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Shifts in writing technology are usually taken to mark a shift from discretionary to rule-bound, impersonal forms of government. Equating writing technology with rules, however, obscures how counterfeiting, both alleged and real, and the exertion of official discretion can consolidate a government of writing. In his important study of Yemeni scribal culture, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society, Brinkley Messick modifies Weberian models of domination by calling for the study of textual domination that intersects in diverse ways with other dimensions of authority. Messick relates the demise of the calligraphic state to the advent of legal codification and print technology. With the arrival of impersonal documents of government and a form of rational law, he argues, writing itself ceased to be the “non-arbitrary mark of the person” and the relationship between the sign and signified was no longer connected by an intermediary figure. Similarly, the notion that the innovations of disciplinary writing constituted a new assemblage of control exercised through the “unavoidable visibility of subjects” has been extremely productive in delineating the colonial career of modern infrastructural power. Following the work of Bernard Cohn, the colonial state's “investigative modalities” have been shown to be integral to colonial command and the production of an ever-accumulating corpus of reports. Statistical surveys, reports, and censuses in colonies did not create a uniform template of rule but did enable the operation of inherently selective, targeted, and differentially articulated projects of governance. These gains notwithstanding, the debates over colonial governance have remained limited to differing estimations of the state's successful mastery of information, and whether its taxonomies were collaboratively authored by intermediaries or imposed upon the colonized. We need to give more attention to the complex articulation of records and reports with the law under conditions of exogenous rule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay studies the evolution of India's anticorruption machinery and discourses of corruption from the 1940s to the 1960s as a tussle between the logics of bureaucracy and democracy playing out as part of decolonization. Anticorruption began as a way of safeguarding the British Government of India's war effort from wayward officials pilfering supplies. As the postcolonial government retooled coercive wartime laws and empowered an increasing number of bureaucrats to manage the economy for developmental purposes, anticorruption evolved into a key demonstration of accountability by the state to the Indian people. Meanwhile, discourses of corruption became increasingly politically potent as India's imperial subjects became voting citizens. These discourses created pressure for a reform of the anticorruption machinery. But the mechanisms resisted full democratization and continued to privilege the executive branch as they had in colonial times. Anticorruption mechanisms became used to subdue challenges to power that took place. They were themselves corrupted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper posits that the varied legacies of colonial rule and decolonisation can explain interstate variation in the institutionalisation of corruption in post-independence India. It concludes that the relative freedom from state capture after independence depended on two conditions: (1) the institutionalisation of bureaucratic autonomy prior to independence and (2) the survival of the disruption of decolonisation by an autonomous bureaucracy to be utilised by new representative governments following independence. These conditions were generally not met across India with the exception of the southern state of Kerala. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the diffusion of meritocratic practices as a potential instance of policy transfer by scrutinizing the introduction of open and competitive examinations during the mid‐nineteenth century in the British Civil Service. Scholars have argued that British reformers were inspired by meritocratic practices in British‐ruled India. In order to assess this claim, we combine qualitative analysis of archival material documenting the interdepartmental debates on meritocratic reforms in the British Home Civil Service as well as in the Indian Civil Service with quantitative analyses of unique data on the implementation of examinations with open competition in British public offices and the India experience of Heads of Departments. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses largely reject the idea that the Indian Civil Service was a key source of inspiration for British merit reforms. While our quantitative analyses show some, albeit weak, evidence, no such evidence was found in the qualitative analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the way in which modern institutions emerged in one region of British-ruled India--the Godavari Delta of coastal Andhra--during the early nineteenth century. Rejecting recently popular cultural theories and the vague language of 'multiple modernities', it suggests that modernity can be defined as the practical effort to govern subjects perceived as strangers with abstract and general categories. But, arguing that our conception of modernity needs to be limited, the article suggests that modern institutions always rely on non-modern ways of life: the rule of law depends on ideas about individual honour; bureaucracy; on family connections and affective expressions of loyalty; and rational interests that are coordinated by archaic idioms of political leadership. The peculiarity of the history of modernity in imperial India was marked not by the limited or partial imposition of modern practices, but by the British regime's reluctance to accept the legitimacy of the very non-modern forms of power it relied on. Tracing this process in the Godavari Delta, the article shows how a regime with limited local resources asserted the monopolistic authority of its structures of government, but in doing so, corroded its own capacity to exercise power. Local institutions which had coordinated local productive resources were undermined, but alternative forms of local leadership were unable to emerge. The consequence was famine in the 1830s, and in the 1840s an effort to refound the imperial regime by imposing British power on the region's natural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]