–3, 88–9.

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gave an assurance to British and French ministers in 1844 that the group’s in-dependence was not at risk.18

By the early 1840s there were signs, then, that Kamehameha III hademerged from his secondary role during the period of Ka‘ahumanu’s domi-nance and acted as a patron paramount. Although the period is usually inter-preted in terms of ‘centralization’ of government under a haole-constructedconstitution,19 Hawaiian initiatives and practices did not disappear. Rather,the long tradition of royal patronage absorbed new clients into the structureof administration at the centre and throughout the group. By 1851, therewere some forty-eight whites in royal service; and during the previous decadethe kingdom was dependent on the services and abilities of Dr G. Judd, Lorrin Andrews, R. C. Wyllie, and others who thought highly of their ownposition and incurred the envy and resentment of merchant-traders, foreignconsuls, and transient visitors.

Several points should be noted about this executive coterie. They did notimpose themselves on the king, but were appointed by him in the style ofkaukau ali‘i. Unlike many of their counterparts in the Pacific at this period(the Pritchards at Tahiti or Fiji, settler-traders in Samoa) they did not act asagents for foreign consuls or for outside governments, but, on the whole, re-mained loyal to their source of employment and status. They were supple-mented by Hawaiian kaukau and retainers from among the ali‘i sent togovern the outer islands and estates of O‘ahu. These were further increasedby a group of younger kaukau and kahu schooled at the Lahainaluna institu-tion founded by Lorrin Andrews in 1831 and run by one of its star pupils,David Malo, from 1841.20 Among its products were Daniel and John I‘i, Timothy Ha‘alilio, Boaz Mahune, David Pi‘ikoi (whose son was elevated tostatus as a prince in 1883), and other clients of the king who found posts forthem in government. Taken together with haole ministers and officials, the whole embryonic set of functionaries can be considered as a ‘service gentry’, typical of patrimonial regimes, rather than a Trojan horse for foreign influence.21

Some were of more service than others. Two subsets, in particular, standout. Kamehameha III’s most dependable clients included the governors ofMaui, Hawai‘i, Kaua‘i, plus John Young (Keoni Ana) sometime governor andkuhina nui, and the long-lived patriarch, Mataiao Kekuanao‘a, Governor of

22 For his career, Young, Rethinking, 116. 23 Ibid. 112.24 Merry, Colonizing Hawai‘i, 44.25 Translation of the Constitution and Laws of the Hawaiian Islands (Lahainaluna, 1842).

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O‘ahu and father of two heirs to the throne. Other close companions askaukau prospered in other ways. John I‘i rose by service through the judici-ary, land commission, the House of Nobles and was one of the framers of the1852 Constitution. He died in 1870 as a rich owner of land in Ewa on O‘ahu.Similarly, Charles Kana‘ina married well to a niece of Kamehameha I, tookcharge of royal lands, was promoted to ali‘i, ventured successfully intomoney-lending and schooner traffic, and produced an heir to the throne,William Lunalilo.22

The second subset of royal clients has attracted more attention, notably R. C. Wyllie, first foreign minister in Kamehameha III’s government, Lorrin Andrews who left his mission in 1842 to become a judge and assistant to Governor Kekuanao‘a, and John Ricord who as a trained lawyer was instantly installed as attorney-general in 1844. Similarly, the ubiquitous DrJudd as a former missionary filled a variety of cabinet posts over the period1842–53. What is remarkable about such men is not that they exercisedunique influence (they did not), but that they worked fairly harmoniouslyalong with royals, Hawaiian clients, and nobles to give the kingdom a degreeof recognition and independence and accessed for their own benefit and thatof fellow-kaukau the labour, land, and fiscal resources they helped to admin-ister. One historian has perceived that traditional ‘server-superior’ relationswere quite compatible with co-option of outsiders: ‘Men like John Ricord,Robert Wyllie, and Walter Murray Gibson served during different reigns andbecause of their abilities were attractive to the respective mo‘i they served. . . What is more these foreigners replaced the kaukau ali‘i when the demandfor Western expertise arose.’23

Replacement, however, came late in the day, particularly where outer-island governorships were concerned; and some of the haole clients were notso expert. Their contribution at the outset of constitutional governmentunder Kamehameha III was to translate the norms of Hawaiian patrimonial-ism into legal precepts and institutions within ‘an appropriation of Anglo-American law by the Kingdom’.24 The process began by codifying tax andlabour obligations to king and chiefs in a Declaration of Rights, 1839, whichprotected commoners against arbitrary imposts. The actual tax laws weredrawn up and revised by the Hawaiian, Boaz Mahune.25 Under constructionwas not so much a ‘constitutional monarchy’ as a strong hierarchy of royalsand officials backed by regulations. The first Constitution of 1840 began,therefore, with a list of the king’s prerogatives based on the general principleof royal protection in return for loyalty and ‘correct deportment’ [pono]; thepreservation of dynastic succession; power to manage all lands; direction ofall executive means of government; reserve of royals’ private lands and lands

26 For the 1840 Constitution, see Translation of the Constitution and Laws of the Hawaiian Islands; Statute Laws of His Majesty Kamehameha III (Honolulu, 1846).

27 Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1778–1854, 227–8.28 Translation of the Constitution, 3.

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taken for non-payment of taxes or fines; control of treaty relations and exter-nal commerce.26 Under the king, the executive and legislature consisted of apremier as a ‘special counsellor’ (an echo of the former kuhina-nui) and fourgovernors of the islands, a House of Nobles, and a representative body to dis-cuss legislation. They attended only three sessions of the embryonic legisla-ture in the 1840s.27 In 1850, the House of Representatives was expanded byroyal authority to twenty-four, elected by Hawaiian adult males and foreignresidents of naturalized status. The judiciary was nominally ‘independent’,but in fact was linked closely to island governors and responsible to aSupreme Court consisting of the king and chief justice.

In his preface to the 1846 edition of the Constitution, John Ricord wasforced to admit that little had been changed by the 1839 Bill of Rights: theConstitution was still patrimonial because ‘engrafted on the ancient form ofgovernment’.28 The political principles underlying the code of civil laws cen-tred on the king ‘whose executive functions are assigned to the managementof five ministers, dependent solely upon him, but controllable by a majorityof ministerial voices’. In practice, there was no ministerial veto over the kingor his executive before 1887. Governors, however, as royal appointmentswere accountable to the minister of the interior from 1845; and all ministerswere ex-officio members of a Privy Council of selected nobles accountableonly to the king and premier. In short, Hawai‘i’s ‘constitutional monarchy’was still far removed from the compromises and conventions being workedout in the United Kingdom and closer to the royal supremacy claimed by theearly Stuarts.

The influence of haole ministers and officials, therefore, has to be viewed inthe context of a struggle to uphold royal prerogatives in the face of a restlessHouse of Representatives at loggerheads with a House of Nobles, Cabinet,and Privy Council. A commission consisting of Judd, I‘i, and a haole judgedrew up a new constitution, debated and amended by the legislature and ap-proved by the king in 1852. Styled as ‘democratic’, even ‘liberal’, its prescrip-tions guided government for a decade. In theory, the king was checked by thekuhina nui—his own appointee. Ministers sat with the nobles, appointed asusual by the king, and were not members of the lower house. It was difficult,therefore, for representatives to force a minister to resign. In any case, minis-ters served at the king’s pleasure and met with him as a cabinet. They joinedwith island governors in the Privy Council and any other councillor the kingcared to appoint. Legislative power was shared between the king, nobles, andrepresentatives, but the king could veto bills. Representatives in the lowerhouse were elected by male suffrage and enjoyed a constitutional right to

29 Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1854–1874: Twenty Critical Years (Honolulu,1953), 115–17.

30 A daughter of Kina‘u and Kekuanao‘a and granddaughter of Kamehameha I.

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initiate budget appropriations. The result was to place in doubt funds re-quired for public expenditure, without control over borrowing by the execu-tive. As a result, from 1856, the executive resorted to the practice of bienniallegislative sessions and appropriations covering two years. But throughoutthe 1850s officials and ministers backed the monarchy in its privileges, par-ticularly Wyllie and Judd, before he was dropped from the Cabinet in 1853.29

From 1854, when Alexander Liholiho came to the throne as KamehamehaIV, there was a running debate in cabinet committees on the power of theroyal prerogative. Constitutional amendments were considered in 1859 and1860—all framed for the purpose of restoring and augmenting the royal ex-ecutive at the expense of elected representation. This monarchist programmestalled for lack of a legislative session in 1863 and because of the death ofKamehameha IV. It was left to the Privy Council of nobles and ministers toproclaim his brother, Lot, as the new king, confirmed by his sister and kuhinanui, Victoria Kamamalu.30

At the wish of the king a new constitution was produced and a conventionof nobles and delegates was appointed to examine it. Most of its eighty arti-cles were agreed quickly, but there was lengthy discussion on voter qualifica-tions. Kamehameha, therefore, dissolved the convention and ‘gave’ the 1864Constitution, after Cabinet discussion. It contained most of the objectives ofthe monarchy—curtailment of Privy Council powers and reinforcement of king and Cabinet as an executive in which the king placed his own men.Nobles and representatives were joined into a single Legislative Assemblywhich helped to outweigh the independence of those elected through a qualified franchise. In a sense, the old pre-1852 monarchy was restored in itspatrimonial style, backed by prescription and a formal legitimacy whichlasted for the next two decades.

Much of the style and efficiency of the state depended, therefore, on thepersonalities of its rulers, as well as their selection of officials. Successioncrises were avoided in the absence of direct heirs by the Hawaiian practice of fostering (hanai). In this way the children of the kaukau and governor,Kekuanao‘a and Kina‘u, a daughter of Kamehameha I, were reared by Kamehameha III and his wife, Kalama, who had no issue. Reigning monarchsusually designated their successors without dispute, but the Kamehameha dy-nasty ended in 1872 with the death of Kamehameha V (Lot) whose heir andsister, Victoria Kamamalu, predeceased him. It was decided by Privy Counciland nobles to continue the succession through the female line which left fourcandidates, effectively reduced to two—William Charles Lunalilo and DavidKalakaua—by exclusion of Ruth Ke‘elikolani (who spoke only Hawaiian)

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Table The Kamehameha Dynasty and Kaukau Ali’i

Ø Ka‘ahumanu = D Kamehameha I = Ø Keopuolani = Ø Kaheiheimalie Ø --------------------------------------------------[regent 1824–32] [1795–1819] | | | |

--------------------------------------------------- | | |D Liholiho D Kauikeaouli Ø Kina‘u = D Kekuanao‘a = Ø Pauahi | |[K. II 1819–24] [K. III 1824–54] | | | |

| Ø Ruth Ke‘elikolani | |-------------------------- | |

D Alexander Liholiho D Lota Kapuaiwa | |[K. IV 1854–63] = Ø Emma [K. V ‘Lot’ 1863–72]† | |

|KaleleonalaniD Kana‘ina = Ø Kekauluohi |

| |D King William Charles Lunalilo |[by election 1873–4] |

D Kapa‘akea = Ø Keohokalole Ø Konia = D Paki| ||

Ø Bernice--------------------------------------------------------------- Pauahi‡

D King David La‘amea Kalakaua Ø Queen Lili‘uokalani[by election 1874–91] [by Cabinet 1891–3]

† Last of the Kamehameha mo‘i. His sucessor, Lunalilo, was grand-nephew to Kamehameha I, and Kalakaua was descended from chiefs of Kona.‡ Last of the Kamehameha lineage through Konia. Paki and Konia were foster-parents to Lili‘uokalani.

Source: Bingham, A Residence, 5; Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, i. 119; Young, Rethinking the Native Hawaiian Past, 113–14; HSA, ‘Hawaiian ChiefsBibliographical Abstract’.

31 See Table. 32 Cited in Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, i. 59.33 Theodore Morgan, Hawaii: A Century of Economic Change, 1778–1876 (Cambridge,

Mass., 1948), chap. 7, 198–201.34 Jon J. Chinen, The Great Mahele: Hawaii’s Land Division of 1848 (Honolulu, 1958), 1–31;

Robert H. Horwitz, Public Land Policy in Hawaii: An Historical Analysis (Honolulu, 1969);Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, i. 132–5; Richard A. Greer, ‘Notes on Early Land Titles and Tenurein Hawai‘i’, HJH 30 (1996), 29–52.

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and Bernice Pauahi (married to an American banker).31 Lunalilo won aplebiscite and was approved by the legislature for a short reign; and hisbrother, Kalakaua, succeeded by the same mechanism in 1874. Both ali‘i con-tinued in the monarchical style of the last Kamehamehas, a tradition taken upagain in unfavourable political circumstances by Queen Lili‘uokalani, sisterof Kalakaua, in 1891.

The question, however, is not so much the dynastic integrity of the succes-sion of kings, but the longevity of kingship over the Hawaiian group, in theface of external and internal pressures for reversal of status in favour of fac-tional leadership by haoles, or cession of sovereignty through consular orother brokers to a foreign power. The answer is not to be found simply in con-stitutional management or ‘centralization’. Indeed, it could be argued therewas a considerable diffusion of authority and administrative power to gover-nors and officials, providing they had the confidence of the king. Like otherpatrimonial regimes, Hawaiian kingship rested its security not merely on status differences among chiefs and between chiefs and commoners, but onaccess to resources by those who would otherwise make political trouble forthe paramount. Hawaiian nobility and, to a lesser extent, haole residents oflong standing were in competition among themselves for office and economicadvantage; and they were in continuous economic relations with externalagencies for production and trade. As anthropologists have noted for the earl-ier period of trade relations in the nineteenth century, in Weberian terms ‘theHawaiian kingship was coupled to an estate type of patrimonial domination,enabling those with seigneurial rights “to conclude compromises with theruler” ’.32 The profitability for chiefs exploiting these rights in terms of pro-ductive labour has been amply demonstrated for the period of the sandal-wood, services, and produce trade, leading to exportable staples in the 1850sderived from early experiments in ranching and plantations.33 The possibilityof ‘compromises’ for mutual advantage can also be extended to haole officialsand gentry who were well placed to supervise access to Hawai‘i’s major resource—land—and to promote other sources of public revenue to keep the kingdom in being.

As is well known, the great land division (Mahele) of 1848 was predicatedon a theory of royal control of all domain and a willingness to strike a bargainwith ali‘i and their subsidiary estate managers and clients by allocating landsto king, chiefs, and commoners in freehold title, as had already been at-tempted for fishing grounds in 1842.34 Behind this ‘reform’ lay the desire ofking and chiefs to improve revenues in decline in the early 1840s as well as an

35 HSA, Interior, Letterbook, vol. ii, Young to Kekale’i, 19 Feb. 1847. 36 Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, i. 167–9. 37 Horwitz, Public Land Policy in Hawaii, 158–63; and table 24 ‘Sales of public land in

Hawaii, 1846–1893’.

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expectation of new wealth from ranching and plantations. Thus, the Mahelewas coupled with a more general attempt to regulate sales to foreigners, whileopening land to investment and production. The process began, therefore,with a plan to adjudicate claims to land titles acquired before 1846. To thisend, a committee of Privy Council consisting of Young, Judd, Pi‘ikoi, andKekuanao‘a in 1846 set about drawing up guidelines on which to base its de-cisions, but restricted its case work to house lots near Honolulu. Formallyconstituted as the Board of Commissioners to Quiet Titles (Land Commis-sion), it made the basic recommendation for the tripartite division betweenking, chiefs, and commoners with a further share of one-third to governmentin return for title grants. It had no power, however, to make any division itselfuntil the Mahele of 1848. So, at the outset of the revolution in land tenure, titles were refused to Hawaiian commoners or foreign applicants until the determination of royal (‘Crown’), chiefs’ and government shares, to satisfythe desire of chiefs and their client land managers to settle freehold titlesamong themselves first.35 Untitled applicants had to wait; and no foreignercould be granted a title in fee simple until an oath of allegiance had been ad-ministered. In 1848, king and nobility came to terms: some 245 chiefs grantedone-third of their estates to the king in return for freehold title to the rest. Theking then divided these and his own lands into private holdings, Crown lands,and government lands. It was stipulated that commoners would be able toclaim title to lots in their possession, from whatever source, at the time of thedivision. By 1855, the king held as Crown lands some one million acres (24per cent) of all land; government lands totalled 1.5 million acres (36 per cent);and chiefs gained title to some 1.57 million acres (39 per cent). Commonerswere left with under 1 per cent.

The main reason for this spoliation was the refusal of chiefs and otherHawaiians who secured titles to recognize commoners’ usehold rights to forest and grazing land outside allotments and the failure or inability of manycommoners to lodge title claims.36 Principal beneficiaries were the Crown, theali‘i, and the rising members of the service gentry who administered lands,taxes, courts, and commissions, and, not least, the important group of islandgovernors. Foreign purchasers of titles were also beneficiaries, 1845–60, infewer numbers and for larger areas. Much of this foreign purchase was gov-ernment land and most of the total of 3,458 sales made before 1893 were con-centrated in the period 1846–65, when some half a million acres changedhands for a low average price of about $2 per acre.37

In this way, a major resource was accessed by Hawaiian nobility and theirclients and by a growing class of foreign investors and settlers who came tohave a considerable stake in the political competence and stability of the

38 Kuykendall, Hawaiian Kingdom, 1778–1854, 416–27.

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regime. The closer they were to royals and officials of that regime, the lesslikely they were to turn to outside brokers and patrons for support or even achange of regime altogether, as long as their basic interests in plantation andcommerce were safeguarded. Much depended, therefore, on the ways inwhich the monarchy and its servants accessed and administered the secondmajor resource—public revenue—and made its benefits available through expenditure on capital projects and emoluments for Hawaiian and haolesupporters.

To these ends, the monarchy created a civil service and appointed envoys,largely by patronage and based on principles of loyalty, kinship, incorpora-tion through marriage, rather than through recruitment according to qualifi-cations and experience. Fortunately, such experience was available; andcompared with many other Pacific communities, including those under colo-nial rule, Hawai‘i was a fairly well-administered state for much of the nine-teenth century. But its continued existence as an independent state rested onability to satisfy the aspirations of royalty, gentry, foreign investors, and (lastof all) its own people together with recognition by outside powers. The question, in short, was whether, in the long term, a process of ‘reversal’ of patron–client status would erode the authority of the patrimonial statethrough foreign brokerage leading to its demise. The question might wellhave been answered by annexation to the United States in the early 1850s,though internal pressures and external foreign policies favouring such a solu-tion were weak.38 The possibility was never entirely absent before the revolu-tion of 1893, but further changes in the internal politics of the kingdom werenecessary, before opposition to the patrimonial state gathered strength.

Hawai‘i’s civil service owed its existence to the king. Created in the 1840sto assess and collect taxes, administer titles to private and public lands and torun the kingdom’s courts, police, army, schools, and representation abroad,five administrative departments embodied an older tradition of nobility andgentry at the service of a paramount, as well as precepts and rules introducedto regulate the services of a developing society. These two arms of adminis-tration—functionaries drawn from the ranks of island ali‘i and from a liter-ate Hawaiian and haole elite—were embodied in the persons of four islandgovernors and five ministers, all appointed by the king as a gift to loyal fol-lowers. All other offices were filled by commissions to individuals awarded atsenior levels by King in Council, or for lower ranks by ministers or governors.Kamehameha III’s Acts of 1845 expanded the fiscal and supervisory functionsof the king’s friends mainly through his premier as minister of ‘interior affairs’in ways that concentrated much of the islands’ judicial and executive businesswithin this ministry. As the largest spending department responsible for public works, the Ministry of the Interior was also the largest employer and

39 For comparison, the chief justice was paid $5,000 and chief clerks of ministries $2,500annually. The steepest rise was in the so-called ‘Civil List’ for royalty and retainers, including the Privy Purse, from a modest $12,000 annually in the 1860s to over $50,000 in the 1880s.

40 For techniques of appointment and promotion, Newbury, ‘Patronage and Bureaucracy’,6–7, 12–14.

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the main channel for communications from island governors. In this way,much of the governors’ responsibilities for tax collection, police and islandcourts, lands, roads, the militias and forts, swelled the business of the Interior.The department paid all salaries. Its responsibility for public works ramifiedinto bureaux for water, forestry, immigration, and postal communications,until these were split off in the late 1890s.

Next to the king, therefore, the minister of the interior was the most pow-erful man in the kingdom. Fittingly, Kamehameha III appointed John Young(Keoni Ana), as kuhina nui and premier to the post, 1845–55, and, thereafter,his brother and heir apparent, Lot Kamehameha. But like all ministerial posts there was a fairly quick turnover of men who held the office for undertwo years on average and sometimes controlled more than one ministry. By contrast, island governors held their posts for relatively long periods(Kekuanao‘a was Governor of O‘ahu for thirty years). Unlike ministers, too,their salaries tended to remain stable at about $1,500 annually, while minis-terial salaries escalated over a period of forty years to $5,000 or $6,000.39 Forboth categories of senior officials there were other means of supplementingincomes.

Governors and ministers appointed by royal patronage were the principalrecruitment officers for a second order of clientage throughout the Hawaiianadministration.40 In the absence of formal methods of application, selectionof officials down to the most menial posts was through recommendation by sponsors—relatives and friends. There was a bias towards securingHawaiians for collectors, assessors, judgeships, police, and towards haolesfor more senior offices of sheriff, departmental posts (clerkships), senior judi-ciary, and most of the technical posts in public works, agriculture, and health.But the nascent civil service was not divided on ethnic lines; and it was not un-usual for senior Hawaiian ministers to nominate haole officials, just as it wasusual for the monarchy to place great trust in its naturalized European service gentry. For Hawaiians with some education advancement wasthrough the patronage of island governors, as assistants and judges. Com-plaints of favouritism were frequent; and public petitions to ministers of theinterior could sometimes work to the disadvantage of governors and theirstaff. In the absence of a clear division of powers, moreover, judicial decisionscould be overturned by governors and King in Council at the request of a min-ister. At lower levels, the posts of tax collector and assessor were coveted forthe opportunity of relieving friends and relatives from obligations. Competi-tion for paid office, however humble, was keen, because it freed a public

41 Newbury, ‘Patronage and Bureaucracy’, 25.42 The Hawaiian Register and Directory for 1878.

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employee from taxes in kind or labour; and it opened up possibilities for securing titles in land.

This became clear in the case of governors and the staff appointed as sur-veyors and land valuers in the wake of the Mahele. There is a record of islandgovernors making public land purchases on their own behalf in the 1850s andsometimes falling into arrears on payment.41 Like the konohiki they had superseded, governors and their agents took over the task of supervising theinterests of royals in plantations and ranching. Much ordinary business forsales and lease of government lands was handled through governors and theInterior; and much was delegated to locally appointed commissioners of pri-vate ways and water rights, land agents, and surveyors. Valuation became a major rural speciality for both Hawaiians and haole fortunate enough to secure nomination. Throughout the period boundaries and evaluation of-fered lucrative work for friends of governors, nobles, and legislators betweenbiennial sessions.

While the service gentry took advantage of the expanding market in land,there is little evidence in the archival records of outright cases of corruptionor embezzlement. Some taxes were misappropriated on Hawai‘i in 1860; andthere was a more blatant case of major defalcation in the post office in 1886.Given the close network of public officialdom it was not easy to misappro-priate public funds; but it was easy for interior officials and their ministerialmasters to overspend beyond legislative appropriations on salaries, publicworks, and extravagant schemes for embellishing royals through accommo-dation and allowances, additional titles and functions, the accoutrements ofmilitary and civil office. Most of this was handled through the Interior, thebiggest spending ministry in the kingdom. After a period of relatively modestbudgets (under $1,000,000) till the early 1870s, public expenditure suddenlytook off during the reign of David Kalakaua, beginning with the very neces-sary Ali‘iolani Hale which housed government offices. Thereafter, publicspending rose to three or four millions biennially and government borrowingand indebtedness followed proportionately.

The second arm of Hawai‘i’s civil service—its diplomatic representation—was both a source of intelligence unusual among Pacific states and an oppor-tunity for less than loyal envoys to indulge in policy-making for specialinterest groups among the settler and business community. By 1878, repre-sentatives had increased to no fewer than fourteen commissioners and consuls in capitals abroad, including a resident minister in Washington, andsome thirty-five consular agents reporting to a Ministry of Foreign Affairs.42

But in matters of serious diplomacy, the monarchy trusted only its own envoys and royals travelled widely. For a time extensive contacts with three

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0

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52 53 54 55 56/58 58/60 60/62 62/64 64/66 66/68 68/70 70/72 72/74 74/76 76/78 78/80 80/82 82/84 84/86 86/88 88/90 90/92

expendituregovt. debtrevenue

Fig . 4 Hawaiian government revenue and expenditure, 1852–1890/92, US$000.Note: Fiscal years are from 1 April to 31 March. The year 1852 is for 9 months to 31 December; 1853, 1854, 1855 are for calendar years. Over the period 1856/58 to 1890/92 intervals cover two fiscal years. A number of fiscal periods 1872/74 to 1886/88 include loans in revenue accounts.Sources: Reports of the Minister of Finance, 1850–1890 (Hawai‘i State Archives; Rhodes House, Oxford). See, too, Theodore Morgan, Hawaii: A Century of Economic Change 1778–1876 (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), appendices, 230–1. It should be noted that ‘Government debt’ in terms of the issueof Exchequer notes and external borrowing is reported in a mix of fiscal and biennial years. Servicing charges are not reported separately. Nevertheless,the main trend is clear, especially after the Loan Acts of 1874 and 1876: see Ralph Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1854–1874: Twenty CriticalYears (Honolulu, 1953), 192.

43 Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1854–1874, 210–19.44 Newbury, ‘Patronage and Bureaucracy’, 9; The Hawaiian Almanac and Annual, 1887, 31.

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major powers, Great Britain, France, and the United States, helped to reduce the risk of loss of sovereignty, while flattering the pretensions of thesovereigns.

Through diplomacy, too, negotiations were opened to reduce the king-dom’s vulnerability in overseas markets. The first projected treaties to breacha United States tariff barrier of between 30 and 40 per cent on imported raw sugar came to nothing.43 The issue was pursued, however, as a form ofeconomic salvation. Its importance politically lay in the amount of leveragereciprocity supplied to those anxious for annexation by the United States. Butpromotion of reciprocity at the level of American government depended onthe political opinions of American resident ministers in Honolulu and oncomplex political canvassing of successive administrations to sell economicand strategic arguments in favour of special treatment for a distant supplier.In 1867, there was a brief meeting of minds between a new US minister, General McCook, and those in the Johnson administration who could see nogain economically, but were persuaded by the case for influence through com-mercial means. In Honolulu, there were serious doubts: the Foreign Minister,De Varigny perceived the risk in signing a treaty for a short-term measure ofprosperity followed by a change of terms or cancellation later. Such a loss ofadvantage might provoke planter pressure for annexation.

The interests of planters nearly prevailed. The Hawaiian Minister of Finance, Charles Harris, signed a draft treaty for duty-free entry for rawsugar in return for a long list of duty-free US imports. In Hawai‘i, the legisla-ture supported the treaty. Cabinet and king were offended, however, by thepresence of an American warship in harbour whose commander was a sus-pected annexationist. It was known, too, that a visiting Congressman had arrived to report covertly on the effects of reciprocity. In Washington, thedraft treaty of 1867 was debated for three years in five sessions of Congress.In the end, the Senate threw it out.

A minor trade recession in 1872 renewed demand from planters for reci-procity. This time producer anxiety coincided with a steep upward trend inpublic expenditure, public borrowing, and consequential rises in taxes on realestate and personal property, paid mainly by the Hawaiian and haole elite.44

The deficit financing that marked Kalakaua’s rule began in earnest in 1874and made him and his cabinets eager to secure commercial and fiscal returnsfrom increased trade without sacrificing sovereignty. So the king supportedreciprocity at this stage and joined the mission of his envoys E. H. Allen andH. A. Carter to Washington. As is well known, Hawai‘i was accorded freeentry for raw sugar for seven years, in return for duty-free American exports.At the same time, the active interest of the administration in the value of

45 Sumner J. La Croix and Christopher Grandy, ‘The Political Instability of Reciprocal Tradeand the Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom’, JEH 57 (1979), 157.

46 Ibid. 151–79.47 See esp. the third volume of Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1874–1893: The

Kalakaua Dynasty (Honolulu, 1967); Merze Tate, The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom: A Political History (New Haven, 1965); William Adam Russ, Jr, The Hawaiian Revolution (1893–94) (Selinsgrove, 1961).

48 La Croix and Grandy, ‘The Political Instability of Reciprocal Trade’, fig. 1, 154.49 Jacob Adler, Claus Spreckels: The Sugar King in Hawaii (Honolulu, 1966).

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Pearl River as a strategic base was allowed for by a Senate amendment to thetreaty denying to other powers strategic concessions. The Hawaiian govern-ment reluctantly approved. The Senate ratified the treaty in March 1875; amuch closer vote to change the US tariff was approved by the House of Representatives; and Kalakaua proclaimed the treaty in 1876.

Consequently, one interpretation of the 1876 treaty is that it was primarilya means for the United States to exclude other powers at the price of a tariffconcession.45 But there was no haste to follow up this advantage by paying for the considerable cost of making Pearl into a viable port. Instead, the option was allowed to lie dormant for the moment, while the advantages forHawaiian sugar were extremely clear over the period from 1876 and throughthe 1880s in terms of quantities exported. Thereafter, there was a price fall,following the loss of advantage through changes introduced under theMcKinley Tariff of 1890.

It has been claimed, too, that reciprocity prepared the way for annexation,just as De Varigny feared it would, by forcing vulnerable interest groups inplantations and other business dependent on sugar to take action leading toconstitutional change in 1887, the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893 andannexation in 1898.46 The argument is more refined than that bald statement;and it makes allowance for other factors on the American side such as stra-tegic interest and anxiety about the actions of other powers. But it has to betested by a closer examination of those ‘interest groups’ and their motives, aswell as the structure of the government they were seeking to subvert.47

The importance of sugar as a staple is not in dispute, nor the growth of im-ports from the United States in a steady upward trend from the 1860s.48 Moreimportant, reliance on sugar as an export discouraged diversification intoother staples; and the tariff advantage for raw sugar discouraged investmentin local refining with one or two exceptions such as Claus Spreckels, largelythrough his financial patronage of the Hawaiian government in return forland and water rights.49 Spreckels’s example demonstrated that there was notcomplete unity in the ‘sugar interests’ camp. He was not an annexationist;and he was driven out of Hawai‘i by his fellow planters after 1893. In severalways the results of the 1876 treaty were contradictory. Leases of governmentand Crown lands expanded, creating a vested interest among the Hawaiianelite of nobles and royals with income from sugar and ranching. Because of

50 Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu, 1977), 25.51 ‘Hawaiian Public-Debt Statement’, Papers Relating to the Annexation of the Hawaiian

Islands to the United States (Washington, 1893), 6263.

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labour imports the demography of the group changed in structure.50 Immi-gration under labour contracts, moreover, reinforced planter dependency onthis low-cost alternative to local labour, antagonized Hawaiians, and madethe topic of supplies from China and Japan a serious issue in negotiations.American rights to exclusive use of Pearl irritated Hawaiians, but acted as amagnet for speculative investment in land around the harbour.

In 1883 both sides considered renewal or abrogation, but there was nostomach in Hawai‘i for a radical change. Congressional committee reportswere cool to the domestic effects of the treaty in the United States, but thoughtit was worth modifying to keep a strategic advantage. American fiscal losseswere substantial in terms of revenue foregone, if viewed in isolation. A seven-year renewal was agreed by both governments in 1884, together with a moreopen declaration of exclusive rights to Pearl for coaling and naval repairs.

Given the scale of American and other foreign investment in sugar estatesand associated business—some $32 millions by 1892—there is, indeed, aprima-facie case for claiming that this special interest would exert pressurefor continued protection. Whether that pressure could be turned into politi-cal action through the Hawaiian or American governments depended on theweight of business representation locally and abroad. In Hawai‘i, moreover,as Kalakaua turned against renewal of reciprocity on grounds of loss of sov-ereignty by concessions over Pearl, the pressing question in the 1880s was thefinancial viability of a regime which operated its administration according to laws fashioned by the executive, interpreted in courts appointed by the executive, and operated a system of public appointments as rewards for loyalservice.

Much of the politics of the Kalakaua period (1874–91) turned on losses orgains in financial advantage for a noisy set of interest groups among whomsugar growers and exporters were important but not unique. Overall, the period was characterized by a loss of ability on the part of the monarchy tosatisfy its clients and assure a majority in the legislature (by using officials aslegislators). There was no shortage of rewards for those in public office. Forofficials of the Interior about one-third of biennial appropriations was paidout in salaries, wages, pensions, and the Civil List for royals which was a highproportion for a department also responsible for capital expenditure. Butthat did not satisfy those legislators and voters excluded from access to suchresources and worried by the high level of public debt which amounted to $3 millions by 1892, a sum equal to biennial revenues.51 As long as generalexpenses on current account were topped up by issue of government bonds athigh rates of interest there was pressure to raise ‘internal’ (direct) taxes and indirect taxes from customs to meet interest charges. By the late 1880s,

52 Where not otherwise cited, statistics are from published reports Budget and Finance, Reports 1842–1900, 3 vols., Hawai‘i State Archives. See, too, Hawaiian Almanac and Annualfor 1891.

53 For their careers in Hawaiian business and politics, Jacob Adler and Gwynn Barrett, eds.,The Diaries of Walter Murray Gibson, 1886, 1887 (Honolulu, 1973); Adler, Claus Spreckels.There is no thorough study of the business community at this period, but see R. A. Hawkins,‘Economic Diversification in the American Pacific Territory of Hawai‘i, 1893–1941’, Ph.D. thesis (London School of Economics, 1986) for coverage of the better-known firms; and for con-spiracy theory, Merze Tate, Hawaii: Reciprocity or Annexation (East Lansing, Mich., 1968).

54 La Croix and Grandy, ‘The Political Instability of Reciprocal Trade’, 169; Tate, The UnitedStates and the Hawaiian Kingdom, appendix ii; Russ, The Hawaiian Revolution (1893–94),32–3.

55 See Fig. 4. ‘Internal’ taxes in La Croix and Grandy are too low, omitting poll taxes, licences,etc.

56 Tate, The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom, appendix ii, 340.57 Russ, The Hawaiian Revolution (1893–94), 32; Papers Relating to the Annexation of the

Hawaiian Islands to the United States (Washington, 1893).

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direct and indirect taxes accounted for two-thirds of a three million dollarbudget which fell into deficit for four of the six biennial periods, 1878/80 to1890/2.52

The deterioration in Hawaiian public finances, by itself, was not enough tobring down the government, given the constitutional authority of the kingover cabinet and legislature. But the regime became vulnerable to attacks onwaste and privilege from haole interest groups. Their targets were the monar-chy and its host of functionaries, the charmed circle of Kalakaua’s appoint-ments overseas and to offices of state, and close business partners such as Walter Murray Gibson, Kalakaua’s quixotic cabinet minister, adviser,landowner, and newspaper editor, or the sugar magnate, banker, and entre-preneur, Claus Spreckels.53 While the issue of public finance has been recog-nized as a factor leading to a forced change of constitution, there are pointsabout the incidence of taxation that need to be clarified.54 First, there was a marked change in the sources of revenue over the whole period from the 1860s to the 1880s which had a bearing on the attitudes of resident Americans and others of the business and official elite. Customs declined toabout a third of revenues, while taxes on real estate and property doubled toabout 20 per cent. There is fair case for associating these imposts with a ris-ing propertied class, Hawaiian and haole. But all classes paid poll taxes, gen-eral licences and fees, including road and school charges, and the burden ofthese imposts fell mainly on Hawaiians, Chinese, and Japanese labourers.55

On limited evidence for 1881, it has been argued that under a fifth of the tax-paying population, mainly 2,600 Americans and Europeans, paid 44 per centof personal, real estate, and other internal taxes. Hawaiians numbering overfifteen thousand paid less than a third, while unrepresented Chinese and others paid one-quarter of such taxes.56 A similar observation has been madefor the biennial period 1891–2.57 Perhaps all that can be concluded is thatthere was a shift towards direct taxation in the rapid economic expansion of

58 Newbury, ‘Patronage and Bureaucracy’, 13, 23, 28.59 J. C. Ching, ‘A History and Criticism of Political Speaking in the Hawaiian Kingdom,

1874–1991’, Ph.D. thesis (University of Missouri, 1962), 29–44; Tate, The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom, chap. 3; Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1874–1893, 200 andnote.

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the 1870s and 1880s, and this was felt more by vociferous interest groupscritical of government waste. In per capita terms it is clear enough that taxesrose from $2.8 in 1876 to $5.8 by 1891. The population as a whole faced ahigher cost of living from duties on imported goods and contributed a declin-ing proportion in the numerous petty imposts which had been the basis for in-ternal taxes from the 1830s to the 1870s. There was more than enoughcombustible material to ignite political protest about taxation from thosewho paid most and were frustrated in their effort to influence or control gov-ernment before 1887.

Increasing ethnic tensions may also have played a part in sharpening haoledisaffection with the regime. But analysis of Hawaiian cabinets and the legis-lature and administration on ‘racial’ lines encounters increasing cross-ethnicdivisions on grounds of ideology (republicanism against monarchy) and theking’s reliance on a mix of favourites, many of whom were Hawaiian-borndescendants of immigrants. Personalities such as Gibson—a fluent Hawaiian-speaker—defy racial interpretations of Hawaiian politics. What was at issuewas not ethnic origins, but access to privilege through government service orthrough protection of real estate and commerce. In practice, Kalakaua ap-pointed more Hawaiian nobles and cabinet ministers than his predecessorsfrom Kamehameha III onwards. He had come to the throne promising jobsfor Hawaiians. None of that promise had been forgotten by nobles or com-moners; and the records of the Interior for the period demonstrate that moreappointments were made available for Hawaiians in executive positions,where less education and no bonds or sureties were required.58 Hawaiiansstill commanded a majority in the legislature. The House of Nobles and theCouncil of State, on the other hand, reflected, through appointments made bythe king, a decline in the numbers of ali‘i descendants and an increase in haoleloyalists. Where racial origins really mattered in local politics was in the con-tinued exclusion of resident Asians from the franchise.

Until 1887, moreover, the king dismissed cabinets frequently and selectedhis ministers on his own initiative. Politics still turned on personalities ratherthan parties.59 By any standards elections were corrupted by the executive tosecure support from Hawaiians and some haole, while a growing foreign elec-torate favoured candidates opposed to increased taxes, extravagance, andfavours to the king’s friends. By 1878, the Cabinet was under attack for financial maladministration and the costs of servicing Loan Acts. The elec-tions of 1882 centred on the debt question and brought in Walter Gibson tothe premiership with a programme of welfare, further loans, and an ambi-

60 Merrill to State Department, 25 July, 16 Oct. 1886, cited in Tate, The United States and theHawaiian Kingdom, 81.

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tious scheme for diplomatic cooperation with Samoa, Tonga, and the CookIslands. It was at this period that Claus Spreckels, as one of the government’sbankers, was able to solicit a large land grant, back a new Loan Act, carrythrough a lucrative agency contract to displace American gold and silvercoins with Kalakaua’s own currency. Other extravagance such as a corona-tion, tours abroad, increase in the national debt were issues in the electionsfor 1884, when a business and planter group emerged in the campaign in opposition to Gibson and gained control of finance committees in the legisla-ture. Cuts in expenditure were agreed and then ignored. Some saw an attackon royal prerogatives as the only way out of a patrimonial regime.

A group of ‘Independents’ led by the lawyers William Kinney and LorrinThurston made some headway at new elections in 1886, though twelve oftheir twenty-eight candidates were Hawaiians. Among the pro-governmentcandidates were only one haole and many Hawaiians who had held public office as judges, assessors, schoolteachers. On the whole, government can-didates prevailed, and Gibson was able to form a new ministry which was unable to deal with corruption charges surrounding the issue of governmentopium licences or criticism of patronage appointments to the civil service. Tothe US minister, Merrill, it seemed that native Hawaiians might take over allposts; W. D. Alexander, official surveyor, thought that the government mightbecome ‘an Asian despotism like that of Johore’.60

The government was less despotic than it seemed, as the Kalakaua–Gibson–Spreckels alliance broke down over public debt which Spreckels had bought up, and over the issue of a new loan to London banks whichSpreckels did not want. Kalakaua’s client circle began to fall apart, just as theloose group of Independents led by Thurston and Sandford B. Dole musteredenough support to threaten an armed insurrection lead by the so-called‘Hawaiian League’. The League, formed by Kinney, Thurston, Dr S. G.Tucker, and Dole claimed to have over four hundred members by 1887,mainly merchants, planters, and businessmen, and drafted a constitution. Itwas not, at this stage, backed by the US representative, Merrill, but it had amonopoly of available force through command of the volunteer HonoluluRifles and a local German militia. On 30 June, Thurston declared an end tothe Hawaiian government, but not the overthrow of the monarchy, andserved his party’s resolutions and constitution on the king.

The king yielded to the demands of the conspirators in the bloodless ‘revo-lution’ of 1887 and reluctantly signed away many of his prerogatives in aConstitution that made a number of reforms. Nobles were subject to electionand merged with other members of the legislature from which officials wereexcluded. The king lost his right to dismiss ministers unless on a vote of con-fidence, veto bills, or make constitutional amendments. The franchise was

61 Newbury, ‘Patronage and Bureaucracy’, 30; Biennial Report of the Attorney-General to theLegislative Assembly of 1888 (Honolulu, 1888), 2–3. Governors were restored for a short periodby Lili‘iuokalani, but they were simply friends of the queen without executive powers.

62 See esp. the section ‘Reform and Patronage’, in Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom,1874–1893, 402.

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extended to male residents of all nationalities (except Asians) with propertyqualifications that excluded many poorer Hawaiians.

The patrimonial state was deconstructed to a certain extent at the top,though it was not a formal ‘constitutional monarchy’, nor a ‘responsible’ gov-ernment, as Kalakaua retained the right to appoint his own Cabinet, ratherthan accept the advice of elected ministers. There is little sign that for the nobility a patrimonial culture was uprooted by a few constitutional prescrip-tions. Former League members who now regrouped as the Reform Party ex-pected to benefit from a spoils system, but were not entirely satisfied, and fewcivil servants were replaced below the rank of minister. At most, the king wasmade to repay ‘gifts’ from nobles and business friends and settle his debts.Elections the same year confirmed the dominance of Reform in the legislatureand Thurston became Minister of the Interior. One immediate consequencewas the passage of two Acts to remove most of the powers of island governorsand bring control of police and lesser judiciary under the attorney-general.The practice of appointing royal relatives and retainers to the most senior ad-ministrative posts in the islands came to an end.61

There were other consequences indicating fundamental weakness in the attempt to make constitutional monarchy work through the dominance ofpolitical factions. It was evident that the royal militia of under a hundred recruits could not handle public riots or an armed insurrection. Control overarms imports and volunteer militias was never enforced. A subsequent rising(on behalf of monarchy) led by the part-Hawaiian Robert Wilcox, in 1889,had to be put down with loss of life by the Honolulu Rifles with help frommarines. Secondly, political groups remained fissile, incorporating a widerange of republican and monarchical opinions. On the whole, Reform wasrun by moderate conservatives; a National Reform Party composed mainly ofpart-Hawaiians looked back to the Constitution of 1864; and from 1892there was also a Liberal Party bringing together Hawaiians and European artisans.62 In the 1890 elections the Hawaiian vote rallied sufficiently to placeReform in the minority. The king was able to choose his own Cabinet againas a mix of conservatives from party factions. There is every indication he intended to continue in this way up till the date of his death in San Franciscoin 1891, when he was succeeded by his sister, Lili‘uokalani.

The queen’s short reign brought to a head the patrimonial and reformisttendencies of opposed factions in government and culminated in the revolu-tion of 1893. Behind the revolution, of course, lay more than mere dissatis-faction with a spendthrift monarchy or the determined effort of Lili‘uokalani

63 Papers Relating to the Annexation of the Hawaiian Islands to the United States, 60.64 Ching, ‘A History’, 21–32.

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to reverse the loss of status and prerogatives under the 1887 Constitution.The most usually cited factor has been American economic predominancebuilt up through sugar, shipping, banking, and the early effects of the Reciprocity Treaty. The overall background of foreign relations with anemerging Pacific power in the context of late nineteenth-century formal andinformal imperial control placed the Hawaiian state at the same kind of dis-advantage as other Pacific communities in a region where spheres of interestwere being consolidated. Not least, Hawaiians were becoming a minority intheir own state. By 1890, they made up 45 per cent of a population that included 36,000 (40 per cent) Asian and Portuguese immigrants. Hawaiian-born and other European foreigners accounted for only 13 per cent of a totalpopulation of 89,990.63 In terms of voter registration, however, the demo-graphic disadvantage for Hawaiians was less obvious. Of a total of 18,593registered voters in 1890, Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians could still com-mand just over half of the electorate. The Portuguese were reported to votefor monarchy, adding, perhaps, another 10 per cent. Even if all local-bornand enfranchised foreigners had been opposed to the monarchy (and manywere not) they could muster only 9.5 per cent of registered voters. Of those,only 4 per cent (783) were of American origin, though they could count onsome support from British and German settlers. This stark fact—that anti-monarchists and annexationists could not win a referendum or abolishthe monarchy through a political programme—doubtless increased theirfrustration with legal methods.

It can be argued, of course, that their economic preponderance far out-weighed their numbers. A patrimonial regime that lost control of returnsfrom public taxation and depended largely on public loans and sale or leaseof remaining government and Crown lands was in a deteriorating positionand risked loosing loyalties at senior levels of government and lower levels ofadministration. To some extent, Kalakaua had been skilful in shoring up themonarchy’s position by playing off his ministers one against the other, chang-ing them around, and keeping control of the legislature by appointments ofnobles and by corrupt electoral practices. One historian of this electoral cor-ruption defines the regime at this period as ‘an oligarchy and aristocracy withmonarchical trappings’.64 But urban native-Hawaiian electors were an uncer-tain factor in local politics. After loss of land, many commoners lived in andaround Honolulu as part of a small, wage-earning class that emerged at the1890 elections as the Hi Kalai‘aina party. Few Hawaiian commoners of theeight thousand or so in Honolulu supported Hawaiian radicals like Wilcox,or, indeed, gave active street support to Lili‘uokalani during her struggle withher cabinet ministers. It may be, as Ching has suggested, that commoner

65 Tate, The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom, 114; La Croix and Grandy, ‘The Political Instability of Reciprocal Trade’, 171–5.

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loyalties were difficult to mobilize around lofty ideals such as the ‘Hawaiiannation’, though their opposition to Asian immigration was strong enough toproduce a current of ethnic antagonism in the politics of the 1880s. In the politics of disenchantment that characterized Hawai‘i’s fissile parties an important haole section of a disillusioned electorate turned to the politics ofintimidation and enlistment of external brokers and patrons.

There is a temptation to equate annexationists with those closely involvedin the sugar industry. Historians have not been slow to see a connection be-tween depression in sugar exports and prices after 1890 and ‘the fermenta-tion of revolutionary ideas’ in Hawaiian politics.65 The movement for changeto a republic centred on the Annexation Club of Honolulu businessmen. Itsnucleus consisted of the 1887 Reform leaders and never numbered more than seventeen. Founded as a precautionary measure against a monarchicalreturn to patrimonialism, the leadership sounded out official attitudes inWashington and in New York and San Francisco business circles. Onemethod tried by the Reform group in the short struggle with Lili‘uokalani’sministries was to pack the Cabinet with annexationists and control the legis-lature through election of haole ‘nobles’ in alliance with the Hawaiian Liberalfaction. It did not work, because the queen could not be made to accept min-isters she did not want, as the Constitution of 1887 did not formally prescribea system of ministerial responsibility to a majority in the legislature. Min-istries chosen by the queen could be voted out, however; and by refusal topass appropriation bills the legislature could hold the civil service to ransom.Worse, the queen did not have power to dissolve the legislature and call elec-tions under the 1887 Constitution. In desperation, she allowed George N.Wilcox (Liberal) to form a ministry of mainly conservative Americans, fol-lowed swiftly by yet another ministry headed by the part-Hawaiian, SamuelParker.

In a sense, Lili‘uokalani was allowed to regain a measure of control overthe executive and was tempted into framing and issuing a constitution of herown, in January 1893, which her ministers refused to accept. This attempt torevert to a pre-1887 regime sparked off the dramatic and confused period,when revolutionaries led by Thurston formed a committee of public safety,declared the monarchy overthrown, bypassed the ineffectual Cabinet, andwere assured of assistance from the US minister, Stevens, and Captain Wiltseof the USS Boston. By 16 January 1893, the queen had been induced underthreat of force to keep the 1887 Constitution. Marines were then landedunder protest from ministers. Reluctantly, Sanford B. Dole agreed to head aprovisional government and formally joined in the process of abrogating themonarchy on 17 January and forming an executive and advisory councilwhich took over public offices without much difficulty.

66 For more recent interpretations, Hawkins, ‘Economic Diversification in the American Pacific Territory of Hawai‘i, 1893–1941’, 62–5; ‘The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy’ inDonald Denoon and others, eds., The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders (Cambridge,1997), 232–6.

67 Russ, The Hawaiian Revolution, 70–8. When the committee called for annexation, Wilcoxwithdrew, reducing it to twelve made up of three lawyers, four wholesale-importers, an engineer,a foundry foreman, and sundry clerks.

68 Consular reports cited in Papers Relating to the Annexation of the Hawaiian Islands, 63.69 Christian Huetz de Lemps, ‘De la primauté des plantations à l’économie des services:

l’exemple des Hawaii’, in J. Doumenge and others, eds., Iles tropicales: insularité, ‘insularisme’(University of Bordeaux III, 1987), 251–360.

70 Tate, The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom, 222; Edwin Hoyt, Davies: The InsideStory of a British-American Family in the Pacific and its Business Enterprises (Honolulu, 1983), 46.

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The episode has been analysed many times in detail. There is a consensusabout motives in a revolution usually seen as the climax to a conflict betweenthe Hawaiian monarchy and ‘sugar interests’, or (more vaguely) Hawai‘i’smissionary descendants in alliance with businessmen.66 Evidence producedsome time ago by William Russ and explored by Merze Tate is not so hard andfast. The revolutionary declaration of 16 January drawn up by Thurston andothers was never issued; so we do not know who its signatories supporterswere. We are better informed about the thirteen-member committee of public safety.67 Only six of these had Hawaiian citizenship (three by birth).There were six Americans, two British, two Germans, besides those born locally. Most were middle-grade businessmen in Honolulu import firms.There were no big planters or merchants. The majority were not holders ofsugar stocks. Arguably, of course, William R. Castle, son of the founder ofCastle and Cooke, was a lawyer and legislator who stood in for his father’sagency interests. The next biggest capitalist was Thurston who had investedmodestly in sugar and ranching and was primarily an attorney. Other annex-ationists outside the committee such as Alexander Young of British originsheld $648,700 in sugar stocks and agreed with their aims. H. Baldwin whoheld over $1 million in sugar stocks and Spreckels who controlled about thesame in sugar and much else backed legislative opposition to the queen, butthey did not play an active part in the revolution.

It has to be remembered, however, that plantations were not free-standingcompanies.68 Nearly three-quarters of their capital was owned by Americansand about one-quarter by British and German business. Some sixty of the es-tates were developed by nine agencies, two of which—W. G. Irwin & Co. andClaus Spreckels—had good economic reasons for not supporting annexation.Either they did not want to see US immigration laws applied to Hawai‘i, or (inthe case of Spreckels) they profited from a unique vertical integration with re-fineries at San Francisco and a well-organized shipping monopoly.69 The pro-prietor of a third agency, Theo H. Davies & Co., was no annexationist eitherand actively supported the dethroned queen and the heir apparent, PrincessKaiulani.70

71 James Blount, Report of the Commissioner to the Hawaiian Islands, US Congress, HouseExecutive Document 47, 53rd Congress (Washington, DC, 1893).

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In short, the conspirators did not speak for all plantation owners. They hadthe ear of most local businessmen and some resident in the United States, suchas Charles R. Bishop, a former member of the House of Nobles and marriedto Princess Bernice Pauahi, though he favoured a protectorate not a republic;and they had lukewarm support from Benjamin Dillingham, a railroad entre-preneur who sided with Spreckels but blamed Lili‘uokalani for the break-down in constitutional government. The provisional government was notvery different in composition from the committee of public safety, althoughsugar interests were more firmly represented for about half of the $482,000held in stock by government members. But in the executive Dole was a justicenot a sugar baron. The rest were compliant and minor businessmen plus,more significantly, the Hawaiian-born American, C. A. Damon, banker,trustee of the Bishop estate, friend of royalty and member of the House of Nobles, now turned annexationist. There were other divided loyalties: W. W.Hall, son of a minister to Lunalilo, was in charge of the revolutionists’ com-missary; S. H. Phillips, long an attorney-general and firm royalist underKamehameha, renounced his Hawaiian citizenship and became an annexa-tionist; A. F. Judd, son of G. Judd, attorney-general under Lunalilo and Justice of the Supreme Court, had no difficulty moving all the way across the political spectrum to become chief justice of the provisional governmentand the Hawaiian republic.

All civil servants remained in office and, in general, they did not take an active part in the revolution. Revolutionary ministers left their departmentalheads in place to keep the overmighty apparatus of the Interior and other departments operating. Undoubtedly patronage and the power of making appointments passed to new political hands, but the effects of this changewere not immediately visible in the five years before Hawai‘i was annexed asan American Territory in 1898.

The path to that end was by no means straightforward. Annexation wasnot accepted as a solution to Hawai‘i’s economic or constitutional problemsby the administration of President Harrison which could not secure Senateapproval; and President Grover Cleveland withheld approval of a draft annexation treaty prepared and delivered to Washington by Thurston andothers, pending an investigative mission by Senator James H. Blount. Unex-pectedly, Blount put a stop to use of the American flag and turned in a reportfavourable to restoration of the queen and highly critical of the collusion ofMinister Stevens with the revolutionaries.71 Refusal by Lili‘uokalani to offeran amnesty to the rebels, if restored, and American reluctance to use forceagainst the republican regime, however, left the provisional government freeto consolidate power, while Cleveland turned the issue over to Congress, at

72 Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu, 1968), 282–3;Hawkins, ‘Economic Diversification’, 67–8.

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the end of 1893. This move made the status of the islands a football in Congressional politics. Republicans tended to support Stevens; Democratsdefended Cleveland and Blount. Few were persuaded by the merits of a case for the monarchy. But so long as a Senate majority could not be found for annexation, the ‘Republic of Hawai‘i’ remained in being from 1894 to1898.

Hawaiian reactions were to issue a reasoned protest against the coup andto form two royalist organizations—the Civil Rights League and the PatrioticLeague. A new version of the Annexation Club supported the government. Atthe same time, the government reluctantly continued to pay Lili‘uokalani and Princess Kaiulani from the Civil List. While decisions hung fire in theUnited States, the annexationists dug in and set up their republic under anAmerican-style constitution which became law by proclamation, in July1894. Local resistance in Hawai‘i and a rising in January 1895 (with the connivance of the British Consul) achieved nothing and led to the queen’s arrest and trial for treason along with nearly two hundred rebel supporters.72

She was pardoned in October 1896 and went into temporary exile in theUnited States. Annexationists then consolidated their position through elec-tions in 1897 in which an oath against restoration of the monarchy was required to register as a voter. Few registered at all—2,687, compared withthe 1890 total of 14,000. Mass petitions were signed and sent in vain to thepresident and Congress for redress.

With the pro-annexation government recognized by the bulk of foreignrepresentatives in Hawai‘i, the American administration and Congress couldafford to debate the finer points of an imperial takeover. Congress had au-thority to acquire new territories, but the Constitution did not specify howthey should be governed. Thus, arguments for or against annexation did notturn on the kind of regime the United States might inherit or transform,whether by protectorate or outright annexation. Much thought was given instead to considering the principal reasons for annexation in terms of eco-nomic and strategic advantage.

Among the economic issues, reciprocity or incorporation of Hawai‘iwithin the American tariff system was not central to US concerns aboutHawai‘i in the 1890s. The McKinley tariff shattered the illusion of protectiveeconomic dependency, while the United States retained all export privilegestill 1895. The effect was to prolong local depression relieved, to some extent, by application of the Wilson–Gorman tariff of 1894 which abolishedbounties on domestic-produced sugar and restored Hawaiian sugar to a privileged place. Consequently, there was no wave of bankruptcies in Hawai‘inor any decline in plantation investment. Locally, fear of action by the

73 Thomas J. Osborne, ‘Empire Can Wait’: American Opposition to Hawaiian Annexation,1893–1898 (Kent, Ohio, 1981).

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monarchy to call a halt to Asian immigration was replaced by a general confidence in the system of contract workers. So much so, that once the provisional government was in control it introduced some 53,000 Japaneseand Chinese, 1893–9, as the largest single immigrant movement in the islands’ history. By 1900, native Hawaiians made up only one-quarter of thepopulation.

Despite the case made out for reciprocity as a factor behind annexation, itsforce was limited to the period before 1890. The main factor in the timing ofannexation was simply a change of administration in March 1897, whenMcKinley’s Republicans succeeded to Cleveland’s Democrats. Progress onthe 1893 annexation treaty was immediate, though the Senate was divided inits views over the racial composition of the new territory, expansion of tradein the Pacific, and the legality of using joint ratification at all.73 On the fringesof the debate were the grand strategists such as Captain Alfred Thayer Mahanwho was certain the Hawaiian Islands were the key to Pacific hegemony; andhe had supporters such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt,and much of the United States Navy. In the end, a two-thirds majority couldnot be found in the Senate. The Republicans resorted to the method used to bring in Texas—a simple majority of both Houses on a joint resolution, following favourable reports by the Foreign Relations Committees of bothHouses in March and May 1898. By then, the United States was at war withSpain from April 1898; and, on 1 May, Captain Dewey destroyed a Spanishfleet in Manila. Hawai‘i became an ally and a staging post for troopships ontheir way to the Philippines. On 1 June and 6 July the resolution passed inboth Houses for McKinley’s signature.

More generally, it can be argued that reversal of status came as much fromthe willingness of a major power to acquire territories, as from subversion bya settler community. In the United States the change was more of a shift of em-phasis from protection of lives and property of American citizens to an activeinterest in strategic posts. By the end of the 1890s, the United States had ac-quired Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, part of the Samoan Islands, andfollowed up with a virtual protectorate over Panama and control of the CanalZone. The Hawaiian Islands became more desirable as a naval base than aplantation territory. Paradoxically, the administration least likely to annexHawai‘i to meet the demands of planters was the most likely to annex onstrategic and international grounds. There was no need to do so to secureAmerican trade—most of it was in American hands anyway. Rumour ofJapanese intervention was a different matter; and when a Japanese warshipwas sent to Honolulu in 1897 to investigate refusal to accept contracted

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labour, local annexationists were provided with a weapon they used through-out their campaign in Washington, even when the Japanese withdrew theirprotest against pending annexation.

There were other long-standing issues preventing a reconciliation betweenbusiness interests and Lili‘uokalani’s regime. Taxation and the queen’s at-tempt to undo the constraints on the monarchical executive under the Consti-tution of 1887 were enough. The queen would have reverted to governmentof a patrimonial type and would, perhaps, have reduced the right of franchisefor immigrant foreigners. The essential cause of revolution lay in irreconcil-able views about the nature of government in Hawaiian society towards theend of the century, when demographic changes had eroded, but not ended,the weight of native and part-Hawaiian franchise in politics. It is usual tolabel the two competing views as ‘royalist’ and ‘republican’. Strangely, theissue of democracy was not foremost among revolutionary republicans. Ifanything, they wanted it limited, because they found it almost impossible to muster sufficient votes, even under a system with a property or literacyqualification. Strangely, too, most of the Hawaiian monarchs would haveagreed with this limitation on democracy. The principal cause of frustrationamong the haole elite in the 1880s and 1890s was that they could never becertain in Hawai‘i’s electoral system of putting into office a party with poli-cies that answered their case for diplomatic protection and lower taxes.

Constitutional monarchy did not answer either, because Hawai‘i did nothave time to evolve the conventions of constitutional government entailingthe retirement of the monarch from the executive. Hawaiian government re-mained essentially patrimonial in a small society, where office depended onloyalty to a superior. That was why governors were stripped of their powersin 1887 and the police and judges were brought under the attorney-general.In practice, that still left the monarch free to appoint a friend as marshal of theislands responsible for putting down riot and rebellion, a duty countered bythe conspirators who moved first and had their own militia and the backingof US marines. In the end, Hawaiian politics and government provide thebasic reasons for settler discontent and the overthrow of Hawaiian kingshipby an oligarchy based on a community of financial interests.

One oligarchy replaced another and proceeded to govern on a very limitedmandate. Not till 1900 did Hawai‘i have an Organic Act passed by Congressin an attempt to balance the need for legal continuity with the facts of politi-cal power. Patronage did not disappear, in the absence of a civil service com-mission to oversee appointments and promotions. Under the Resolution ofAnnexation in 1898, local municipal legislation (with all the electoral and judicial disqualifications that entailed) remained in force with one importantexception. In helping to frame the Organic Act for the Territory of Hawai‘i,Sanford Dole and his Republicans kept to strict property qualifications for

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74 The number of Hawaiian farmers fell from 679 in 1920 to 445 in 1940. M. M. Vause, ‘TheHawaiian Homes Act, 1920: History and Analysis’, MA thesis (University of Hawai‘i, 1962),1–16.

75 For paternalism in the 1920s and 1930s, Daws, Shoal of Time, 314–15; John S. Whitehead,‘Western Progressives, Old South Planters, or Colonial Oppressors, the Enigma of Hawaii’s “BigFive,” 1898–1940’, WHQ 30 (1999), 295–326.

candidates and voters. To their dismay Congress threw out this restrictiveview of ‘democracy’ by permitting all Territorial citizens qualified by age, sex,and residency to vote in all local elections.

The irony of this imperial generosity was that native Hawaiians were oncemore in a position to disrupt Republican and Democrat Parties in the islandsby supporting a Home Rule Party which threw up Robert Wilcox as aquixotic and unstable leader elected as delegate to Congress. Business in thelegislature was as chaotic and irresponsible as it had been after 1887, whenHawaiians had unseated Reform from its temporary dominance of cabinet.As then, there was a risk appropriations would not be voted, and Dole had tocall extra sessions to get budgets approved.

The problem was solved Hawaiian-style. The new oligarchy under Republican leadership persuaded Jonah Kuhio Kali‘anaole, adopted into themonarchy under Kalakaua and Lili‘uokalani, to join their camp, standagainst Wilcox, and attract enough Hawaiian votes to become delegate toCongress. Kuhio, in short, became the government’s client, as a personableand influential prince in Washington. In return, the envoy was granted statusand affluence, and, more importantly, the chance to make more jobs availablefor Hawaiians through the implementation of county government through-out the islands from 1905. Ironically, the patronage of the new oligarchy re-stored to a limited degree some of the advantages bestowed on Hawaiians byformer ministers and governors. But it did not restore land. Indeed, Crownlands were confiscated; and the failure of the niggardly leases made availablethrough the homestead programme, 1917–21, among the twenty thousandHawaiians entitled to resettlement did nothing to redress the loss.74 But thenHawai‘i’s aristocracy never had been generous towards commoners. Theywere paternalistic towards those who were loyal. The code of conduct continued among the sugar agencies towards those, especially Asians or Filipinos, who were judged to be trustworthy and industrious.75

So it continued for much of the new century. An oligarchy stayed in power.The ‘Big Five’ companies that controlled most of the sugar production by1910 resembled an eighteenth-century ‘family compact’ that made appoint-ments to boards, ran commissions, and co-opted by marriage suitable clientsfrom the service gentry. The new haole aristocracy was not so different in itscommercial endogamy from the old ali‘i caste endogamy and engendered justas many businessmen and politicians as chiefs and followers in succeedinggenerations. They filled the legislature with Republicans until 1940. With one

76 The exception was Joseph Poindexter (1934–42).77 Roger Bell, Last Among Equals: Hawaiian Statehood and American Politics (Honolulu,

1984); and for use of the term, see William E. H. Tagupa, review, PS 9 (1985), 178.

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exception, the governors of Hawai‘i were nominees of the sugar gentry, justas island governors had been nominees of the monarchy.76

Unlike most other reversals and imperial takeovers, the Hawaiian case re-sulted in a form of constitutional incorporation, not constitutional devolu-tion and independence. Statehood came late in the day in 1959, as resentmentbuilt up over military occupation and congressional wardship and has evenbeen regarded as a form of ‘decolonisation’—a strange term for this exampleof assimilation and ‘the triumph of American values and institutions overthose indigenous to the islands’.77

12 Fiji

Neither centralized nor a patrimonial state, the scattered archipel-agos of Fiji owed their unification to colonial rule from 1874. Usually treatedas a model of ‘indirect rule’, as invented by Governor Sir A. H. Gordon, thesocial and political structures of the Fiji group might well have been takenunder an administrative protectorate, leaving variants of local hierarchy andtheir methods of subordinating conquests in place. Fijians were exposed, in-stead, to the formal prescriptions of a Crown Colony system introduced witha large measure of paternalism embodied in the 1874 Deed of Cession and toa great deal of administrative regulation prescribing the place of their chiefsin a hierarchy which stayed formally defined until the 1940s. From then on,the structure of Fiji’s government began to change in the direction of re-presentation for all ethnic groups, but much of the ‘Fijian Administration’tended to remain separate from central government, until independence.1

The distinctiveness of Fijian chieftaincy and leadership within a plural so-ciety derives from both the paternalism and the formalism of British over-ruleand, in a large measure, from pre-colonial status of lineage leaders by descentand by achievement. It can be argued that the patronage of governors createda new hierarchy by incorporation of chiefs into a line of administrative powereasily understood by Fijians as a way of safeguarding land rights and culturalidentity. It can also be conceded that officials may have ‘reinvented’ chief-taincy in the process by curtailing some of its authority and use of force. Butthe reasons for Fijian acceptance of over-rule lie in earlier political structureswithin the variety of chiefdoms and confederations that competed for terri-tory and ‘the possession of many followers, subjects and allies as possible’through war, diplomacy, trade, and enlistment of outsiders. Ultimately, Fijianleaders submitted their competitive disunity to a form of political unificationwithin a colonial state.2

With a population of some 140,000 Melanesians inhabiting about ninety-five islands of the group, Fiji almost certainly had a greater variety of social

1 G. K. Roth, Native Administration in Fiji during the Past 75 Years: A Successful Experimentin Indirect Rule, Royal Anthropological Institute, Occasional Paper No. 10 (London 1951). Forwords in Fijian the usual conventions for pronunciation have been followed, as indicated at firstmention in the text: b as in mb; c as in th; d as in nd; g as in ng; q as in ngg. Alternative orthogra-phy is provided in the Index.

2 S. A. Sayes, ‘Cakaudrove: Ideology and Reality in a Fijian Confederation’, Ph.D. thesis (TheAustralian National University, 1982), 96. My interpretation of early Fijian chieftaincy reliesheavily on this work and on David Routledge, Matanitu: The Struggle for Power in Early Fiji(Suva, 1985).

Fiji217

Map 9. Pre-colonial Fiji: Confederations and Chiefdoms, after W. P. Morrell, Britain in the Pacific Islands (Oxford, 1960) and FijiDepartment of Surveys (Misc.) 271E

3 The problem of ‘reconstructing’ Fijian social and political structures, following redefinitionin relation to land tenure, is discussed in detail by Douglas L. Oliver, Oceania: The Native Cultures of Australia and the Pacific Islands, 2 vols. (Honolulu, 1989), ii. 1150–77.

4 The implications of types of vasu relations for the power politics of Fijian chiefdoms areanalysed in Routledge, Matanitu, 35–6.

218 Pacific Islands

and political organization than allowed for by later administrative organiza-tion of local government through chiefs.3 Nevertheless, there were some com-mon characteristics that lasted into the period of European over-rule. Onewas the territorial location of patrilineal descent groups (yavusa) in defensivevillages as chiefdoms (vanua) under the leader (tui, turaga) (turanga) of a senior lineage. A second was the formation of wider coalitions and conquestsinto confederations (matanitu) under paramounts whose warrior and ritualstatus was certainly high, but whose security of political tenure was open tochallenge from kin rivalries and defection to other leaders. Some of that terri-torial expression of political status survived into colonial provinces and divisions.

Key issues in defining status were access to material resources to rewardsupporters in a system of power through appropriation and redistribution,the widespread use of gifts, and the extension of kinship obligations throughhigh-ranking marriages.4 But nothing in Fiji’s recorded history leads one tobelieve that the aggregation of chiefdoms into confederations frequently atwar was stable enough to give rise to a patrimonial system with offices of stateor able to produce leadership capable of welding together large island terri-tories for very long. One consequence of Fiji’s fluctuating and mobile powerstructures, therefore, was probably a readiness on the part of chiefs to extendto foreigners and settlers the techniques of incorporation and alliance thatplayed such an important role in their own internal struggles. The easiestsources for such support lay in historic contacts through trade and settlementby Tongans in all parts of the group, but more especially in the Northern Lauislands, and, more significantly, in sporadic European trade and settlementfrom the eighteenth century.

Perhaps the simplest way of analysing chieftaincy in Fiji, therefore, is to accept the Fijian village, or cluster of villages, under a chief of the highestranking patriclan as the cornerstone of local hierarchies, pre-1874, recogniz-ing that at a second and more complex level the village could incorporate conquests reduced to the status of serfs. At the highest level of political or-ganization, groups of successful villages, or great confederations could retainother villages as ‘border’ clients (bati) (mbati) which fought on behalf of theiroverlords, but which could, in the manner of clients, change their alle-giance. Or as Oliver puts it: ‘Bati were more or less voluntary affiliates, moreallies than tributaries. They were members of villages whose leaders had for some reason or another (including shrewd political expediency) been

Fiji 219

persuaded to render respect to those of a (usually more powerful) confedera-tion of villages, and to promise to assist the latter in times of war.’5

Some earlier anthropologists made a good deal of the ‘borders’, and A. M.Hocart took great care to correct the view that their populations were physi-cally excluded from a dominant descent group.6 Hocart also recognized thatthere were levels of alliance and clientage, so that: ‘There results a relativitywhich is typically Fijian: a group which is noble to another may be border toa third.’ This may be taken to mean from the examples given by Hocart thatthere was a hierarchy of states or vanua, owing allegiance to a central domi-nant capital (such as Somosomo in the case of Cakaudrove and Taveunimatanitu), and that some of these could be vassals by conquest or vassals(clients) by allegiance.

In any case, there is reason to believe that ascribed status and subordina-tion by conquest were not the sole methods of organizing a political hierarchyin Fiji, although there was a high degree of internal kinship or affinity withina village and ways of cementing socio-political obligations through the claimsof sisters’ sons on a brother. Fijian society was both hierarchical and fluid inphysical settlements and in loyalties, leaving room for clientage and allianceunder outsiders, as, for example, on the offshore island of Moala which hasbeen closely studied and where chiefs from Viti Levu were welcomed as paramounts until displaced by Tongans in the 1850s.7 For, apart from the‘Bau model’ of provincial hierarchy with its heavy reliance on incorporatedEuropean factors from the 1850s, there was also a ‘Tongan model’ present inthe north-eastern islands to provide a patrimonial precedent which the morenormative patriliny of Fijian descent groups and political leadership did not.But ‘patrimony’ has to be used with caution in the Fijian cases. The power ofFijian chiefs as tui or roko tui at the highest levels of confederacy remaineddisputed, and it is not certain that senior members of ranked lineages survivedlong enough to found dynasties in the Tongan manner. There would seem tobe, too, a lack of assigned offices over estates or associated villages. Bati‘borders’ may be regarded as warrior shock troops for an overlord and witha first claim on plunder, rather than holders of fiefs as a reward for loyalty.8

Some historians, therefore, have supplied an explanation for the lack of in-stitutional paramountcy in Fijian political structures in the early nineteenth

5 Oliver, Oceania, ii. 1173.6 A. M. Hocart, The Northern States of Fiji (London, 1952), 27–33; Peter France, The Char-

ter of the Land: Custom and Colonization in Fiji (Melbourne, 1969), 117–24; Jean Guiart, ‘Mon Dieu là haut la Tête en bas! Introduction à la connaissance des sociétés océaniennes’. MS Noumea, 1994, 99–100.

7 Marshall Sahlins, Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island (Ann Arbor, 1962).8 Basil Thomson, The Fijians: A study of the Decay of Custom (London, 1908), 88–9; and

for the lack of offices to back the power of a confederation paramount, Sayes, ‘Cakaudrove: Ideology and Reality in a Fijian Confederation’, chap. 4, and 307.

9 David Routledge, ‘The Failure of Cakobau, Chief of Bau, to Become King of Fiji’, in G. A.Wood and S. O’Connor, eds., W. P. Morrell: A Tribute (Dunedin, 1973), 125–40; and Routledge,Matanitu.

10 Hocart, The Northern States of Fiji, 30.11 Routledge, ‘The Failure of Cakobau’, 129.

220 Pacific Islands

century, emphasizing less the divisive presence of European clients and bro-kers and more the parochial issues that kept warfare alive and prevented territorial consolidation of power.9 Although six independent federations existed in the Fijian group by the 1830s, Bau failed to force privileges for itsleading titled lineage from any of its rival chieftaincies. Like Cakaudrove, itwas, in Hocart’s phrase, one of the ‘upstart states’.10 Its paramount chief, theVunivalu, Tanoa, had been defeated and deposed in the late 1820s. His son,Cakobau (Thakombau), built up his own band of clients and mercenariesduring the period of opposition to his father and defeated the rebels in 1837at the age of 20. The presence of deserters, sandalwood and bêche de mertraders made little difference, although some serviced arms. They fought bothfor and against Bau; and Wesleyan Methodists, their way prepared to a greatextent by Tahitian and Tongan missionaries, settled first in neighbouringRewa and did not open a station at Bau until 1854. Moreover, they broke theusual pattern of European clientage by opposing warfare (though they al-lowed their converts to fight). But they did not create a missionary ‘kingdom’in a society where limited centralization through a senior lineage was a complex and subtle process ‘depending not primarily upon the extent of European influence, but upon factors within the polities themselves’.11 Inorder to build up matanitu alliances, patriclan leadership employed the tech-nique of strengthening numbers by incorporation within a maximal lineagethrough vasu privilege exercised by chiefly marriage to sisters of other chiefs.In this way, earlier leaders of Bau had worked for consolidation of patriclans,but were blocked by Rewa, until Cakobau unleashed a territorial war,1844–55. The first phase of this war provided an opportunity to cement loy-alties by installing a chief of Rewa as vasu to his victorious neighbour and byincorporating minor chiefs as clients of Cakobau as the Vunivalu of Bau. But(by contrast with Hawai‘i and Tonga) land tenure in Fiji was kin-based andso was not available for redistribution as a reward for allegiance or hereditaryoffices.

At that stage external alliances had an important bearing on the traditionalwarfare and diplomacy of Fijian chiefs. For the most part, European contactby traders, missionaries, and visiting warships was concentrated on the off-shore islands and coastal anchorages of south-eastern Viti Levu in the firsthalf of the nineteenth century. At the same time, Tongan settlement, merce-nary warfare and backing for a Wesleyan Methodist version of Christianityinfluenced the power balance between chiefdoms of the Lau group and thoseof confederations on Viti Levu and Vanua Levu. The main focus of

12 Ibid. 136; W. P. Morrell, Britain in the Pacific Islands (Oxford, 1960), 134–8 (for the background to the 1858 ‘deed’ and its signature by other chiefs in 1860).

Fiji 221

Europeans’ attention was the small island of Bau, the neighbouring coastalplain and the fertile Rewa and Wailevu deltas.

Two reasons for European intervention lay in outside support for would-be settlers’ claims to land or freedom to proselytize. European appeals for redress through consuls and visiting warships were a standard pattern in foreign brokerage of interests and could elevate or diminish the status of aparamount chief. A crucial stage in this transition lay in the notion of a formal contract or treaty, enforced by outside arbitration, and occasionallycontested by rival patron powers. That stage was reached at Bau through J. B.Williams’s intervention as an American Commercial Agent on the side ofRewa in the 1844–55 war to obtain repayment of debts from the so-called‘Tui Viti’, or King of Fiji, as Cakobau became styled.

The second external factor, Tongan settlement, was equally important in defining Cakobau’s status by preserving him from destruction, but leaving him vulnerable to outside demands on his resources. Traditional trade relations opened a way to religious conversion through Tonga’s brandof Wesleyan Methodism, the Lotu Tonga, which made headway in the Laugroup in the 1840s, and through the political action of Ma‘afu who stoodwithin the Tui Kanokupolu lineage in Tonga and acted as Taufa‘ahau’s envoy from 1847. A visit by Taufa‘ahau (later King George Tupou I of Tonga)to Fiji resulted in an offer of military assistance to Bau in 1853, in return for conversion to the Wesleyans’ lotu. The bargain promised to enhanceCakobau’s status, if victorious in the struggle with Rewa, or to reduce it bymaking him the client for Tongan consolidation of power in the Lau groupand eastern Viti Levu. In the event, Cakobau’s nominal conversion and Tongan intervention were instrumental in eliminating the power of Rewa in1855.

Thus, the two sources of external influence, Tongan and European, left themost prominent chief in Fiji as client to outsiders, as well as patron in localpolitics. King George of Tonga who brokered a peace extracted material ben-efits in the shape of canoes, an American vessel, the island of Rabi (Rambi),and left Ma‘afu as a representative and a chief in his own right in Vanua Levuand northern Lau. Cakobau’s debts remained unsettled which left him opento the influence of Williams’s rival and British Consul, W. T. Pritchard, whopersuaded him to sign the first (unacceptable) deed of cession to Great Britainto ward off American pressure in 1858. From then on, the status of ‘Tui Viti’carried with it obligations to outside agencies in general and a particular ac-ceptance of the brokerage of Pritchard who ‘became virtually arbiter betweenthe great chiefs, capable of imposing his will even on the Tongans’.12 In effect,the 1858 offer of cession was a trial run for a collective agreement by Fiji’s

13 A. C. Reid, ‘The Chiefdom of Lau’, JPH 18 (1983), 183–97; I. C. Campbell, ‘The AllegedImperialism of George Tupou I’, JPH 25 (1980), 159–87.

222 Pacific Islands

chiefs later to secure a form of protective paramountcy, when further experi-ments with centralized government failed.

Cakobau was not a strong enough personality to control access to re-sources by outsiders in the fragmented state of Fijian politics, and, thereby,regulate the market for land to his own advantage. Ma‘afu, by contrast, wassuccessful in the role of patron-chief and his administration worked better inthe Lau group than the beach factions, chiefs, and consular brokers in Bau.This was because Ma‘afu mastered many of the European techniques formanagement of lands and taxes and enjoyed a special status as a cousin andenvoy of Taufa‘ahau, cemented by a treaty of friendship in 1865 betweenTonga and the Fijian chief of Lakeba (Lakemba). It helped, too, that Ma‘afuwas regarded locally by the ruling family as linked with their lineage and hadother kin ties in the Moala group. Such was the basis for the formation of anew state in Lakeba and a base for Tongan influence in the outliers and east-ern Fiji. Ma‘afu was also able to meet a need on the part of Fijian chiefs formethods to deal with outside pressures for plantation lands in the 1860s. Hemobilized his own Tongan clients as officials to survey and arrange leases forTongan and Fijian lands in the form of individual allotments. But he kept hisposition as patron-overseer and could take back titles in default of rent ortribute. He was careful, too, to cede only unoccupied lands. In this he was assisted by his European client, R. S. Swanston (formerly Pritchard’svice-consul), who helped to draw up a constitution of the North-eastern Confederation in 1869; and it helped that the King of Tonga formally cededall his rights in Fiji into Ma‘afu’s hands.

From 1865, therefore, there were two political centres in Fiji: one under theVunivalu of Bau and the other consisting of the loose confederation betweentwo of the principal paramounts of Vanua Levu and Ma‘afu as Tui Lau atLakeba. A chief by ascription, Ma‘afu was also a big man by achievement,moving throughout the 1860s between the roles of patron-administrator andbroker in Fijian affairs.13 On the other hand, at Bau, Cakobau fell into thehands of a mixture of advisers from the beach community and forfeited landin settlement of debts. Projects for a centralized authority to bolster his posi-tion continued. Successive attempts at framing a constitution were evidenceof a search for legitimacy in the face of settler lawlessness and an aim of widerconfederation on Viti Levu through periodic assemblies of chiefs. Prescriptiveremedies adopted and adapted from Hawai‘i provided salaried offices for European client officials and applied taxes and laws. But government fromBau did not work for the rest of Viti Levu or Vanua Levu. The sale of land wasnot brought under control; and the first boatloads of imported Pacific Islandslabour from Tanna (Vanuatu) for cotton plantations in the 1860s heralded a

14 RHL, 919 5.5, The Constitution Act of Fiji [1871]; Constitution and Acts of Fiji.15 RHL, MSS Pac s. 34/8, ‘Fiji Ministry of Finance’. Correspondence 1872–1873; Routledge,

Matanitu, 133–6.16 Deryck Scarr, The Majesty of Colour: A Life of Sir John Bates Thurston, i. I, The Very

Bayonet (Canberra 1973), 137–210.17 Routledge, Matanitu, 163–4.18 RHL, MSS Pac. 5 34/1, ‘Fiji HBM Consul Dispatches, 1872–1874’, March to Foreign

Office, 20 Aug. 1872, 5 Oct. 1872, in Fiji Executive Council 1872. For the regional origins of buliand roko tui titles, France, The Charter, 108.

Fiji 223

new source of unregulated conflict for consular arbitration and missionaryprotest. A revised constitution drawn up in 1871 by an assembly of chiefsfrom most of the vanua went further towards the creation of a central government by instituting a royal Cabinet responsible to the ‘king’, a PrivyCouncil of governors (vanua chiefs), and a Legislature of Europeans fromtwenty-one districts of the two main islands.14 There was a Bill of Rights, pro-vision for poll and labour taxes, licences, and taxes on European-held land.An elaborate Act established a Supreme Court and Provincial Courts underwardens (chiefs’ European secretaries) and provided for jury trials. Such anelaborate structure presumed a budget of over $120,500 and a civil servicelikely to absorb about half of revenue.15 Essentially, the 1871 Constitutionwas an attempt to set up a kingdom based in Bau on the model of Hawai‘i, butwithout the loyalties of provincial chiefs and appointed civil servants implicitin that model. Cakobau’s government had the greatest difficulty recruitingchiefs and planters as regional ‘governors’; direct taxes and port duties pro-vided inadequate revenue; without power to allocate lands, Cakobau had noreal patronage to dispense. The British Consul hardly recognized the regimeat all; and within the administration itself the king’s chief secretary, JohnThurston, a sympathetic broker and adviser, came to favour annexation, inthe face of intractable problems of control, jurisdiction, and debt.16

It is possible to take the view that such an embryonic government by a smallfaction of settlers and chiefs left the ‘Tui Viti’ as a mere figurehead who failedin the face of settler violence. But that does not square entirely with the agreedlanguage of the 1871 Constitution which exalted the position of the para-mount in relation to other chiefs, or with his part in eventual negotiations forcession in 1874. A more balanced analysis perceives a large degree of cooper-ation between chiefs as governors and magistrates and merchant-planterswhich provided a short-term stability in chiefdoms near Bau, but failed, ulti-mately, to settle tensions between planters and Fijians in the interior and innorthern and western Viti Levu.17 For the first time, too, minor district chiefs,or buli (mbuli), were enlisted into a regional police raising armed oppositionfrom some settlers and consular accusations of ‘despotic’ rule.18 The majorweakness of the settler–Fijian government, however, was that it had insuffi-cient resources to command loyalty from regional chiefs throughout the archipelago and risked bankruptcy in financing administration from 1872 on

19 Fiji Executive Council, Minute 3 Feb. 1872; Fiji, Ministry of Finance, correspondence 2 June 1872–20 September 1873.

20 David Routledge, ‘The Negotiations Leading to the Cession of Fiji, 1874’, JICH 2 (1974),278–93.

21 Routledge, ‘The Negotiations’, 284. The Bau government already had Fijian rebels from theinterior on trial and 300 were condemned to forced labour on plantations in conditions of doubtful jurisdiction.

224 Pacific Islands

a series of debenture issues held by Australian and New Zealand banks. Thesehad to be serviced by sale of produce collected as tax through the firm ofRabone, Feez & Co., Sydney, on falling cotton and copra prices, or by sale of Fijian government lands.19 By 1873, there was a risk that official salariescould not be paid. A new constitution was circulated in the Fijian language to the chiefs, unratified by the Legislature, giving greater powers (so ConsulMarch claimed) to European ministers and giving them effective control. Butit was never in force, after Thurston was persuaded by a British naval officerto suspend it in October 1873, pending the results of an investigation byBritish commissioners into the future of Fiji.

Although there were many settler and some government voices in favour ofannexation, it was not easy to find an outside patron power willing to acceptCakobau’s regime at Bau as an instrument for controlling lawlessness and therate of settlement in the group. The Australian Colonies formally resolved in1870 this should be done by proxy of Great Britain on behalf of Australian in-terests, before Germans or Americans moved in. At most, Britain agreed torecognize the Bau government in 1871, but not to accept further responsibil-ities, under the goad of humanitarian pressures, without a formal enquiry bycommissioners who were not empowered to negotiate terms.20 The acrimo-nious and tortuous relations between Thurston, as champion of Fijian rights,and Commissioners Goodenough and Layard who sought to safeguard thesettlers do not concern us here. Neither side said much about the extent of theTui Viti’s powers outside of Bau; and Thurston hankered after a change ofconstitution to replace settler representation by a ‘strong nominee govern-ment similar to that of the colonial regime’.21 In the Colonial Office, between1871 and 1873, opposition to cession weakened, as the powers that might beexercised through a consul or resident under a protectorate were consideredto be inadequate to deal with British and foreign planters and traders. By thedate of the commissioners’ enquiry Lord Kimberley, as Colonial Secretary,had come round to the view that annexation was probably the only way tocontrol traffic in land and labour.

In Fiji, however, it was not so easy for consuls and commissioners to persuade chiefs to cede the whole group of islands. Several points emergedfrom the debate between assembled chiefs, Cakobau, his ministers, andGoodenough and Layard in the intense negotiations between March and October 1874, illustrating the failure of constitutional prescriptions to create

22 Ibid. 287. 23 Routledge, Matanitu, 216.

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a centralized state. One was the degree of disunity in the ranks of the Fijianchiefs, made worse by their suspicion and dismissal of Ma‘afu as ‘Viceroy’and Governor of Lau which effectively split off a good third of the archipel-ago. It is also clear that G. A. Woods, as Cakobau’s premier, had ‘failed in hispromise to establish a Fiji-wide government’, even on Viti Levu, which madesome of Cakobau’s pretensions to local paramountcy untenable.22 Further-more, at the height of the debate on whether to cede sovereignty, allCakobau’s ministers resigned, leaving only the Vunivalu and Thurston tospeak for Bau, together with an assortment of provincial chiefs, who were notat one with Bau, but agreed with Thurston that a cession should be arranged.After a verbal agreement, a Deed of Cession was signed on 30 September bythe Vunivalu and four chiefs, followed at a later date by Ma‘afu and five others. Their status as signatories was not in question. Five of them were highchiefs of confederations. Several among the remaining eight represented Bauand were kinsmen of the Vunivalu. But most were certainly not subordinateto Cakobau and are listed separately in the final document brokered by SirHercules Robinson, Governor of New South Wales, on behalf of the reluctantpatron power. There were signs that a form of patrimonialism was in evidenceduring the period of constitution-making and experiment with government,1871–4: ‘If Cakobau’s own role was largely nominal and ceremonial, that of his family was more active. His sons, Epeli, Nailatikau and Timoci Tavanavanua, built support among the chiefs throughout the country, as didhis half-brother, Savenaca Naulivou. Timoci, as Minister of Police in 1871,initiated Fijian participation in the maintenance of law and order.’23

Other more senior chiefs, and especially Ma‘afu, adhered to the agreementfor British over-rule, because they could not risk being left out and losing thepositions they had won by war and alliance. A much more extensive form ofalliance was in the making between the leadership of Fiji and an imperialpower and it was important that the chiefs of Bau should not be the sole beneficiaries. As a symbol of the new dispensation, Sir Hercules Robinson accepted Cakobau’s war club on behalf of the queen.

Compared with other incorporations of indigenous hierarchies into theBritish Empire by annexation or protectorate, the 1874 Deed of Cession did not formally guarantee the existing political structure, but only arrangeda temporary and provisional government. Lands were vested in the Crown,excluding those lawfully occupied by settlers and Fijians and required for their use. There was a recognition that the current high chiefs should beretained and a half-promise to investigate and award any lands, pensions, orallowances they might claim. Any form of indigenous paramountcy by a single title-holder was unacceptable to the chiefs: Fiji was not Hawai‘i orTonga; and part of the purpose of the cession was to delimit chiefs’ authority

24 Morrell, Britain in the Pacific Islands, 167–8.25 Sir Arthur Gordon, ‘Native Taxation in Fiji’, 18 Mar. 1879, cited in Roth, Native Adminis-

tration, 9.26 Parliamentary Papers (1875), LII, 1114, 171–2; and for his earlier career, Kenneth O. Hall,

Imperial Proconsul: Sir Hercules Robinson and South Africa, 1881–1889 (Kingston Ontario,1980), 19.

226 Pacific Islands

in conditions of rapid land transfers and demands for local and importedlabour.24 The cession left the incoming administration a fairly free hand to de-termine the place of indigenous authorities in the hierarchy of a despotic formof colonial rule and to manage Crown lands as it thought fit.

Reversal of status, therefore, was abrupt in Fiji. In the long debate aboutwhat type of administration emerged from the cession, the place of ‘custom’or the indirectness of ‘indirect rule’ as official orthodoxy, it is sometimes lostfrom sight that Sir Arthur Gordon and his successors aimed not only at pro-tection of a social system, but at political solutions to the problem of exercis-ing power as a form of regulated patronage. Financial necessity was not theonly argument for utilizing existing structures headed by chiefs: ‘For, be it re-membered, the legal non-recognition of their position would not have in anyway deprived them of the power they possessed over those who yielded tothem an instinctive and unquestioning obedience. As it is they are cheerfuland willing assistants to the Government . . .’25

For ‘assistants’ one may read ‘clients’. Whether they were so cheerful isopen to question. In any case, it has been forgotten how much Gordon owedto the diplomacy and actions of his immediate predecessor, acting as tempor-ary governor—Sir Hercules Robinson—who had considerable experience inutilizing high-caste Sinhalese headmen at local government levels in Ceylonand in curbing the aspirations of small, unrepresentative minorities of settlersin a Crown Colony. It was Robinson who laid down the formal structure ofsome twelve provinces under recognized roko tui, as chiefs and high chiefs ofvanua, and the subordinate stratum of districts (tikina) under eighty-twochiefly agents (buli). No doubt he received guidance in this from his chief secretary, Thurston; but he also took the initiative in putting an end toCakobau’s poll tax, designed to force Fijians into plantation work and com-muted it into a corvée for more general purposes. Equally important, he initi-ated the system of mixed courts of European and Fijian magistrates and themore extensive system of Fijian stipendiary magistrates.26 From the outset,territorial divisions—provinces and districts—were regarded as fixed politi-cal units with chiefs as agents, rather than as disputed and highly variabledomain for mobile patrilineal clans based in villages. In mitigation for thisrather arbitrary organization, it has to be remembered that the underlyingpremiss of warfare in a set of competitive chiefdoms had been removed. SirArthur Gordon is credited or blamed for initiating much more; but he, too,drew on the writings of J. W. B. Money on Dutch use of native regents and

27 Ian Heath, ‘Towards a Reassessement of Gordon in Fiji’, JPH 9 (1974), 81–92. Gordon maywell have seen parallels between roko and regent; but the networks of medanas, mantries, andchiefs chosen from notables were more elaborate than anything in Fiji. See, J. W. B. Money, Java;or How to Manage a Colony, Showing a Practical Solution of the Questions now AffectingBritish India, 2 vols. (London, 1861), i. 212–24.

28 RHL, 919 5.5, ‘Notes of the Proceedings of a Native Council, Ovalau, September 1875’, inActs of Fiji. The meeting went on for nine or ten days and Gordon attended. Subsequent annualcouncils were chaired by Gordon. For inauguration of Gordon as ‘paramount chief’, R. F. Watters, Koro Economic Development and Social Change in Fiji (Oxford, 1969), 41; and forGordon’s attachment to this status, in the manner of a Highland chief, France, The Charter, 106, 124.

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chiefs in Java, where a patrimonial administration was reformed and pre-served to further peasant production.27 The essential point of Gordon’s policy, however, was not slavish adherence to some formula he had acquiredfrom the Dutch, but a piece of power brokerage in which the status and po-litical territories of a hierarchy of chiefs were formally recognized, delimited,and allowed a great measure of judicial independence and financial self-administration, in return for loyalty to a foreign ruler and controlled accessto lands. There was a novel, dominant power in the land and a new dispensa-tion hardly possible in pre-1871 conditions.

In short, together with limited guarantees about ‘native usages and cus-toms’ in the Deed of Cession, there was a political and financial trade-off between an indigenous hierarchy, below the level of the Tui Viti (who wasdropped from any position of ‘paramountcy’) and an incoming administra-tion in which the governor himself, 11 September 1875, was received as‘supreme chief’. This obeisance was no mere piece of protocol, but a care-fully considered decision by a council of ten rokos and their buli, plus the Vunivalu, Cakobau, to render homage (tamaki) to a foreign paramount (andagent for the queen) who intended to govern ‘Vakaviti’ according to Fijiancustom, ‘or through us the Chiefs of the people’.28 Before he left in 1880, Gordon stressed the need for ‘native agency’ to carry out the head of gov-ernment’s wishes, but he did not explore very far the implications of this dependency for the local administration, saddled with native regulationselaborated in 1877 by the governor’s board of officials and Fijians and facingthe difficulties of collecting a produce tax in an increasingly monetized localeconomy. Left undefined, too, was the relationship between statutory politi-cal units of provincial and district government and social units under patri-clan and village chiefs responsible for administration of lands.

Assessing how this hierarchy worked in practice and evolved as the instru-ment of ‘Fijian Administration’ has exposed the ways in which Fijian ‘tradi-tion’ has been reinvented, as well as safeguarded, especially in matters of landownership. Historians are less conclusive about the extent to which tradi-tional leadership became a formal civil service or left behind the reciprocalobligations of ascribed leadership of kin units and the clientage obligations of

29 R. R. Nayacakalou, Leadership in Fiji (Melbourne, 1975), 85–9.30 T. J. Macnaught, ‘Chiefly Civil Servants: Ambiguity in District Administration and the

Preservation of a Fijian Way of Life’, JPH 9 (1974), 15–16. What mattered (as in the past) wasclient services, not the tidy demarcation of social and territorial units.

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lesser chiefs to their seniors. The anthropologist, R. R. Nayacakalou, recog-nized in the 1950s that underneath the system of ‘utilizing the personnel oftraditional leadership to carry out the policies of a colonial government’ therewere anomalies and tensions between different layers in the chain of com-mand.29 A village patrilineal chief had his own following of kin and ‘quasi-members’ incorporated as a result of population change, wars, and migrationinto a land-using locality. But in many ways he was sidelined into ceremonialfunctions by provincial roko and buli chiefs of subdivisions (tikina) as terri-torial units.30 A village headman was client to a buli and more like an agent ofgovernment in an unpopular job, responsible, like his patron, for carrying outthe regulations handed down from above to the district chiefs. A roko as aprovincial head and traditional chief of considerable status appointed buli,subject to government approval, and was a source of provincial funds. Alldozen or so roko were de facto members of the Council of Chiefs, an impor-tant link with the Fijian Affairs Board which created new regulations andwith the Legislative Council, the only body empowered to create new lawswith application to all Fiji. Powers were derived from above, and representa-tions were made from below. Appointments at each level were supervised, butgenerally tolerated by provincial commissioners. The Fijian Affairs Boardalso paid for the whole hierarchy on a budget supplemented by a grant fromgeneral funds to make up the shortfall in provincial revenues. Anthropolo-gists, like historians, have, therefore, distinguished between a buli as enforcerof government rules (though he might also be of minor chiefly rank in his owndistrict) and the roko who as a coordinator with wider responsibilities wasnot necessarily a chief in districts where he worked. Where he was, traditionalstatus reinforced administrative training.

Part of the difficulty in documenting this kind of general and nuancedanalysis from different periods and locations in Fiji so as to account for theevolution of Fijian Administration lies in the absence of a survey of appoint-ments and careers since 1874. Some of Nayacakalou’s statements about financial administration, moreover, do not square with nineteenth-centuryrecords; and important events such as rapid depopulation in the 1870s and aslower decline till the end of the century probably had a bearing on territorialamalgamations and, therefore, on title succession among kin and politicalunits, as well as making more land available for sale and lease. More atten-tion has been paid to the classification of social and landholding units, as a re-sult of the land commissions of the 1890s and 1912, than to the reasons forthe decline in the numbers of roko per province by 1905 and their re-

31 RHL, Fiji Legislative Council, Council Papers Revenue and Expenditure (Suva,1880–1913); RHL, 919 s. 5; Colonial Office Confidential Print, Further Correspondence Respecting the Affairs of Fiji and the Native Population [1895]; Native Taxation and the Communal System in Fiji, cd. 2240 [1904].

32 Timothy J. Macnaught, The Fijian Colonial Experience: A Study of the Neo-traditionalOrder under British Colonial Rule prior to World War II (Canberra, 1982); Deryck Scarr, ‘ARokotui for Lomaiviti’, JPH 5 (1970), 3–31; and more generally his Fiji: A Short History (Sydney, 1984).

33 I borrow this phrase from Andrew Strathern’s insights into the dynamics of social and political change in a different cultural context in Papua New Guinea: A Line of Power (London,1984).

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emergence as key intermediaries by the 1940s. Descent lines have been studied more than the Civil List.

For example, even a cursory analysis of the finances of the ‘Provincial’ orFijian Administration over the period from the 1880s till 1913 reveals that Fijian ‘officials’ below the level of the most senior roko were part-time administrators and could not possibly have lived on their salaries, even sup-plemented by rations and transport. The whole budget for the Fijian branchof local administration was modest indeed, hardly ever amounting to morethan one-tenth of the total colonial budget (excluding extraordinary publicworks expenditure) and easily covered by Fijian head taxes. Moreover, ‘Native Department’ annual expenditure tended to remain static at about£6,000 or £7,000 in the 1880s and 1890s, when thirteen roko tui were paidbetween £100 and £300 a year and a hierarchy of 161 buli £10 to £15 a year.31

If anything, these scales decreased by 1913, when the sum for expenditure onsalaries for the Fijian establishment (including those of European officers)stood at only £6,000. The roko had been reduced to ten, supplemented byeight commissioners, plus eight stipended Rotuman chiefs and a proliferationof 182 buli at the usual bargain rates of under £10 a year. Now it is true thatif the accounts are examined more closely a number of other Fijian personnelwere paid as native inspectors of taxes and as native stipendiary magistrates,constables of police and as armed native constabulary under other depart-ments. Their salaries, nevertheless, would add no more than about £3,000 tothose of the Fijian Administration. In all, the picture is one of extreme parsi-mony towards personnel who must have used their positions to supplementtheir income.

To some extent case studies of the ways in which appointments were madeand power used within the ranks of the approved hierarchy of chiefs andagents support this contention.32 One might conclude that what was estab-lished in the 1870s was not ‘indirect rule’ but a ‘line of power’ along whichsubordinate social and political units were dependent for access to new re-sources and services on the actions of chiefly administrators with ascriptivestatus and prescribed functions who could do favours for kin and followers.33

Thus, from the beginning, T. J. Macnaught has argued that the salaried roko

34 Macnaught, The Fijian Colonial Experience, 28. 35 Ibid. 49–63.36 Nayacakalou, Leadership in Fiji, 88–9. 37 Scarr, ‘A Rokotui for Lomaiviti’, 13.

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tui of fourteen provinces were entitled to allegiance and services from localpolities, as well as use of prison labour and a share of land lease moneys. Inturn, the lesser order of buli acting as brokers for headmen and villages en-sured tax collection and government work in return for status, small salaries,and a share of lease moneys. Authority in the line was enforced throughstipendiary magistrates applying articles of prescriptive regulations. ‘Tradi-tion’ was codified for a system of rewards and penalties, but it was still suf-fused with reciprocal obligations and access to goods and services on the partof office-holders. His general conclusion on the period of the nineteenth century is that some of the chiefs’ hereditary privileges were removed, andothers enlarged: ‘There is little evidence to suggest that Fijian chiefs amassedfortunes in office, but much to show that they lived beyond their means tomeet the reciprocal obligations attached to their privileges.’34 In other words,British over-rule did not disrupt second-order clientage between roko andbuli, or buli and headman, and, indeed, may have enhanced the relationshipby making the overthrow of a chief impossible.

A second conclusion is that there were avenues for advancement on thepart of chiefs turned ‘big men’. There are documented examples of access tonew sources of income for high chiefs with a measure of education and mili-tary careers and reputations for loyalty, obedience, and respect.35 To those wecan add Nayacakalou’s example of Ratu Emosi who combined the offices ofvillage chief and headman in the 1950s to refurbish and modernize his village,went into church and house construction as a business, and then into religiousprophecy.36

Similarly, Deryck Scarr found that beneath the regularities of meetings andduties supervised by the governor’s native commissioner and the provincialoffice, the tendency of Fijian magistrates to restrain officials below the rankof roko had to be curbed, in order to allow buli to participate in a share of dis-trict rates and labour. Tensions arose when some European magistrates triedto supplant a roko and control the subordinate village system, counter to theassumption of Fijian leaders that they could make appointments at all levels.This assumption becomes clear from his example of the Roko Tui Ra, a self-made chief recognized by Cakobau, given to selling land and appointing closerelatives to the posts of magistrate and buli in the 1870s.37 Such ambitions rancounter to the wishes of local hereditary chiefs; and in 1879 a roko with kinship ties in Ra was appointed, and he took care to approve buli of local origins.

This tension between respect for ascribed status on the part of officials andselection of loyal subordinates is also illustrated in the more complex case ofthe Lomaiviti chieftainship as a provincial dependency of Bau. Candidatesfrom local patriclans were ignored in favour of appointment of clients of the

38 Deryck Scarr, The Majesty of Colour: A Life of Sir John Bates Thurston, ii. Viceroy of thePacific (Canberra, 1980), 146–96, 198.

39 Scarr, ‘A Rokotui for Lomaiviti’, 27. 40 Ibid. 30.41 Macnaught, ‘Chiefly Civil Servants’, 2–20.42 May, 30 June 1911, cited in ibid. 11.

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Vunivalu of Bau in the 1870s; and this precedent of choosing a ‘government’man continued in 1883 by selection of Ratu Marika, backed by Governor DesVoeux and then by Thurston, against the wishes of Lomaiviti buli and formerenemies of the Cakobau lineage. Thurston’s view was that government pa-tronage prevailed over any hereditary claims to office; and he actively carriedout this form of patronage as acting-administrator and governor, in order(ironically) to preserve the privileges of chiefs and retain their ‘voice in theland’.38

The examples raise the more general question of the emergence of a civilservice. Scarr’s conclusion from an analysis of the posts of buli, magistrates,scribes, and agricultural inspectors was that family status was enhanced locally by a presence in government, however minor, and especially in theprovincial office. Mobility at these lower levels, however, diminished provin-cial loyalty and confirmed the status of functionary. Cases of venality provideevidence of the increased expectations of appointees and the need for protec-tion by a roko. A further conclusion is that at the buli level a candidate re-quired status by primogeniture and agnatic descent to succeed. Higher up,there would also appear to have been emphasis on ascribed status. Of all ap-pointments of roko tui, 1889–97, two could be regarded as hereditary suc-cessors, five had chieftaincy rank in the provinces where they were appointed,and four only could be regarded as officials owing primary loyalty to the governor and the Fijian administrative service.39 The samples are not largeenough to identify a firm movement from ascription to bureaucracy. Whatdoes emerge is the continued importance of local networks in the ‘line ofpower’, where rank and eventually experience assisted in the formation of aloyal Fijian Administration. Success depended, in the case of the Roko Tui Ba(Mba) in the late 1880s: ‘on building up a local power nexus in a way that noforeigner to the province could have done, basing on his kinship group. He established a new village for himself where his own house could be regardedas the chief’s, with the object of eclipsing the existing Nadi villages, identifiedas they were with the established chiefly lines.’40

The ambiguities of chiefly and official status were further explored by Macnaught for a later period; and his general conclusion was that customarydeference, especially by magistrates towards chiefs in office, worked againstthe emergence of a professional, detached service gentry.41 There was a dropin the number of roko heading provinces, however, in favour of administra-tion by commissioners. In 1911, Fijian leaders were still described ‘as subsi-dized native chiefs’, not as civil servants.42 In any case, by the 1930s, the trend

43 ’Atu Emberson-Bain, Labour and Gold in Fiji (Cambridge, 1994), 65–7.44 Macnaught, ‘Chiefly Civil Servants’, 19.

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was towards closer supervision. All the remaining roko had to channel theircorrespondence through the district commissioner who controlled provincialfunds.

This change did not necessarily mean the end of lower order clientage, ofcourse, but simply a change of patron. The shift is confirmed by the increaseduse of ‘Native Assistants’ recruited from chiefly families to help reduce dis-putes over claims to status and precedence and keep the European com-missioner informed of likely trouble. Such men owed their position to the European provincial officer not the roko. Although in the Lau group, Cakaudrove and Kandavu provinces roko continued to build up small fiefsand kept strict enforcement of regulations at bay, in the less isolatedprovinces, as the Native Department became part of the Colonial Secretariat,commissioners were intolerant of such initiatives. In recruitment of labourfor the gold mines, however, the roko was permitted to turn a blind eye on theagency work of chiefs and headmen, so long as there was a flow of cash backinto the local economy.43 More work would be needed to confirm the suspi-cion of commissioners that lower-level Fijian officials exercised patronage byallowing remission of head taxes which were in continuous arrears behind assessments.

Matters were allowed to drift in the 1930s until post-war investment andreforms. In general, the incomplete history of Fijian administration exposesthe inherent contradiction between the obligations of chieftainship at variouslevels and official incorporation of client-chiefs into a different order of obli-gation and rule-making. As in other Pacific societies, a chief’s following wasmade up of various kinds of social units including ‘those that adhered . . . byvirtue of their kinship with him, need for his protection, prior conquest, orlong co-residence’.44 Allegiance was hard to express on a map of village or district boundaries; and the process of segmentation meant that some kingroups took their allegiance and services elsewhere under their own buli.Macnaught’s analysis of the social origins of buli, 1900–40, suggests thatmost combined high rank with influence in a district derived from access tooutside sources, remission of tax in return for services, or other forms of reci-procity. A good quarter were outsiders serving in a tikina where they had nokin; and a few were commoners promoted to de facto chieftainship. It was notdifficult, in any case, for a strong roko to appoint buli from members of hisown extended family, securing, as the Roko Tui Lau did (1901–30) a loyalband of clients. With this kind of precedent from ‘custom’ reconstruction ofthe Fijian Administration after 1944 and amalgamation of many districtsfailed to turn buli into civil servants. The principal change was revision of Native Regulations by the reconstituted Fijian Affairs Board which took over

45 Legislative Council of Fiji, Council Paper No. 1 of 1960: Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Natural Resources and Population Trends of the Colony of Fiji 1959(Suva, 1960), 16.

46 Henry J. Rutz, ‘Bureaucracy and Brokerage: Fijian Villages and Public Goods’, in Rodmanand Counts, eds., Middlemen and Brokers in Oceania, 149–86.

47 Robert Norton, ‘Chiefs for the Nation: Containing Ethnonationalism and Bridging the Ethnic Divide in Fiji’, PS 22 (1999), 21–50.

48 For the background to the Council, see Lawson, The Failure, 69–81.

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all the finances of Fijian local government In this way the Board, as a supervi-sory body, came under the Council of Chiefs and the five Fijian representa-tives in the Legislative Council who had to approve its regulations.

The chiefly hierarchy, therefore, was well entrenched by the 1950s to takeadvantage of expanded economic development. Chiefs held the majority ofposts in the Fijian Administration, including those of Economic Developmentofficers and Fijian magistrates. On the other hand, they were unapproachableby many commoners and costly for villages to entertain ceremonially. Manyof them were insufficiently educated to undertake the more complex respon-sibilities of local and central government in the period before decolonization;and because of this shortage ‘plural’ offices fell on men who were legislators,officials, and members of numerous boards, thus closing off avenues for ad-vancement for those of non–chiefly status.45 In the absence of advancementby merit, the continuation of patron–client relations was confirmed by laterstudies of the ways in which Fijian officials had to work through village head-men as brokers and entrepreneurs to make any development programmework.46 Paradoxically, too, senior Fijian chiefs extended their role as brokersand patrons to include Indian leaseholders of Fijian lands.47

Fiji moved towards a Westminster-style constitution with separation ofpowers and elections in a complex system of communal and a few ‘generalelector’ seats. By 1967, there was a full ministerial system with portfolios dis-tributed evenly between Fijian, Indian, and European members of the Houseof Representatives. Until then, the Council of Chiefs continued to elect sevento ten Fijian members of the Legislative Council and determined the com-position of the Fijian Affairs Board which regulated much of the Fijian Administration including the duties and privileges of chiefs.48 After 1970 andindependence, there was a measure of decentralization to Provincial Councilswith an elected element, still under the supervision of the Board, and a newland rating system in place of the old head tax, as approved by the chiefs. Atthe centre, Fijian rights were firmly entrenched under the 1970 Constitution;and at the election of 1972 the Fijian Alliance obtained a substantial majorityof seats over the Indian National Federation Party. By the 1977 elections,however, the moderate Alliance which had appealed to a large number of Fijian and Indian voters lost ground to more assertive Fijian nationalists,though Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara was sworn in as prime minister at the invita-tion of the Governor-General, Ratu Sir George Cakobau, and his party

49 Bavadra did not hold a chief’s title but was a member of a chiefly lineage; and his wife hadchiefly status it is claimed: Lawson, The Failure, 243.

50 Ibid. 240–1.51 Parliament of Fiji, Parliamentary Paper No. 8 of 1974, Report of the Committee Appointed

to Consider the Emoluments etc., of Members of the House of Representatives and the Senate ofFiji (Suva 1974).

52 Sir Richard Ramage, Localisation of the Fiji Civil Service: A Report (Suva, 1968).53 Ibid. 2–3.

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retained a majority after a second election. The Alliance remained in powertill 1987.

Political changes contingent on subsequent military coups have been thefocus of most academic commentary. The testing time for democratic politicsand the inherent power of Fijian status groups came towards the end of the1980s when the long rule of the Fijian Alliance was challenged by a coalitionof Labour and the Indian National Federation Party under the Fijian, Timoci Bavadra, who, while not anti-chief, was a democrat and union leaderopposed to the establishment of chiefs from eastern Fiji, an opponent of cor-ruption, and partisan of commoner voters.49 The reply of the Alliance was tobrand any attack on chiefly privileges as near-sedition. Attacks on chiefs wereequated with threats to Fijians’ lands.50 Whether ‘tradition’ could be sepa-rated from politics remained doubtful; but the reasons for this conflation layless in ideology than in the long practice of clientage for the loyal supportersof government ministers, chiefs, and officials.

The Fijian community and its leadership had been in competition, since the1960s, for places in an expanded civil service, government corporations, andto a lesser degree in the expatriate and Indian-dominated business sector. Inan underdeveloped country, the prizes were rich. Forty per cent of ordinarygovernment expenditure in the 1970s went towards public service emolu-ments; and Members of Parliament and the Senate with modest salaries andallowances (by outside standards) were, nevertheless, reckoned to be in thetop 13 per cent of income earners, including businessmen.51 In preparationfor ‘localization’ of the civil service before independence ‘imbalances’ in re-cruitment of Fijians, Indians, and others had been noted.52 With the prospectof some five hundred posts held by temporary expatriates becoming vacant,it was perceived that the 1960s pass rate for the Cambridge Overseas andNew Zealand School Certificates put Indians clearly in the lead. Indians alsotook over half of the local New Zealand University Entrance passes.53

Colonial Office advice was circumspect, recommending a ‘fair’ racial bal-ance, but leaving this objective to be determined by ministers, especiallywhere ‘sensitive’ departments such as Police and Judiciary were concerned. Intime, it was hoped the ‘communal’ aspect of government employment wouldbe eliminated. In the meantime, Fiji began as an independent state with thelower ranks of the Police firmly in Fijian hands, while Legal Offices and the Inland Revenue were run by Indians and Chinese. All of the eight

54 Sir Arthur H. Tange, Review of the Fiji Public Service Commission, 1980. Parliament of Fiji,Parliamentary Paper No. 44 of 1980.

55 Tange particularly criticized the work of the Public Service Appeal Board (‘not accountableto anyone’), Review, 24, 53. The Board of five included one Fijian and three Indian civil servants(including the future Prime Minister Dr Timoci Bavadra).

56 Ibid. 2, 24.57 The Review stated that there were some seventy ‘statutory bodies and committees’ with a

staff of 4,600 in Fiji. Tange recommended that power to decide pay and conditions for these postsbe forfeited by the Cabinet to the Commission and the Ministry of Finance. It is not clear this wasever done.

58 Durutalo, The Paramountcy of Fijian Interest, 36.

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local magistrates were Indian. Some departments were difficult to fill at all, particularly Agriculture, Lands, Mines and Survey, which required qualifica-tions at tertiary levels. On the other hand, Fijian Affairs and Local Govern-ment were largely in the hands of Fijians, backed by the Council of Chiefs andthe provincial council system; but posts under Education and places at a pro-jected University of the South Pacific were expected to go to better-qualifiedIndians above the level of primary teaching.

Clearly, the Fijian Public Service Commission would bear a heavy respon-sibility for civil service manpower selection on equitable grounds. By the endof the 1970s, a report found that the Commission had largely failed in thistask, because of government interference, undermanning, and removal of itspermanent secretary in 1978, leaving considerable influence with ministers inselection of the Commission’s staff.54 The Tange Report of 1980 was circum-spect but clear on two points: although Fiji had attempted to follow theBritish tradition ‘of eliminating political patronage’, power over promotionslay with the Commission, and choice of its members to exercise that powerwas restricted by politicians.55 Secondly, Tange was moved by his evidence torecommend that a ‘racial factor’ should not be considered, when promotiondecisions were made.56 Less surprisingly, the investigation reviewed the manystatutory bodies employing a quarter of Fiji’s public servants who lay outsidethe Commission’s authority and were responsible only to ministers.57

It was unlikely that Fijian ministers would restore safeguards for an in-dependent Public Service Commission. Like other patron parties the Alliancehad been long enough in office by 1987 to entrench a system of rewards,amounting to nepotism in some cases, and to administer an excessive share ofmoneys from rent of lands and concessions to business companies throughthe Native Land Development Corporation. There has been little investiga-tion of this area of Fijian business and politics to explain indigenous Fijians’poor record in running local companies, compared with appointments to dir-ectorships in state and expatriate enterprises ‘for their political influence andthe potential benefits they might bring to the corporation in the form of con-tracts and licenses obtained from government’.58 Little of the commentaryhas risen above the level of newspaper speculation, accusation, and rumour,

59 Deryck Scarr, Fiji: The Politics of Illusion: The Military Coups in Fiji (Kensington, 1988),33; Lawson, The Failure, 245–8.

60 Of the twenty-eight members of Bavadra’s party in Parliament nineteen were Fiji Indians,but six Fijians were in the fourteen-member Cabinet holding the main portfolios for Fijian Affairs, the Public Service, and Home Affairs. Lawson, The Failure, 253.

61 J. Leckie cited in William Sutherland, Beyond the Politics of Race: An Alternative Historyof Fiji to 1992, Political and Social Change Monograph 15 (Canberra, 1992), 196–7.

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though there was considerable force in the charge that the near 30 per cent ofLand Trust moneys that went to chiefs was never properly accounted for.59

The point was never pressed home by calling for a commission of enquiry; butBavadra’s announced plan to set up a National Lands Commission went tothe heart of a sensitive issue by threatening access to resources on the part ofthe hierarchy. The corruption charge exposed even higher levels and involvedRatu Mara’s property deals with the Department of Education, the use ofhurricane relief money, writing off Development Bank loans to ministers,issue of tax permits, backhanders from companies in return for relief fromduties on imports. All this could be found in many political contexts and notjust in ‘new states’. The point here is that Alliance leaders had personal andparty favours to lose under a change of government in April 1987, a changesubverted by the military coups of the same year, although the governmentwas not entirely dominated by Fiji Indians.60 Moreover, one of the immediateresults of the coups was a change in the balance of civil service appointments.When many Indians resigned or retired, Fijians took up three times as manyappointments as Indians, 1987–9; and, for the first time, the racial balance in the civil service lay with a Fijian majority at 53 per cent of posts in 1989,compared with Indian and other groups.61

It is hard, therefore, to resist the conclusion that the hold of ‘traditional’chieftaincy over ethnic Fijian voters was not quite so secure as Alliance lead-ership thought in the face of Indian competition. There had already been con-siderable unease at the style and relative wealth of Fijian parliamentarians, aloss of votes to extreme ‘nationalists’ in the 1970s, and a swing towards National Federation in 1982 and in 1987 with the help of a (largely Indianand civil service supported) Labour Party. An element of class politics cutthrough some of the ethnic polarities, not very far, but sufficiently in the eth-nic Fijian case to swing voters against appeals to ‘tradition’ and ensure thatthe Labour Coalition with National Federation won twenty-eight seats totwenty-four in the House of Representatives.

Moreover, from 1973, only a handful of the sixty-six members of the GreatCouncil of Chiefs (as they were now styled) were appointed because of theirchiefly status. Most of the remainder were there because they were FijianMembers of the House of Representatives (some of whom were also chiefs) or nominated appointments from Provincial Councils. The majority of theCouncil, therefore, were not chiefs by descent or title; but they were members

62 Cited in Nayacakalou, Leadership in Fiji, 136.63 James West Turner, ‘Continuity and Constraint: Reconstructing the Concept of Tradition

from a Pacific Perspective’, CP 9 (1997), 345–81; Lawson, Tradition versus Democracy in theSouth Pacific.

64 J. Clammer, ‘Colonialism and the Perception of Tradition in Fiji’, in A. Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London, 1973), 199–222.

65 Later the government of Mahendra Chaudhry was overthrown without much resistancefrom President Ratu Mara or the Council of Chiefs, and the army once more held effective powerin a state of emergency.

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of a powerful oligarchy to advise ministers and appoint members of the FijianAffairs Board and the Trust Board. In effect, they acted as a standing com-mittee for Fijian representatives at parliamentary and local government levelsas guardians of the provisions written into the Constitution on the status andland rights of ethnic Fijians. As such, the hierarchy of appointed and electednotables protected the ‘communal way of life’ regarded as ‘traditional’ (andsacrosanct), as the chiefs’ spokesman Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna had reported tothe Burns Commission in 1959.62

Appeal to the ‘traditional’ has been the focus of considerable argument inthe light of seventeen years of Fijian political dominance, followed by a swingto Indian dominance in 1987, military government, constitutional debate andreform.63 Critics of this emphasis on a political ideology to safeguard vestedinterests take their stand on the propensity of elites to invent reasons for le-gitimacy from the historic past and play on genuine fears of dispossession.Some also point out that much of the entrenchment of ethnic Fijian landrights has a dubious basis in the models of land-holding units set up by latenineteenth-century land commissions, as well as in the promotion of chief-tainship for the purposes of government in the colonial period.64 What mat-ters, more recently, is the political and constitutional action taken to defendthis ideology. It can also be argued that pressing reasons arising from compe-tition for public office, rather than the land issue, lay behind Fijian insistenceon a monopoly of the highest posts.

Details of the subsequent revision of the Constitution in 1990, endorsed bythe Great Council of Chiefs, are beyond this survey, except to note that limitswere set to return of Indians to a guaranteed number of seats, allowing gov-ernments to be formed without them on a purely communal system withoutcross-voting. Urban constituencies as the source of much Fijian and IndianLabour support were deliberately under-represented. Apart from this gerry-mandering, an appointed Senate of Chiefs ensured a permanent veto over le-gislation on Fijian affairs. All this entrenchment was revised again under the1997 Constitution, of course, to permit equality of voting rights for a slightlyreduced Indian population.65 Under both constitutions, however, the GreatCouncil of Chiefs reverted to a more exclusive status group than before, ex-cluding many untitled Fijians from its ranks and won the power to nominate

66 Nicholas Thomas, ‘Regional Politics, Ethnicity, and Custom in Fiji’, CP 2 (1990), 136.67 Brij V. Lal, Power and Prejudice: The Making of the Fiji Crisis (Wellington, 1988).68 Lawson, The Failure, 51.69 The theme of external patronage has been explored but not well developed in Durutalo,

The Paramountcy of Fijian Interest; and E. Utrecht, ed., Fiji: Client State of Australasia(Sydney, 1984).

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the majority of members of the upper house and appoint and remove the president.66

Indian and Fijian ethnic blocs were by no means uniform in ideas and po-litical programmes. But on the Fijian side of the electoral equation were con-tinuities in the authority of the institutions of Fijian Administration, howeverreformed by a democratic process and inflated as part of the Public Service.For ethnic Fijians governance derived from the status of titled chiefs; and, sec-ondly, there was an acceptance of Fijian possession of land as a cultural arte-fact, as well as a source of wealth, and a belief in non-alienability. That thesetwo ‘traditions’ were deeply influenced, even constructed, with the help ofBritish administration from the nineteenth century is a good debating pointfor those who see a contradiction between the aims of conservation andchange implicit in the concept of Fijian Administration, roundly criticized byNayacakalou and others.67

These are not the only issues for the power struggle in contemporary Fiji.The third is the power of patronage exercised within a hierarchy of the Fijian‘establishment’. Nor is this limited to access to resources derived from rentedlands from which it has been rightly pointed out ordinary Fijians get very little.68 For, while it is true that fear of dispossession and resentment of power-sharing maintain the leadership’s reciprocity with commoners, within the system of government and the public service since the 1960s there have beenopportunities for advancement through patronage and nepotism which an al-ternative administration bent on a measure of reform placed under threat in1987. An appeal to the continuity of protection through patronage, in returnfor loyalty, has resonances that reach back to the role of heads of great con-federations (still the basis of rural constituencies and administration) and forward to the religious and secular role of ethnic Fijian leaders in defence of vested interests in conjunction with outside business patrons.69 OnceBritish in origin, that patronage by outsiders created a sub-system within Fiji, favoured by a British presence, but reduced by the emergence of a Westminster-style democratic validation of political power. Older validationsdid not disappear and were backed by an unprecedented ethnic Fijian monopoly of coercive force.

In the 1980s, however, there is some evidence of discontinuities which willaffect Fijian views of ‘tradition’ as a safeguard against change. One is that thechiefly establishment which promoted a new patron-party in the early yearsof the decade—the Soqosoqo ni Vakavulewa ni Taukei (SVP), as ‘nationalist’

70 Lawson, Tradition versus Democracy in the South Pacific, 68–74.71 Norton, ‘Chiefs for the Nation’, 30–1, 37–8. 72 PEB 13 (1998), 177.73 Ibid. 1–17; UN Development Programme, Fiji Poverty Report (Suva, 1998).

Fiji 239

successor to the Alliance, failed to dominate elections for communal Fijianseats in 1992 and 1993 or prevent internal party factions from contestingseats. Few chiefs, moreover, won seats among the thirty or so SVP parliamen-tarians in a party dominated by commoners. By contrast, Labour appealed toboth Indians and Fijians, though less in the towns than in the rural cane-growing areas.70 At the same time, there is some evidence of a conciliatorybridging role played by chiefs between Fijian and Indian leaders.71

Little explanation is given for this rift between the chiefly establishmentand its source of support, apart from regional electoral factors, personalities,and the clumsiness of inexperienced politicians such as the coup leader,Sitiveni Rabuka. The reason may be an even more important discontinuity,namely the vulnerability of the Fijian economy sustained from the 1970s tothe 1980s by a considerable Indian and foreign service sector, by an unevenproduction and trade performance and by inward investment and overseasaid. Without these inputs Fiji’s civil or military leaders have little to redistrib-ute in the shape of employment or opportunities for social and educationaladvancement to meet the aspirations of a new generation of Fijians who maybe less impressed by inherited status, if, as in the distant past, it is not matchedby achievement. Economic achievement, however, faltered in the late 1980s,measured in GDP growth rates and in per capita terms, while consumer pricesrose.72 Average incomes were still higher than in most other small states (atsome $US 2,000 per head); but this may reflect a much larger earnings gapwithin the dual economy of Fiji between the monetized and mainly subsis-tence/monetized sectors. The view is confirmed by UN data for the early1990s reflecting ‘deep inequalities’ and relative poverty for a quarter of Fiji’shouseholds. This trend has continued and has not been helped by a long series of budget deficits, an outflow of skills, and allegations of ‘abuse of office in the public service’, especially in government enterprises (the Na-tional Bank, Viti Corporation, Pacific Fishing Company).73 In other ways,Fiji’s links with outside investors are still strong, assisted by deregulation,manufacturing, and tourism opportunities. But whether an ethnic Fijian es-tablishment of chiefs and inexperienced commoners can assure budgets forsocial services and administration that take 30 per cent of revenues is prob-lematical, especially if the country becomes a pariah state, because aparochial view of ‘traditional’ hierarchy has prevailed over imperfect but equitable democratic and communal power-sharing.

13 Tonga

Of the Pacific hierarchies considered here, the Tongan archipelagohas the most durable claim to patrimonial consolidation over a period ofsome three thousand years of settlement. The group may have had a para-mount chief with a Tui Tonga title as early as the thirteenth century.1 If so, itdid not mark a stable paramountcy at that early date; and traditional and ge-nealogical evidence suggests that rivalries and title segmentation resulted bythe fifteenth century in a division between the religious leadership of the TuiTonga and a secular political paramountcy in control of the hau, or rulership.It has been suggested that the basic units of Tongan society—a local descentgroup (kainga) with a chief (‘eika) and a group of households remained un-changed. At the same time the ten to fifteen maximal lineages (ha‘a) com-manded by the most senior title-holders throughout the Tongan archipelagodeveloped into political corporations within island settlements and formedalliances around a number of core paramountcies, expanded by numerousrefugees, commoners, and chiefs by warfare and conquest.2 By the period ofintermittent European contact at the end of the eighteenth century, leadershipat the highest level was a matter of competition between the highest-rankinglineages of such political corporations; and this competition gave increasedimportance to a long tradition of outside alliances and marriages within theTongan group and as far as Samoa and Fiji. At lower levels there was asharper division between chiefly corporations commanding land resourcesand the bulk of chiefs of local descent groups and commoners dependent onmilitary protection, allocations of estates, in return for tribute to paramountsof ha‘a lineages.3 At both levels, a retinue of relatives, fighting men, and exec-utives distinguished a chief by agnatic descent or by headship of a maximallineage from the commonality. The basis of power, however, remained landheld within the ha‘a by inheritance and by conquest and allocated by the secular holder of the hau to subordinate kinsmen as island governors and tomatapule stewards of estates.

1 I. C. Campbell, Island Kingdom: Tonga Ancient and Modern (Christchurch, 1992), 6; Kirch,The Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms, chap. 9; Noel Rutherford, ed., Friendly Islands: A History of Tonga (Melbourne, 1977), chaps. 3, 5.

2 R. R. Nayacakalou, ‘Land Tenure and Social Organization in Tonga’, JPS 68 (1959),93–114; Guy Powles, ‘The Persistence of Chiefly Power and its Implications for Law and Political Organization in Western Polynesia’, Ph.D. thesis (Australian National University,1979), 56–7.

3 William Mariner in John Martin, ed., An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands in theSouth Pacific Ocean, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1827), ii. 208–9.

Tonga 241

Map 10. The Tongan Archipelago, after W. P. Morrell Britain in the Pacific Islands(Oxford, 1960), Map 1

This evidence of a tension between status by rank within a senior lineageand political power as the prerogative of a successful military chief has beentaken further to distinguish between a ‘titular’ system and a ‘hau’ system inCentral Polynesia and in Tonga in particular. A dual chieftaincy such as thatbetween the Tui Tonga and the Tui Kanokupolu was a recognition of the splitbetween candidates from the highest caste within a number of ranked line-ages, on the one hand, and those who made their way to titles by militarymeans.4 Other examples can be found in the chieftaincies of the Leewardgroup of the Society Islands; and there were variants in the concept of a royalcaste with appointed or hereditary executives in the hierarchies of Hawai‘iand Tahiti. In Tonga, the concept was refined from the 1840s by paramountcyof the Tui Kanokupolu lineage in the person of Taufa‘ahau as founder of theTupou dynasty which became paramount in the 1860s. A further conse-quence of the duality within the Tongan hierarchy and the geographical dis-persion of contenders through the archipelago was a constant quest formanpower, as well as titular legitimacy. ‘Like his Malay counterpart con-tending for an Indonesian sultanate, the Tongan challenger required men andeconomic resources to support his warriors.’5

Much of the pre-European evidence for contacts outside Tonga suggests,therefore, dynastic as well as economic reasons for continuous exchanges ofgoods and people within the archipelago and with Samoa and eastern Fiji.Domination of the inner core of islands from the seat of religious and secularpower at Lapaha on Tongatapu entailed assignment of junior relatives tochieftaincies on ‘Eua, Ha‘apai, Vavau, and the northerly outliers as far asUvea, as part of a maritime empire. Chieftaincies were reinforced by makinguse of the superior rank of female siblings by exchange of chiefs’ sisters anddaughters with other lineages, and by recruiting Fijian, Tongan, Rotumanmatapule retainers and officials into the entourage of a paramount.6 The picture of an ‘empire’ dominated by a centralized secular paramountcy onTongatapu, is, however, an idealized construction, though some of the ele-ments of dynastic and economic power-brokering over several hundred years are true enough. A summary of the Tongan polity on the eve of European contact places Tongatapu firmly at the centre of a structure of influence, rather than dominion, extending over nine hundred kilometreswithin the archipelago and well beyond:

Kinship alliances linked the paramount lines with those of the local ruling chiefs in thecore islands and the outliers. Such alliances were confirmed by marriage relations, forwhich exotic prestige goods were vital. In turn, the outlying islands affirmed their inferior status and loyalty to the hau and Tui Tonga through the tribute of the ‘inasi[ceremonial]. Thus within the chiefdom there was a circular flow of goods, tribute

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4 Niel Gunson, ‘The Hau Concept of Leadership in Western Polynesia’, JPH 14 (1979),28–49.

5 Ibid. 42. 6 Kirch, The Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms, 225–6.

7 Ibid. 241.8 For population estimates, Kirch, The Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms, 222; Campbell,

Island Kingdom, 29.9 George E. Marcus, The Nobility and the Chiefly Tradition in the Modern Kingdom of

Tonga, The Polynesian Society Memoir No. 42 (Wellington, 1980). The main divisions andpower bases by the 1790s were: Vava‘u and Ha‘apai under the Tui Kanokupolu, Tuputoa; Tongatapu as a base for the Tui Tonga (religious figurehead) and the Tui Ha‘atakalaua ha‘a. In1820 Vava‘u came under a paramount, Finau; Ha‘apai came under Tuputoa’s son, Taufa‘ahau(later King George). Laufili was elected Tui Tonga in 1827; and Aleamotua, great uncle ofTauafa‘ahau, was elected Tui Kanokupolu on Tongatapu in 1827.

10 Kirch, The Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms, 226.

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inwards towards the paramounts, prestige goods outwards to the local chiefs. Monopolisation of the sources of prestige goods by the paramounts helped to securetheir power over the system as a whole.7

Nevertheless, there is little evidence for authority exercised by appoint-ments throughout the archipelago as in patrimonial regimes. It is acceptablethat a thousand years of occupation, a rich agricultural endowment, and population increase to between thirty and fifty thousand led to paramountcythrough competition and increasing division between chiefs and commonersto the point of class stratification. But archaeology does not explain theeclipse of some senior titles and the fusion of others after several generations.8

Whatever their claims by descent and military support, secular title-holders inthe principal groups still lived through a period of intense rivalry and civil warfrom the 1790s to the 1820s over succession issues in which transient and settled foreign agents played a part.9

Just how important was that part? It was assisted by the quasi-patrimonialstatus of local chiefs of senior lineages, in the sense that Tongan aristocracywas accustomed to a measure of ‘bureaucratization’ by appointed matapule,the maintenance of a court (falefa) under the secular paramount at Lapaha,and ritual tribute.10 But such consolidation of power within and over corpor-ations of lineages was probably limited (and contested) on the main islands of the group. The amount of effective centralization in the group as a wholeshould not be exaggerated; and the patrimonialism of the Tui Kanokupolucould be matched by at least two other paramounts, one of whom (the TuiTonga) had claims to religious legitimization. Possibly such sanctions hadweakened; but the place of religion in secular politics was still important, asincoming mission sects demonstrated in their bid for support from para-mounts. It may also be that one of the contributions made by missions was toreaffirm the combination of sacred and secular elements within the hau of asingle lineage of the chiefly caste by the 1840s.

At lower levels, however, the influence of Europeans was specific and theirposition one of dependency for much of the first half of the nineteenth cen-tury. From the considerable evidence we have of casual contacts and longer-term residence by Pacific islanders and Europeans, as a result of exploration

11 H. G. Cummins, ‘Tongan Society at the Time of European Contact’, in Rutherford, ed.,Friendly Islands, 63–89; David A. Chappell, ‘Secret Sharers: Indigenous Beachcombers in the Pacific Islands’, PS 17 (1994), 1–22.

12 Campbell, Island Kingdom, 41.13 Of the first expedition sent by the London Missionary Society in 1797 eighteen were landed

in Tahiti and ten in Tonga. The bulk of the Tahitian missionaries left for New South Wales in1809.

14 Niel Gunson, ‘The Coming of Foreigners’, in Rutherford, ed., Friendly Islands, 90–113.15 Ibid. 105; Campbell, Island Kingdom, 52.

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and trade, it would seem that no simple generalization sums up the influenceof the muli (foreigners) in Tongan society.11 They stood outside the traditionaltapu system which may have given them a certain freedom of action; but theystill required a measure of status by personal achievement and a protector tosurvive and succeed. Transients consisting of deserters, convicts, the earliestLondon missionaries, and occasional traders and whalers could be said tohave made little political impact and were valued only for their artefacts ortheir knowledge of firearms. Such clients were useful muli in the 1790s—‘andthe chiefs were eager to patronize them’.12 They could, like William Marinerand George Vason, integrate fairly well into Tongan society and even associ-ate with the highest title-holders at considerable risk when patrons were removed by violence. The main business of transients was warfare, entrap-ment of unwary vessels, service of armaments, and intermediation betweenTongans and other outsiders. Like their counterparts at Tahiti, therefore, the earliest pioneer missionaries failed the test of useful brokerage and with-drew.13 A few converted Tahitians who came as missionaries two decadeslater integrated more easily, paving a way for the Wesleyans in 1826.14

A second category of resident foreigners, like their Fijian and Samoan pre-decessors, influenced Tongan politics more permanently, to the extent thatthey assisted the highest-ranking chiefs to gain an ascendancy. In the later1820s and 1830s Wesleyan missionaries came as brokers and teachers, andone, William Brown, rose to become an executive for Finau, chief of Vava‘u,while in 1822 the missionary, Walter Lawry, was taken under the protectionof Palu, chief of Mu‘a on Tongatapu. These events coincided with changes inthe local balance of power. The most consequential was the defeat of the sonof the Tui Tonga by the young Taufa‘ahau, when chief of Lifuka in the Ha‘apai group, which established him as Tui Ha‘apai and removed a politicalthreat from the lineage of Pau.15 In the Vavau group the Finau family rose toparamountcy as Tui Vava‘u and appointed their own governors. But on Tongatapu there was no paramountcy or immediate succession to the TuiKanokupolu title. In short, from the beginning of the new century there wasa vacuum in Tongan politics and little evidence of centralization. Paramountshad been murdered or were ineffective. A small trade in arms did not influ-ence the balance of power within the core group of islands decisively, evenafter Taufa‘ahau’s rise to paramountcy on Ha‘apai.

16 S. Latukefu, ‘The Wesleyan Mission’, in Rutherford, ed., Friendly Islands, 125.17 Hugh Laracy, ‘The Catholic Mission’, in ibid. 136–53.18 C. Newbury, ‘Aspects of French Policy in the Pacific, 1853–1906’, PHR 27 (1958), 45–56.

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For their part the Wesleyan missionaries could not be said to have influ-enced political change either, while they were protected by local chiefs atMu‘a and Hihifo on Tongatapu in the early 1820s. Indeed, they had been dis-couraged from trying to set up their own local network of commoners andconverts which had led to accusations of aiming at chieftaincy. It was notuntil 1827 that Tahitian missionaries of the London Society and the rein-forcement of three Wesleyans headed by the resourceful and diplomaticNathaniel Turner began to make headway, when the highest chiefs perceivedthat candidates for conversion could be co-opted as followers. Aleamotu‘awas the first to do this on Tongatapu, though he outwardly recanted in returnfor election to the Tui Kanokupolu title (and the hau) in 1827. On Vava‘u,Finau was persuaded to copy this tactic in the interests of building up an al-liance against Tongatapu.16 Progress with literacy in the embryonic churchfounded by John Thomas at Ha‘apai was also a factor in persuading chiefs tolead, rather than follow, this trend. Not to be outdone, Taufa‘ahau carefullyextended his patronage to the mission in the late 1820s; and in 1831 he ac-cepted Christianity and baptism as Siosi (George) as an act of statesmanshipand faith in the efficacy of the new god. In 1833 he was nominated by Finauto succeed to his title and had the support of his uncle, Aleamotu‘a, the TuiKanokupolu of Tongatapu.

While it is possible to see in this alliance of religious innovators and highchiefs the outlines of centralization and title consolidation, clientage was di-visive as well as a support for secular authority. Opposition on Tongatapu ledto warfare in 1837. Two Catholic priests who settled there in 1842 were co-opted by a lineage opposed to George Taufa‘ahau. They converted a chief,Moeaki, at Pea and associated themselves closely with the Tui Tonga atMu‘a.17 As religious and political competitors in Tongan affairs, Wesleyansand Catholics played out their rivalry at international levels of support andintervention by naval commanders. Internally, the issue of secular dominancewas settled by Taufa‘ahau’s succession to the Tui Kanokupolu title in 1845, asthe new hau with titles in all main groups. His titular position was confirmedby war in 1852 against Catholic factions centred on the Havea lineage in Tongatapu. Conversion of the Tui Tonga to Catholicism in 1848, however,mattered little, because of his renunciation of secular functions, whileGeorge’s act of statesmanship in protecting defeated Catholics and acceptingreligious tolerance in a treaty with a French officer in 1855 marked the firstinternational recognition of his ‘sovereignty’ over the Tongan group.18

Missions and the advice of foreign clients complemented Taufa‘ahau’s ascendancy by legal prescriptions and by a centralized form of taxation to replace annual tribute. As elsewhere in the Pacific, Tonga’s early law codes

19 Powles, ‘The Persistence of Chiefly Power’, 243–4.20 Noel Rutherford, ‘George Tupou I and Shirley Baker’, in Rutherford, ed., Friendly Islands,

chap. 9; and Shirley Baker and the King of Tonga (Melbourne, 1971).21 For an analysis of the 1875 Constitution, Powles, ‘The Persistence of Chiefly Power’,

250–61.

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were important for a society slowly acquiring literacy by religious recruit-ment with the sanction of chiefs. The paramount, George Tupou, embracedWesleyan endorsement of hierarchy and kingship through the Old Testamentand accepted the precepts of the New, as mediated by his own status and example. The earliest Vava‘u code of 1838 was in his name and handed downat a council of chiefs. A subsequent code of 1850 which applied to all thegroup was probably modelled on one of the Society Islands’ codes and createda secular arm for enforcement through island governors and judges. Moresignificantly, the Tui Kanokupolu, or George Tupou I as he became, wasstyled as ‘the root of all government’ with control over land sales and taxa-tion: chiefs held authority from him under the law with a right to traditionalservices.19

In any case, for an ambitious paramount there was no shortage of adviceon how to expand a patrimonial role by acquiring the charismatic function of law-giver. Tupou visited Sydney in 1853 to see how a foreign govern-ment worked; he corresponded with Sir George Grey as Governor of NewZealand and accepted guidance from the former Hawaiian commissioner to Polynesia, Charles St Julian, who furnished copies of the Hawaiian Constitution; and from 1860 he recruited the Wesleyan Methodist, ShirleyBaker, as client, confidant, and friend for thirty years.20 A code of 1862 endedserfdom and forced levies in the kingdom, in return for an annual head tax of$3 and a provisional system of land allotments by chiefs for rent.

Baker was the draughtsman of a constitution submitted to an assembly ofchiefs in September 1875. Tupou was its inspiration, reinforcing his patri-monial position by gaining a right of kingship through primogeniture for his lineage in return for allocation of estates to some chiefs and creation ofnoble titles for twenty others. The executive was the king’s to commandthrough appointment of ministers, judges, island governors, and an elemen-tary civil service of magistrates, clerks and land recorders, gaolers, and roadinspectors. In this way succession questions were settled without the politicsof an electoral college of chiefs; potential rivals from ha‘a lineages were created into ‘a nobility at law’ as the gift of the paramount (ten more were cre-ated in 1882). A Lands Act the same year fixed in perpetuity the scattered es-tates of nobles and some stewards, creating a lower level of patronage overuntitled male Tongans by lease of hereditary allotments.21 From a central ex-ecutive of king, Privy Council (ministers, chief justice, and governors) lawswere handed down to an occasional assembly of thirty appointed nobles andthirty elected by chiefs and stewards which could not initiate bills, but had

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some control over finance. ‘Constitutional monarchy’ hardly applies to sucha system where so much was in the gift of the king; and to say that Tupou cre-ated ‘a constitution under a monarchy’ may fit the facts better, but does notmeet the patrimonial realities of ‘patronage and sycophancy’ that held thekingdom together.22 The essential mechanism was the large measure of re-source allocation made through estate grants which created a vested interestfor nobles, chiefs, and matapule executives, allowing subsequent rewards forloyalty. When a central treasury was established, by far the largest expendi-ture was for offices held by ‘powerful Chiefs who might object to the newstate of things, by appointments as Secretaries of State and other high salariedoffice’.23 For commoners, too, there were distinct advantages in guarantees oftenancies free from arbitrary requisitions.

With patrimonial centralization went a measure of religious conformity.Both Baker and Tupou share the responsibility for the creation of an inde-pendent Free Church of Tonga in 1885, outside the Wesleyan Conference atSydney, and for enforcement of its precepts. Until his removal in 1890, Bakerremained, therefore, both secular adviser and effective chairman of a reli-gious institution headed by a king who thus acquired much of the spiritualmana formerly associated with the Tui Tonga title. As chairman and first min-ister from 1880, Baker was a good example of the ‘lopsided friendship’ char-acteristic of clientage relations. His status was certainly not one of equalitywith Tupou. The most careful assessment of his position demolishes any ideahe managed the king or was a clandestine power behind the throne in themanner of the Revd George Pritchard in Tahiti or Father Honoré Laval inMangareva.24 Reforms and codes owed much to his advice—but that was nomore than his function as a client. The supersession of the Wesleyan missionby the Tongan Free Church also owed much to Baker’s agency work, but thechange was an article of Tupou’s policy of spiritual headship of his people ina unified institution which led to severe persecution of Wesleyan dissidents onTongatapu and a long schism. Baker was the faithful draughtsman of the1875 Constitution to prescribe internal authority and as a defence against ex-ternal criticism. Recognition by Germany and Great Britain followed theFrench example of two decades previously. Baker’s temporary removal fromoffice in 1879 through the machinations of Governor Gordon in Fiji in noway affected his standing as the king’s man, and he returned in time to reformfinancial administration and advise on a method of ensuring commoners’ access to land leases, while assigning a share to nobles’ hereditary titles. Thismove created enemies from among lesser title-holders who, in conjunctionwith European traders, became a focus for opposition through other patrons

22 Ibid. 264.23 Maudsley to FO, 3 Jan. 1879, Foreign Office Confidential Print 4285, ‘Correspondence

Respecting the Pacific Islands’.24 Rutherford, Shirley Baker, 176–7.

25 Their respective claims are discussed in Rutherford, Friendly Islands, 173–5.

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centred on the so-called Mu‘a parliament of 1881. A further source of inter-nal faction derived from Baker’s rivalry with the Revd J. E. Moulton over con-trol of education and adherence to the Free Church. His position was nothelped by the critical reports of British consuls which attracted outside atten-tion and threatened the independence of the Tongan state.

With Europeans forbidden to purchase land, the only danger to the Tonganstate lay in a reversal of status as a dependency of a foreign power. As in otherPacific societies there were two potential causes of intervention—foreigndebts and disorders arising from a disputed succession to titles. The constitu-tional right of Tupou to nominate his successor was called in question by SirJohn Thurston’s deportation of Baker in 1890 and installation of a premierwhom the British favoured as a new king, rather than the heir apparent,George Taufa‘ahau.25 But in his last years Tupou I made a stand and withdrewfrom government, leaving taxes in abeyance and no means of patronage tothe opposition. When, therefore, Basil Thomson was sent by Thurston fromFiji to advise on finance, the rival line withdrew from competition. WhenTupou died in 1893, Taufa‘ahau was proclaimed as Tupou II and replaced hispremier with his own client, Saketi, who immediately alienated nobles, com-moners, and foreign settlers by tightening up on arrears of tax and bypassinglocal traders. More seriously, the king’s failure to distinguish public revenuefrom his privy purse led to a financial crisis in 1897 and loans from the prin-cipal German trading firm in the Western Pacific, increasing British fears offoreign intervention. Tupou’s independent kingdom could well have fallenvictim to partition negotiations, until, in 1898 and 1899, other bargainsstruck with Germany and the United States over their claims to the Samoangroup, left Britain with a free hand in Tonga. The result was a Treaty of Protection negotiated by Thomson (as envoy of the Fiji High Commissioner)in 1900, conceding control of external relations, lease of coaling stations, andadvice on internal affairs through a resident with jurisdiction over foreigners.When Tupou II resisted loss of bargaining power with foreigners, Thomson(illegally) declared a formal protectorate by proclamation, until the Treatywas ratified, 16 February 1901.

The Tongan state entered a dangerous phase, risking total loss of sover-eignty. In practice, consular agents found it impossible to alter the Constitu-tion or command resources, though they did insert officials such as a chiefjustice and a treasurer into key positions at cabinet level. It was difficult, how-ever, in view of earlier treaties, to apply British Orders-in-Council to the king-dom, when not all jurisdiction had been ceded and Tupou refused to sign allarticles in the 1900 Treaty which became unworkable. Governor Sir Everardim Thurn, therefore, intervened at the end of 1904 to install as members ofthe Cabinet his own clients enlisted from disaffected chiefs and deported the

26 The most detailed analysis is A. Lavaka, ‘The Limits of Advice: Britain and the Kingdom ofTonga, 1900–1970’, Ph.D. thesis (Australian National University, 1981). The opposition was ledby Polutele Kaho (Police Chief) supported by the nobles Ata, Finau, ‘Ulukalala, Vaea.

27 Noel Rutherford, ‘Tonga Ma‘a Tonga Kautaha: A Proto Co-operative in Tonga’, JPH 16(1981), 20–41.

28 Charles W. Forman, ‘Tonga’s Tortured Venture in Church Unity’, JPH 13 (1978), 3–21.29 Ibid. 21.

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premier, Saketi, his son, and several other ministers.26 None of the new menwere from the Free Church. A questionable Order-in-Council was rushedthrough to legalize the High Commissioner’s action.

For the time being the Colonial Office backed the governor and im Thurn’snominees kept him informed of anything that might have served as a pretextfor annexation. Until 1909, the British Consul, Hamilton Hunter, was an ef-fective agent for outside control. His successor, W. T. Campbell, however,provoked a Colonial Office reaction against interference by his attemptedsuppression of an independent Tongan trading company, 1910–11, whichthreatened the position of foreign merchants. What had begun as a coopera-tive to channel benefits to Tongans ended as a form of resistance againstBritish intervention, undermined the High Commissioner’s clients in Cabinet,placed Consul Campbell on the wrong side of the law, and stiffened Tupou IIin his dealings with a new Fiji High Commissioner. The consular agent wascalled to heel; the Tongan Constitution was upheld; and it was acknowledgedthat sovereignty resided with the King in Council.27 A new consul, H. E. W.Grant, followed the policy of Hunter in acting less like a resident to a Malaystate, and more like the envoy of a friendly power.

Queen Salote also faced internal opposition, after her succession in 1918,but was able to establish her headship of the Free Church in 1924 which as-sured her of loyal supporters and control of an institution more in touch withthe Tongan people than their Parliament. Indeed, the history of the FreeChurch makes a good example of a second-level patronage system, ever sincethe Revd Jabez B. Watkin was appointed its president, as Tupou’s client anddispenser of church moneys to chiefs.28 When Salote decided to take to herselfthis privilege, Watkin was deposed and replaced by her own nominee. Factions formed around the key question of access to resources on the part ofappointed church ministers, until it became clear that patronage had passedto the royal family. One historian, therefore, has found in this religious andinstitutional hierarchy ‘a paradigm of Tongan life’.29 Congregations andchurch committees had no control over funds; ministers could only be ap-pointed or removed by the head of Church and State. So, too, in the secularfield of government an attempt in 1940 to impeach Salote’s ministers demon-strated how ineffective the Parliament was in criticizing royal appointees.

While such internal factions could be mastered, there was still an externalsource of danger to the body politic in the presence of a British chief justiceappointed by the Fiji High Commissioner with a seat in the executive and the

30 Elizabeth Wood Ellem, ‘Chief Justices of Tonga 1905–40’, JPH 24 (1989), 21–37.31 This would also seem to be the conclusion of Kerry James, ‘Rank and Leadership in Tonga’,

in White and Lindstrom, eds., Chiefs Today, 49–70.32 Ibid. 57.33 J. B. Hardaker, ‘Agriculture and Development in the Kingdom of Tonga’, D.Phil. thesis

(University of New England, Armidale, 1975).

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legislature from 1905. This influence was countered from 1915 by royal appointment of an acting chief justice and attorney-general—a Europeanmarried to a Tongan, and, therefore, an ideal papalangi client. He enabled Salote to play off advisers one against the other and reduce the influence offoreigners in her Privy Council.30 There were further contests of will, how-ever, with the chief justice over title successions among the nobility which shedid not always win. Eventually, a solution was found in the 1940s which limited legal interference to a chief justice on tour, and the royal court retained and extended its independent patrimonial functions by revision ofthe Treaty of Friendship in 1970.

Over the century from the 1870s, then, one might conclude that politicalpatronage overtook status by ascription and achievement, so far as the nobil-ity and chiefs were part of government in Tonga.31 Although royal ministerswere usually hereditary nobles or related to aristocrats, their functions in the state were defined by political appointment. Further down the ranks ofTongan society such ‘chiefly values’ are reflected in kinship ranking. Hierar-chy by ascription has been assured through ‘custom’ and a Constitution inwhich the line of political power is patronage and access to resources on thepart of those chiefly functionaries engaged in making the Constitution work.Accordingly, the doctrine of political accountability to Parliament and peoplehas not gone very far in a system where accountability is ultimately to the royal family. What concerns us here is not the dilemmas this poses for the Tongan people, but the ways in which the chiefly rivalries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were transformed into kingship and aristocracy based on mutual advantage, without which the patrimonial system would have collapsed from internal and external challenges.

The point has been made in one survey of contemporary Tongan leadershipthat such a transformation through constitutional prescription using existingsocial and political structure changed that structure by creating a wider set ofclients among the male population at large. Internally, all senior chiefs werebeholden to the king. Allocations of town and country lands to nobles andcommoners for rent and diversion of tax to a central treasury entailed less de-pendency on chiefs and more ‘fealty to the king and government’.32 Otherstudies of Tonga’s land tenure, however, are less sure of this wholesale trans-fer of loyalties and have pointed to the difficulty of ensuring commoners’ ac-cess to resources which is the contract for allegiance.33 Lower-level clientageis at variance with affection and respect between king and commoner, be-

34 Ibid. 68. 35 James, ‘Rank and Leadership in Tonga’, 55.

Tonga 251

cause land allocation according to need has become less and less certain,given delays in registration of lots and the partiality of the minister of lands—a noble. This second level of patronage is also manifested by the ability of nobles to promise allocation of allotments for ‘gifts and other favours fromthe would-be land holders’.34

Clearly, throughout Tonga’s historical battle to adapt to some aspects ofimported values and technology, while rejecting others, personalities were as important as changes in principle. Only a personality of high status likeTaufa‘ahau, Tupou I, could have pushed through the prescriptions for laws,emancipation, a constitution, by offering titles and hereditary estates to thosewho were the most likely source of political trouble by their territory andnumbers of followers. In a sense, the Tupou dynasty was also able to ‘decon-struct’ (in James’s phrase) some of the mystique of rank by depriving the ma-jority of former aristocrats of titles and leaving them to improve themselvesas members of a ‘gentry’, but not the service gentry owing appointment andallegiance to the royal house.35

The appearance of constitutional monarchy may well have helped to keepforeigners at bay. Unless a foreign power was prepared to invade and set theconstitutional hierarchy under a new overlord—governor or high commis-sioner—the structure remained intact as a defence against factionalism in secular affairs, though not in commercial or religious affairs. Even so, the re-versal of the royal clientage system was far from impossible after 1893 duringdisputed succession, in conditions of private and national debt, or simply forthe strategic value set on Tonga’s harbours by an external power. It is not hardto imagine ‘treaties of friendship’ becoming the basis for a more formal pro-tectorate or annexation, condoned willingly by Australian colonies and NewZealand, if Britain had accepted more extensive responsibility than a patron-age role and five years of formal protectorate.

summary

Chieftaincy by descent and achievement has been important to the study ofalien over-rule in the Pacific islands, first, for incorporation of visitors and set-tlers as dependents, and, secondly, for provision of local government struc-tures for imperial administration. In a number of cases such leadership servesstill as a political and cultural artefact of indigenous identity. In other cases‘traditional’ leadership has been superseded by self-made entrepreneurs andelected politicians. Historically, the politics of alliance, friendship pacts, andpatronage were as essential as warfare and religion to the structure of manyindigenous hierarchies. European traders, missions, and officials added a new

dimension to the hierarchy, or created one of their own from rival factions. Insmall successor states habits of deference to lineage leaders, as well as kinshipand clientage obligations are still part of administration, business, and poli-tics, not least where alien settlement and competition are still issues.

The Hawaiian Kingdom provides an example of territorial consolidationby a paramount lineage and a patrimonial government through incorpora-tion and appointment of Hawaiians and Europeans to offices of state. Accep-tance of foreign models of law, literacy, and religion, on Hawaiian terms,maintained the primacy of the royal executive over its own nobility, its min-isters, and its system of island government through appointed officials andtheir subordinates. In short, American and European settlers with skills tooffer were employed on much the same terms as Hawaiians and integratedwithin a Polynesian hierarchy as ‘service gentry’. Like that nobility, too, theybenefited from division of landed estates and definition of property titles undertaken by the monarchy from 1848. Because, too, the Hawaiian islandswere open to a profitable trade in staples based largely on ranching and plan-tations, the monarchy and its clients profited from direct and indirect taxes,sale and rent of lands, and from rising salary scales in government depart-ments and services. Moreover, recognition by foreign powers from the 1840sallowed the ruling lineage to manage succession to the highest offices of king-ship and island governorships, while securing a loyal civil service and controlof political representation and the judiciary in ways that kept opposition atbay until the 1880s.

During that decade more critical factions from among the plantation andbusiness community, resentful of rising taxation and royal extravagance, re-fused to tolerate government through the king’s ‘friends’ in the manner ofmonarchs and extracted constitutional concessions to the Legislature. At the same time, the political and commercial risks of a reciprocity treaty withthe United States, contracted in 1876, exposed the Hawaiian economy tochanges of tariff policy in the American market for raw sugar and to American naval interest in Pearl Harbor as a strategic base. The domestic andforeign policies of a patrimonial regime were challenged through the Legislature and within ministries by a vocal minority of lawyers, business-men, and would-be republicans. Moreover, the ability of the monarchy tofund largesse to officials, governors, and supporters was called into questionby deterioration in public finances. On Kalakaua’s death in 1891, Queen Lili‘uokalani inherited a kingdom in which royal prerogatives were underthreat, foreign relations and trade depended on American good will, andwhere Hawaiians were becoming a minority in the face of Asian and some European immigration. The balance of political power in the executive andthe electorate, however, denied anti-monarchists a clear mandate. A militantfaction, therefore, overturned the monarchy in 1893, leaving the way openfor eventual Congressional approval of an illegal settler government and

252 Pacific Islands

Territorial status. But patronage politics in the administration did not endthere, surviving into the 1930s under the influence of the Territory’s businesscorporations and Republican Executive.

By contrast with Hawai‘i, Fiji’s communities were fragmented, segmented,and vulnerable. Chieftaincy over the patrilineal clans and confederations ofFiji’s many islands was defined by seniority in descent and by achievementthrough warfare and the construction of alliances. No single paramountcyprevailed long enough to establish authority over large parts of the group.Exposure to outside trade and settlement offered additional sources for political support from Tongans and their chiefs, more especially in the Northern Lau group, and increasingly in the early nineteenth century fromEuropean missionaries, traders, planters, and official agents who looked tothe chiefdom of Bau and its neighbours in south-eastern Viti Levu as a bridge-head for conversion, commerce, and arbitration. By 1871 the initiative of afew settlers and intervention of consuls and naval officers encouraged an em-bryonic constitutional government based on the person and influence ofCakobau the Vunivalu of Bau. At the same time his authority was rivalled bya confederation in the Lau group under the paramountcy of the Tongan chief,Ma‘afu. When Cakobau failed to impose order on the whole of Fiji or to settle the problems of government debts, foreign plantations, and importa-tion of labour, Fijian chiefs agreed in 1874 to cede the group to the BritishCrown, in return for assurances concerning their status and Fijian lands.

In return, the first governors incorporated Fiji’s chiefly hierarchy into a simplified structure of provinces, districts, and villages under Crown Colonygovernment. The early practice of consulting provincial chiefs became insti-tutionalized within ‘Fijian Administration’, as headed by governors, their of-ficials, and the most senior of the provincial hierarchy. In the course of nearlya century of British over-rule many selective features of Fijian ‘custom’ wereestablished on the model of those provinces best known to officials. Never-theless, there was room for bargaining over chiefly successions and appoint-ments at all levels of the hierarchy. Fijian leaders did not become civil servantsand retained considerable initiative in the ways they accessed rents fromlands, labour services, and secured posts for subordinates. None of that com-promise prevented considerable alienation of Fijian lands under governmentcontrol or the importation of Indian labour and settlers. Over time, the dis-tinctiveness of ‘Fijian Affairs’ within island government was reinforced by Fijian sensitivity concerning demographic change, economic backwardness,and preservation of a defensive command of village, provincial, and legisla-tive authority to meet economic and political challenge to the line of powerarranged between chiefs and British officials. Accordingly, ethnic loyalty anddeference to protective superiors became an important factor in party poli-tics, as Fiji moved towards responsible government and independence in1970.

Tonga 253

Although Fiji’s politics can be understood in terms of ethnic tensions overland and jobs, the entrenchment of chieftaincy within the Constitution andlocal government had other consequences in terms of competition for controlof civil service departments and the management of public corporations. Underneath the ethnic polarization of party contests there were issues ofclientage and corruption during the long administration of a patron partyheaded by Fijians and challenged temporarily in 1987. At the end of a periodof military coups and constitutional revision, however, a Great Council ofChiefs is still entrenched in government as a legacy of the hierarchy con-structed by British over-rule and preserved as a defensive mechanism by Fijianpolitical leaders.

Tonga, too, has a long history of chieftaincy over maximal lineages by de-scent and alliance that continues to the present day. Power to allocate lands to subordinate kinsmen and stewards as governors and office-holderswithin settled islands and small groups of islands of the archipelago provided a foundation for extending political control over competing lineages. Fromthe 1820s a warrior chief followed this pattern of paramountcy, when Taufa‘ahau used his titular base within the Ha‘apai group to win the leadinglineage title in Vava‘u and then the Tui Kanakupolu title in the central islandof Tongatapu. From 1845 through war, title succession, and adroit patronageof Wesleyan missionary conversions, Taufa‘ahau emerged in the manner ofKamehameha in Hawai‘i as a territorial paramount through descent andachievement as King George Tupou I. A notable part of this achievement washis acceptance and adaptation of codes of laws, courts, taxes, and elementaryinstitutions of a centralized state as laid down in the Tongan Constitution of1875. In return for legitimation of the Tupou dynasty, the most senior chiefsin the group were recognized as nobility by tradition and in law. They wereappointed as executive ministers, governors, and magistrates with titles andlands sanctioned by the king, on condition of provision of tenancies for com-moners and an end to arbitrary tribute. To complement his secular status as aPolynesian paramount with an Executive and Legislature defined and cir-cumscribed, Tupou became head of an independent Free Church of Tonga in 1885 outside the Wesleyan mission. For the first time, secular and religioustitles were held by one chief.

Such an accumulation of authority within the Tongan state created dis-sident factions from among lineage chiefs excluded from office, among Tongans loyal to the Wesleyan Church and within a small but influentialnumber of commercial agencies. Unimportant by themselves, they were dan-gerous in combination with the agents of imperial powers in the context oflate nineteenth-century rivalries for island posts. From 1893 the king’s greatgrandson and successor, Tupou II, faced a series of interventions by Fiji’s gov-ernors, in their role as Western Pacific High Commissioners. In 1901 a Treatyof Protection opened a way for British control through consular officials and

254 Pacific Islands

Tongan clients within the Tongan Cabinet. Consistent opposition from theking and some adroit manoeuvring won a measure of respect from the Colonial Office and acknowledgement of Tonga’s autonomy as a sovereignstate from 1911. Treaties of Friendship, rather than Protection, allowedQueen Salote to consolidate her dynastic position over Church and State andneutralize the influence of a British chief justice in her Executive. Foreign set-tlement and foreign over-rule have been kept at bay by a patrimonial statethat has managed to satisfy its nobility and office-holders and retain the loyalty of most Tongans. That may well remain so, as long as limited land re-sources, remittances from Tongans abroad, and international aid provideproductive employment and services and preserve the state from factionalschisms from within.

Tonga 255

Conclusion

The Resident has to deal with an Emir or Chief possessed of an extremelysensitive character, not by any means always inclined to play a fair game,or averse to doing a little extortion for his personal advantage; with agroup of powerful subordinate Chiefs, each of whom is playing for hisown hand, greedy for power, as jealous and sensitive as the Emir himself,and all too prone to take advantage of any opportunity given them to playoff the Resident against the Emir . . .1

(Resident Charles Temple, 1918)

No one who has not lived among us can fully appreciate to what extentthe giving and taking of bribes occupies the attention of all degrees to theexclusion of the ideals of disinterested service.2

((Sir) Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, 1950)

Resident Temple’s comment on the politics of power that lay under the sur-face of a formally prescribed system of Native Authorities would probablynot have surprised other administrators in the darbars of Indian states, in aMalay sultan’s Council, or at a meeting of Fiji’s Council of Chiefs. The alle-gations made by Nigeria’s future premier in 1950 underlined just how littlehad changed in the operation of clientage and gift exchange underpinning thestructure of emirate government.3 This public reasoning was not pursued veryfar. But it did point up the continuities between an earlier orthodoxy and theentrenched authoritarianism that had grown and prospered in northernNigeria over half a century, as British pragmatism joined forces with Hausa–Fulani patrimonialism.

Essentially the relationship between leaders of rulers and ruled was a politi-cal one, couched in the terminology of administrative hierarchy. Because in-digenous leadership was subordinated within this relationship, patrimonialand clientage features of indigenous politics continued at subordinate levelsand occasionally between the European and indigenous rulers in the upperlevels of the hierarchy. Governors and residents or commissioners were not‘chiefs’, but they sometimes behaved like chiefs. Indigenous chiefs and theirsubordinates were not ‘civil servants’, though in a number of administrations(Fiji, Malay states, Buganda) they were posted as officials. Like Cromer in

1 Temple, Native Races and their Rulers, 68.2 Northern Nigeria. House of Assembly Debates, 19 Aug. 1950.3 See the long list of ‘Customary Presents’ prohibited in 1955, in Whitaker, The Politics of

Tradition, appendix B.

Conclusion 257

Egypt, administrators ‘governed the governors’.4 Convenient as it is to termthis governance ‘indirect rule’, the relationship was more political than thatadministrative typology suggests, if only because there were strategic andeconomic interests at stake in many of the territories concerned. In Egyptdiplomacy and force were used to establish and defend control of an informalprotectorate on a vital imperial link between Africa and India. At the periph-ery of empire among lesser hierarchies the first Resident of Perak began hisadministration by playing off shaik against raja in political manoeuvres cen-tred on the State Council.5 More distantly still, following Sir Arthur Gordon,Governors Thurston and Des Voeux manipulated selection of Fijian provin-cial chiefs so as to favour clients of government. Imperial bureaucracy couldnot work without imperial bargaining.

The alternative is to fasten on proclaimed policies, the analysis of men andmethods which all too often yields a bland stereotype of the over-rulers:

The ordinary British district officer preferred to think of himself as a kind of adult pre-fect, dedicated to an ethos of service for the betterment of his inferiors. Africans werelike children—they must be raised slowly in the scale of civilization. Colonial officialsshould simply ensure that the natural evolution of Africans would take place withoutundue interference. This notion was usually coupled with a historical belief that late-nineteenth-century Africans were in a stage of development on a par with the ancientSaxons and Celts or, at best, with mediaeval Englishmen.6

Even if this kind of cultural relativism is to be found in the more personaldiaries and letters of European officials, I doubt it survived the pressing needto manage tax, land, legal, and practical problems in public works, health,and education in cooperation with indigenous leaders. At stake were resultsin civil government based on a line of power and local officers’ authority; andimperial authority depended, among other factors, on ‘the support for it oftraditionally legitimate, if newly established, indigenous political author-ities’.7 Moreover, the more closely the politics of over-rule are examined indifferent regions, the more they are seen to derive in large part from pre-colo-nial structures. That point was made in 1950 by Lord Hailey who rejected thedichotomy of ‘Direct’ and ‘Indirect Rule’, or any parallel with Indian admin-istration, and who saw that administrative systems elsewhere were condi-tioned ‘by the nature of the indigenous political institutions . . . found inexistence and the social structure to which the procedure of local rule had tobe adjusted’.8 This is especially evident for societies with ranked lineages,where competition for power was ‘inherently segmentary’.9 For this reason

4 al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer, 68. 5 Sadka, ‘The Journal of Sir Hugh Low’, 37, 98.6 Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of British Africa, 339. But see their suggestive analogy be-

tween imperial state construction in Africa and the royal courts of Early Modern Europe, 344.7 Low, Lion Rampant, 28. 8 Hailey, Native Administration, iv. 7–8.9 Smith, ‘On Segmentary Lineage Systems’, section 2, 43–55; and for the notion of a ‘segmentary

state’ influencing peripheral units through central offices, Fox, Kin, Clan, Raja and Rule, 56–7.

10 Watters, Koro, 40.

258 Conclusion

over-rule was not a matter of ‘indirectness’ or remoteness from internal poli-tics. Fulani and British ‘chiefs’, like Malay chiefs and political officers, Fijianchiefs and officials, associated as ‘co-ordinate units’ (to borrow M. G. Smith’sphrase), each with recognized status grades in a changed political order. Co-ordination in Fiji, it has been claimed, created a new hierarchy as a ‘projec-tion by the Fijians of their own rank and status systems into the colonialsituation’, so that European officials became their ‘chiefs’, ‘and the Queen thegreatest chief of all’.10

This bold interpretation of status reversal is unusual in the literature of im-perial rule but not too far removed from assurances of ‘allegiance’ and ‘loy-alty’ on ritual occasions in other dependencies. In the case of Indian princelystates, it might be argued, however, that such coordination was an objectivethat political officers never completely reached. Compared with other hierar-chies, the Indian darbars and their states were difficult to penetrate andunder-administered by the paramount power. In smaller territories ‘segmen-tary lineage systems’ might be a more accurate term for localized descentgroups (as in the Sudan, Southern Africa, Fiji, Tonga), where there were cor-porate political units, but fewer political offices. Immigrant advisers and set-tlers added to existing offices, most notably in the Hawaiian Kingdom and toa lesser extent in the Society Islands and Fiji. The hierarchies they influencedwere less complex in their range of political segmentation than more popu-lous and extensive structures in Asia and Africa. But however stratified or de-centralized the structure, eventually the game of administrative politics hadto be played out between rival networks of officials (as at the courts of Indianprinces), by augmenting the status and authority of some chiefly grades at theexpense of others (as in Buganda), or by recruiting lineage or clan elders as of-ficials. A variation on this political theme was control through a subordinateservice gentry applied in Egypt and in the administrative service recruitedfrom the sons of chiefs and sultans in Malaya. In the special case of the Hawaiian Kingdom, control of the service gentry was exercised by a royallineage; and the fact that influential European and American settlers were included, or excluded, gives point to the political crisis undergone by thatkingdom at the end of the nineteenth century. Patrimonial rule could be rejected as well as incorporated by imperial rule.

For those reasons this study began in the conviction that a model of relationships between rulers and ruled based on the status differences and re-ciprocal advantages implicit in the patron–client construct used by anthro-pologists and political scientists might serve historians better than formaladministrative terms or informal euphemisms for accommodation with over-rule. It is not likely that ‘indirect rule’ (even in its reified and capitalizedform) or the shorthand of ‘collaboration’ will disappear from academic

11 John W. Cell, ‘Colonial Rule’, in OHBE, iv. The Twentieth Century, ed. Judith M. Brownand Wm. Roger Louis (Oxford, 1999), 232–54.

12 Ibid. 234, 242. 13 Crowder and Ikime, eds., West African Chiefs, pp. vii–xxix.

Conclusion 259

vocabulary. But before these terms are applied, perhaps thought should begiven to the utility of a much older model, illustrated by the cases collectedabove.

There is a distinction, of course, between the historiography of ‘indirectrule’ as administrative orthodoxy and its usefulness as an analytical category.The limitations inherent in adopting an outmoded administrative model in allits variants for an exposition of the structure of over-rule in practice areamply demonstrated in the long and controversial literature devoted to themodel itself. That is no less true of a more recent overview of British adminis-trative methods, for two reasons which apply to the literature as a whole.11

Given that European officials in remarkably small numbers were obliged to‘work with local authorities’, their role cannot simply be viewed in terms of‘gradations of indirect governance’.12 Over the long period of expansion oftrade through indigenous networks to partition and consolidation of power,the basic relationship within the ruling hierarchy was political, in the sense ofsharing, contesting, and defining the purposes of imperial power. The politi-cal struggle began with the appearance of European traders and isolated settlements and ended only with the final transfer of power to decolonizedgovernments. Analysis of that power relationship between different orders ofthe hierarchy according to an administrative stereotype in contemporary use(as Hailey came to appreciate) made no advance in our understanding of the‘reversal of status’ implicit in changes of governance between the pre-colonialand colonial periods. Secondly, it offered nothing to assist our understandingof the continuities and changes in power structures of post-colonial states, thesurvival or disappearance of ‘traditional’ authorities, or the invention of newbrands of civil or military rulership. Fundamentally, ‘Indirect Rule’ was an illusion—an ideology of improvement through administrative reform—thatmasked compromises reached through political argument and the use of forceto allow the hierarchy of imperial over-rule a modest breathing-space to faceup to greater ‘reversals’ and change.

This consideration from a longer perspective weakens, too, any compara-tive analysis of European styles of over-rule limited to cases drawn from oneregion, as, for example, in the rather hard and fast distinctions drawn byMichael Crowder and Obaro Ikime between French and British systems inWest Africa.13 Indeed, they felt obliged to make the point that considerableconfusion has arisen from the extension late in the day of a model fashionedfor the treasuries and emirate authorities of Northern Nigeria to other Britishterritories where administration at local level through self-governing tradi-tional authorities was already practised. But they were right to fasten on localgovernment as the key area for the rather manipulative and authoritarian

14 Crowder and Ikime, eds., West African Chiefs, p. xxii.15 Outside of West Africa the conclusions of Crowder and Ikime based on selected cases can

be challenged by French experience in Cambodian, Moroccan, and some Pacific protectorateswhere administration was marked by ‘an informal power-sharing collaboration among tradi-tional chieftains’ and French officials. See Robert Aldrich, France and the South Pacific Since1940 (Honolulu, 1993), 297–8. Compare, too, British treatment of the Sultan of Zanzibar, thekings of Kandy or Zulu chiefs, after conquest, in ways that did not match the principles of ‘indi-rect rule’.

16 See the useful analysis of changing views on land in colonial territories by Frederika Hackshaw, ‘Nineteenth Century Notions of Aboriginal Title and their Influence on the Interpre-tation of the Treaty of Waitangi’, in I. H. Kawharu, ed., Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspec-tives on the Treaty of Waitangi (Auckland, 1989), 92–120.

260 Conclusion

practices of French administrators, compared with a more tolerant use of pre-existing executive, judicial, and fiscal functions, often in a conciliar form,by their British counterparts. For, local government offered a potential powerbase to influence local society or a source of potential opposition to aspiringpoliticians from the new educated elite. Hence their conclusion that French‘official’ chiefs with less civil jurisdiction and financial resources may havehad ‘no patronage to offer’ to a political following of their own and on thewhole were unsuccessful in forming patron parties. By contrast, chiefs inBritish areas may have had more to bargain with and to defend, when caughtup in a new political game for survival under new political masters at the period of decolonization.14 On the whole in Sierra Leone and Nigeria theywere rather better at political alliance within the structure of mass partiesthan were chiefs in French areas or in Ghana; and the reason lies in the sur-vival, indeed, enhancement of traditional and conciliar authority in ways thatmade chiefdoms a useful power base for successor politicians who were notideologically fearful of ascriptive status as a source of political rivalry.

The weakness of using attitudes to local government units to illustratestyles of imperial administration, however, is that they are very specific to par-ticular territories and times and that they are defined in terms of prescriptiveregulation. As the dynamics of the establishment of European over-rule or its political endgames illustrated, the fortunes of chiefs and their followingdepended on coming to terms with political change, or being swept aside.Moreover, if the range of cases is extended beyond neighbouring Europeanterritories of one region a larger number of exceptions to the stereotypes ofparticular ‘national’ styles of administration becomes more apparent.15

Focus on styles of local government also leaves out of account the broaderpurposes of imperial co-option and subordination of local rulers. Those pur-poses included expansion of commerce and some capital investment; acquisi-tion of judicial rights to protect nationals; abolition of the international slavetrade; land acquisition, at first through acknowledgement of aboriginal titleand increasingly in the later nineteenth century through a positivist legal argument in favour of imperial claims to ‘unoccupied’ estate.16 Apart fromannexation by conquest, the cooperation of ‘natural rulers’ was an essential,

17 Memorandum by Sir John Bramston, Feb. 1891, cited in Colin Newbury, ‘“Treaty, Grant,Usage and Sufferance”: The Origins of British Colonial Protectorates’, in G. A. Wood and S. O’Connor, eds., W. P. Morrell: A Tribute (Dunedin, 1973), 81.

18 Johnston, Sovereignty and Protection, 23–31.19 Onslow to Lugard, 28 Jan. 1903 in Newbury, British Policy, ii. 154.20 As they had much earlier in Indian states, Malay states, and in the case of Maori signatories

to the Treaty of Waitangi.

Conclusion 261

widespread feature of these invasive techniques. Above all, treaty signatorieswere used in British practice to exclude other imperial powers to areas of indigenous sovereign territory; and they were used, at the same time, to deny that sovereignty in the 1890s by reducing signatories to a subordinatestatus under the tutelage of an imperial power.17 The road to empire, more especially in the nineteenth century, was paved with treaties. But it was a politically managed empire and not simply a creation of ‘jurisdictional imperialism’.18

For, in return, in most British territories, chiefs kept a large measure of civil jurisdiction in, for example, the administrative model based on theBechuanaland Protectorate of 1891 and applied in West Africa, CentralAfrica, and the Western Pacific. Because of these precedents—legal anddiplomatic—it is hard to see Lugard as the inventor of ‘indirect rule’. At the moment of Lugard’s military action against Kano and Sokoto in 1903 whichsecured British control of Northern Nigeria, the Secretary of State forColonies laid down that ‘there is no desire on the part of His Majesty’s Gov-ernment to destroy the existing forms of administration or to govern thecountry otherwise than through its own rulers’.19 That view was entirely con-sistent with older British practices in Africa and elsewhere from the 1880sand earlier. Much more than ‘local government’ was at stake. In this way in-ternational obligations to protect foreign nationals could be met without an-nexation; slave-raiding could be stopped (though it would take much longerto tackle the issue of domestic slavery); with expanded trade and access to ex-portable staples, revenue could be raised to pay for the politics of subordina-tion; and in a colonial protectorate the Crown could rule by Order-in-Councilwithout recourse to Parliament. If necessary, of course, refractory chiefscould be deposed and compliant ones supported in office. ‘Natural rulers’ andimported officials became coordinate units, however, not because the Britishsuddenly invented a new system of colonial government at the end of the nine-teenth century, but because those who adapted a much longer tradition of devolved imperial administration to territories large and small in Africa,South-east Asia, and the Pacific were given a renewed legitimacy through revision and consolidation of the Foreign Jurisdiction Acts in conjunctionwith chiefs who retained status and authority.20

In the longer perspective of imperial expansion, therefore, a patron–clientmodel fits the wide variety of cases of diplomacy, conquest, accommoda-tion, and subordination better than a prescription for a method of ‘local

21 Cf. Crowder and Ikime, eds., West African Chiefs, pp. xvi–xviii. Attempts were made, ofcourse, to reduplicate European models of French communes and British municipalities inAfrican towns and elsewhere.

22 Brimnes, Constructing the Colonial Encounter, 57 note 117.23 Weingrod, ‘Patrons, Patronage and Political Parties’, 382–3 and sources cited.

262 Conclusion

government’ with its resonances of committees, boards, and councils.21 Takenbeyond its simple connotation of ‘face-to-face’ (dyadic) relationships be-tween individuals and groups of unequal status for mutual benefit, the model,rather, is one of interaction between hierarchies than a blueprint for adminis-tration. Patron–client relations were ‘a feature of patrimonialism’ preservedwithin the new colonial order.22 Governing officials constituted one statusgroup, graded in rank and responsibilities, as a line of power stretching backto metropolitan officials and ministers and company directors. Indigenous hierarchies constituted a subordinate form of local and sometimes regionalgovernment with its own status grades. Both hierarchies usually continued to administer laws and courts in parallel though frequently modified by theover-rulers. At the point of interaction between the two systems relationswere political, in the sense of determining access to resources, confirmation ofstatus, and were defined in a great deal of prescriptive regulation, sometimeswith the participation of consultative councils. As in all political systems, dis-agreement, clash of aims and values, compromise, and rewards were part ofthe business of running regional empires with the cooperation of the gov-erned. Both sets of officials, it is worth remembering, were not immune fromremoval and redress from within their own hierarchies. Describing this com-plex administration shared by officials of different cultures as ‘collaboration’misses two essential points inherent in patron–client relations: differences instatus and the ‘mediating mechanism’ common to the brokerage roles of bothchiefs and European officials.23

It is not claimed that this joint stratification operated as a totalpatron–client system (except, perhaps, in a metaphorical sense) throughoutthe societies of imperial dependencies. Levels of social and political stratifica-tion were too complex and differentiated for that. Divisions of race and loy-alties precluded complete trust. But in the cases examined above there aresufficient examples of patrimonial governments incorporated as subordinatehierarchies and other cases of patron–client layers within chiefdoms to illus-trate the argument that an incoming imperial government usually seized on aready-made machinery of administration for its own purposes. The argumentcan be further extended into the period of the formation of political parties,constitutional government, and, eventually, independence, to demonstratethat the mechanism of using patron-brokers to mobilize support has its partin the politics of post-colonial states in continuity with their colonial and pre-colonial past.

24 Eisenstadt and Roniger, ‘Patron–Client Relations’, 71; Fox, Kin, Clan, Raja and Rule,54–131; Price, Kingship and Political Practice; A. W. Southall, Alur Society (Cambridge, 1956).

25 Eisenstadt and Roniger, ‘Patron–Client Relations’, 50–8.26 M. Mauss, The Gift, Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London,

1954).27 Eisenstadt and Roniger, ‘Patron–Client Relations’, 58. See, too, Oskar Kurer, The Political

Foundations of Development Policies (New York, London, 1997).28 As, for example, by Tongan settlers under Ma‘afu in eastern Fiji; by Tutsi invaders of

Rwanda and Burundi; or by Baganda among the segmentary societies of Teso, and most notablyby Fulani conquest of Habe kingdoms.

Conclusion 263

From the vantage-point of their own disciplines, social scientists interestedprimarily in social or political structures have given different emphasis to themodel. In social anthropology there has been a large measure of agreementthat clientage can be discerned as a necessary part of patrimonial chieftain-ship deploying power through appointment of kin and non-kin within rankedlineage systems. Among political scientists, some have followed anthropolo-gists in stressing the utility of clientage in conditions of factional politics toovercome the weakness of links between kin groups at the periphery of a stateand ‘patrimonial-like bureaucracies’ operating from the centre of pre-imperial and imperial state structures.24

Although the very large theoretical literature on clientage models containsmany insights useful to historians of empire, there has been little concerted effort to incorporate imperial systems of management into the discussion.Those systems rested on paradoxical relationships that were certainly asym-metrical in terms of power and yet operated with seeming cooperation and ameasure of solidarity against ‘outsiders’ beyond defined boundaries.25 On thewhole, force was held in reserve, while the line of power was established bypragmatic instructions and practice. Access to resources on both sides bringsimperial practice, however, into the definition of clientage as a specific exchange expanded by internal production and foreign trade.26 But politicalscientists such as Eisenstadt and Roniger avoid the problem of hierarchy andascriptive roles in colonial government by simply regarding ‘imperialism’ astotalitarian and monolithic, controlled from the centre.27 This rather rigidview of political behaviour in ‘ascriptively based’ hierarchies is at odds withthe evidence of cases reviewed above and is certainly not in agreement withcurrent historical thinking about the role of political achievement in combi-nation with ascribed status in many Pacific or West African hierarchies.

The argument for interpreting subordinate imperial relationships in client-age terms is not simply ‘instrumentalist’ in economic exchanges or totally re-spectful of hierarchies based on the ascriptive claims to chieftainship by localleaders. It rests, first, on the social and political structures of pre-existing hierarchies taken over, largely (but not uniquely) by Europeans.28 There weregood reasons in terms of manpower and resources for incorporating an

264 Conclusion

indigenous hierarchy, whether in Muslim or animist societies, if it could beforced or persuaded to serve imperial ends. Pre-imperial structures weretaken over by a mixture of force and internal co-option and patronage basedon allocation of offices and lands and established the formal pattern of over-rule in a remarkably large number of imperial territories well into the periodof political devolution of power. Thus, imperial administration was in a senseautochthonous, except in settlements with substantial settler immigration.Even in such territories, a form of internal partition could be attempted tosafeguard some indigenous structures and interests, although the risk of de-motion, even disintegration, of the status and functions of chiefs was high (asin Kenya, Natal and Cape Province, the Hawaiian kingdom). In others, suchas Fiji, Malaya, the small South African protectorates, indigenous hierarchieshave held out remarkably well against the economic and political challenge ofimmigrant settlers, while in other areas of settlement they have been dismem-bered by pressures on land and labour. A third reason for adopting the modelis that it accounts better for some of the advantages extracted by indigenousrulers in terms of a share of revenue, the stability of their political status, demarcation of their territory, and subordination of their officials and sub-chieftaincies. In general, there was an end to internal warfare and the pre-dations of neighbours, legitimization of internal authority under the auspicesof a new ruler.

There are very large differences, however, in the scale and complexity of so-cieties and political structures taken over, ranging across the heterogeneousstates and principalities of nearly a third of the Indian subcontinent, emiratesof the most populous region of western Africa, paramountcies of the south-ern African High Commission territories, chiefdoms of the Malay peninsulaand archipelagos of the Pacific. It is evident that neither the British nor anyother imperial power thought up an administrative plan of such universal application—hence the emphasis on pragmatic adaptation of structuresavailable. There was, however, a preference for ‘kingdoms’ and ‘chiefs’ as in-stitutions to do imperial business with; and there was no reluctance to exper-iment in the ‘creation’ of chiefs as ancillaries if necessary. How much imperialexperience was applied from one region to another through central policy-making or transfer of officials is still an open question; and on the whole theconclusion of this study is that despite the ubiquity of official terms such as‘resident’ or ‘paramount chief’, local pragmatism prevailed. For legal termssuch as ‘protectorate’ a case might be argued for some cross-fertilization ofadministrative methods, particularly towards the end of the nineteenth cen-tury. But it has to be remembered that some dependencies (Egypt for a period,the Malay States, the Crown Colony of Fiji) were not protectorates at all; andin those that were (French Morocco, East Africa, Zanzibar, the MandatedTerritories of Rwanda-Burundi) administrators were not always deferentialtowards local kings and paramounts. In the end imperial formulas do not

29 Hailey, Native Administration, iv. 9.

Conclusion 265

matter. What matters are the ways in which rulers and ruled interacted in the context of Asian, African, and other societies. It is unwise, therefore, toclassify them (as Lord Hailey did) by ‘statutory enactment’, as distinct fromtheir political roles in a new dispensation.29

Where there are parallels between territories under foreign rule they resideless in the application of any preconceived policy than in the type of patri-monial structures utilized, or in the chieftainships and headships of segmen-tary lineages taken over. The kingdoms of Hawai‘i or Tonga have much incommon structurally (though not in scale) with the kingdoms of the GreatLakes region, especially in the ability of their rulers in senior lineages to es-tablish supervisory headships through kin, fictive kin, and nobles bought offfrom making trouble by allocations of land. The fact that the techniques of royal control were supplemented and made more effective by co-optedmissionaries and helpful administrators reinforces the point that (among theSoga states of Uganda, or in Hawai‘i, for example) Europeans were regardedat first as allies, not usurpers. Annexed Fiji with its provincial and districtchiefs has something in common, too, with Stool chiefs of the Gold CoastColony who emphasized their ‘inherent’ rights over control of land and rentsand were backed by colonial administrators in this interpretation of ‘tradi-tion’. Emirs of Northern Nigerian provinces were the product of conquestand patrimonialism, as were many of the princes of Indian states, thoughboth sets of rulers were subject to very different guidance on the internal ad-ministration of their courts, treasuries, and subordinate offices. Patrimoni-ally, too, the Khedivate of Egypt operated like the Alawite Sultanate ofMorocco (on a grander scale), but their rulers and states underwent very different transformations under British or French control with a different political outcome for the dynasties concerned.

In addition to this focus on the political content, rather than the adminis-trative form of client regimes, the model offers other advantages by reachingback into the pre-imperial period of early European contacts and forward tothe post-colonial period of successor states in which patronage and a measureof patrimonialism have not disappeared. Four stages have been applied in the survey to the materials we have for interpreting the role of hierarchicalgovernment in accommodating with or resisting political change inspired byimmigrant or indigenous elites.

The first phase of European contact was marked by the dependency ofcommercial agents, missionary and other settlers on the patronage of indig-enous rulers. The experience of East India Company factors and separatetraders on the coasts of Africa illustrates, respectively, their clientage relationswith officials and brokers of the Mughal principalities and with chiefs andmiddlemen of trading states created by the Atlantic slave trade. The few posts

30 H. J. Leue, ‘Legal Expansion in the Age of the Companies’, in Mommsen and de Moor, eds.,European Expansion and the Law, 132–57.

31 Emperor of China to the King of Ava, Apr. 1836, cited in W. S. Desai, History of the BritishResidency in Burma, 473.

266 Conclusion

and enclaves permitted or won from rival clients were established as defensiveforts and anchorages, rather than flourishing entrepots. It is possible to seethem (especially Calcutta, Saint Louis, Lagos, Zanzibar) as future stagingposts into the interior. But the period of European dependency was long; ad-ministration was limited to British subjects and protected Indian or Africandependants. It is also possible to see in early grants of local jurisdiction andthe operation of mixed courts in Madras the beginnings of ‘mayors’ courts’ inother presidencies and the notion that imported law might be applied to Indi-ans as well.30 But this assumption that Europeans carried their law with themhad very limited application at first in West or East Africa; and whether itcould be held to apply to British African subjects outside the coastal colonieswas not decided until the mid-nineteenth century.

Similarly, in South-east Asia East India Company officials and traders cameas supplicants to the ports of China and as client brokers to sultans. Experi-ence with the kings of Burma or the Kingdom of Kandy in Ceylon demon-strated the limits of informal influence without recourse to military andadministrative power. And where such power was achieved, as in Ceylon, itwas exercised by the British through a hierarchy of local headmen in the man-ner of their Dutch predecessors. Some paramounts, not least the Emperor ofChina, refused to become clients or even patrons for good reason; and hewarned the Burmese king against allowing foreigners to remain.31 ‘It is notproper to allow the English after they have made War and Peace has been settled to remain in the city. They are accustomed to act like the “Pipal” Tree(wherever this plant takes root and particularly in old temples and buildingsit spreads and takes such firm hold that it is scarcely possible to be removedor eradicated).’

Doubtless many Indian princes would have endorsed this warning. In theKingdom of Hawai‘i, too, where commercial and evangelical pressures forchange were relentless in the early nineteenth century, paramounts and theirofficials took steps to make a selective control over settler agencies and thecodes and institutions they imported. For this reason the Hawaiian case, ex-plored in some detail above, provides one of the better documented examplesof the consolidation of a kingdom under a senior lineage, reinforced by constitutional and legal precepts and a large extension of patronage practicesfrom within the Hawaiian hierarchy of island chiefs and notables. The stabil-ity of the patrimonial state depended, too, on confirmation of the hierarchy’stitles in land, to the exclusion of commoners, and a beneficial partnershipwith foreign plantation and mercantile business over some four decades. Italso contained within that economic partnership the political seeds of resent-

32 C. Collin Davies, ed., The Private Correspondence of Lord Macartney Governor of Madras(1781–85) (London, 1950), pp. xii–xvi, 110–13, 140–6.

Conclusion 267

ment of monarchy and subversion of its status with the assistance of a majorrepublican power.

There is a distinction, however, between the agencies that indigenous lead-ers had to deal with. Chartered companies with powers of administrationposed a more formidable threat than religious and secular agents operatingunder an uncertain and limited consular protection, unless a special casecould be made for backing them (anti-slavery, commercial debt, strategiccompetition). It is no historical accident that the second phase of ‘reversal’ ofstatus between European agencies and African or Asian rulers is exemplifiedby the East India Company and by other chartered companies in Africa orSouth-east Asia.

The course of that commercial and administrative reversal (or ‘inversion’)has been treated at some length, therefore, for the Indian presidencies. Be-cause of the ambiguous structure of the Company, its transformation into aland power was marked by commercial subversion and extraction of revenuethrough an existing service gentry, a mixture of military alliance and militaryconquest, leading, eventually, to administration and jurisdiction in Bengalwithout the intermediation of a paramount ruler. The examples of interven-tion in the commercial and financial affairs of Bengal, Awadh, and the statesof central and south India, illustrate, too, the mechanisms of court and pres-idency politics, at a period when the East India Company was becoming a ter-ritorial power in the last half of the eighteenth century. Reversal of statusstemmed from many local issues—currencies, credit, abuse of trade privi-leges, and loss of state revenue to rulers. There was also an increasing com-pany commitment to cover the costs of administration, war, and investmentin trade by enlistment of allies and defence of clients. In this process the workof residents as administrators and spies was essential to ‘inversion’ of statusamong Bengal rulers and the Calcutta presidency. Plassey was as much aproduct of intrigue as firepower. Run as a ‘protected’ prince for a short period, by 1773 the Bengal nawab had no executive role; and Bengal servedas an example for later annexations and closer control of land administrationand revenue. On the other hand, Awadh (for a period) and many other greaterand lesser principalities of India survived into a much less bureaucratic ‘re-versal’ of status and preservation within an imperial hierarchy.

Overall, Indian rulers remained essential and sometimes cooperativeclients in the long rivalry with France; or they were demoted and their ter-ritories absorbed into the administrative practices of Madras and Bombay.Survivors were products of a compromise (as Hastings had acknowledged)between ‘western venality’ and ‘eastern corruption’ in patrimonial systems ofgovernment.32 By the end of the Company’s monopolies in 1833, ‘inversion’

33 For the background, Richard Gilson, Samoa 1830–1900: The Politics of a Multi-CulturalCommunity (Melbourne, 1970).

268 Conclusion

on such a scale, unprecedented in British experience, left the imperial over-ruler with a choice of methods: annexation and close management of revenue, law, production, and trade on the model of Bengal’s ‘Permanent Set-tlement’, or a more distant supervision through political officers of the ad-ministrative courts and tributary systems of client rulers left in place. By 1858this duality under the Raj was confirmed by the practices of resident officersand, to a lesser extent, by the prescriptions of formal treaties.

Elsewhere, reversal of status for African or Asian and Pacific islands hier-archies occurred gradually by negotiation and in treaty forms, or abruptly byfailed negotiation, military defeat, demotion, or preservation. Indian statesdid not set any precedents for the variety of ‘treaties’, ‘agreements’, ‘engage-ments’ regulating the status and privileges of chieftains, emirs, kings, andparamounts. But the universality of treaties arising from the anti-slave tradecampaign on the African coasts supplied both a format and a justification for naval and consular interventions leading to a combination of conquest,influence, and supersession by colonial governors or high commissioners ofprotectorates.

Reversal of status could also come about through ‘mediatization’ to settleinternational indebtedness in the case of the Egyptian Khedivate in the 1870s,leading to a British monopoly of influence within a patrimonial state. In sim-ilar conditions of debt and strategic vulnerability two decades later, Britishpatronage of the Sultan of Morocco failed in the face of instability within theSharifian government and determined French insistence on construction of acompliant protectorate. Both Egypt and Morocco were strategically andcommercially important pieces on the imperial board. But parallel techniquesof mediation and partition were applied in lesser dependencies in the Pacificto overcome, for example, the difficulty of finding an acceptable recognizedauthority in Western Samoa in 1889.33

Apart from treaties and assumptions of international jurisdiction, forcecannot be ignored in the process of ‘inversion’. Among specific causes for demotion of a prince or paramount to subordinate status were, first and foremost, assertion of monopolies over trade with European factors and, sec-ondly, a dangerous propensity on the part of the largest states to contract for-eign debts. In the cause of ‘free trade’ the Yoruba state of Ijebu was made anexample by military force in 1892; and the road to new markets up the Nigerwas stormed by the monopolist Royal Niger Company, much in the mannerof the longer and more complex subversion of princely monopolies and rev-enues by East India Company public and private agents. In such conditions ofpressure for revenues or competition from rivals, reversal of status could besudden, as the Nawabs of Bengal and Awadh, the last Zulu king, or the Emirs

34 Flynn, ‘Class, Clientelism, and Coercion’, 133–56; James C. Scott, ‘Patronage and Ex-ploitation’, in Ernest Gellner and John Waterbury, eds., Patrons and Clients in MediterraneanSocieties (London, 1977), 21–40.

35 Featherstone, Colonial Small Wars; and for the small size and composition of imperialforces in Africa, Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of British Africa, chaps. 3, 4.

36 Timothy C. Weiskel, French Colonial Rule and the Baule Peoples: Resistance and Collaboration, 1889–1911 (Oxford, 1980), chap. 8, esp. 240–4.

37 David Killingray, ‘Imperial Defence’, in OHBE, v. 342–53, esp. 348–50.

Conclusion 269

of Nupe or Ilorin discovered. Arguably, too, the consequence of maladminis-tration of public finance in the name of a patrimonial state as well as com-mercial vulnerability through a reciprocity treaty were factors in bringingabout the downfall of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893; and foreign debts anda doubtful system of royal accounting very nearly undermined the Tonganmonarchy in 1904.

The underlying premiss of imperial force has caused difficulty, however, forsome critics of the patron–client model who prefer to find ‘class’ differencesin imperial or hierarchical systems.34 But such assertions sit uneasily with evi-dence of ethnic and social structures; and no account is taken of the politicaland administrative cost to imperial regimes of recourse to enforcement of unpopular measures for internal security.35 Such critics ignore, too, the co-option of indigenous allies by incoming rulers and the settlement of older con-flicts within the armed reckoning of imperial occupation. Cetshwayo’s Zulukingdom was dismembered as much by civil war as pressure from colonialNatal. But such conflict was not continuous, unless land and labour weredominant issues. Apart from India, remarkably small regiments and militiaswere held in reserve in imperial dependencies and, on the whole, they were lo-cally recruited. Force was deployed more at the beginning and end of empireand in the interests of wider global strategies than in suppression of rebellion.Revolts against tax and forced labour, loss of land, and curtailment of repre-sentative government are a feature of imperial ‘inversion’ and the endgamesof political concessions. For this reason the once-fashionable ‘resistance-or-collaboration’ dichotomy in imperial administration is less useful than expla-nations in terms of excessive demands on local resources through tax andlabour to account for revolts at the ‘periphery’ of imperial over-rule.36 Likethe patrimonial states they took over, European imperialists sought politicalrather than military solutions to the problems of territorial incorporation andgovernance, if only because of the high cost of imperial defence.37

Once subordinated to a new ruler, princes and chiefs either waxed orwaned in authority during the third stage of imperial clientage. Their fortunesin the princely states of India ran the whole gamut of consolidation and pros-perity down to demotions and controlled succession, loss of sources of trib-ute, and, more rarely, disappearance into a district administration of BritishIndia. From their experience of alliance, counter-alliance, and conquest incentral and south India the British did not elaborate any ‘system’ of over-rule.

270 Conclusion

Rather, there were a number of practices applied that derived from the notionof supporting and reforming ‘kingship’. One was confirmation of subordi-nate rulers in their status and titles with the possibility of dynastic succession.A second was control of foreign relations. In addition, considerable use wasmade of power to partition and reallocate territory, sometimes to the advan-tage of the presidencies, and at other times as part of a peace settlement be-tween indigenous states. Through residents as envoys, spies, and brokers theylearned to supervise, rather than manage, administration of finance. In anycase, definitions of the status of princes were less important than the manoeuvres of agents of the Raj within the patrimonial structures they wereattempting to influence.

There were big differences compared with hierarchies of protected stateselsewhere. One was sheer numbers and variations in size which led, in prac-tice, to numerous transitions in and out of direct supervision during periodsof minority rule or suspension of a ruler. Political officers did not set up ad-ministrative departments, but worked through a court hierarchy, sometimescreating clients and networks of their own, sometimes forced to concede thatlittle ‘reform’ could be accomplished in the face of a determined ruler. It was difficult to apply external rules for audit, unless a political officer alsohad influence over a dewan imported from British India. There was nostipending of rulers with independent resources unless (as in the case ofMysore) the legitimate ruler was effectively suspended for a long period.More important, technical and service departments were kept out of thestates, unless they had special railway, telegraph, or other agreements. Alto-gether the two principles pursued on both sides were confirmation of dynas-tic rights and tributary rights, in return for manpower for the Indian Army,and a degree of order and propriety among princely rulers, under the patron-age of the Queen Empress.

There were other topics to negotiate—opium and salt trade, repayment ofdebts, the protocols of salutes, honours and travel abroad, and, eventually,the status of princes in a period of constitutional change. But that item waspostponed as long as possible. Subordinate political status was covered instead by the vague doctrine of ‘paramountcy’, as a recognition of status differences, rather than prescriptive rules for conduct of internal politicsthrough conciliar representation. Princes could be deposed and restored, buttheir states could not be abolished. The trend by the end of the nineteenth cen-tury was towards a measure of bureaucratization and codification of rela-tions with the agents of the Raj, but little in the way of political reform of thestructure of the states.

By contrast the patrimonial states of Egypt and Morocco present examplesof political and bureaucratic influence and control over internal central gov-ernment hierarchies and peripheral provincial and tribal leadership. TheBritish consul-general continued and extended the system of ministerial and

38 Sir Bryan Sharwood-Smith, ‘But Always as Friends’: Northern Nigeria and the Cameroons,1921–1957 (London, 1959), 54.

Conclusion 271

departmental appointments applied before 1882 in the Khedivate to reformrevenue collection, service debts, and to improve infrastructure. Much of thistechnique rested on the political skill of Cromer and the khedive’s willingnessto contain sources of official and public opposition to exercise of patrimonialauthority by foreigners. In Morocco, on the other hand, a resident-general excluded the sultan and his officials from key departments of state in theMakhzen. Among the Arabs and Berbers of the Atlas, however, considerableuse was made of local caids, recognized or invented. In effect, Egypt contin-ued to be run as a patrimonial state, though the exact source of favours wasdisputed, while Morocco was run by a parallel and predominantly Frenchadministration at the centre with assistance from indigenous leaders elsewhere.

In all the regions of sub-Saharan Africa discussed above, the process of in-version redefined the status of rulers. Nigerian emirs were held to lack ‘sover-eign’ powers, but political officers were careful, indeed required, to preservea chain of command through the provincial or district chief whose prestigeand authority were upheld.38 The Sultan of Zanzibar who also had a claim toa limited territorial ‘sovereignty’ was reduced after 1890 to the position of aroyal dependent, like the Sultan of Morocco, and marginalized from admin-istrative authority. For a long period from 1895 the executive authority ofMalay rulers in the Federated States, as opposed to their nominal status, decreased as control over district administration and service departmentspassed to residency secretariats. On the other hand, the effective power ofNigerian emirs and Bugandan territorial chiefs could be said to have in-creased in the 1920s and 1930s. Buganda became a model for a surrogatecolonial administration within the Great Lakes region. In Northern Nigeria,residents and lieutenant-governors after Lugard encouraged a diffusion ofauthority, with some reorganization of territorial and village chieftaincies, tothe advantage of the emirs who were better funded from a successful andnearly autonomous system of provincial and local treasuries. They could bedeposed, as British officials entered into the game of succession politics; andthey could be tolerated, despite abuses of power, if loyal. None of them (noteven the Sardauna of Sokoto Caliphate) enjoyed the status bestowed on theBugandan kabaka by the Agreement of 1900 that reinforced the position ofthe highest grades of territorial chiefs and elevated their paramount to thelevel of an Indian or Ottoman prince under the Queen Empress. To a lesser degree the paramounts and chiefly oligarchy of Rwanda and Burundi hadtheir status and service roles confirmed under German and Belgian adminis-tration, applying new forms of taxation and labour obligations within thestructure of clientage relations with the Hutu peasantry.

39 Smith, ‘On Segmentary Lineage Systems’, 63.

272 Conclusion

In the Yoruba states and in Sierra Leone over-rule was less hierarchicallystructured, after rejection of Lugard’s model before 1918. Chiefs were kept incheck from below, as well as from above. The use of paramounts at Oyo,Ibadan, or Ife for a period had much less effect on Yoruba political organiza-tion than the encouragement from the 1930s of pre-existing councils of chiefswith judicial functions. But chiefly clientage continued in urban administra-tion, together with appointments to office and title creation. Titled chiefsfound their place in conjunction with urban elites in pressure groups for political reform and party formation from the 1940s.

In the Gold Coast the Asante confederation was reduced in size and au-thority by decapitation and by restoration of the Asantehene to a diminishedsphere of authority. In the chieftaincies of the Colony, on the other hand,paramounts improved their position by exercise of older privileges over‘strangers’ in farming and mining; and they joined forces with an articulateurban elite in a ‘rhetoric of rights’ to defend ‘customary’ claims to landagainst claims of the administration.But there was much less formal bureau-cratization of offices, compared with East-Central Africa. Even in Bugandathere was a shift from tribute to fixed salaries, coupled with clientage throughan increase in subordinate offices. In both regions power was diffused to ter-ritorial chiefs and councils and local big men. Resources from revenue andlabour services improved chiefly resources. In Buganda this pattern alteredonce again, when Mutesa II began to assert patrimonial leadership (withsome encouragement from a British governor in the 1940s) and resisted con-stitutional change directed towards a unitary state. Asante chiefs would makea similar and less successful resistance, while Northern Nigerian emirs madea bid to delay and then to take charge of the pace and balance of federal allo-cation of powers as they affected their region.

Malaya falls into no easy administrative typology that ignores the basis ofpatrimonial rule in Malay states. In those states there was no formal protec-torate conceded. By ‘agreements’ residents were posted in the guise of ‘ser-vants’ of the sultans, but in reality they were a political arm of the Governorof the Straits Settlements. From the beginning they worked through senior of-ficials and district chiefs and nobles (initially without a sultan at all in Perak);and their styles differed as much as the political structures of the patrimonialchieftaincies they advised and administered. The content of that advice aimedat improving revenues, especially from tin mining and other concessions inland leases, keeping order through district officers and Malay officials, andopening the states to further trade and plantation development. Implicit inthe administrative bargain was a political one—support for dynastic rulers inreturn for legitimizing a diplomatic and official presence. As in NorthernNigeria the new political order struck a balance between British and Malayofficials in a hierarchy of ‘co-ordinate units’.39 Institutionally the sultan’s

40 For these examples, see Newbury, Tahiti Nui; Malama Meleisea, The Making of ModernSamoa: Traditional Authority and Colonial Administration in the Modern History of WesternSamoa, Institute of Pacific Studies (Suva, 1987); Richard Gilson, The Cook Islands 1820–1850,ed. Ron Crocombe (Wellington, 1980).

Conclusion 273

council became the focus for that form of cooperation. But there was no ‘na-tive treasury’ system; sultans and officials were stipended and rescued fromdebt and given access from 1891 to rents from land. Parallel with this politi-cal symbiosis a number of administrative departments in the states functioned under British officials supplemented by an ancillary Malay Administrative Service linked closely with district notables and headmen. Inboth sectors of government, therefore, a British and Malay elite administeredunder joint authority. Thus, power was diffused, as it had been in the pre-British period, but the sultans were freed from dynastic competition. Inclu-sion of Chinese representatives on the councils recognized an importantstatus group. Diffusion of power was curtailed to a large extent, however, byfederation of administrative service departments from 1895 for the foursouthern states, while the unfederated states retained much of their internalautonomy under political advisers and used a greater share of revenue onsalaries and emoluments. Relative loss of status and some functions lastedinto the 1930s, while the question of federation was debated and surfaced inpost-war bargaining for constitutional change.

In Pacific dependencies the chronology of foreign over-rule followed quitelocal political patterns of co-option, alliance, resistance, or submission. Re-versal of status in the Hawaiian group in 1893 by an illegal settler putschbrought to an end any possibility of administration of the Territory througha monarchical hierarchy. Tonga’s experience of over-rule was transitory,when clients of the Western Pacific High Commission were established in theexecutive for a short period of protectorate control. Fairly early in the nine-teenth century the paramountcy of the Society Islands succumbed to Frenchover-rule in 1842 and became an example of a dual political administrationthat lasted into the 1870s. The Cook Islands fell into a similar pattern fromthe 1880s and retained for much longer the authority of senior island lineagesunder British administrators who acted as local ‘paramount’ chiefs. A similarrole was played out by Governor Solf in German Samoa, but not by his suc-cessors in the New Zealand Mandate that tolerated a diffusion of power backto village and district title-holders and officials.40 In Fiji the ‘Bau’ model of ahierarchy of provincial and district lineage chiefs and village headmen be-came ubiquitous, even in islands under Tongan influence. Once the more dy-namic elements of competition were removed, a certain regimentation ofpolitical structures under Crown Colony rule worked to the advantage of Fijian and British elements in the new hierarchy. Gordon and Thurston con-structed a political system of ‘co-ordinate units’, like administrators inNorthern Nigeria, because there was common ground in political aims, pro-viding rule was vakaviti—in Fijian style, reinforcing the powers of a chiefly

41 Tinker, ‘Structure of the Heritage’, 49.42 Though jurisdiction could be casuistically assumed to exist: Ezechiel, Minute, 16 Jan. 1904,

in Newbury, ed., British Policy, ii. 346.43 For the battle between Supreme Court and Provincial Court jurisdictions in Nigeria from

1914, Omoniyi Adewoye, The Judicial System in Southern Nigeria (London, 1977), chap. 5.44 Merry, Colonizing Hawai‘i, 44.45 Mommsen and de Moor, eds., European Expansion and Law, 8.

274 Conclusion

oligarchy over people, lands, and the application of regulations, in return forstipends and older privileges.

Three general features of the period of colonial over-rule call for comment.One was a near-universality of prescriptive regulations and treaties, provid-ing an appearance of judicial as well as political authority. ‘A feature ofBritish administration in Asia’ it has been claimed ‘was the blending and blur-ring of the executive and judicial functions of government.’41 The same ob-servation applies to colonial territories in Africa. There was an importantdeparture, however, during the nineteenth century from the inability of polit-ical officers to assume judicial functions over Indians in the protected states,on the one hand, and the growing assumption, confirmed by the consolidatedForeign Jurisdiction Act of 1890, on the other, that ‘protection’ carried withit a duty of jurisdiction, especially over other foreign nationals. The view wassubject to the requirements of diplomacy. No jurisdiction in Yoruba stateswas ceded at all in the 1890s by treaties that had to be renegotiated for thispurpose after 1900.42 When jurisdiction was assumed, more often it was ex-ercised as a form of judicial review (as in the Malay States), while indigenouscourts continued to apply Islamic or ‘customary’ law. Where no such juris-diction was ceded it was exercised in criminal cases by political officers inNorthern Nigeria beyond the reach of a colonial Supreme Court until 1933.43

The basis for such an expansive practice was political, as much as a desire forreform of customary authority or the role of religious sects. In Fiji the West-ern Pacific High Commission, accustomed to operating courts through a chiefjustice and European and Fijian magistrates, attempted to install chief justicesin Tonga, as part of a reversal of status begun by the Governor of Fiji after1901—a move deftly countered by Queen Salote. More unusually, the rulinghierarchy of independent Hawai‘i reinforced its status by ‘appropriation ofAnglo-American law’, a process eventually turned against the monarchy byrepublican-minded attorneys.44

Such a view of power through jurisdiction agrees in part with the viewtaken by Mommsen and de Moor of the co-existence of colonial and custom-ary law as a joint system of arbitration and jurisprudence, forensic andSupreme Court justice. ‘This was part of the informal “unequal bargains”upon which the stability of colonial rule rested at the periphery’, they claim.45

It is an important claim relevant to the patron–client model of this study andthe dispute-management of many lineage-structured societies arising in thecontext of political competition and rank rivalry. It needs to be added that the

46 F. von Benda-Beckmann, ‘Symbiosis of Indigenous and Western Law in Africa and Asia’, inMommsen and de Moor, eds., European Expansion and Law, 307–26.

47 Cited in ibid. 288.

Conclusion 275

use and modification of customary law by missionary or imperial arbitratorsrested on normative values imported and applied more especially in criminallaw and civil sanctions, as well as on instrumentalist objectives such as accessto land, taxes, and labour through administrative jurisdiction. A preliminaryconclusion is that the flexibility of indigenous systems of personal and publicjustice led to a ‘symbiosis’ through a mix of reform and toleration undercolonial law compatible with the reciprocity of clientage, though this wholearea needs to be explored much further.46

The proposition agrees well enough with case studies on the reinterpreta-tion and amalgamation of Hindu Shastras (codes), together with Englishcommon law in British India in ways that produced a rich dialogue and theemergence of a Hindu Code with external borrowings in 1955. But in Indianprincely states no such ‘duality’ developed, given the very limited cession ofjurisdiction to the Raj in cantonments, though Indian princes and the Indianservice gentry exploited for their own ends opportunities afforded by im-ported statute and imperial courts in British India. By contrast, in other de-pendencies, the colonial powers upheld chiefs’ powers of judicial decision infamily law or land tenure, but restricted them in criminal jurisdiction and incommercial cases involving Europeans. Although this observation has beenargued with reference to Central and East Africa, it could also be applied toCrown and chiefs’ control and division of lands in Fiji and to chiefly controlof lands in Hawai‘i, Tonga, and the Gold Coast. Occasionally, allocatorypowers over land thought to be the prerogative of chiefs had to be curbed andregulated by powers assumed by Crown officials. But Martin Chanock, forone, is in no doubt that the recognized legal authority of chiefs reinforced the‘system of hierarchies flowing down from the Crown through chiefs, sub-chiefs, clan heads, and family heads’, thereby increasing the dependency ofagnatic and collateral kin (and one may add stranger-dependants in WestAfrica).47

While this may have been so for non-Islamic systems of local jurisdiction,administrators in Morocco, Egypt, or northern Nigeria were careful for ad-ditional reasons to respect the learning and power of Mallams and Alkalicourts. In the Nigerian Protectorate the whole issue of preserving indigenousjurisdiction as well as executive control of appellate jurisdiction came to ahead in an internal debate over extension of the powers of the NigerianSupreme Court in ways that would have replaced district officers by profes-sional magistrates in the late 1920s. The necessity for restricting English lawand preserving Hausa–Fulani and animist ‘political and social organization’was stoutly argued on behalf of his political officers by Acting Lieutenant-Governor G. J. Lethem who based his stand, interestingly enough, on the

48 Arnett Papers, Box 6/4 for memoranda and the views of political officers., esp. fo. 99,Lethem, ‘The Supreme Court and its Relation to Native Policy’, 22 June 1928. Lethem appearsto have used Lee-Warner’s The Native States of India (London, 1910), which recognized thatthere were a few British courts in Gujarat states and in the cantonments. Occasionally a Britishmagistrate might be ‘loaned’ to some of the larger states.

49 Arnett Papers, Box 6/4, fo. 123. 50 Ibid., fo. 124.51 More generally, see Adewoye, The Judicial System in Southern Nigeria, 228–33.52 Hailey, Native Administration, iv. 3–4; and sections above for African states and Malay

states.

276 Conclusion

works of the Indianist, Sir William Lee-Warner, and his justification for isolating the Indian princely states.48 For appeals, commercial cases, and non-Islamic jurisdiction over Europeans and Nigerians in the North, the adminis-trators’ Provincial Courts were held to be adequate and cheap to run. Therewas an additional reason supported by political officers to a man—the feltneed to keep out African barristers licensed by the Supreme Court and re-garded, for example, by Edward Arnett on the basis of his experience as resi-dent in Cameroon as ignorant of ‘native law and custom’ and as politicianson the make.49 Apart from prejudice and resentment of a potential challengeto the authority of political officers, Arnett’s opposition also gave a more sub-stantial reason, closer to the main theme of this study:

In one respect the African barrister remains very African. Just as every native cook or chauffeur has his humble mate to assist him, and every native of position has a number of followers and courtiers whose position largely resembles that of the‘clientes’ of a Roman patrician, so the African barrister distinguished by his educationand by his official standing in relation to the Supreme Court attracts without effort anumber of followers who forward his interests by seeking out and fostering all dis-putes which may bring employment and money and influence to their master.50

If new patrons from among the service gentry were permitted to become influential operators throughout the land, where would it all end? For thetime being the Colonial Office and the northern Nigerian establishment, both Fulani and British, kept a southern educated elite at bay and appeals to English-style courts remained very limited after the judicial reforms of 1933and 1945. The ‘symbiosis’ of judicial and political interests prevailed.51

A second point, not always well developed in studies of imperial over-rule,is the entrenched financial advantages accruing to paramounts and chiefswithin the administrative hierarchy. The confirmation of tributary obliga-tions to Indian princes was one of the more important legacies of settlementof disputes with subordinate chiefs and landowners. In African hierarchieswith supervised treasuries and in the Malay states levels of personal taxationtended to remain static, in proportion to overall sources of revenue. But ex-penditure through the treasuries, supplemented from central or federal gov-ernment sources, tended to rise. A large percentage of this expenditure—between 45 and 60 per cent—went towards remuneration of indigenous au-thorities shortly before and after the Second World War.52 Some territories,

53 Lemarchand, ‘Political Clientelism’, in Schmidt and others, eds., Friends, Followers, andFactions, 107.

54 Kaufman, ‘The Patron–Client Concept’, 284; and the more sceptical counter-factual argu-ment of Michael Gilsenan, ‘Against Patron–Client Relations’, in Gellner and Waterbury, eds., Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies, 167–84, based on his observation of thechanging status and roles of sheikhs and beys (overlords) in Lebanon. Kaufman’s objection is discussed at greater length in Newbury, ‘Patrons, Clients, and Empire’, 258–9.

55 Barnes, Patrons and Power, 8–9; Fatton, Jnr, ‘Clientelism and Patronage in Senegal’,61–78.

Conclusion 277

such as Fiji, were less fortunate in remuneration for chiefs, though there wereother privileges; and for all states approaching independence sources ofspending on local government and central government recruitment created avested interest in the transfer of political power for old and new status groupsexercised, too, through management of public corporations.

A third feature common to many of the examples was construction of sec-ondary layers of brokerage and clientage. In some systems this feature wassimply a continuation of hereditary and nominated offices that had existedunder an emir, sultan, kabaka, or ali‘i. It was exploited in the Indian princelystates by residents and political officers seeking administrative leveragethrough nomination or influence with court finance ministers, bankers, andimported officials. Over time, there were running battles with princes and be-tween princes and their subordinate officials over the creation of personalnetworks in courts and princes’ councils. Recognition that British officialswere, like chiefs, brokers and patrons, and that their subordinates were alsopatrons with influence and obligations to friends and relatives is not a featureof most studies of administration. But some time ago Lemarchand observedthat in Africa administrative integration by colonial powers ‘can be viewed interms of pyramiding of patron–client ties’.53 Uncovering this facet of workingarrangements in a prince’s or an emir’s court goes a long way towards meet-ing objections from Kaufman and others concerning the application of a‘dyadic’ model to group relations. ‘Patron–client’ is not ‘a concept for all sea-sons’, but a recognition of the fluctuating fortunes of chiefs and big menunder changing economic and political circumstances.54 Those who, like Sandra Barnes and Robert Fatton, have explored the evolution of politicaland administrative linkages between Lagos notables and the outer villages ofLagos, or the continuation of political clientage in Senegal through the colo-nial period to independence, would agree, I think, that: ‘Clientelism is amany-tiered phenomenon.’55 It is clear that the creation of a civil service in theHawaiian Kingdom in the nineteenth century rested on several layers of subordinate clientage exercised through Cabinet ministers, island governors,and senior clerks within ministries, under the overall patrimonialism of themonarchy. The creation of a civil service in the Federated Malay States from1909, or in Fiji from the 1950s, eventually revealed similar mechanisms atwork. At least one study has broached the difficult topic of ‘bribery and other

56 Tilman, ‘Bureaucratic Development in Malaya’, 599. Tilman pointed to the inexperience ofjunior officials dealing with the general public and to a cultural acceptance of ‘tea money’ as away of getting things done.

57 Jayannatha, Electoral Allegiance in Sri Lanka, 86–7, 92–3, 200–3.58 This theme underlies much in Oskar Kurer, The Political Foundations of Development

Policies (London, 1997), Introduction, and 66–85; and Africa as a ‘pathological’ case, chap. 6, though there is little treatment of the imperial period.

59 Governor-General Lord Hastings, 6 Feb. 1814, in Madden, ed., Select Documents, iii.223–4; Fisher, A Clash of Cultures, 251.

60 On the opinion of Chief Justice H. C. Gollan, 19 Sept. 1902; Lugard to the Sultan of Sokoto,21 Mar. 1903, in Newbury, ed., British Policy, ii. 153, 344.

61 Woodward, Sudan, 29–39; A. E. Afigbo, The Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in SoutheasternNigeria 1891–1929 (London, 1972).

278 Conclusion

forms of corruption’ in the Malaysian Public Services, revealed in 1955.56 InSri Lanka the grades of territorial and village headmen essential to Britishover-rule lasted well into the 1960s as the basis for emergent patronage poli-tics.57 In short, there is enough material to indicate continuities in local-leveland upper-level forms of clientage for economic and political organization ofresources and power between the period of imperial over-rule, when politicalofficers were also brokers, and successor regimes under civil and militaryrulers utilizing local networks for support.58

There was always a danger, of course, in a more interventionist period ofover-rule, that chiefs as brokers became too dependent on their official pa-trons. They could, in short, be ‘reinvented’ according to a novel ideology of asuccessor regime, or according to some bureaucratic goal of turning theminto more mobile functionaries. There is a good example of ‘reinvention’ inthe view of Lord Hastings in 1814 that the East India Company, as successorto the Mughal Empire, might hold principalities such as Awadh ‘as vassals insubstance though not in name’, internally sovereign, but rendering militaryforces for defence and submitting disputes for arbitration. The idea of substi-tuting for the Mughal system did not really survive loss of Company respon-sibility and power to a representative of the Crown or the practice of creatinginternal constituencies at Lucknow or other state courts.59 Lugard, as HighCommissioner, also had the idea of placing himself at the apex of Fulani andBritish over-rule, thus displacing the rulers of Sokoto and Gwandu whosesovereignty he was advised had been surrendered to the Royal Niger Company.60 This centralizing conception faded in his absence from 1906,when provincial residents worked out different compromises without toomuch thought for questions of ‘sovereignty’. On the other hand, in societiesof the northern Sudan or south-eastern Nigeria, whole new orders of ‘chiefs’were created either from local heads of nomadic clans and religious sects, orfrom clan heads and heads of clan councils, dignified as ‘Warrant Chiefs’.61 Inthe examples considered above the concept of an indigenous ‘Civil Service’ including chiefs never really took root in West or East-Central Africa. Elsewhere, it has to be treated with some caution, especially in the case of Fiji

62 James West Turner, ‘Continuity and Constraint: Reconstructing the Concept of Traditionfrom a Pacific Perspective’, CP 9 (1997), 345–83.

63 C. A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad 1880–1920 (Oxford, 1975), 45,105, 168–9, 232–43; Gerald A. Heeger, The Politics of Underdevelopment (London, 1974),33–4; F. G. Bailey, Politics and Social Change: Orissa in 1959 (London, 1963); Mitra, Power,Protest and Participation, 217–19.

64 Price, Kingship and Political Practice, 200–1.

Conclusion 279

where ‘Fijian Administration’ remained inseparable from the privileges andpractices of chiefly hierarchy, compared with the effort made in Malaya to recruit an ‘Administrative Service’ as an adjunct to the Malay Civil Service. Itis over Fijian administration, too, that the argument about the ‘reinvention’of chiefly ‘tradition’ has been loudest, because of the political implications of sanctioning the power and authority of leaders owing their position to as-cription, as well as a measure of election.62 The simplest conclusion may bethat all chieftaincy that survived under colonial rule underwent a certainamount of reformulation, if only because of its subordinate position in a new hierarchy. If chiefs did not object or abuse their position, ‘reinvention’may well have been preferable to older practices of competition through warfare.

In any case, it is a fact of political life in many post-colonial societies thatchieftaincy leadership and the obligations of patrimonial hierarchy have sur-vived; and this is an additional reason for pursuing the patron–client modelinto a fourth stage—decolonization. The reasons for the interest of politicalscientists in the operations of clientage in contemporary Asian or Africanstates, of course, are not exclusively to do with the survival of chieftaincy inmany of them. In India the expansion of the National Congress from an amal-gam of elites centred on the cities into local and provincial organizations inthe early 1920s was predicated on creating lower-level ‘machines’ for mobi-lizing votes to man local and district boards, as well as a political movementbased on opposition to the Raj. In the ‘political undergrowth’ of Indian gov-ernment the role of the rais as patron-broker has been continuous.63 Princelystates stood outside this development and princes disappeared. But theGandhi family may have a royal style; and monarchical politics have been observed in the state politics of northern India and in ‘Hinduism . . . as an informal ideology of personalised administration’ in Tamil Nadu.64

Elsewhere, and especially in Africa, the fate of chieftaincy was linked muchmore closely to the fate of political parties. Where these failed to take rootunder the pressure of ethnic conflict, as in Rwanda-Burundi, the chiefly aris-tocracy was among the first casualties. Even where a party and prince wereone, as in Buganda, the period of constitutional legitimacy for a kabaka wasshort. On the other hand, in Namibia, South Africa, Nigeria, Fiji, rulers havebeen incorporated into the constitutional system in advisory and consultativecouncils. In Lesotho and Malawi chiefs dominate senates. Some eight hun-dred traditional leaders, or amakhosi, survive in local government and

65 Merrill R. Goodall, ‘Administrative Change in Nepal’, in Braibanti, ed., Asian BureaucraticSystems, 616–17.

66 Richard L. Sklar, ‘African Politics: The Next Generation’, in Richard Joseph, ed., State,Conflict, and Democracy in Africa, (Boulder, Colo., 1999), 165–78, 176.

67 Martin Kilson, Political Change in a West African State: A Study of the ModernizationProcess in Sierra Leone (Oxford, 1966).

68 Richard Fanthorpe, ‘Neither Citizen nor Subject? “Lumpen” Agency and the Legacy of Native Administration in Sierra Leone’, African Affairs, 100 (2001), 363–86, esp. 366, 374. Fanthorpe’s argument is that the political symbiosis between chiefs, administrators, and post-colonial politicians has broken down for lack of resources to command.

69 Heeger, The Politics of Underdevelopment, 48–9, 53, 62–3, 97–9; Clapham, Private Patronage and Public Power; Reno, Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone; Jayannatha,Electoral Allegiance in Sri Lanka.

70 Wale Oyemakinde, ‘The Chiefs Law and the Regulation of Traditional Chieftaincy inYorubaland’, JHSN 9 (1997), 63–74.

280 Conclusion

administer to about half of South Africa’s 42 million people. The Sultan ofSokoto was deposed in 1996; but the Kabaka, Muteba II, has been revivedwithout constitutional office. More remarkably, in the Kingdom of Nepal,foreign aid and the transformation of a maharaja into a monarch from 1960elevated the royal palace to the apex of a patrimonial government that out-lawed political parties and ruled through a nominated Council of Ministers,army, and police.65 The politics of chieftaincy are capricious, however, no-tably under military regimes, though the institution of ‘chieftaincy’ itself hasbeen defended as necessary to the ideal of ‘mixed government’ in Ghana andother states and has, perhaps, been underestimated.66

While that may be so, the unanswered question about chieftaincy at differ-ent levels is whether it perpetuates or simply adds to the politics of clientagein states with civilian or military regimes. From the above cases it could beclaimed that clientage through patrimonialism is still fundamental to the pol-itics of Morocco, Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland, Nigeria, Tonga, and, prob-ably, Fiji. In the transfer of power from one oligarchy to another in SierraLeone, chiefs remained ancillaries to incoming political parties and profitedaccordingly.67 But it is now better understood just how ‘inherently unstable’chieftaincy was in post-colonial Sierra Leone, leading to re-emergence of self-made leaders and ‘war-boys’ as protectors of impoverished and marginalizedcitizens.68 In Malaysia, though State Rulers have been reduced in executivefunctions, they enhance the role of the Federation and its premier as patron-benefactor in coalition politics. Patrimonialism and party politics have beenin conflict in Egypt, where the king did not head a nationalist party as in Morocco. But the operation of factional clientage in politics has been well de-scribed for the Sudan, Indian state politics, Senegal, and Sri Lanka.69 ForNigeria the verdict on the influence of chieftaincy is more mixed. In the South,chiefs had to wait until fairly late during the transfer of power for legitima-tion of titles, succession, privileges, and relations with local governmentcouncils in order to safeguard ‘custom’ from political attack through a‘Chiefs Law’ of 1957.70 Other sources have detected a fairly robust and

71 Vaughan, ‘The Impact of Party Politics and Military Rule on the Traditional Chieftaincy inWestern Nigeria, 1946–1989’; Balogun, ‘Enduring Clientelism’ 244; Crowder and Ikime, eds.,West African Chiefs, pp. xxvi–xxviii.

72 Robinson, ‘Traditional Clientage and Political Change in a Hausa Community’, 117–26.73 Peter Geschiere, ‘Chiefs and Colonial Rule in Cameroon: Inventing Chieftaincy, French and

British Style’, Africa, 63 (1993), 151–75, esp. 165.74 Oladimeji Aborisade, ed., Local Government and the Traditional Rulers in Nigeria (Ile-Ife,

1985), 358–9.75 Hooper, ‘Introduction’, in Antony Hooper and Judith Huntsman, eds., Transformations of

Polynesian Culture, The Polynesian Society Memoir No. 45 (Auckland, 1985), 8.76 White and Lindstrom, eds., Chiefs Today, 10–15.77 ‘Clientelism’, in Robert Aldrich and John Connell, France’s Overseas Frontier: Départ-

ments et Territoires d’Outre-mer (Cambridge, 1992), 199–203; Durutalo, The Paramountcy ofFijian Interest, 36–7; Peter Larmour, ‘Corruption and Governance in the South Pacific’, PS 30(1997), 1–18.

Conclusion 281

subtle capacity for survival in the face of political change in the Yoruba southand a necessary attachment by military leaders to the patronage values ofHausa/Fulani society in the north of the country.71 Much of this verdict wouldagree with the scarce material we have on the role of ‘politician princes’ as bigmen in civilian and military regimes in the Hausa community of the Niger Re-public.72 Chiefs have also survived in Cameroon in alliance with a dominantparty, more particularly in former British areas of the Grassfields and amongthe Bamiléké. Thus, old colonial ‘protegés’ have become new political clientsretaining authority in tax and judicial management.73 On the other hand, sur-vival among Yoruba chiefs and enforcement of local government regulationshas left them marginalized from central government under military rule(1966–79) or under the Presidential system operating at intervals since then.In the early 1980s they argued strongly for constitutional safeguards and better funding, but displayed considerable ambiguity on their relationshipwith political parties.74

For the Pacific islands studies of the contemporary interaction of chiefs,civil servants, and politicians are in short supply, unless (as in Western Samoa,Fiji, Tonga) chiefs are also politicians in office. But as a recent survey has in-dicated, ‘traditional notions of hierarchy remain at the centre of political life’in constitutional provisions and in social behaviour in a large number of Pacific communities.75 On the whole anthropologists have been content tocategorize chiefs as ‘statesmen’, ‘chiefly bureaucrats’, and even as chiefs in op-position to the new political order, rather than to explore whether they influ-ence recruitment into political and civic office.76 A further point raised byPacific historiography is whether ‘bureaucratization’ partially or completelyreplaced chiefly patronage networks in island administration. There is reasonto believe that older forms of informal patronage have subsisted.77 The pat-tern of contemporary ‘clientelism’ has been more carefully observed in thepolitics of France’s Overseas Territories and Departments, where local andmetropolitan networks are a ‘key element’ for understanding the reciprocalbenefits of elite cooperation in return for material benefits. In former British

78 Jeffrey Sissons, ‘Royal Backbone and Body Politic: Aristocratic Titles and Cook Islands Nationalism since Self-Government’, CP 6 (1994), 371–96.

79 Charmian London, The New Hawaii (Containing ‘My Hawaiian Aloha’ by Jack London)(London, 1923), 50.

80 Jean Guiart, ‘Mon Dieu là haut la Tête en bas! Introduction à la connaissance des sociétésocéaniennes’ (MS Noumea, 1994), 261.

282 Conclusion

territories the history of island civil services is under-researched. But from theevidence we have, a preliminary conclusion might be that new service groupsand hierarchies in small-scale communities were not easily transformed intoadministrative bureaucracies in the Weberian sense of the term, though in-digenous elements of prescribed office may have been present in the co-optedsystem. To do so assumed a willingness to invest in close supervision, educa-tion, reform, and the codification of ‘customary law’ that imperial rulers preferred to avoid, if the society could be managed under its indigenous au-thorities, in return for a share of resources and confirmation in office. If suchauthorities were unequal to the task of more complex administration or weredisplaced by a better-educated elite (as in French Polynesia, for example) par-ticular attention has to be paid to a stratum we can call ‘notables’ (or ‘servicegentry’ in the terms of Indian history) who might be from immigrant groupsor a mix of immigrants and the indigenous elite. All that can be said at thisstage of Pacific political science is that hierarchies—‘traditional’ or modifiedby elite recruitment—have not disappeared, especially in Fiji and Tonga. Indeed, in the Cook Islands traditional title-holders have been exploited inthe cause of ‘ethnic nationalism’, especially at ariki level, while being ex-cluded from the offices of central government.78 The main example of hierar-chy and patrimonialism examined here—the Hawaiian Islands, suffered avery different historical fate, though it can be argued that the haole (foreign)political and business elite who succeeded the royal dynasty behaved for atime as political patrons. As Jack London wrote of the Territory, after his so-journ in 1907: ‘Hawaii is patriarchal rather than democratic. Economically itis owned and operated in a fashion that is a combination of twentieth-century, machine-civilization methods and medieval feudal methods.’79 Thereare, however, other successor states not absorbed by a metropolitan power,where a patron–client model accounts for continuity in systems of govern-ment. As a French anthropologist has remarked, in the post-colonial periodindependent decision-making has entailed wholesale replacement of expatri-ates in the public sector by ‘the sons, daughters, nephews and nieces of Polynesian and Melanesian politicians and notables. One form of nepotismhas been replaced by another . . . Indigenous nepotism has a wider range ofrecruitment than European nepotism. Pacific clientage systems in a subtleway reflect older status rivalries and distribute the windfall better.’80

For students of developing economies, however, such an observationsmacks of complacency with the failure of many new states to overcome the

81 Douglas Rimmer, Staying Poor: Ghana’s Political Economy, 1950–1990 (Oxford, 1991),224.

82 Ibid. 222–3.83 Earle, Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology, 171, 179, 186–9, 192 (for Greek

city-states), 176–7 (for ritualized friendships).84 Brimnes, Constructing the Colonial Encounter, 5–8; James Davidson, ‘Problems of Pacific

History’, JPH 1 (1966), 1–25.85 Brimnes, Constructing the Colonial Encounter, 8.

Conclusion 283

dangers of a political ‘spoils system’. At the end of his detailed survey of fortyyears of economic underperformance in Ghana, after promising beginningsin the 1950s, one specialist is forced to concede the inefficiencies implicit inpolitical use of public bodies and subsidized enterprises to ‘generate rents andpatronage opportunities’.81 Worse, the leadership exhibited by Nkrumah andhis civil and military successors resembled old-style patrimonial chieftainshipon a much bigger scale, rather than devotion to national goals:

Big men were trusted to look after their followers. And politicians were expected tolive like politicians—in style and comfort, and with a clientele of personal adherents.Most who sought political power did so precisely to attain such a social status. Thiswas not a post-colonial novelty but had always been so; disinterested administratorsdetached from the people they governed had been only a temporary and alien implantin the body politic.82

One may take issue, of course, with the notion of complete ‘disinterest’ onthe part of imperial administrators anxious to access resources. But the pointof continuity in a political culture is well made and there are many character-istics of Ghana’s history relevant to hierarchies in other Asian, African, andPacific societies. In a sense post-colonial politicians have revealed themselvesall too often to be old chiefs writ large, while some are legitimately descendedfrom former chiefs turned party politicians. The aim of this study has been toshow how hierarchical leaders have long acted for political and material ad-vantage in terms that go beyond the specifics of imperial policies and resort toan older model of relationships at the interface between rulers and ruled—asold, indeed, as the Greeks and Romans.83 In this way, the argument for recog-nition of patrimonialism and clientage is consistent with a more ‘dynamic’ in-terpretation of ‘traditional’ societies confronted with external agencies. Thecontemporary reaction against the alleged ‘passivity’ of colonial societies is,of course, not so new or limited to Indian historiography and was confrontedin African and Pacific studies earlier.84 But it is difficult not to agree withBrimnes’s conclusion that: ‘In general, it seems most fruitful to look at the re-lations between the colonial power and indigenous inhabitants as a result ofa dialogue in which both sides participated. They did not of course participatefrom the same motives and rarely did they participate on equal terms.’85

The utility of the patron–client model for this approach to the political dy-namics of the ‘dialogue’ is that it can be applied to the pre-colonial phase of

284 Conclusion

early contacts and settlement, where it has its political and social analogieswithin the structures of indigenous societies. It is particularly useful in deal-ing with missionary and merchant settlement to investigate at what stage, ifat all, these harbingers of social and economic change reversed their situationof dependency and became secular authorities as well as brokers. The notionof brokerage has also been drawn on because it is implicit in the patron–clientrelationship for trans-cultural communication. The role of the political andeconomic broker has been well recognized moreover in anthropological andpolitical science to account for the ways in which clientage operates at differ-ent levels in relatively complex African or Asian societies, including the levelof foreign administration. Finally, it is not difficult to extend the model intothe post-colonial period, where local clientage operates within a civil serviceor as patron-party politics, or where, by analogy, ‘clientelism’ is a feature ofeconomic dependency for an underdeveloped state.

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92, 101, 104, 120, 126, 130, 136,141–3, 180, 188, 190, 218, 222, 238,240, 242, 249, 250, 260

by imperial agencies 1, 12, 30, 32–4, 39,40, 43–4, 52, 62, 75, 110, 112

in Malay states 159, 164, 166, 176military 26, 104in Morocco 90–2in patron–client relations 8, 59, 60, 278see also labour; land; reciprocity; revenue;

taxes; tributeachievement and status 6, 8, 9, 10, 125, 126,

141, 179, 181, 184, 216, 222, 239, 244,250–1, 253–4, 263

see also ascribed status; chieftaincy;prescription

Action Group Party (Nigeria) 119, 120Adamawa Province 116adamfo (patron) 104administration, imperial, see Belgian; British;

Dutch; French; German; administration;jurisdiction; service departments

administrators, see commissioners; districtofficer; governors; political officers;residents

Afghans 22, 27, 35, 40, 45, 50Agra, India 19, 48Ahmadu Bello (Sultan of Sokoto) 124ahupua‘a districts (Hawaiian islands) 184,

186Akan people (Gold Coast) 10, 104, 106,

107, 143Akassa, Nigeria 103Akbar (Mughal Emperor) 21, 22Akim people (Gold Coast) 106Alafin of Oyo (Yoruba paramount) 118, 120Alake of Abeokuta (Yoruba paramount)

118, 119

see also EgbaAlamgir II (Mughal Emperor) 32Alawite lineage, Morocco 90–5Aleamotu‘a (Tongan paramount) 243,

245Alexander, W. D. 205Alexandria, Egypt 83ali‘i (Hawaiian chiefs) 185–6, 196, 204Ali al-Tom (Sudan chief) 88Aliyu, Emir of Zaria 116Allahabad, India 30, 35Allen, E. H. (trade envoy) 200Allenby, Edmund Henry Hynman, Viscount

(field-marshal) 86Alliance Party:

Fiji 233–4, 236, 239Malaya 170, 173

Alwar state, India 63Andrews, Lorrin (Hawaiian minister) 189,

190‘Anglo-African’ government 113

see also British administrationAnglo-French Conventions:

(Siam) 175, 152Anglo-Zulu war 137Ankole state, Uganda 125, 129, 132Annexation Club:

in Hawaiian politics 208, 211anthropologists:

and chieftaincy 139, 263contribution of 2, 6see also Busia; Fallers; Goody; Lloyd;

Mair; Nayacakalou; Oliver; Richards;Smith

Apter, David (political scientist) 132Arcot, India 24

see also Carnaticarmed forces:

in the Hawaiian islands 185Hyderabad Contingent 58and imperial administration 3, 269in India 11, 25, 32, 63, 72in Morocco 93in patrimonial states 126see also police

arms trade:in Pacific Islands 185

Arnett, Edward John (Resident, ActingLieutenent Governor) 116, 276

Asaf-ud-Daula (Nawab of Awadh) 37–40

Index

308 Index

Asante, Ashanti (Gold Coast, Ghana) 103,104, 106, 107 109, 132, 143, 156

confederation 108, 272and constitutional change 272

Asantehene (Asante paramount) 104, 106ascribed status 8, 9, 139, 179, 181, 216,

250–1, 253–4, 263see also achievement; chiefs, chieftaincy

Atahiru (Sultan of Sokoto) 110Australia 71

and Fiji 224Awadh state, India 11, 22, 29, 30, 34, 45,

51, 54, 57, 58, 63, 73, 267annexed 57as client state of Bengal 38and Company penetration 35–8, 45, 74loss of territory 48and resident agents 74revenue 38, 52reversal of status 40

Awolowo, Obafemi (Yoruba chief andpolitician) 124

Awujale of Ijebu (Yoruba paramount) 118

Ba (Mba) province 231Baganda Appointments Board 132Baganda people 126, 129, 130, 132, 133

see also BugandaBahadur Shah II 57Bahawalpur state 50Baker, Revd. Shirley 246–8bakungu chiefs, Buganda 126, 128, 129, 135Bakwena people, Botswana 138Baldwin, H. P. (Hawaiian sugar merchant)

209Balewa, Sir Abubakar Tafawa (Prime

Minister of Nigeria) 256Baluchistan Agency 58Bamangwato people, Botswana 138Bangalore 60Bangkok 150barantaka (political clientage) 117Baring, Sir Evelyn, see Cromer, Evelyn

Baring, EarlBaroda state 41, 50, 52, 59, 64barori (clients) 111Basuto National Council 138Basutoland National Party 138bataka chiefs, Buganda 128Batare lineages, Burundi 134, 135bati (mbati, border clients, allies) 218batongole chiefs, Buganda 126Bau (Mbau chiefdom) 219, 220–2, 224, 253,

273Bavadra, Timoci (Prime Minister of Fiji)

234, 236bêche de mer (trepang) 220

Bechuanaland Protectorate, see BotswanaBegams of Awadh 37Belgian administration:

in Rwanda-Burundi 134, 135Benares 35, 37, 39Bengal 11, 12, 21, 22, 29, 32, 34, 35, 38–40,

43–6, 48, 51, 52, 72, 73army in rebellion 58as a client state 74Company authority in 27‘dual system’ in 33and imperial administration 1, 23, 267Nawab of 23, 30, 33, 267and South-East Asia 175trade 19–20, 22–3, 25, 29, 30

Bentinck, Lord William Cavendish (governor-general) 51, 57

Berbers in Morocco 93Bezi lineages, Burundi 134, 135, 136Bhonsla (Maratha chieftain) 41, 48, 49big man leadership 10, 141, 146

in Pacific societies 179in Sierra Leone 121in Uganda 130‘war boys’ 280

Bihar, India 21, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33Bikaner state 61Bingham, Hiram (American missionary)

187Birch, James (Resident in Perak) 155Bishop, Charles R. (Hawaiian businessman)

210blad al-Makhzen (zone of government) 90blad as-siba (unadministered zone) 90, 93Blingnières, Comte de (Controller in Egypt)

81, 82Blount, James H. (Commissioner to the

Hawaiian Islands) 210Board of Commissioners to Quiet Titles

(Land Commission) 195Board of Control:

and East India Company 44, 56, 71Boki (chief of Maui and Governor of O‘ahu)

188Bombay 19, 20, 34, 40, 41, 43, 45, 50, 51,

58, 59, 63, 72, 73, 74and Marathas 41Political Department 58Presidency 79

‘Bond’, 1844 (Gold Coast) 10Bornu (Nigeria) 110Botswana (Bechuanaland) 138, 145Brahmins 22, 63, 69

as administrators 41, 64bribes:

in Nigerian administration 256see also corruption

Index 309

Bristow, John (Resident in Awadh) 36, 37,39

British administration 259in Burma 152in Ceylon 151in East Africa 125–33in Egypt 96, 270in Fiji 216, 226–7, 230, 238, 253, 273in the Gold Coast 106–8, 122, 143, 272in Malaya 149, 154–9, 164, 166, 167,

173, 175, 271, 272in Northern Nigeria 110–17, 144, 271in Sierra Leone 121, 272in Southern Nigeria 117, 272stereotype of 257in Uganda 129–31in West Africa 122, 260

British India, see IndiaBritish South Africa Company 138, 145brokerage, brokers:

administrative 12, 48, 75, 91, 121, 149,155, 161, 172, 173, 175, 188, 230, 233,262, 277, 284

commercial 20, 32, 72Brooke, Raja Sir James 156Brown, William (missionary) 244Buganda 125–35, 140, 144, 279

Agreement 1900 128, 271Bukedi district, Uganda 129buli (mbuli officials) 223, 226–32Bundella 45Bunyoro state 125, 126, 129, 132, 133Burdwan, India 29, 30, 33Burma 150, 151, 172, 175, 266Burns, Sir Alan Cuthbert Maxwell (colonial

governor) 108Busia K. A. (anthropologist) 106businessmen:

in Africa 142and Fijian politics 235and Hawaiian politics 3, 198, 201, 205,

252, 253in India 23in Malaya 167, 169, 173

Busoga state 125, 130Bussy, Charles Castelnau de 24Butler, Harcourt (Indian civil servant) 65Buxar (battle of, 1764) 29, 32, 35, 74Byron, Lord (naval commander) 188

cadis (judges) 91caids (district chiefs) 91–3, 96Caisse de la Dette Publique, Egypt 80Cakaudrove (Thakaudrove, province) 219,

232Cakobau (Thakombau, Vunivalu of Bau)

220–6, 230, 253

Cakobau, Ratu Sir George (Governor-General of Fiji) 233

Calcutta (Fort William) 19, 21, 23, 25, 27,29, 30, 35–9, 41–5

Calcutta Council 25, 27, 29, 36, 74Cambay state 50Cameron, Sir Donald Charles (colonial

governor) 118Campbell, W. T. (consul) 249Canton 150Cape of Good Hope 71Cape Province 264Carnac, John (general) 35Carnarvon, Henry Howard Molyneux

Herbert, Earl (Secretary of State for theColonies) 155, 156

Carnatic, India 19, 24, 26, 34, 40, 42–5, 74Carter, H. A. (trade envoy) 200Casamajor, James (resident) 51Castle, William R. 209Catholic missionaries:

in Rwanda-Burundi 135in Tonga 245

cattle ranching 188Cave, Stephen (Financial Controller in Egypt)

80Central India Agency 49, 58, 60, 61, 62Central Native Council, Nigeria 117Cetshwayo (Zulu paramount) 137, 145, 269Ceylon 71, 149, 151, 175, 226, 266Chamber of Princes 67, 69Charles II, King 19Charlton, Richard (consul) 188Charter Renewal Act of 1813, see StatutesChartered companies:

as imperial agencies 267see also British South Africa Company;

East India Company; Imperial BritishEast Africa Company; Royal NigerCompany

Chaudhry, Mahendra (Prime Minister of Fiji)237

Cherif Pasha (minister) 81, 83chiefdoms:

alliances 40, 41, 220competition 41, 45, 216, 226disaggregation 45, 74origins 7, 101, 102, 218and over-rule 107, 108, 122, 137, 140,

143, 145, 223, 262, 264and politics 260status of 107, 143

chiefs, chieftaincy:access to resources 130, 134, 185, 194,

240, 246, 252, 253, 268, 275, 276, 280

administrative roles 107, 108, 117, 118,

310 Index

chiefs, chieftaincy (cont.):131, 122, 151, 157, 216, 218, 225–31,256, 258, 269, 272, 278, 279

by achievement 6–10, 125, 126, 141, 179,181, 184, 216, 222, 239, 244, 250, 253,254, 263

and allegiance 187, 220, 232by ascription 6, 10, 145, 161, 222, 231,

250, 279basis for 14, 61, 179as ‘civil servants’ 230, 232, 256, 278as clients 10, 27, 70, 75, 89, 96, 101, 118,

129, 134, 141, 142, 151, 157, 162, 218,226, 249, 255, 257, 267, 281

and corruption 236creation of 278and decolonization 108, 142, 252, 279deposition of 57, 59, 94, 108, 112, 119,

144, 161and foreign debts 268and jurisdiction 1, 40, 61, 117, 131, 140,

157, 169, 248, 260, 251, 274, 275and lands 194, 240, 275and legitimation 22, 116, 126, 142, 164,

171, 187, 243, 254, 264, 280and missionaries 135, 186, 244, 245as ‘native authorities’ 7, 107, 121and offices of state 85, 104, 122, 138, 181,

186, 252as patrons 6, 8, 9, 19, 20–22, 41, 47, 64,

73, 81, 96, 101, 104, 111, 114, 125,126, 128, 129, 130, 134, 149, 152,188–90, 195, 202, 218, 220, 222, 232,244, 245, 250

and political parties 23, 236, 237, 251,254, 260, 272, 279

and prescriptive regulation 7, 13, 15, 60,65, 70, 92, 109, 113, 121, 128, 139,144, 155, 181, 188, 191, 192, 216, 224,234, 245, 261, 265

and ‘re-invention’ 14, 237, 278and revenue 49, 61, 101, 102, 130, 134,

276, 280status of 6–15, 22, 23, 40, 44, 47–50, 56,

57, 60, 61, 65, 67, 69, 75, 80, 92, 118,129, 131, 142, 154, 159–71, 179, 181,194, 216, 218, 221, 228, 237, 250, 254,258, 264, 270, 271

under military rule 124, 142see also ali‘i; big men; caids; emirs;

headmen; kings; maharajas; obas;paramounts; roko; sultans; turaga

Child, John (governor) 21China 152, 175, 26Chinese:

in Fiji 234in Hawaiian islands 203, 212

in Malay States 157, 161, 163, 165, 273in Straits Settlements 150, 154

Chittagong 29, 30, 33Chulalongkorn, King of Siam 152Civil Lists:

in Egypt 79, 60, 81, 95in Fiji 229in Hawaiian islands 202, 211in India 60in Malaya 154in Nigeria 113

Civil Rights League 211civil servants:

indigenous agents as 54civil service:

in Fiji 231, 234, 236in Hawaiian government 196–8, 210in Malaya 170in Nigeria 123in Pacific island states 282

Clarke, Sir Andrew (Governor of the StraitsSettlements) 154–6

Clementi, Sir Cecil (Governor of the StraitsSettlements and High Commissioner)167, 169

Cleveland Grover (US President) 210client, see patron–client relations.client states 38, 74, 75, 84, 86, 95, 96, 125,

133, 145, 152, 175clientage 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 18, 247, 250,

251–4, 256, 263, 269, 272, 275,277–80, 282–4

in African states 101, 103, 107, 111–12,133–6, 138–41, 143–5, 265, 271

Egypt 79in Indian states 32, 33, 42, 48, 53, 54, 60,

73, 80in Morocco 90, 92, 94, 97in Sudan 89in Pacific states 197, 219, 227, 230, 232,

234, 245see also patron–client relations

clientelae 2clientelism 5, 7, 8–10, 14, 197

see also patron–client relations.Clifford, Sir Hugh (Governor) 116, 117,

159, 166Clive, Robert, Baron (Governor of Bengal) 1,

11, 24, 27, 29–33, 35Cochin-China 150coercion:

in Hawaiian administration 185–6, 205,210

in imperial administration 3, 15, 26, 35,38, 40, 46, 52, 73, 84, 90, 93, 116, 143,150, 152, 155, 175, 238, 257, 259, 263,264, 268–9

Index 311

see also armed forces; policeCohen, Sir Andrew Benjamin (Governor)

132coinage:

in Indian states 63in Indian trade 21, 23

‘collaboration’ 1, 4, 5in imperial historiography 262in South-East Asia 172

Collins, John (Resident at Lucknow) 54colonial administration, see Belgian British,

French, German administrationcolonial administrators:

as ‘chiefs’ 256see also commissioners; governors;

political officers; residents‘colonial compacts’ 4Colonial Office 75, 125

and chieftaincy 109, 119, 120, 155, 167,168, 261

and Fiji 224and Malay States 155, 159, 166, 167, 169and Tonga 249, 255

Colvin, Sir Auckland (Indian and EgyptianAdministrator) 83

commissioners 260East-Central Africa 73, 74, 75,130, 131Fiji 229, 231, 232, 242, 243, 244, 245,

255, 256, 257in India 48, 58, 75Malaya 94, 95, 97Southern Africa 79, 80in West Africa 67, 68, 69, 103, 117, 118,

121commoners (‘youngmen’):

Buganda 126Fiji 232, 233, 238, 239Gold Coast (Ghana) 107in the Hawaiian Islands 186, 190, 194,

195, 204, 207, 214, 226Condominium, see SudanConfederacy Council (Ashanti) 106confederations (matanitu) 216, 218, 220,

225, 238, 253Congress, see Indian National CongressConseil Supérieur du Pays (Rwanda) 135‘constitutional monarchy’ 84, 86, 94, 97,

133, 162, 170, 176, 190, 191, 203, 206,213, 251

applied to Pacific hierarchies 190, 191,206

see also monarchyconsuls, consuls-general, consular agents:

as administrators 82–3, 85and chiefs 102, 143, 188, 189, 224Hawaiian 198and settlers 221, 248, 253

Convention People’s Party (Gold Coast,Ghana) 108

Cook Islands 273, 282‘co-ordinate units’:

in imperial administration 273Coorg 57Cornwallis, Charles, Earl, Marquis 34, 39,

43, 46Coromandel Coast 19, 43corruption:

in Fijian government 235, 239in Hawaiian government 198, 204, 205,

207in Malaysian civil service 278in Northern Nigerian government 122in Senegalese politics 142in successor states 141see also bribes

councils:of chiefs and elders 102, 104, 107, 117,

118, 122, 123, 129, 130, 131, 140, 143,228, 233, 235, 236, 237, 254, 256, 272,278, 279

in Fiji 228, 233Gold Coast 107, 108, 109governors’ 20, 159Indian states 15, 51, 59, 67, 75, 218, 227Malay states 161–3, 166, 167, 170–2,

175–6and politics 119, 120, 172in Nigeria 119, 272provincial 106, 233, 236in Uganda 129see also local government

Court of Directors, see East India Companycourts:

appellate 15in India 20, 34in Southern Nigeria 103see also Crown Courts; jurisdiction

Courts of Equity 10, 102Coussey Commission:

Gold Coast (Ghana) 108credit:

in African trade 102in Egypt 8, 81, 84in Indian trade 20, 42, 55, 267in Malaya 166see also debt servicing

Cromer, Evelyn Baring, Earl (Consul-Generalin Egypt) 82, 84, 85, 95, 256, 271

Crowder, Michael (historian) 259Crown (Head of State) 30, 56, 57, 58, 67,

70, 71, 74, 138, 159, 168, 187, 253, 261

Crown Colony government 4, 71, 151, 181,216, 264, 273

312 Index

Crown Courts 34, 275see also Supreme Court

Crown lands:in Egypt 81in Fiji 225, 226, 275in the Hawaiian islands 195, 201, 207,

214Crown prerogatives:

in imperial administration 261Curzon, George Nathaniel, Marquis

(Viceroy) 60, 65custom, see chiefs; chieftaincy; ‘tradition’customary law, see jurisdictioncustoms privileges:

in Indian trade 19, 21Cutch, India 61

Dagomba 106Dahomey kingdom 103, 138Dalhousie, James Andrew Broun-Ramsay,

Marquis (Governor-General) 57Damon, C. A. 210darbar (administrative court) 11, 27, 38, 48,

60, 61, 64, 256, 258dastaks (licences) 23Dato Onn (politician) 170Daudi Cwa (Kabaka of Buganda) 130Daulat Rao Sindia 49debt servicing 2, 25

and China trade 150East India Company 36, 73and Egypt 80, 82, 86, 95, 268and Fijian chiefs 221, 222, 248and Hawaiian government 188, 202,

204–6and Indian states 37–40, 44, 47, 50, 52,

63, 73, 74, 270and Malayan nobles 165, 273and Morocco 90, 95and Tonga 251and subordination 79, 268, 269

Deccan 24, 34, 40, 42, 47, 74Deccani nationalism 68Declaration of Rights (1839):

in Hawaiian government 190decolonization:

in Fiji 233in High Commission Territories 139in Malaya 168in Rwanda-Burundi 136, 145

Deed of Cession, Fiji 227Delhi 12, 29, 35, 39, 40, 44, 48, 57, 60Delhi College 54Democratic Party, Botswana 138Des Voeux, Sir G. W. (governor) 231, 257de-stoolments, see chiefsdewan (finance minister) 29, 37, 39, 64, 51,

53, 63, 64, 70, 80, 270

dewani (financial administration) 30, 33Dillingham, Benjamin 210Dinka, people 89Dinkar Rao (Minister in Gwalior) 63district officers 15, 116, 123

as brokers 175as magistrates 275in Malay States 163, 272Malays as 164see also commissioners; political officers;

residentsDoab 40, 48Dole, Sanford B. (Hawaiian politician) 205,

208, 210, 213Douglas, W. B. (Resident in Selangor) 157Dufferin, Frederick Temple Blackwood,

Marquis, Ambassador at Constantinople83, 84

Duncan, Jonathan (Resident in Benares) 39Dundas, Sir Charles (Governor) 131Dupleix, Jean François, Governor of

Pondicherry 24dustucks, see dastaksDutch administration:

in Ceylon 15Dutch East Indies 226Dutch merchants:

in South-East Asia 149

East Africa Protectorate (Kenya) 125East African Federation 132East India Company 9, 19, 23, 72, 268

alliances and military support 42, 44Charter of 1661 20Charter Renewal Act, 1813 57dependency on Mughal authorities 12, 19,

72finances 25, 30, 43, 51, 73and imperial administration 267‘Indian’ methods of influence 45and Indian states 19–58legacy of over-rule 55and Malay states 152methods of expansion 30, 35monopoly 20as Mughal successor 278private traders 25, 27Regulating Act, 1772 33relations with rulers 11, 35, 265reversal of status 32in South-East Asia 149–51, 175tribute to 29, 52see also Indian princes; residents

Egba people 103, 118Egypt 2, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88–90,

93, 94, 258administration in 95army mutinies 82

Index 313

British occupation 83, 95Chamber of Notables 83as a client state 84Commission of Liquidation 82Constitution, 1922 86finances 81, 82, 84King of 79as a mediatized state 80merchants and land-owners 85nationalist movement 85opposition groups 82as a patrimonial state 271Treaty with Britain (1936) 86tributary to Ottoman Empire 80Wafd political party 86see also Khedivate; Sudan

eika (lineage chief) 240Elliot, F. A. H. (tutor to prince in Baroda) 64Elphinstone, Hon. Mountstuart (Governor of

Bombay) 57Emir of Kano 124

salary 114emirs:

councils 117, 122in Northern Nigerian politics 120, 122,

124status 110, 116, 140, 271

emirates:classification 112courts 126see also Nigeria

Epeli (son of Cakobau) 225ethnicity and government:

in Fiji 234, 238, 253in Hawaiian government 204

euphemisms, see collaboration; indirect ruleEuropean treaties:

influence in India 32extraterritorial jurisdiction, see jurisdiction

factionalism:in Hawaiian government 208, 252in Tongan government 254see also segmentation

Faizabad Treaty, 1775 35, 37falefa (court) 243Fallers, L. A. (anthropologist) 6, 139Fanti states (Gold Coast) 104farman, imperial decree 21, 23Farouk I (King of Egypt) 86Farrukhsiyar (Mughal Emperor) 21Federated Malay States, see Malaya, Malay

StatesFiji islands, Fijians 151, 181, 258

annexation, 1874 224, 253Civil Service 254Constitutions 223–4, 233, 237Crown lands 225, 253

Deed of Cession 216, 221, 225economy 239government (pre-1874) 221–3independence, 1970 233Indians 234, 236, 253jurisdiction 226land commissions 228, 237Legislative Council 228, 223plantations 222Public Service Commission 235Senate of Chiefs 237social and political organization 218taxes 226, 227, 232territory and population 216and Tonga 222, 225‘tradition’ 227

Fiji High Commissioners 249, 254see also Western Pacific High Commission

Fijian Administration 216, 228, 229, 231–2,238, 253, 279

and chiefs 225–33Native Assistants 232Native Department 232

Fijian Affairs Board 227–8, 232–3, 237Finau (paramount chief) 244, 245force, see armed forces; coercion; policeForeign and Political Department, India 60,

64–6, 75Foreign Jurisdiction Acts 65, 261, 274Foreign Office (British) 72, 80, 125Fort St George, see MadrasFort William, see CalcuttaFrance:

and the Hawaiian Islands 206and India 24, 73in Indo-China 152Overseas Territories and Departments

281and Tonga 245

Free Church of Tonga 247–9, 254French administration:

in Morocco 79–96, 268, 270, 271in West Africa 122, 260

French Polynesia 282French Union 96Fuad, Ahmad (King of Egypt) 86Fulani, people 8, 109–14, 116–17, 122–3fur trade, Pacific 185Furidkot 50

Gaekwad of Baroda 41, 45, 50, 5, 64Gambetta, Léon 83Gambia 122Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, ‘Mahatma’

(Indian nationalist) 69Ganges delta 91, 21Ganwa chiefly oligarchy:

in Burundi 135, 136

314 Index

George IV, King 188George V, King 88German administration:

in Rwanda-Burundi 134in Samoa 273

Gibson, Walter Murray (businessman andminister) 190, 203–5

gift exchange:in patronage systems 26, 36, 54

Girouard, Sir Edward Percy (Governor)110

Glover (Sir) John Hawley (Governor of LagosColony and Protectorate) 103

Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate (Ghana)10, 104, 119, 265

constitutional change 106, 108chiefdoms 104–6, 265European intervention 10use of chiefs and councils 122, 143see also Akan; Akim; Asante; Northern

TerritoriesGoldman, Irving (anthropologist) 179Gonja 104Goodenough, J. G. Commodore 224Gopaul Doss (bankers) 36Gorakphur 40Gordon, Sir Arthur, see Hamilton-GordonGorst, Sir John Eldon (Consul-General in

Egypt) 85Government of India, see Indiagovernors 4, 14, 15, 20, 256

in Africa 116, 117, 143, 268, 271East India Company 32, 40, 45, 48, 51,

55, 76Egyptian 85, 96in Fiji 216, 233, 256Hawaiian 185, 191, 194, 197, 198, 206,

213, 215, 277as high commissioners 254in Malaya 155, 157, 159, 175in Morocco 90, 92as patrons 159, 248in Sudan 88Tongan 240, 244, 246, 252, 254in Zanzibar 125

governors-general 33, 34, 36, 40Grant, H. E. W. (consul) 249Great Britain:

and Fijian cession 224, 225and the Hawaiian Islands 200and Tonga 248–51, 254see also British administration; Colonial

Office; Foreign OfficeGreat Council of Chiefs 237

see also Council of ChiefsGrey, Sir George (governor-general) 246Grunshi, West Africa 104

Guillemard, Sir Lawrence (Governor of the Straits Settlements and HighCommissioner) 166

Guinea, West Africa 122Gujarat 19–21, 41, 63Gwalior state, India 41, 42, 48, 49, 52, 61,

62, 63Gwandu, West Africa 111Gyaman, Gold Coast 104

ha‘a (maximal lineage) 240, 246Ha‘alilio, Timothy 189Ha‘apai 242, 243, 245Habe (Hausa) kingdoms 110, 111Haider Ali (ruler of Mysore) 42, 43Haider Beg Khan (Minister in Awadh) 37, 39Hailey, William Malcolm, Baron

(administrator) 123, 140, 141, 171,257, 259, 265

Halifax, E. Wood, Baron Irwin, Earl of(Viceroy) 67

Hall, W. W. (Hawaiian politician) 210Hamilton-Gordon, Sir Arthur Charles, Baron

Stanmore (Governor) 11, 14, 151, 174,216, 226, 227, 247, 257, 273

hanai (fostering) 192haole (foreigners, white settlers) 183, 188,

191, 194, 196, 198, 204, 208, 214Harlow, Vincent T. (historian) 72Harris, Charles (Minister in Hawaiian

government) 200Harrison, Benjamin (US President) 210Hasan Reza Khan (Minister in Awadh) 37Hassan II (King of Morocco) 94, 96Hastings, Warren (Governor-General of

Bengal) 33, 34, 36–8, 42–6hau (secular rule) 242, 243, 245

see also chieftaincy; paramountcyHausa, people 6, 8, 13, 109–12, 114, 117,

123Hausa culture:

patronage in 111Hawai‘i, Hawaiian Islands 179, 181, 184,

185as American Territory 210annexed, 1898 201and foreign investment 209immigration 215, 212, 227political and social structure 184, 185population and resources 180, 184, 207,

212Hawai‘ian Kingdom 252, 258, 264, 266,

269acknowledged as independent 188and Anglo-American law 274Civil Service 196–9committee of public safety 209

Index 315

constitutions 190–2, 205, 207, 208, 192finances 196, 252foreign relations 200–5franchise 207, 214House of Nobles 190, 191, 204House of Representatives 192and land 195monarchy 188, 190, 192, 201nationalism 208overthrown 201, 252as a patrimonial state 181, 183, 185, 186,

188, 189, 190–2, 194, 196, 205–8, 213politics 202, 207, 211, 214provisional republic 208, 211see also France; Great Britain; United

States of AmericaHawaiian League 206Hawaiian nationalism 222Hawkins, William 19headmen:

in administration 103, 112, 117, 131,138,149, 151, 154, 157, 163, 164, 173, 175,176, 226, 230, 232, 233, 266, 273, 278

see also mudaliyars, penghulusHeussler, Robert (historian) 157Hi Kalai‘aina party 207hierarchies:

in colonial government 256duality in 242fate of 141in Fiji 227–8, 237, 253in Hawaiian government 282in Malay States 173terminology for 172see also line of power; over-rule

High Commission Territories 145see also Botswana; Lesotho; Swazi

High Commissioners 268in Egypt 86in Malaya 166, 167, 170in Nigeria 104, 110, 278in South Africa 138Western Pacific 248, 249, 251, 254

Hihifo (Tongatapu) 245Hindu, people, nobility 19, 22, 27, 29, 32,

41–2, 44–5, 48, 54, 58–60, 63, 67, 73,74, 175

historiography:administration in Africa 140‘collaboration’ 1, 4, 5, 102, 137, 170, 172,

258, 262, 269diffusion of power 4, 185, 273and imperial chronology 10, 12, 13, 79,

265, 273and ‘imperial discourse’ 2, 16imperialism of free trade 102and ‘indirect rule’ 1, 3, 5, 11, 12, 55, 79,

88, 111, 117, 124, 139–41, 142, 156,172, 216, 226, 229, 257–9

‘informal empire’, 4, 10‘line of power’ 61, 110, 117, 156, 164,

229, 231, 253, 257, 262of Pacific societies 181of patrimonial states 71

HMS Blonde 188Hocart, A. M. (anthropologist) 219Holkar Marathas 41, 44, 49, 61Home Rule Party 214Hong Kong 150Honolulu 183, 185Honolulu Rifles 205, 206Hugli, port 19–21Hunter, Hamilton (consul) 249Husain Kamil Pasha (Sultan of Egypt) 86Hussain Khan (Dewan in Awadh) 39Hutu people 134–6, 145Hyderabad state:

and East India Company 34, 40, 42–5,52–3, 73

and foreign alliances 21–4, 49, 74and residents 62, 64and Indian politics 68

Hyderabad (Deccan) Company Limited 62Hyderabad State Railway Company 62

I‘i, John 190, 191Ibadan, Nigeria 103, 118, 119Ibadan Progressive Union 119Idris (Sultan of Perak) 161, 163Ijebu state 268Ilorin 103im Thurn, Sir Everard (governor) 248, 249Imbokodvo Party, Swaziland 139Imerina kingdom 138imperial ‘discourse’, see historiographyimperial administration:

autochthonous 264cross-fertilization in methods 264national ‘styles’ 260and political theory 263and protectorates 264pragmatism in 264purposes 260symbiotic relations in 4, 118, 131, 14,

258, 273, 275, 276, 280see also Belgian; British; Dutch; French;

GermanImperial British East Africa Company 128imperial patronage:

and business 173imperial policy:

co-ordination of 71Independents:

in Hawaiian politics 205

316 Index

India, Indians 23, 34, 53, 55, 234, 236–7,239, 266, 274

banking houses 54in Fiji 234, 236, 253population and territory 55trade routes 19see also Indian Government; Indian princes

India Office 58, 61, 72, 76Indian Army 270Indian Civil Service 70, 164Indian Government (Raj):

agencies 48, 50, 53, 61, 62, 63, 64commissioners, collectors 58Foreign and Political Department 60–6,

75patron rivalry in 59

Indian Mutiny and Civil Rebellion 57, 58,63, 74

Indian National Congress 68, 69, 70, 72, 75Indian nationalism 67Indian opium, see opiumIndian Penal Code:

in Perak State 155Indian ‘Political Law’ 65Indian Political Service 65, 70

see also political officers; residentsIndian presidencies, see Bengal; Bombay;

MadrasIndian princes, princely states 3, 6, 7, 11, 45,

47, 55, 57, 60, 65, 69, 139, 168, 258,275–7

and arbitration 61area and population 55competition between 12, 35conferences 66and constitutional change 67, 270defined as a ‘political community’ 65finances 60, 62, 63loans to government 62protected from annexation 59salutes and honours 60status of 47, 65, 69, 270succession disputes 50treaties, treaty rights 58

Indian States Committee, 1927 67‘indirect’ rule 5, 122, 141

and Indian states 11, 59political content of 257and pre-colonial structures 140see also historiography

Indore state 41, 49, 61, 62, 64Indus, River 50‘informal empire’, see historiographyinternational rivalry:

as patron rivalry 12in India 24in South-East Asia 150

‘inversion’, see reversal of statusIrwin, see HalifaxIskander (Sultan of Perak) 166Islam 79, 93, 9, 96, 97, 110, 125, 274Ismail (Khedive of Egypt) 80, 81, 95Istiqlal Party (Morocco) 94iTaukei, commoners 180Ives, Edward (Resident in Awadh) 39izzat (prestige of a ruler) 60

Ja Ja (merchant chief) 102jagirs (revenue lands) 29, 38, 61Jahangir (Mughal Emperor) 19Jaipur 61, 62Jam Sahib of Nawanagar 63James I, King 19Japan:

and Hawaiian annexation 212Java 149Jodhpur State 49, 62Johnston, Sir Harry (administrator) 53, 128,

129Johore State 161, 175, 205Judd, A. F. (Hawaiian attorney-general) 210Judd, Dr Gerrit (medical missionary and

government minister) 189, 190–2, 195judges:

administrators as 15Crown 34Hawaiian 197, 205, 213Islamic 90, 91, 92, 111Malayan 162in Native Courts 108

Junagarah State 50jurisdiction:

Alkali courts 275in Buganda 131extra-territorial 53, 150, 152in Hawaiian government 203, 210, 219Hindu Shastras (codes) 275and imperial power 274in Islamic states 275in Madras 266in Malay States 163in Nigeria 276over protected subjects 15in Tonga 246, 248see also courts; judges; law codes; Supreme

Court

Ka‘ahumanu (wife of Kamehameha I) 185–9kabaka (paramount in Buganda) 126,

128–34, 271Kabbaka Yekka Party 133Kaggwa, Sir Apollo (Katakiro of Buganda)

128, 131, 132kahu (teacher) 189

Index 317

kainga (descent group) 240Kaiulani (Hawaiian princess) 209, 211Kakunguru, Semei (general and

administrator) 129Kalakaua, David (Hawaiian King 1874–91)

192, 194, 198, 200–7, 252Kali‘anaole, Jonah Kuhio (Hawaiian

Delegate to Congress) 214Kamehameha I (King of the Hawaiian Islands

1795–1819) 185, 187, 188, 190Kamehameha II 186

see also LiholihoKamehameha III 188–90, 192, 196, 204Kamehameha IV 192Kamehameha, Lot (Kamehameha V) 197Kampala, Uganda 132Kana‘ina, Charles 190Kandavu island 232Kandy (Kingdom) 151Kano, Nigeria 104, 110, 111, 113, 114,

124Kapu (sacred) 187Kapurthala 50Karagwe state 128Kashmir 50Kasimbazar, market 19, 27katakiro (chief minister of Buganda) 128,

132Kathiawar 50, 61, 63Kathiawar Agency 63Katsina Emirate 113Kaua‘i island 185Kauikeaouli (Kamehameha III 1825–54) 186kaukau ali‘i (service gentry) 186, 189, 190Ke‘eaumoku (chief and governor) 188Ke‘elikolani, Ruth (governor) 192Kedah 161Kekuanao‘a, Mataiao (Governor of O‘ahu)

189, 190, 192, 195, 197Kelantan 161Kenya 142, 264Khama, Tshekedi (Botswana paramount)

138Khandi Rao (Gaekwad) 59Khedivate, in Egypt 79, 81–2, 84, 95, 268Kimberley, John Wodehouse, Earl (Secretary

of State for the Colonies) 154, 224Kina‘u (Regent to Kauikeaouli) 188, 192kingship:

as constitutional monarchy 251in East-Central Africa 126in Morocco 95and primogeniture 246in Tonga 245, 246, 249see also chieftaincy; Hawaiian Kingdom;

paramountcyKinney, William 205

Kitchener, Horatio Herbert, Earl (general) 85Kono, Sierra Leone 141konohiki (stewards, agents) 186, 198Kordofan province, Sudan 88Kotah 49Kuakini (Governor of Maui) 187, 188Kuala Kangsar 157Kuala Lumpur 159, 166, 176Kuala Lumpur–Klang railway 158kuhina nui (senior minister) 188, 189, 191,

192, 197Kumasi, Gold Coast 104Kutch, India 50

labour 224, 226, 253administration 131, 134, 145, 162, 190,

224, 275in Buganda 131and clientage 2, 130coerced 116, 128, 151, 158, 186, 269, 271competition for 138contracted 202, 213, 222immigrant 203, 253as an imperial resource 113, 137, 264, 269payment for 113recruitment by chiefs 232services avoided 198services for chiefs 185, 186, 190, 194,

223, 230, 272status of 114

Labour Party, Fiji 236, 239Labuan 156Lagos, Nigeria 14, 103, 117, 119, 122Lagos Colony and Protectorate 103Lahainaluna school 189Lakeba (Lakemba) island 222land 2, 30, 33, 46, 49, 51, 52, 54, 60, 73, 74,

80, 81, 85, 93, 95, 104, 110, 114, 122,201, 204, 216, 218, 220, 221, 269, 275

administration 158, 163, 164, 194, 195,222, 224, 233, 255, 257, 267

and custom 227, 237, 238, 265, 272and hierarchies 22, 36, 106, 126, 129,

133, 134, 136, 173, 174, 186, 194, 198,207, 240, 246, 250, 254, 266

as an imperial resource 38, 131, 137, 138,151, 152, 157, 165, 225, 228, 230, 260,264, 275

lease and sale 106, 107, 158, 165, 195,198, 205, 224, 226, 230, 233

Land Commission, see Board ofCommissioners

landlord–stranger relations:in West Africa 101

Lango district 130Lapaha, Tongatapu 242, 243

318 Index

Larut, Malaya 154, 156Lau islands, Fiji 180, 218, 221, 222, 232,

253Laval, Father Honoré 247law codes 246

adopted by chiefs 187, 188in Hawaiian government 191, 252in Tonga 245, 246see also jurisdiction

Lawry, Walter (missionary) 244lawyers, African 117Layard, E. L. 224leaders, leadership:

continuities in Africa 141defined 7, 10historiography 181see also big men; chiefs,chieftaincy

Lee Warner, Sir William (civil servant andauthor) 65, 276

Legislative Councils:in Botswana 138in Egypt 84, 85in Fiji 228, 233Gold Coast 106, 108in India 69in Swaziland 139in Uganda 132

legitimation 142, 261Lesotho (Basutoland) 138, 145Lethem, G. J. (administrator) 275Liberal Party:

in Hawaiian politics 206, 208Light, Francis (trader and administrator) 149Liholiho (Kamehameha II 1819–1824) 186,

187, 188Lili‘uokalani (Hawaiian Queen 1891–93)

194, 206–8, 210, 211, 213, 252Limba, people 101Limbdi state 59‘line of power’ 230, 262, 236

in Fiji 229, 231, 253in Indian states 55in Tonga 250

lineages 6and political offices 258rivalries 240, 243succession 116

local government 140in British India 65finances 227in Fiji 228, 229, 233Gold Coast (Ghana) 107and imperial administration 120, 259,

260, 261, 277Southern Nigeria 120

Lodge, Henry Cabot 212Lomaiviti 230, 231

London Missionary Society 245London, Jack (novelist) 282Lot Kamehameha (Kamehameha V 1863–72)

192Lotu Tonga 221Low, Sir Hugh (Resident in Perak) 155–7,

257Lucknow 35, 38, 39Lugard, Sir Frederick John Dealtry, Baron

(soldier and administrator) 104,109–14, 117, 118, 128, 139, 140, 261,278

Lukiiko (Buganda Assembly) 130, 132, 133

Lunalilo, William Charles (King of theHawaiian islands 1873–1874) 190, 194

Luo, people (Kenya) 125Luyia, people (Kenya) 125Lyautey, Louis Herbert (Resident-General in

Morocco) 92Lytton, Edward Robert Bulwer, Earl

(Viceroy) 59

Ma‘afu (Tongan noble) 221–2, 225, 253Ma‘aji (treasurers) 114McCallum, Henry (Governor Lagos Colony

and Protectorate) 103Macartney, Sir George, Baron 149McCook, General (US Minister to the

Hawaiian Islands) 200MacDonald, M. J. (Governor-General of

Malaya) 169MacGregor, Sir William (Governor, Lagos

Colony and Protectorate) 103McKinley Tariff, 1890 200, 211Mackinnon, Sir William (businessman) 125MacMichael, Sir Harold (Commissioner to

Malaya) 168, 171Madhava Rao, Sir T. (Dewan Baroda state)

64Madras, India 5, 19–24, 27, 33–4, 40–8,

51–2, 56, 59, 62, 64, 72–4Madras Council 42, 43Maffey, Sir John (Governor-General of the

Sudan) 88Maghrib 90, 93, 94Mahan, Captain Alfred Thayer 212maharajas 49, 52

Jaipur 61Mysore 51Sindia 62, 63

Maharashtra 74Mahdism, Mahdiyya 86, 88, 115

see also SudanMahele (land division) 194, 195, 198Mahune, Boaz 189, 190Mair, L. (anthropologist) 6, 126, 139, 141

Index 319

Maitland, Sir Thomas (general andadministrator) 151

Maiturare (Sultan of Sokoto) 115Makhosini Diamini (Swazi Prince) 139Makhzen administration 91, 92, 93Malabar Coast 42, 43Malacca, see Straits SettlementsMalacca sultanate 152Malay Administrative Service 164, 176, 273Malay Chinese Association 174Malay College, Kuala Kangsar 164Malay Congress 169Malay nationalism 171Malay Planning Unit 168Malay rulers (sultans) 171

and constitutional change 176Head of State 170and political parties 172Rulers’ Conference 170status 159, 171, 172, 175see also chieftaincy

Malay Union 180Malaya, Malay States 258

aristocracy 158citizenship 170constitution 169finances 165independence 171investment in 158and Japanese occupation 168, 171jurisdiction in 169treaty revision 168

Malayan Civil Service (MCS) 164, 170, 113,279

Malayan Communist Party 170Malayanisation in the civil service 170, 174,

176Malaysia:

government patronage in 174Malcolm, Sir John (Governor of Bombay)

57Malhar Rao Holkar 49Malhar Rao, Gaekwad 59Malo, David (historian) 189Mamprussi, West Africa 104, 106Mangareva, French Polynesia 247Mantri of Perak 154, 155Mara, Ratu Sir Kamisese (Prime Minister of

Fiji) 233, 236, 237Maratha, chiefdoms 21, 22, 24, 34, 35,

40–5, 48, 56–8, 74and Bombay 45political organization 40–1treaty 41and tributaries 44see also peshwa

March, E. (Consul) 224

Margai, Milton (Prime Minister of SierraLeone) 142

Mariner, William 244Marquesas islands 179Marrakesh 9matanitu, see confederationsmatapule (stewards, retainers) 240, 242,

243, 247Maui island 185Maxwell, W. E. (Resident in Selangor) 158Maxwell, W. G. (Chief Secretary in Malaya)

166, 169MCS see Malayan Civil ServiceMende, people 102, 121Mengo, Buganda 130merchants:

African 88, 102European 7, 10, 19, 25, 102Indian 9, 19, 20, 23, 25, 27, 45see also chartered companies

Merrill, George W. (US Minister to theHawaiian Islands) 205

Mewar, India 61Middleton, Nathaniel (Resident in Awadh)

36Midnapur, India 29, 30, 33military coups:

in Fiji 254see also armed forces; Indian Mutiny

Mill, James 57Mindon Min (King of Burma) 152Minto, Gilbert John Murray Elliot, Earl

(Viceroy) 66Mir Jafar (Nawab of Bengal) 27Mir Kasim 29missionaries 125, 143, 180, 182, 220, 224,

253and chiefs 187co-option of 265in Fiji 221in the Hawaian Islands 183, 187Pacific islanders as 220, 224, 225in Tonga 244

Mitchell, Sir Charles (Governor of the StraitsSettlements) 159

mo‘i (paramount, Hawaiian islands) 184,190

Moala island (Fiji) 219, 222Moeaki (chief) 245Moloka‘i island 185monarchy:

in Egypt 105in Buganda 132, 133in Burundi 136in Ceylon 151Hawaiian 183–204, 296, 302in Morocco 84

320 Index

monarchy (cont.):in Rwanda 134in Tonga 271–8, 296see also Crown; ‘consitutional’ monarchy;

kingship; VictoriaMoney, J. W. B. (author) 226Mongkut, King of Siam 152Montagu–Chelmsford Report (1918) 65Morocco 79, 264, 265, 268, 270, 271, 275,

280courts 91and French over-rule 92–5, 96kingship in 94–5nationalist movement 93–4as a patrimonial state 90–2, 96–7protectorate treaty (1912) 90sultanate 79, 90, 265

Moshoeshoe (Sotho paramount) 38Mossi Kingdom, West Africa 106Moulay Hafidh, Sultan of Morocco 91Moulton, Rev. J. E. 248Mountbatten, Louis, Earl (Viceroy) 68,

69Mpande (Zulu paramount) 137Mu‘a, Tongatapu 244Mubarak, Nawab of Bengal 33Mughal empire 21, 24, 27, 40, 42, 47, 74

and Europeans 10, 19, 20, 21, 30, 57, 72,265

nobility 64as a patrimonial system 22, 72successor states 11, 22, 32, 40, 43, 55,

265, 278see also Akbar; Alamgir II; Farrukhsiyar;

Jahangir; Shah AlamMuhammad Ali Khan (Nawab of Arcot and

the Carnatic) 24, 44Muhammad Ali Walajah (Nawab of the

Carnatic) 42Muhammed ben Moulay ‘Arafa (Sultan of

Morocco) 94Muhammed ben Yussuf (Sultan of Morocco)

103, 106mukama (paramount in Nyoro) 126Mukhtar (Minister in Awadh) 37muli (foreigners) 244Munro, Sir Thomas (Governor of Madras)

56, 57munshis (assistants) 54Murshid Kuli Khan (Nawab of Bengal) 23Murshidabad, Bengal 27, 29, 33, 73Museveni (President of Uganda) 134Musinga (Mwami of Rwanda) 134Muslims, see IslamMustafa Fahmy (Prime Minister of Egypt)

85Muteba II (Kabaka of Buganda) 280

Mutesa II, Sir Edward (Kabaka of Buganda)131, 132

mwami of Burundi 136mwami (paramount in Rwanda) 135Mwanga (Kabaka of Buganda) 128Mysore state 42, 43, 45, 48–51, 53, 55–7,

59, 62–4, 68–9, 74, 270control by Madras 44maharaja restored 52, 60

Nagpur 41, 45, 49, 52Nailatikau (son of Cakobau) 225Najm-ud-Daula (Nawab of Bengal) 30Nana Ofori Atta (Omanhene of Akyem

Abuakwa) 107, 108Natal 71, 264, 269

and Zulu chiefdoms 137National Federation Party (Fiji) 233, 234,

236National Liberation Movement (Gold Coast,

Ghana) 109National Reform Party (Hawaiian islands)

206nationalist movements 59, 68, 69, 83, 94,

167, 169, 172, 176, 282in Buganda 132and chiefs 234, 236, 237, 251, 254, 260,

272, 279in Egypt 96in Malaya 169in Morocco 93, 94

Nationalist Unionist Party (Sudan) 89‘Native Authorities’ 7, 107, 110, 117, 120,

129see also local government

Native Councils 102, 108, 117, 140see also councils

Naulivou, Savenaca (brother of Cakobau)225

Nawab of Bengal 29, 33, 267Nayacakalou, R. R. (anthropologist) 228,

230, 238Negri Sembilan, Malaya 15, 161, 165Neguib, Mohammed (Egyptian general) 86Nehru, Jawaharlal (Indian politician and

Prime Minister) 68Nepal, Kingdom 50, 280New Caledonia 179New Zealand 3, 4, 71

and Western Samoa 273Niger Delta 102Niger Protectorate 103Nigeria 6, 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, 88, 102, 103,

109–14, 116–24, 131, 139, 140, 142,144, 256, 271, 272–6, 278–81

as an administrative model 5, 11, 88, 259amalgamation 114, 117, 118

Index 321

chiefs in 103, 104, 118, 122, 140, 265,271, 278

Civil Service 123conquest and over-rule 110, 261constitutions 27corruption 256Federation 123joint hierarchy in 113, 116, 121, 131, 144,

256, 273, 274, 276Northern Provinces 104, 110, 140, 144,

256, 261, 265patrimonial elements in 109political culture 15, 124, 142, 256politicians and chiefs 119, 144, 260, 272,

280revenue and over-rule 114, 271Southern Provinces 119see also Lagos Colony and Protectorate

Nigerian Youth Movement 119Nile Frontier Force 84Nizam of Hyderabad 42, 43, 44, 68Nkrumah, Kwame (Premier and President of

Ghana) 108, 109nobles, nobility:

as administrators 164, 198, 204, 248,250, 251

as a class 185as clients of chiefs 64, 206in conciliar government 162, 190, 191,

192, 204, 205, 207, 246and European agents 27, 161, 272and resources 22, 62, 164, 201, 246, 247,

250, 265see also service gentry

North West Provinces 48North-Eastern Confederation (Fiji) 222Northern Circars, India 42Northern Peoples Congress (Nigeria) 123Northern Territories (Gold Coast) 106, 107,

109Nubar Pasha (Prime Minister of Egypt) 81Nuer, people 89Nupe Emirate 110Nyoro state 126

O‘ahu island 183, 184, 185–7Obas 103, 118, 119

see also YorubaObote, Milton (Prime Minister of Uganda)

133, 134Ochterlony, David (Resident at Delhi) 54Olubadan of Ibadan (Yoruba paramount)

118, 119Omani Arabs 50, 125Oni of Ife (Yoruba paramount) 103, 118opium 52, 62, 65

in Malay States 157, 165

Opium War 150‘orientalism’ 54Orissa, India 19, 21, 30, 32, 33, 35Ottoman Empire 79, 80, 95

and Egypt 82, 84over-rule 34, 118, 257

and chieftaincy 14, 16, 33, 47, 49, 157,164, 168, 179, 230, 251, 272, 278

and custom 253and decolonization 141, 145denotation 16, 121, 151, 159, 171, 216,

258, 259and diffusion of power 4, 185, 273establishment of 72, 86, 89, 117, 138,

143, 151, 155, 157, 175, 218, 225, 260,264, 273

expansion of 96gradations of 3and imperial hierarchy 3, 52, 54, 58, 76,

144, 176, 278and institutional change 173, 254methods of 268, 269, 274, 276and patrimonial states 57, 71, 79, 92, 94,

95, 130, 140, 144, 255and politics 256and prescription 7, 13, 37, 39, 60, 65, 70,

109, 113, 121, 128, 139, 144, 155, 181resistance to 5, 12, 33, 92, 94, 168, 171,

211, 249, 269, 272, 273styles of 259see also Belgian; British; Dutch; East India

Company; French; German

Pagan Min (King of Burma) 152Pahang state, Malaya 158, 159, 162Palmer, Sir Herbert Richmond (Resident,

Lieutenant-Governor, Northern Nigeria)113, 115, 116

Palmer, William (Resident in Awadh) 36, 39Palu (chief) 244Pangkor Engagement (1874) 154–6Papua New Guinea 179paramountcy, paramounts 1, 3, 6, 58

basis of power 184by title accession 6, 254in Anglo-Indian relations 57, 74, 270in Rwanda 134in the Hawaiian Islands 184Northern Gold Coast 106in Tonga 240see also Alafin; Alake; Aleamotu‘a;

Asantehene; Awujale; Cetshwayo; chiefs,chieftaincy; Finau; kabaka; Khama;mo‘i; mukama; mwami; Olubadan; Oni;peshwa; Shaka; Sobhuza; Taufa‘ahau;Tuputoa; Vunivalu; Yang di-PertuanAgong

322 Index

parganas (districts) 30Parker, Samuel (Hawaiian politician) 208Parsis 64Passfield, see Webb, Sydney JamesPatiala state 50, 59, 60, 68Patna 23patrimonial states 5, 91, 95, 136, 140, 144,

174, 185, 269, 270compared 265, 292deconstructed 152, 206, 258political offices in 198, 283used by foreign administrators 79see also Buganda; chieftaincy; Egypt;

Hawaiian Kingdom; hierarchy; Indianprinces, princely states; Malaya;Morocco; Nigeria; patrimonialism

patrimonialism 5in Awadh 36, 37and bureaucracy 126, 129, 131, 185in East-Central Africa 126, 132in Egypt 84, 280and finance 269in Ghanaian government 283and patron–client relations 289in High Commission Territories 138in Indian states 22, 53, 56, 60, 62, 63, 69,

70in Malaya 172, 156, 162, 175, 272in Morocco 90, 92, 95, 97in Nepal 280in Northern Nigeria 109, 111, 141, 256opposition to 196, 203, 205, 206, 213,

258in Pacific societies 181, 183, 190–2, 211,

213, 219, 225, 243, 246, 252, 255, 256

Patriotic League:in Hawaiian politics 211

patron parties 109, 138, 141, 144, 145, 166,172

patronage:and corruption 46, 53, 75by East India Company directors 34see also preferment

patrons 4, 6–13see also patron–client relations

patron–client relations:in African administration 13, 102, 111,

116, 126, 128, 135, 140, 272, 277between Africans 276in Ceylon 151and colonial government 142, 256, 258,

261, 262, 263, 277, 283defined 8, 9, 111, 262in Egyptian government 80as an exchange system 263in Fiji 219, 226, 230, 233, 238, 254

in Hawaiian government 189, 196, 197,202

in India 48, 60, 63, 69, 75, 279in Lagos politics 277in Malaya 157, 158, 162, 163, 165and military rule 124in Morocco 92in Ontario 4in Pacific states 180, 222, 245, 247, 250,

282as personal bargains 12in political science 5, 280in post-colonial states 280, 281second-level 27, 181, 249, 251, 277in Siam 152in South Africa 137, 141in Sri Lankan politics 278in Sudan administration 88, 96in West African trade 101, 102and under-development 283

Pauahi, Bernice 194, 210Pea (Tongatapu) 245Pearl Harbor 201, 202, 252Peking 149Penang 149penghulu (village chief) 156, 157–8, 163–5Perak state 154, 156, 159, 161, 163, 257,

272Perlis 161‘Permanent Settlement’ (Bengal) 268Peshawar 50peshwa (Maratha paramount chief) 24, 40,

41, 44, 45, 50Phillips, S. H. (Hawaiian attorney-general)

210Pi‘ikoi, David 189, 195Pickering, William (Protector of Chinese in

Malaya) 165pitso (assembly), Basutoland 138Pitt, William, the Younger (Prime Minister)

34plantations 194, 198Plassey, battle of (1757) 23, 29, 45, 267police 3, 52, 61, 95, 280

Fiji 223, 225, 229, 234Hawaiian islands 196, 197, 206, 213jurisdiction 50Malaya 155, 157, 170Northern Nigeria 112, 114, 124Rwanda-Burundi 135

political advisers:in Malay States 161

political agents, political officers 12, 58, 70,71, 75, 258, 268, 278

Indian states 3, 63, 65, 75, 270, 274, 277Malaya 163–4Nigeria 110, 112, 271, 275

Index 323

ranking 112records 15see also commissioners; district officers;

residentsPolitical Department, see Indian Governmentpolitical party patronage:

in Fiji 235in West Africa 143, 144

political scientists:and patron–client relations 10, 263

political structures:continuities in 257‘symbiosis’ 273

politicians:as successor rulers 141

politics:and business 252and colonial administration 2, 16, 116,

131, 139, 256, 258, 261, 270and decolonization 133, 136, 142, 234,

262, 280and elites 15, 69, 72, 75, 120, 174and ethnicity 171, 204, 234, 254and European intervention 25, 37, 56, 59,

72, 73, 95, 101, 145, 175, 208, 213,244, 267

indigenous 24, 26, 41–3, 64, 68, 73, 112,115, 122, 130, 137, 152, 183, 196, 202,222, 246, 251, 256

parties, factions 2, 89, 92, 96, 124, 130,139, 144, 166, 171, 173, 208, 213, 234,236, 252, 253, 280, 284

and patronage 14, 26, 70, 75, 145, 204,221, 253, 278, 281

‘prebendel’ 13and representation 65, 69, 81, 84, 86, 93,

106–8, 124, 133, 138–9, 140, 228, 234,236, 248, 249

Pondicherry 24Poona 41, 44, 45Port Loko, Sierra Leone 101preferment in recruitment:

in New South Wales 4see also patronage

prescription:and status 7, 13, 15, 39, 60, 65, 70, 92,

109, 113, 121, 128, 139, 144, 155, 181,192, 245

see also achievement; ascribed statusprincely states, see Indian princes, princely

statesPritchard, George (missionary and consul)

189, 247Pritchard, William T. (consul) 189, 221,

222Privy Council (Hawaiian islands) 191, 192,

195

prosopography:of administrators 15, 16

Province Wellesley, Malaya 149provincial commissioners, see

commissionersProvincial Councils:

Fiji 233Gold Coast 108

Provincial Courts 276Public Service Appeal Board (Fiji) 235public services, see civil servicePunjab 48, 49, 59, 60, 68, 74Purling (Resident in Awadh) 38

Quebec 71

Rabat 92Rabeh Zobeir (Islamic war lord in Bornu)

110Rabi (Rambi) island 221Rabone, Feez & Co. 224Rabuka, Sitiveni (Prime Minister of Fiji)

239Radunath Rao (Maratha chieftain) 41Raffles, Sir Thomas Stamford (Lieutenant-

Governor of Java) 149railway agreements:

Indian states 62Yoruba states 103

Raja Muda Abdullah, Perak 154Raja Muda Yusuf 155, 157, 161, 162Raja of Berar (Maratha chieftain) 44Raja of Tanjore 44rajas 10, 34, 49

as Malay officials 156, 164Rajkot state 59Rajput Agency 61Rajput states 68Rajputana (Rajasthan) 45, 47, 48, 49, 52,

62Rajputs 11, 22, 49Ramnarayan (finance minister in Bengal,

deputy in Bihar) 29ranching 194, 198Rangoon 152Ranjit Singh, Maharaja 50Ratu Emosi 230reciprocity:

in political relations 8, 14, 142, 156, 157,186, 232, 238, 275

in US–Hawaiian commerce 200, 212Treaty (1876) 200, 201, 207

Reform Party (Hawaiian islands) 206Regent of Kedah 167Republic of Hawai‘i 211

see also Hawaiian islandsresidency ‘system’ 11, 54, 157, 159, 172

324 Index

residents, agents:bribery of 54client networks 75as envoys 45, 48functions of 267, 270in Indian states 27, 29, 33, 36–40, 43–5,

47–54, 56–61, 64–5, 70, 73–5, 80and Malay rulers 145, 156, 157, 159, 163,

272,in Nigeria 111–13, 115, 116, 118, 119salaries 48styles of administration 157use of indigenous agents 35, 37, 38, 52,

54, 73, 75, 79resources, see access; labour; land; taxrevenue and expenditure 30, 34, 51, 113,

229, 234in Gold Coast (Ghana) 109in Hawaiian government 192, 198, 200,

202, 203in Indian states 31, 53, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63,

67, 73, 74, 75in Malay States 157, 160in Northern Nigeria 112, 115see also debt-servicing; East India

Company; tax; tributereversal of status 11

in imperial relations 259, 267, 268in Egypt 268in Indian states 267in Malay States 156, 169in Pacific societies 182, 183, 194, 247,

273in Western Africa 143

revolution:in Hawaiian government 206in Rwanda-Burundi 136

Rewa, chiefdom 220, 221Riaz Pasha (Prime Minister of Egypt) 82, 85Richards, A. I. (anthropologist) 6, 133, 139,

141Ricord, John 190, 191Rif, Rif chiefs 92, 94, 96Robinson, R. E. (historian) 5Robinson, Sir Hercules (administrator and

governor) 225, 226Robinson, Sir William Cleaver Francis, Baron

Rosmead (Governor of the StraitsSettlements) 156

Rohilkhand 40Rohillas, India 22, 45roko, roko tui (provincial chief) 219,

226–30, 231, 232Roko Tui Ra 230Roko Tui Ba 231Roko Tui Lau 232Roosevelt, Theodore 212

Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose, Earl(Foreign Secretary, Prime Minister) 85

Rotuma island 242Rotuman chiefs 229royalty, see kingshipRoyal Niger Company 103, 104, 110, 143,

268, 278Royal Proclamation (1858) 58

see also Indian princes, princely statesRubber Growers Association (Malaya) 158Rudahigwa (Mwami of Rwanda) 135rulers, indigenous 2, 11–15, 256, 260, 281,

264, 265, 267, 270, 271, 272African 110–12, 116, 118, 122, 128, 131,

141, 143, 144, 278in Egypt 80Indian 12, 21, 27, 34–5, 39, 47–9, 51–2,

54, 56–76, 267, 270Malayan 152, 158–9, 161, 164, 165–176,

271, 280Pacific islands 187, 192, 240see also chiefs, chieftaincy; emirs; khedive;

paramounts; sultansRussell, Sir Henry (Resident in Hyderabad)

57Rwanda-Burundi 125, 141, 144, 279

see also Burundi

Saad Zaghlul 86Saadat Ali Khan (Nawab of Awadh) 39Sadka, Emily (historian) 159, 161, 162Sahlins, Marshall (anthropologist) 179Saif (Nawab of Bengal) 33St. Julian, Charles 246Saketi (Tongan premier) 249Salabat Jang 24Salafism 93Salar Jung (Dewan in Hyderabad state) 64Salbai, Treaty (1782) 42, 43Salbat Jang (Nizam of Hyderabad) 42Salote, Queen (Tupou III) 249, 250, 255,

274salt 29, 52, 62Samoa 181

European mediation in 268and German administration 273and New Zealand administration 273and Tonga 242

Sanads (decrees) 37, 49, 58sandalwood trade 185, 188, 194Sarawak 156Sardauna of Sokoto 271segmentary lineage systems 92, 258

in East-Central Africa 125, 130, 144and political competition 6, 7, 92, 258Southern Sudan 89

Selangor state, Malaya 154, 159, 163, 167

Index 325

Senegal 14, 142, 277, 280Seringapatam Island 43, 44, 60service departments:

in Buganda 133in Malay States 155–7, 159, 162, 163,

271, 273Northern Nigeria 112

service gentry (elites) 70and Hawaiian government 186, 189, 195,

198and imperial administration 158, 167, 282in India 11, 23, 27, 36in Malay States 151, 157in Nigeria 276in Sudan 88in Uganda 133see also nobles, nobility

settlers, settler society:access to resources 195, 221, 222incorporation of 258status in Hawaiian islands 185, 187and taxes 200

Seyyid Bargash (Sultan of Zanzibar) 125Shah Alam (Mughal Emperor) 11, 29, 30,

35, 40, 42, 44Shaka (Zulu paramount) 137Shanghai 150Shar‘ia law 91Shepstone, Sir Theophilus (Secretary for

Native Affairs, Natal):as ‘Paramount Chief’ 137

Shore, Sir John, Lord Teignmouth 39Shuja-ud-Daula 29, 35, 36Siam (Thailand) 149, 150, 152, 161, 172,

175Sierra Leone 122, 141, 143

chiefs and big men 101, 121Sikander Jah (Nizam of Hyderabad) 44Sikhs 22, 48, 50, 60, 68Sind 47, 50Sindia Marathas 41, 42, 44, 61–3Sindia (Maharaja of Gwalior) 61Singapore Island 150, 159, 161, 175Siraj-ud-Daula (Nawab of Bengal) 27, 73sirdar (commander-in-chief) 84slave trade 102, 143, 260, 265, 268slavery, domestic 88, 158, 261, 267Sleeman, W. H. (Resident in Awadh) 57Smith, M. G. (anthropologist) 6–8, 111,

139, 141, 258Sobhuza II (paramount of Swaziland) 138Society Islands (French Polynesia) 179, 242,

246, 258, 273Soga people (Uganda) 265Soga state 128Sokoto 110, 111Sokoto Caliphate 103, 115

Somosomo, Fiji 219Soqosoqo ni Vakavulewa ni Taukei Party

(Fiji) 238South Africa (Republic) 138, 145

local patron leadership in 141Southern Nigeria, see NigeriaSpeedy, Captain (Resident in Malaya) 155Spreckels, Claus (merchant-planter) 201,

203, 205, 209, 210State Civil Service:

in Unfederated Malay States 164state councils 166, 167, 170

Gold Coast (Ghana) 107, 109in Malaya 164, 166, 167, 170, 273Southern Nigeria 119

State Rulers, see rulersStatutes, Acts:

Charter Renewal Act (1813) 57Currency Act (1876) 63Foreign Jurisdiction Act (1890) 65, 168,

261, 274Government of India Act (1935) 167Hawaiian Organic Act (1900) 213Protection Act (1922) 67Regulating Act (1773) 33, 43Tonga Lands Act (1882) 246

Stevens, John L (US Minister for theHawaiian Islands) 208, 210

stipending of chiefs, see chiefs, chieftaincyStraits Settlements 149, 157, 175

links with China 150links with India 150

subadar (imperial governor):East India Company as 33

succession disputes, see chiefs, chieftaincySudan 79, 84, 86, 88, 89, 95

Anglo-Egyptian 84–6, 96factional politics 89independence (1956) 89

Sudan Political Service 88Suez Canal 86, 96sugar 201, 202sugar industry:

and Hawaiian annexation 208, 210, 214Sukuna, Ratu Sir Lala 237Sultan Atahiru, Sokoto 110Sultan of Johore 149, 167, 169Sultan of Kedah 170Sultan of Morocco 90, 95, 96, 271Sultan of Perak 154Sultan of Sokoto 104, 115, 280Sultan of Zanzibar 271sultans:

and constitutional change in Malaya 169status in Malaya 161, 163, 164, 168, 169see also Abd al-Hafiz; Abdullah; Ahmadu

Bello; Atahiru; Husain Kamil; Idris;

326 Index

sultans (cont.):Iskander; Maiturare; Moulay Hafidh;Muhammed ben Moulay ‘Arafa;Muhammed ben Yussuf; Seyyid Bargash;Tambari; Tipu

Sungei Ujong, Malaya 159Supreme Court 276

at Calcutta 34in Nigeria 110, 117, 118, 122, 274, 275see also jurisdiction

Surat 19, 20, 21, 40, 45, 50Sutlej, River 48, 50swadeshi (home rule) 69Swanston, R. S. 222Swazi National Council 138Swaziland 138, 145Swettenham, Sir Frank (Resident in Malaya)

156–8, 169, 172

Tahiti (French Polynesia) 242, 244, 247see also Society Islands

Tambari (Sultan of Sokoto) 115Tanjore, kingdom 43, 44Tanna (Vanuatu) 222Taufa‘ahau (Tongan paramount title) 222,

242, 244, 245, 254compared with Kamehameha I 254conversion 245see also Tupou, George

Taufa‘ahau (Tupou II) 248Tavanavanua, Timoci (son of Cakobau) 224Taveuni 219Tawfik, Khedive of Egypt 82, 83, 84, 95, 96tax, taxation 118, 131, 203, 204

see also revenue and expenditureTemne, people 101, 121Temple, Charles Lindsay (Resident,

Lieutenant-Governor, Northern Nigeria)112, 113, 256

Templer, General Sir Gerald (HighCommissioner in Malaya) 170

Tenterden, Lord (Foreign Office official) 83Teso people and district 129, 130Thai dynasty, see SiamThakore of Rajkot 69Theo H. Davies & Co. 209Thesiger, Wilfred 89Thomas, Sir Shenton (Governor of the Straits

Settlements and High Commissioner)167

Thomas, John 245Thomson, Basil H. 248Thurston, Lorrin A. (politician and lawyer)

205, 206, 208, 209, 210Thurston, Sir J. B. (administrator and

governor) 224, 225, 226, 231, 248,257, 273

tikina (districts) 226, 228, 232Tipu Sultan 42, 43, 44titles, hereditary 5, 57, 59

abolished 57, 58chiefs and 104, 124, 242, 243, 245confirmed 111, 270, 280for nobles 198, 246, 251, 254for residents 54purchase of 102restoration of 162succession to 248see also chiefs, chieftaincy; land

Tonga, Tongan islands 179, 181, 240, 274Assembly 246and British over-rule 248, 273constitution 246, 254factionalism in 251finances 247, 248foreign contacts 243, 248government 246, 248, 250, 276political alliances 240regional trade 242resources and population 243Treaty of Friendship (1970) 250Treaty of Protection (1901) 248, 254

Tongan Kingdom 269patrimonial basis 251

Tongan trading company 249Tongans:

in Fiji 218–21, 253Tongatapu island 242, 243, 244, 245Toro state 125, 128, 129, 132Torrens system of land leasing 158tradition:

in Fiji 230‘re-invention’ 61, 67, 181, 279

Transvaal (South African Republic) 137,138, 145

Travancore state 43, 53treasuries:

in Northern Nigeria 113, 144treaties and agreements 5, 12, 34, 48, 261,

268, 270, 272, 274in Africa 103, 106, 109, 110, 113, 114,

118, 122, 128, 129, 143, 274in Egypt 86and European states 19, 24, 30, 150, 175in India 19, 27, 29, 32, 33, 35, 37, 39–46,

48, 50–2, 55, 57–8, 60, 65, 67–8, 73–5,151

with Morocco 90, 92, 93in the Pacific islands 188, 191, 200–2,

207, 210, 212, 245, 246, 248, 251, 255in South-East Asia 150, 152, 154, 159,

161, 164, 167–9, 175Treaty of Tientsin (1858) 150Trengganu state 161

Index 327

tribute 24, 29, 33, 37, 49, 50, 52in Hawaiian government 184in Indian states 74, 75, 270

Tswana chiefs 138Tucker, Alfred (Anglican Bishop of Uganda)

129Tucker, Dr S. G. 205Tui Ha‘apai (title) 244Tui Ha‘atakalaua (title) 243Tui Kanokupolu (title) 242–5, 254Tui Lau, see Ma‘afuTui Tonga (title) 240, 242–5, 247Tui Vava‘u (title) 244Tui Viti (title) 221, 224, 227

see also CakobauTunku Abdul Rahman 170Tupou dynasty 241Tupou I (George, King of Tonga) 246, 248,

251, 254and Fiji 222see also Taufa‘ahau

Tupou II 248, 249, 254Tuputoa (paramount chief) 243turaga (turanga, headmen, chiefs) 180, 218Turner, Nathaniel (missionary) 245Tutsi, chiefs and people 134, 135, 145

Uganda 125, 132, 134see also Buganda

Uganda High Court 131Uganda National Congress 132Uganda People’s Congress 133Umma Party, Sudan 89UMNO, see United Malays National

Organizationumuhueto clientage 135Unfederated Malay States 167, 175, 273

see also Kedah; Kelantan; Perlis;Trengganu

United Malays National Organization 172,174

United States of America:and the Hawaiian Islands 169, 183, 196,

200, 207, 211, 212, 252Urabi, Ahmad Colonel (nationalist leader in

Egypt) 82, 83Uvea island 242

vakaviti (Fijian custom) 227, 273Vancouver, Capt. George 187vanua (land, chiefdom) 218, 219, 223, 226Vanua Levu 220, 221, 223Varigny, Charles de (Minister in Hawaiian

government) 200, 201Vason, George 244vasu relations:

in Fiji 218, 219, 220

Vava‘u island 242, 243, 244, 254Victoria (Queen of Great Britain and

Ireland):as imperial paramount 60, 161, 270, 271given war club 225

Victoria Kamamalu Ka‘ahumanu 192Viti Levu 219, 220, 222, 223, 225, 253vizier:

in Moroccan administration 93see also waziri

vulagi, outsiders 180Vunivalu of Bau (paramount title) 220, 222,

231see also Cakobau

Wafd Party, Egypt 86, 94, 96Waialua (Hawai‘i island) 186Wailevu 221wakils, envoys, assistants 45, 49war lords 42, 44, 136Watkin, Revd Jabez B. 249Watts, William (Resident at Murshidabad)

27, 29waziri, minister 116Webb, Sidney James, Baron Passfield

(Secretary of State for Colonies) 167Weber, Max (sociologist) 5, 6, 7, 194, 282Weld, Sir Frederick (Governor Straits

Settlements) 158Wellesley, Richard Colley, Marquis Lord

Mornington (Governor-General ofIndia) 40, 43, 44, 50

Wesleyan Methodist Church 220Wesleyan Methodist missionaries 244, 245,

247, 254Western Africa (West Africa) 4, 5, 16, 102–3,

112, 121, 138, 142, 259–61, 275Western Pacific High Commission 273, 274Western Region, see NigeriaWestern States Agencies 49whaling traffic:

in the Hawaiian Islands 188Wilcox, George N. (Hawaiian politician)

208Wilcox, Robert 206, 214Williams, J. B. 221Wilson, Sir Rivers (Controller in Egypt) 81Wilson-Gorman tariff 211Wiltse, Capt. G. C. 208Woods, G. A. 225Woodward, Peter (historian and political

scientist) 89Wyllie, Lorrin C. (government minister) 189,

190, 192

Yang di-Pertuan Agong (Malayan paramountruler) 171

328 Index

Yang-di-Pertuan (Sultan of Perak) 161yavusa (patrilineal descent group) 218Yoruba people and states 103–4, 117–20,

123–4, 142–3see also Nigeria

Young, Alexander (Hawaiian politician) 209Young, John (Keoni Ana, government

minister) 189, 195, 197Young, John (Olohana) 185

zamindars, landholders, landlords 22, 30,33–4, 38, 55, 70

Zanzibar 79, 125Zulu chiefdoms 137, 145Zululand 137Zungeru, Northern Nigeria 111