Patrons, Clients, and Empire: Chieftaincy and Over-rule in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific

Patrons, Clients, and Empire

Patrons, Clients, and Empire Chieftaincy and Over-rule in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific

COLIN NEWBURY

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Colin Newbury 2003 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0-19-925781-7 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset in Sabon by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by T.J. International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall

To the Memory of John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson 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 during colonial rule in the central and eastern Pacific. The theme of traditional leadership under imperial rule continued to command my interest during several years of teaching and research in Nigeria, at a period when assumptions about ‘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 graduate teaching seminars at Oxford in the 1970s and 1980s, where students and colleagues critically examined historical sources and methods. As one of those colleagues later wrote, we absorbed from widely different case studies in time and place a ‘concept of continuity’ as ‘the peculiar stamp of imperial history at Oxford’. That sense of continuity in the case of indigenous leadership and hierarchy has, 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, though critique of ‘collaboration’ and other euphemisms for foreign over-rule certainly did. In retrospect, I think we circled around, rather than confronting, the broad topic of ethnological ‘encounters’, suspicious, as historians always are, of ready-made theories from the Social Sciences. In those days the idea of imperial 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 point in detail.) Self-government, however, changed the historiographical perspective for later successor states, as it had earlier for the political history of the settler colonies. But the problem of accounting for political structures in other territories under imperial over-rule in terms that were not simplistic assumptions about the transformation or preservation of chieftaincy through imported administrative skills in the face of alternative political elites still remains. Fortunately for historians the insights of other disciplines in the postimperial study of successor regimes have increased. The weight of evidence in favour of continuities in civil and military government suggests rule through ‘chiefs’, ‘big men’, and patrimonial presidents has taken on new forms within the parties and bureaucracies of post-colonial states. And if that is so, what was the political role of the administrative ‘guardians’ in the imperial phase— enlightened despots, judicious referees, or active participants in the ebb and

viii

Preface and Acknowledgements

flow of local power struggles for status, authority, and resources? Answers attempted since the 1960s tend to concentrate on the origins, character, and intentions of the over-rulers. A different approach from the viewpoint of the ruled regards alien rulers as essentially transient obstacles to national independence. 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 drawn from different political cultures to see whether there were common features to the interaction of indigenous and alien leaders. An exploration of cases has to be selective and cover both the historiography and the narrative of imperial administration. This is especially so if the study is to be useful in teaching courses and for the general reader. Consequently, I have drawn heavily on area specialists as well as the work of anthropologists and political scientists in fields other than my own. They are not responsible, of course, for the argument or the conclusions of this study, or the use I have made of a patron–client model to explain relationships within imperial hierarchies. There are three reasons for this choice of method. One is that clientage is rooted in the segmentary politics typical of many precolonial societies and continued within the structure of European over-rule. Secondly, and especially for eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century administrators 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 and exercise power. The study, therefore, has some relevance to our judgement on imperial administration for failure or success in ‘preparing’ for the exigencies and responsibilities of devolved government within political cultures that could be influenced but not entirely restructured, within the confines of unitary or federal states. Accordingly, my debts to academic predecessors and contemporary scholars and friends cover several continents and many libraries. I owe much at the outset to the late Professor Richard Gilson and Professor J. D. Freeman at the Australian 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 societies of the political continuities in nineteenth-century indigenous leadership at different levels and in contemporary government. Similarly, I learned a great deal from the late Professor K. O. Diké, as Director of the Nigerian Record Office at Ibadan, and from Professor Saburi O. Biobaku as head of the Yoruba Historical Research Project. Both, too, in their own ways were well versed 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

Preface and Acknowledgements ix and organization, and for a case study of politics and administration in a Nigerian emirate that remains a model of its kind. The dedication of this study to two outstanding colleagues and friends does no more than epitomize a long-standing gratitude to historians who have grappled with similar explanatory problems. That respect extends to include Frederick Madden and David Fieldhouse, whose edited collections of documents I have systematically 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, by Peter Carstens, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Toronto, and by John Flint, Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University. I owe a special debt to Professor Jerry H. Bentley, University of Hawai‘i, Editor of the Journal of World History, who published an earlier version of some of the themes and cases in this book. Similarly, Dale B. Robertson and Sharlene Rohter as editors of Pacific Studies accepted a pilot study of patronage in the Hawaiian Kingdom which has been drawn on here. At the University of Hawai‘i, too, Dr Chieko Tachihata and Joan Hori gave access to the Hawaiian Collection of the Thomas Hale Hamilton Library and Professor David Hanlon made available research facilities within the Department of History. In New Zealand the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies Christchurch under the direction of Dr Ueantabo Neemia-Mackenzie allowed me to take up a Visiting Scholarship at Christchurch in 1999 to revise the Pacific section of this book. I am especially grateful for the support of the Centre’s Administrative Assistant, Kate Scott, and for the opportunity to discuss that research with 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 his knowledge of past and current Pacific History. As ever, Oxford University Press has provided firm guidance and an enlightened and sympathetic awareness of the problems of textual presentation. I am grateful to Ruth Parr, Commissioning Editor, History, and to Anne Gelling, Kay Rogers, Dr Lynn Childress, 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

Contents List of Figures and Table

xiii

List of Maps

xiv

List of Abbreviations

xv

Introduction

1 pa rt i. indian states

1. Trade and Dependency

19

2. Reversal of Status

27

3. Clients and Brokers

47

4. Rulers and Raj

56 pa rt i i. 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

pa rt i v. maritime south-east asia 10.

Malaya

149

xii

Contents pa rt v. pacific islands

11. Hawai‘i

183

12. Fiji

216

13.

Tonga

240

Conclusion

256

List of Sources Used

285

Index

307

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 John Hadley d’Oyly and Nawab Mubarak-ud-Daula at the Murshidabad Darbar from the Oriental and India Office Collection, Add. Or. 3205, is gratefully acknowledged. Map 7 has been adapted with the permission of the Department of Publications, University of Malaya. Other Maps have been adapted with the permission of Oxford University Press 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 BLO CEHI CHA CHBE CHI CHSA CO CP CSSH FO HJH HSA JAH JAS JCAS JCCP JEH JHSN JICH JLAO JMH JPH JPS JRAI JSAS JSO JWH MAS NCHI NZJH OHBE PEB PHR PS RHL WHQ

African Studies Review Bodleian Library, Oxford The Cambridge Economic History of India The Cambridge History of Africa The Cambridge History of the British Empire The Cambridge History of India The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia Colonial Office Contemporary Pacific Comparative Studies in Society and History Foreign Office Hawaiian Journal of History Hawai‘i State Archives Journal of African History Journal of Asian Studies Journal of Contemporary African Studies Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics Journal of Economic History Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History Journal of Local Administration Overseas Journal of Modern History Journal of Pacific History Journal of the Polynesian Society Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Journal of Southern African Studies Journal de la Société des Océanistes Journal of World History Modern Asian Studies The New Cambridge History of India New Zealand Journal of History The Oxford History of the British Empire Pacific Economic Bulletin Pacific Historical Review Pacific Studies Rhodes House Library, Oxford Western Historical Quarterly

Introduction There will . . . be a Nabob with an Allowance suitable to his Dignity and the territorial Jurisdiction will still be in the Chiefs of the Country, acting under him, and the Presidency in conjunction; though the Revenues will belong 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 government of their new conquests in Bengal could be carried out cheaply and effectively through a stipended Indian ruler, his claim was as old as empire, though not as straightforward as he made it sound. In the absence of sustained coercion, the relationship between imperial powers and subordinate societies has always been a rich field for compromises in human interaction. In the long term a degree of cooperation in the interests of social survival makes subordination bearable, if not agreeable. There might be established, as the British in India found, a mutual dependency between officials and local service gentry. As Clive indicated, divided jurisdiction over British subjects and subjects of the prince in the Bengal example was a usual and necessary concession to local law and custom. Access to resources for the paramount power was explicit. Nevertheless, as the British were to find, there were ambiguities in subordinate cooperation between the first and second orders in the imperial hierarchy—between alien over-rulers and a subordinate elite responsible for internal administration. Prescribing a new order did not entirely remove active opposition or sullen tolerance existing between a subject nobility with its own traditions of authority and loyalty and incoming military or civilian officials with their own preconceptions of how indigenous society was run. Consequently, the historiography of imperial expansion, occupation, and withdrawal contains numerous euphemisms to disguise gaps in cultural understanding and to encapsulate the strategies of survival within one culture purposefully influenced by another—at arm’s length, rather than by assimilation. The terminology of subordination includes ‘paramountcy’, ‘protection’, ‘subsidiary alliance’, ‘indirect rule’, ‘collaboration’, drawn mainly from British experience in India and Africa. In sociological terms the voluntary or 1 Cited in Frederick Madden, ed., with David Fieldhouse, Select Documents on the Constitutional History of the British Empire and Commonwealth, iii. Imperial Reconstruction 1763–1840: The Evolution of Alternative Systems of Colonial Government (Westport, 1987), 156.

2 Introduction involuntary hierarchy may also be expressed as a patron and client relationship with its roots in the classical clientelae established by Roman rule over the Hellenes and in North Africa, on the model of domestic bargains arranged between a protective superior and a steward for benefits in kind.2 At all levels the long history of clientage or ‘clientelism’ between states, individuals, and corporate groups has a large literature of its own.3 Within a wide variety of cultural contexts, political scientists and sociologists have identified forms of dependency in labour and land use, wage employment and protection, debt servicing, ranging through ‘tenurial systems in Egypt, Thailand, Cyrenaica; the politics of rotten boroughs in India; disbursement of loans and scholarships in Colombia, debt-peonage in Bolivia; city hall contracts for kickbacks immigrant votes for food and jobs in the United States’.4 The common features are held to be differences in socio-economic status between dependants and their patrons, favoured by a compliant and patron-dominated system of local or national government.5 Imperial historiography covers much more than the semantics of administrative and socio-economic ‘systems’, but there is common ground between those examining dependency and hierarchy at local levels and those studying the larger hierarchy of imperial and territorial dependencies. Interaction and discourse between rulers and ruled, it is argued here, have been fundamentally concerned with the politics of status rivalries, competition for office, and access to resources, rather than mere blueprints for orderly conduct in a colonial territory. For this reason, perhaps, there was little meeting of minds in the first half of the twentieth century between those specializing in the administrative operation of empire with emphasis on the views of metropolitan officials and officials in the field and those whose main interest lay in the dynamics of political and social change in colonial societies. That gap began to close after the Second World War, when sociologists and political scientists followed the lead of anthropologists into the politics and administration of Asian, African, and Pacific societies, as imperial rule came to an end.6 The initial divide between historians and other social scientists was one of source materials and methodology, rather than any intrinsic difference in the need to explain the ways in which imperial hierarchies functioned and their subordi2

E. Badian, Foreign Clientelae (Oxford, 1958), 117, 125, 159. 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 ‘Bureaucracy’; Christopher Clapham, ed., Private Patronage and Public Power: Political Clientelism in the Modern State (London, 1983). 6 For the background to this development, S. N. Eisenstadt and Louis Roniger, ‘Patron–Client Relations as a Model of Structuring Social Exchange’, CSSH 22 (1980), 44–77. 3

Introduction 3 nate rulers survived, or not, into the period of decolonized administration by new elites. Anthropologists (sometimes in the service of imperial rulers) had, moreover, supplied a rich collection of case materials on state-like structures incorporated into European dominion in the wake of an earlier band of scholar-administrators. Much of that material was discrete, unique to particular social and political systems and, with few exceptions, little concerned with the interaction of imperial rule and subordinate chieftainship.7 It supplied no answers to the question that occupied imperial historians, namely, how was it that so few could rule so many without general revolt for so long. To which two answers were suggested by historians themselves. One relied on the notion of degrees of control in the imperial context with the implicit subtext of recourse to force by the imperial state, if required. The text was more appropriate to British India, where the Raj was backed by considerable coercive power, than to the armed police and small battalions of the protectorates and colonies of Africa, Malaysia, the Pacific, where military power was in short supply after initial periods of conquest and occupation.8 The idea of a gradation of applied authority still has its advocates in the early and impressive typology of the modes of intervention to be found in cases of ‘indirect rule’ within the British Empire, explored by D. A. Low, harking back to the degrees of supervision exercised by political officers in the princely states under the aegis of ‘paramountcy’.9 In the history of a settler society the technique has been kept alive by another historian seeking to make sense of myths and realities of imperial incorporation in early New Zealand by resorting to the notion of a ‘spectrum of empire’ passing through stages of ‘false’, ‘loose’, and ‘tight’ controls applied by the Pakeha state to its Maori subjects.10 The image moves from the mailed fist to the velvet glove. The initiative for finding the correct application lay with the imperial over-ruler. But the typology of measured control is unhelpful in the broader imperial context which requires an explanation why intervention was necessary in the first place and an account of the political changes in the status of subject leaders that flowed from it. A second approach to the exercise of imperial power was closer to ‘clientage’ 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 to the End of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1996), 249.

4 Introduction commercial, missionary, military, and administrative—‘traditional’ leadership, followed by an educated and emergent elite leadership, acted in symbiosis 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 was precedent for this approach in examples of ‘colonial compacts’ within the older empire of the ‘Ancient’ West Indies, where planters endured commercial subordination for protection, or in the ‘family compacts’ arranged by Nova Scotian and New Brunswick oligarchs with patron governors.11 One innovative historian of Canadian settlement fastened on tenancies granted to the Loyalists of Ontario as the basis of a political patronage system that evolved from essentially personal bonds into political networks by the period of Confederation.12 There were examples, too, of patronage by preferment in recruitment by ‘private recommendation’ within the nascent civil service of New South Wales, showing that a widespread practice of social advancement in the Old World was flourishing in the New.13 That was one type of empire based on kinship and fealty, derived from the pattern of settlement already in process before the early nineteenth century and leading to a devolving dependency in Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. But there were other forms of political and economic dependency 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, captured territories, and remnant slave colonies from the early nineteenth century. New possessions acquired in the course of external wars were managed through ‘forms of benevolent tutelage’ as Crown colonies.14 Within these cases 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 11 Madden, ed., Select Documents, iii. 271, 274, 353, 367; and iv. The Dependent Empire and Ireland 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 New South 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 Latin America: Sources of ‘The System’ in the Fifteenth Century Writings of the Infante D. Pedro of Portugal (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 Western Africa as a feature of humanitarianism, Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison, 1964).

Introduction 5 On the borders of British influence, it was a short step from trade agreements to favouring one ruler or another in succession disputes and war.16 To encompass all these examples and periods the boldest model attempted by historians has been one of ‘collaboration’ between elites and imperial rulers, held to apply to both European settler societies in their formative stages and to the indigenous hierarchies of tropical territories.17 Never developed with much precision or detail, the model did not explore very far the benefits 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 these reasons, ‘collaboration’ was seized on as a useful shorthand for surveys of imperial methods, especially in Africa; and it complemented a literature which emphasized the elements of ‘resistance’ in the colonial period.18 It still has currency in summaries of European imperial government, along with the stereotypes of ‘Direct’ and ‘Indirect Rule’.19 Such labels did not formulate detailed answers to puzzles about the strength and weakness of imperial rule or about the political gains or losses for the protagonists. As one critic noted, historians failed to make use of parallel advances in social science methodology: ‘for what to them was collaboration, anthropologists and political scientists were already discussing as clientelism, including the imperial period.’20 While this was not completely accurate (historians of Central and East Africa did draw on other disciplines dealing with clientage in the inter-lacustrine kingdoms), much of the anthropological contribution laid bare a central theme of government in patrimonial states, where offices and appointments flowed from the authority of a ruler or rested on hereditary titles. There were, and still are, qualifications to be made about this theme which owed much to Max Weber’s original distinction between ‘traditional’ appointments made through kinship and 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 a Theory of Collaboration’, in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe, eds., Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, (London, 1972), 117–42; ‘European Imperialism and Indigenous Reactions in British West 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 British Expansion, 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’, JAH 9 (1968), 437–54; and for an evaluation and critique, Wm. Roger Louis, Imperialism: The Robinson 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’, in CHSA, 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.

6 Introduction ‘bureaucratic’ offices held by non-kin from outside patrimonial sources on the basis of loyalty to the ruler.21 And it has to be said that Weber himself had little, 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 of outsiders ‘raised from the dust’ is less sharp.22 This would agree, too, with what we know of the formation of centralized states in the Hawaiian islands, Tonga, and Fiji, where indigenous and foreign clients were incorporated into the structure of lineage-dominated governments. These examples and others in India’s princely states and the Malay states demonstrated that the working relationship between a ruler, or patron, and his officials, or clients, was predicated on differences in status and on reciprocal access to resources, not simply on degrees of affinity. The study of hierarchies pointed up, too, the central problem of succession to paramountcy from within a variety of descent groups, leading to factionalism, a tendency to make offices hereditary; and it acknowledged the importance of achievement and support from military and civil clients in conditions of succession rivalry.23 Important, too, has been the perception that such ‘elements of precolonial polity . . . had an impact on the development of elite engagement after 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 reconciliation between the study of kinship systems as forms of social organization and a need to explain the formation of state-like structures in which leadership by ascription was one factor among others in political organization. One anthropologist, M. G. Smith, stood outside the debate over ‘stateless’ societies and state formation by arguing that ‘in any political system policies are made through a process of competition between segments of the society and that decisions are carried out through a hierarchy of administrative roles. 21 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, trans. A. M. Henderson and 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 African Chiefs (London, 1960); M. G. Smith, Government in Zazzau: A Study of Government in the Hausa Chiefdom of Zaria in Northern Nigeria from 1800 to 1950 (London, 1960); but for a more 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’, JPH 14 (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.

Introduction 7 Thus all political systems have their segmentary and hierarchical aspects and these concepts cannot be exclusively used for stateless societies and states respectively.’25 The great value of Smith’s incisive and comprehensive article, particularly for historians, lay in its emphasis on the dynamics of competition within and between societies based on lineages of persons claiming genealogical relations by descent. Lineage groups segment over time from a common core and exhibit both internal cohesion and external opposition to other groups as territorial units. This cohesion has been a mark of ranked lineages in segmentary states typical of the African, Asian, and Pacific examples considered below; and it is fundamental to the patterns of leadership that have emerged in hereditary succession, oligarchic councils of nobles, and ancillary offices at the centre and periphery of state authority.26 On the whole the model of segmentary politics has proved durable, useful, consistent with the social structures and economic behaviour of political hierarchies, and easily accommodated into 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 on the ways in which an incoming (alien) administration had to cope with both the politics of lineage competition as well as the administration and authority of the existing chiefly hierarchy. One is that attempts to limit leadership in a chiefdom to defined administrative offices (in the manner of Weber’s ‘bureaucratic’ offices by role prescription) as ‘native authorities’ were doomed to run into the problem of active participation by alien administrators in favour of one political faction or another, one office-holder or his rivals. The same observation also applies to missionary endeavours, as rival sects, or sometimes within the same sect, to enlist and convert a leading political figure as patron of a new religion. The more obvious example of merchant-traders cultivating indigenous merchants and brokers for exclusive advantage is well known. The connection between political and administrative action could not be avoided, though it might be formally denied. Over-rulers and lesser agencies were part of the political dynamic of segmented states. Secondly, in complex hierarchies such as the emirates of Northern Nigeria, the Indian princely states, 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, also applied to incoming Europeans. 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.

8 Introduction The ramifications of this departure from kin recruitment need not be followed here.28 The importance of clientage in patrimonial regimes was particularly emphasized, however, in the early 1960s, by Smith in the context of his study of one of the Hausa-Fulani emirates and defined as ‘an exclusive relation of mutual benefit which holds between two persons defined as socially and politically unequal, and which stresses their solidarity’.29 In this way the fundamental connotation of patron–client relations as a face-to-face (dyadic) relationship for beneficial exchange of resources located one of the mainsprings of political behaviour in many indigenous hierarchies. Political clientage was not merely an optional extra added to the institutional structure of a segmentary state, but a way of obviating kin rivalries by creating loyal followers.30 Nor does it help in understanding Asian or African statewide government to pursue an analogy with European feudalism, rejected fairly decisively (for African cases) some time ago.31 The main point is that in a wide variety of chiefdoms the political elite recruited outside immediate kin (sometimes by adoption and marriage) from among other lineage heads and from slaves, favourites, ritual, and craft experts. Such advancement might well be temporary without permanent claims to offices or land. More usually, within closed hierarchies protected by practices of endogamy, land allocation or other rewards in status recognition were features of the reciprocity that underlay 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 political and administrative relationship between the Fulani and British hierarchies from about 1900, when they began to operate as a ‘contraposition of coordinate units’, meaning a protectorate government of aliens and indigenes within a ranked system.33 A further consideration arising from this dynamic model of lineage segmentation and state formation (though it was not developed by Smith) is that there is a fair consensus that ritual and secular leadership in chiefly hierarchies has rarely been a product of simple rules of succession for very long. In competition for office both suitability by descent and 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 28 They are discussed in passing in Balandier, Political Anthropology, 60–3; and more extensively in Lemarchand, ‘Political Clientelism’, 103–8. 29 30 Smith, Government in Zazzau, 8. Cf. Balandier, Political Anthropology, 95. 31 Ibid. 95–7. 32 Lloyd, ‘The Political Structure of African Kingdoms’, 91–2; Balandier, Political Anthropology, 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 detailed survey of similar conflict in a Pacific segmentary state, Douglas L. Oliver, Ancient Tahitian Society, 3 vols. (Honolulu, 1974), i. 1024–48.

Introduction 9 There were, moreover, wider applications of the patron–client model taken up 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 African and other successor states to account for the pattern of civil and military leadership in command of state resources in conditions of weak democratic and legal institutions in the post-colonial period.36 Such applications stressed continuities between pre- and post-colonial political structures which the period of foreign administration had disguised rather than eradicated. For political scientists like René Lemarchand contemporary clientelism derived from pre-European political hierarchy as an ‘exchange relationship between actors commanding different resources’ and operated as part of redistributive functions within African systems of kingship. Such resources extended beyond cattle and slaves to public office and were used to defuse opposition to paramount chiefs through manipulation of competing clients. Lemarchand also made the important point that patron–client relations can be reversed: ‘Resources may gravitate into the hands of his clients to such an extent as to make the royal patron a captive of his subordinates.’37 Others who have deployed the concept have emphasized the importance of competition and personal achievement, as against ascriptive status, even in societies which have nominal rules of succession.38 This distinction has its parallels, too, in more recent analysis of ‘chieftainship’ in Pacific societies considered below.39 Competitive and factional elements in colonial urban society have also been discerned in early East India Company relations with Indian merchants and their client artisans in Madras, where, it is argued, patrimonial obligations to arbitrate, bestow ‘honours’, and settle disputes were transferred 35 S. N. Eisenstadt and L. Roniger, eds., Patrons, Clients and Friends: Interpersonal Relations and the Structure of Trust in Society (Cambridge, 1984); Robert Kaufman, ‘The Patron–Client Concept 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., LocalLevel Politics: Social and Cultural Perspectives (London, 1969), 300–2; Jean François Medard, ‘The Under-developed State in Tropical Africa: Political Clientelism or Neo-Patrimonialism?’, in Clapham, 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 Modernization 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 Studies Seminar, African Studies Institute (Johannesburg, 1977), 280–323. 39 Douglas, ‘Rank, Power, Authority’, 1–27; G. M. White and Lamont Lindstrom, eds., Chiefs Today: Traditional Pacific Leadership and the Postcolonial State (Stanford, Calif., 1997); Price, Kingship, 14–18.

10 Introduction from local rajas to reluctant company officials.40 Thus, like their counterparts in the early nineteenth century in Niger Delta markets or at the Gold Coast forts foreign entrepreneurs and judicial assessors found themselves intervening 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 informal protectorate within neighbouring Akan states as clients, rather than imperial subjects.41 For historians the utility of the patron–client model may have been obscured, however, by the post-colonial location of many of the case studies taken up and expanded by political scientists in the 1960s with little in-depth treatment of the pre-colonial and colonial phase. In their effort to classify post-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 the manner of chiefs, or whether these have simply been replaced by political ‘big men’ with chiefly and dynastic aspirations. For this reason, perhaps, there have been serious conceptual differences between ‘structuralist’ anthropologists 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, a high 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 communication between disciplines can be confronted, however, by exploration of historical cases from a variety of imperial territories and societies. For reasons of imperial chronology and because of advances made in interpreting the 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 need to 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 40 Niels Brimnes, Constructing the Colonial Encounter: Right and Left Hand Castes in Early Colonial South India (Richmond, 1999), 1–13, 68, 69. 41 Formalized by the ‘Bond’ of 1844 between the Governor of Cape Coast and Fanti chiefs agreeing to a measure of criminal jurisdiction. See David Kimble, A Political History of Ghana 1850–1928 (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.

Introduction 11 and Indian—towards a greater synthesis with less on justification and administrative method and more on the exercise of power at lower levels.44 Older ideas of ‘oriental despotism’ were revised in an exploration of patrimonialism and clientage in the structures of successor states to the Mughal Empire. In particular, the growth of a ‘service gentry’ during this decentralization through the mechanisms of military support, revenue collection, and the gradual reversal of status in the relationship between autonomous states such as Bengal and Awadh and the East India Company suggested a different explanation for the transformation of Company raj into British raj. There is still a big gap in knowledge of the internal workings of such states, though important inroads have been made by Ian Copland who was among the first to describe in some detail the co-option of a patrimonial system in western India.45 More recent research, too, confirms the important role of the court darbar (formal council) as an institution of princely government and a ceremonial occasion for defining status among royal kin and other officials. For it was into this institution that British political officers were incorporated and maintained it to influence rulers and chiefs.46 It is also clear, too, that forms of loyalty in the Indian army in post-Mutiny reconstruction mattered more than the rules and regulations of the Company’s army.47 At the period of maturity and decline in British power in India, moreover, one historian made a pioneering application of the patron–client model to the final phase of relations between the Raj and Indian princes that has not really been taken up by historians of the end of empire elsewhere.48 It was tempting, of course, to label much of the reversal of status between old 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 of princely states, balanced between autonomy and near annexation. Others have latched on to a term derived from British experience in Northern Nigeria (and owing nothing to Indian precedents) to provide a template for 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 Indian Politics 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); Richard B. Barnett, North India between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals and the British 1720–1801 (Los Angeles, 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).

12 Introduction ‘the entire structure of indirect rule India’.49 A better case may be made for the influence of Indian precedents on British administrative practices in Ceylon or the Malay states. But, in general, the argument of this study is that there was no overall policy or practice governing British relations with indigenous hierarchies, though there frequently was a typology of personal relations and bargains struck between paramounts and political officers, according to advantages sought by both sides. African (especially Northern Nigerian and Central African) practice owed more to a local political culture in which patron–client relations were an integral part of an administrative hierarchy than to any other imperial model. Indian historical studies strongly suggest, too, a phased chronology which is applicable to other regions in which a patron–client model makes sense of the historical material at each stage. First, it is abundantly clear that initial contact through maritime trade left the East India Company in a condition of dependency 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), partly through alliances and treaties. Secondly, reversal of this dependent status involved a dramatic shift in effective power, as the maritime company became an agency with a commercial and strategic stake in the internal affairs of northern and southern Indian states. Again, the fortunes of war were supplemented by diplomacy, access to resources, and a mix of administrative procedures that involved indigenous rulers and subordinate layers of client officials and commercial intermediaries. It has to be remembered, too, that this dramatic period of empire-building was also a product of internal competition for power within and between major Indian states that failed to combine against a commercial and military agency constructing a monopoly control piecemeal over a subcontinent. That phase merged, amidst resistance and compromise, into a third phase of consolidation and debate from 1857 to the imperial 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, the princely lineages preserved their internal status. But there were ambiguities in the status of princes and officers of the Raj, particularly in the numerous middle-ranking and smallest states. Would one style of government control impinge on the other and make minor princes and chiefs redundant? Either way, administrators and indigenous leaders performed what Gluckman once termed ‘inter-hierarchical roles’, subject to conflicting pressures from above 49 Michael H. Fisher, ‘Indirect Rule in the British Empire: The Foundation of the Residency System 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).

Introduction 13 and below, so that political bargaining was not excluded from an administrative relationship at the zenith of imperial rule.50 It was at this point, too (from the period of the First World War) that the brokerage functions of the viceroy and officials had to take into account the expanding constituency of party politicians at local council level—a point reached, sooner or later, at local and national levels in other dependencies. What were the implications of limited representative government for unelected state councils and their patrimonial rulers? Because of the possibilities for change in the roles of patrons and clients, the model does not assume a rigid hierarchy according to regulation and prescription; and it allows for competition between clients, on the one hand, and administrative patrons, backed by imperial power, on the other. It is assumed on the basis of historical examples that both sides have an interest in accessing the resources and revenue of the pre-colonial and colonial state. But no such mutuality of interest guarantees permanent political stability, an absence of human failure or administrative breakdown between rival factions within the hierarchy of government. Moreover, a period of cooperation with traditional elites could not prevent the emergence within a colonial system of a new political elite seeking other forms of patron support for their particular aims. This last point is of importance for the subsequent fate of indigenous hierarchies in the period of party formation and transfer of political power to the leaders of a decolonized state. Chronology differs in examples discussed below. But the main phases are European dependency followed by reversal of status between incoming 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 new states. The aftermath of colonial rule in Africa has been particularly fruitful in case analysis of patron–client relations. Older stereotypes of ‘charismatic’ leadership of nationalist movements gave way to a more incisive, if disillusioned, account of the use of state resources to hold together political factions, military displacement of civilians, and the onset of ‘prebendel politics’ through conversion of public offices into private assets.51 A few political 50 Max Gluckman, ‘Inter-Hierarchical Roles: Professional and Party Ethics in Tribal Areas in South 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-Saharan Africa (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; William Reno, Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone (Cambridge, 1995); Pearl T. Robinson, ‘Traditional Clientage and Political Change in a Hausa Community’, in Pearl T. Robinson and Elliot

14 Introduction scientists have been careful to trace the continuities of patronage politics from the colonial and pre-colonial past in Senegal, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and Burundi, and former High Commission territories in South Africa.52 We now have detailed and pioneering studies of the decline and survival of chieftaincy in Nigeria and Ghana, unmatched by comparable work in other states of Africa.53 In a different region of over-rule and decolonization in the Pacific the focus has been on change in the structure and function of ‘chieftainship’ and a critical review of the notion of ‘tradition’ as a basis for ascribed leadership in Fiji, Tonga, and elsewhere.54 One of the more perceptive studies of the political survival of indigenous rulers in Malaysia also summarizes reasons for 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, and participation in improved revenue for minimal expense.55 Most of those themes, though not all of the cases, will be developed below. There are questions about the explanatory value of the concept of clientage, however, which have not been completely resolved. In an imperial hierarchy not all governors or subordinate officials have acted as ‘patrons’ in the absence of subordinate social and political hierarchies. In some segmentary societies chiefs had to be invented, not co-opted; draconian codes of rules and regulations did not allow the emergence of administrative reciprocity. In one outpost of empire a resident commissioner thought it essential to remember ‘who were the prefects and who the fags’ and made few concessions to local leadership.56 In some colonial states it might be argued the function and Skinner, eds., Transformation and Resiliency in Africa (Washington, DC, 1983), 105–28; Amos Perlmutter and Valarie Plave Bennett, eds., The Political Influence of the Military: A Comparative 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 and Warren Weinstein, The Pattern of African Decolonization: A New Interpretation (Syracuse University, Program of Eastern African Studies, May 1973). 53 Sandra T. Barnes, Patrons and Power: Creating a Political Community in Metropolitan Lagos (Manchester, 1986); Olufemi Vaughan, ‘The Impact of Party Politics and Military Rule on the Traditional Chieftaincy in Western Nigeria, 1946–1988’, D. Phil. thesis (Oxford University, 1989); Richard Rathbone, Nkrumah and the Chiefs: The Politics of Chieftaincy in Ghana 1951–1960 (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 in Fiji (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 Government in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands’, Journal of Local Administration Overseas, 10 (1971), 280–93.

Introduction 15 status of chiefs were made more secure by imperial rule, while in others they became 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. The distinction between the judicial functions of administrators and the role of judges 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 emergent elite. An endeavour will be made to come to a conclusion on the basis of the limited evidence available at the end of the survey. Another doubt is about the place of coercion, which has worried some political scientists more than African 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 the Conclusion.58 One method of examining these two points basic to the conduct of administrative officials has been through prosopographical research into their social background, education, and careers, in order to assess the methods and quality 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 the top layer of the colonial hierarchy is examined in this way, without assessment of social mobility through the ranks of indigenous administrative services, where these existed. Lacking, too, is an account of European officials’ education through field experience with indigenous leaders, the influence of the ‘fags’ on the ‘prefects’ and the kind of dialogue taking place between them.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 preserving pre-colonial ‘practice’ in areas of government defended as essential to the status and authority of a chief.60 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 in the 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 Fijian lands 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.

16 Introduction It is hoped, therefore, that an extensive and comparative treatment of overrule and chieftaincy which exceeds the confines of rulers’ biographies will make 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 studies reassessment of the interaction of indigenous with imperial officials and other agents was already well under way in the 1960s.61 Some of that revision undoubtedly stemmed from academic sympathy with ‘nationalist’ perceptions of the immediate past as a transitory preface to a new (indigenous) political order. 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 could not be so easily explored from pre-independence sources. 61 James Davidson, ‘Problems of Pacific History’, JPH 1 (1966), 1–25; Toyin Falola, ‘West Africa’ in OHBE, v. 486–99.

Part I

Indian States

1 Trade and Dependency From their earliest merchant ventures in the seventeenth century, the English prospected the markets of the Indies as international competitors and dependants on the grace and favour of the Mughals, their provincial governors and local officials. William Hawkins who commanded the third voyage of 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-opted into temporary service. Rival Portuguese clients discouraged this imperial patronage, but the English company retaliated by using sea-power and respectful 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, the directors and their factors learned by experience that privileges were easier to secure than to enforce on provincial authorities who exercised their own controls over foreign merchants. In 1615 the embassy of Sir Thomas Roe from James I to Emperor Jahangir raised the level of client supplication through five years of patient diplomacy for further privileges in Gujarat but no general treaty covering concessions in northern India. Temporary cooperation with Dutch 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 in their settlements. As a further concession Portugal ceded Bombay to Charles II 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 from long-distance trade, but unable to penetrate Indian markets very far. The main advantage derived by the Company, its servants, and Indian merchants was exploitation of regional coastal trade. To this end Fort St George was built at Madras in 1641, as a concession from a minor Hindu ruler for a share of customs duties. Posts extended northward along the coast into Orissa, to the port of Hugli and the important market of Kasimbazar in the Ganges delta and inland along the Ganges to Patna. Company servants in private trade 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).

20 Indian States and sugar, as the public joint-stock venture met with financial difficulties and near-loss of monopoly to rival ventures after 1688. In terms of commercial strategy, Indian posts were worth much more than the relatively insignificant amount of trade passing through them in the seventeenth century. They gave access to a regional mercantile system with advanced techniques of credit, financial instruments, insurance, shipping, and brokerage. Footholds in India opened a way to trade with Persia through Kandahar 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 Persian Emperor demonstrated; and so was the possibility of armed conflict with rival clients. English attention, therefore, concentrated on tapping the markets of northern and western India in the upper Jumna and Ganges valleys and in Gujarat. Staple exports were indigo, cotton goods, saltpetre and pepper, raw and finished silk, in return for English broadcloth, tin and lead, and a variety of exotic and luxury items from Africa and Europe. Trade was balanced for the most part by importation of Spanish specie and bullion for Indian mints. Before the full potential of the region could be exploited, however, the status of the Company had to change in terms of official backing in England and commercial and fiscal advantages in India. There were internal monopolies to contend with, varying weights and measures, duties levied in towns and states, extortion by officials at ports. To reduce these costs, imperial edicts were some help, but constant cooperation with Indian brokers, bankers, and malleable officials was essential. To access local markets for manufactures and exportable staples local networks of principals and intermediaries operated through advances of imported goods and specie, a mix of bribery and trust. Low salaries encouraged factors and soldiers 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 between England and India and relaxed its control over trade in specified goods by its servants. At the same time the Royal Charter of 1661 renewed Company privileges and reinforced its authority to administer through governors and councils at the principal posts (Bombay and Fort St George), seize interlopers, wage war and make peace with non-European princes. Subsequent political battles to defend this status and see off rivals led to parliamentary confirmation of privileges in 1708 in return for a contribution towards national finances. During the period of relatively prosperous trade in the second half of the seventeenth century, company factors consolidated their base factories grouped round Surat, Bombay, Madras, and the Hugli as European enclaves. Bombay governors attracted Indian merchants and craftsmen and administered courts for English subjects, without need to ask the permission of a provincial ruler. But the port did become involved in Mughal and Maratha

Trade and Dependency

21

warfare. An unwise venture into military and naval operations by Governor John Child in 1688 ended in ignominious defeat by Mughal forces. Madras, too, structured its settlement into a municipality in 1688 and administered taxes and courts. There, however, the Council negotiated extension of factories with a Maratha chieftain and with the Mughal’s military official for the Coromandel coast. Such arrangements were insecure. Villages purchased to enlarge Madras boundaries were resumed by Mughal officials and had to be recovered later by imperial edict. Trade in the Ganges delta markets created new factories administered from Madras; but these, too, existed with the approval of the Emperor’s local officers in Bengal. Increasingly, too, company officers were drawn into factional disputes to the extent of favouring one side or another for the purposes of trade and bestowing ‘honours’ in the manner of local rulers.2 Commercial success, therefore, depended on constant bargaining for customs privileges from local officials and precautionary defence. Bengal factories were moved to the Ganges mouth, abandoning the Hugli in the face of a Mughal attack.3 There, Fort William was constructed on the site of Calcutta, which became the seat of a presidency over dependent factories in 1700, following the practice already adopted by Madras and Bombay. To safeguard these scattered enclaves the Company obtained a new imperial farman in 1717, securing improved rights to trade through the provincial governors of Hyderabad, Gujarat, and Bengal (including Bihar and Orissa). Duties at Surat and in Bengal were commuted into an annual sum; a few rented villages were added to Madras.4 The edict promised redress for stolen goods and delivery of debtors to factory chiefs as a form of commercial jurisdiction. Company coinage minted in Madras was allowed to circulate in Bengal. These prescriptive rules were, of course, concessions—a privilege accorded by a patron to foreign clients. In practice they simply afforded grounds 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’s fame as founder of a ‘conquest state’ that continued to expand until the end of the seventeenth century.5 There was much less reason for them to be impressed by the reign of the Emperor Farrukhsiyar who issued the farman of 1717. The empire was moving rapidly into financial and political decline. The reasons are much debated. Specifically, the ‘war state’ had reached the limit of expansion in northern India and was no longer able to control new and strong 2

Brimnes, Constructing the Colonial Encounter, chap. 4. 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 to 1740 (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. 3

22 Indian States states formed by Maratha chieftains in central India.6 The basis of patrimonial empire in the reign of Akbar—namely, an assertion of paramountcy over all religious hierarchies and revenue systems—could no longer be taken for granted. Much of its structure lingered on in the organization of successor states and in formal legitimization of official appointments. But the share of revenue obtained from agricultural production and other imposts was increasingly retained by warrior-landholders; and this squeeze on revenue available at the centre failed to meet the aspirations of nobles and the official class that maintained the empire. Rural production and taxation did not keep pace with the demands of the ‘war-state’ as mediated through oppressive officials holding fiefs and local zamindars caught between imperial demands and a reluctant peasantry.7 This argument is qualified by other evidence of more widespread commercial prosperity in the early eighteenth century and, perhaps, entrenchment of zamindars as a class of estate managers and estate owners less open to coercion from above.8 Whatever the balance of historical opinion about failure or inability to access resources, at least two factors in the Mughal patrimonial state had weakened: ‘These were the ties of emotion and interest that bound the nobility to the throne and those contractual ties buttressed by self-interest that linked the rural warrior aristocracies to the empire.’9 Weakness in military terms at the frontiers compounded loss of confidence in the usefulness of these patrimonial bonds. A series of succession wars, 1707 to 1720, destroyed faith in the efficacy of central authority. The ‘huge system of household government’ began to fail its clients.10 The shadow of imperial forms and protocols remained with the imperial court, while the substance of power passed to a set of tributary kingdoms composed of hierarchies of Muslim and Hindu overlords and lesser land managers. Between the Persian invasion of 1739 that exposed the weakness of the Mughals in the north and the defeat of Maratha chieftains by Afghan invaders in 1761, there was a power vacuum in central India.11 Successors included Hindu Rajputs and military Brahmins with strong clan organizations; Marathas, Sikhs, and Jats to the west of the upper Ganges who defied Mughal revenue collection; Muslim states created by Afghans and Rohilla mercenaries; and, not least, Muslim provinces taking advantage of Mughal weakness—Bengal, Awadh, Hyderabad—who followed a patrimonial model ‘attaching support by the manipulation of kinship ties, by direct patronage and favour of personal dependants and eunuchs, or by cash grants and pensions’.12 6

John F. Richards, NCHI, i/5. The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, 1993), 283. Ibid. 291; Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (London, 1963). Raychaudhuri and Habib, eds., CEHI, i. 244–9; John R. McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal (Cambridge, 1993). 9 10 Richards, The Mughal Empire, 292. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 10. 11 Ibid. 15; Bhattacharya, The East India Company, 213. 12 Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 26. 7

8

Trade and Dependency

23

Such was the variety of local powers foreign traders had to do business with from the early eighteenth century. If anything, their dependency increased when they tried to reinterpret and to abuse the reciprocal rules of patron– client relations. For, the Company and its factors had been incorporated into the practices of India’s regional trade by a century of experience. Freedom to trade inland meant finding reliable brokers who could negotiate with Indian bankers and tap into sources of production. Excessive advances to Indian merchants on behalf of the Company created liabilities that the Company could not always meet and that the broker might refuse.13 In practice, too, the promise of the 1717 farman to allow Madras rupees to pass in Bengal ran into determined opposition; and a further promise to allow the English use of the Murshidabad mint in Bengal was firmly ruled out by the Indian banking house which had a monopoly in coining money and control of exchange rates. Company reliance on an extensive service gentry of bankers and brokers (‘banians’), moreover, created similar risks for unofficial private trade 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 the province of Bengal. The nawab/viziers and officials who rose to authority in Bengal in the early eighteenth century and founded their own dynasty from the governorship of Murshid Kuli Khan (1717–27), encouraged foreign trade, but saw plainly that the abuse of imperial licences by foreigners deprived the state of revenue. This loss contrasted with the rapid growth of commerce at Calcutta and its factories where, by 1756, the annual value of total trade amounted to over £1 million.14 As this trade was seasonal, shipping found employment in cabotage, financed by Europeans and by Indians; and for these ventures, Company passports used by Company servants were instruments for avoiding duties. Indeed, they could be bought and sold, loaned to surrogate traders, and they were an additional means of hiring brokers to tap into inland sources of manufactures and staples, in return for trading duty-free on their own account. Abuse of dastaks invited interference by Bengal officials; and such practices did nothing for the long-argued case for allowing Madras rupees to circulate at face value in Bengal, instead of at a discount. One historian has seen in this potential conflict arising from threats to Indian merchants and to local 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 13

Bhattacharya, The East India Company, 38–9. 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. Eastern India 1740–1828 (Cambridge, 1987). 15 Raychaudhuri, ‘The State and the Economy’, 192. 14

24 Indian States mid-century. An increase in the numbers of foreign rivals and the local consequences of European wars made the coastal enclaves more difficult to defend. The effects of European conflicts on Indian interests were felt mainly in the Carnatic where French were set against English for a decade after 1744 and, again, from 1756 to 1763. During that period much turned on the personal policies of Joseph-François Dupleix, as Governor of Pondicherry, and Robert Clive, a Company soldier, contending, respectively, for rival influence with the Mughal subadar or governor of the Deccan and for promotion of the Nawab of the Carnatic who aimed at territorial expansion and hereditary rule free of Mughal influence. Both territorial princes, nizam and nawab, moreover, were under threat from the Marathas to the North who succeeded in extracting tribute, but did not establish a permanent presence. Dupleix captured 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 European treaty. 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 by expanding French territory around Pondicherry and had established, by 1751, a useful influence over the subadar, Salabat Jang, giving the French entry into the Deccan through Hyderabad in central India. Clive’s reply was to 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 was strengthened by the diplomatic skills of Dupleix’s lieutenant, Charles Bussy. Bussy defended the nizam’s state against the Marathas, made peace with their paramount peshwa in 1752, and extracted sufficient revenue to maintain his army. Absorbed with the idea that alliances with strong principalities in central India would help their struggle with the Company on the coast, Bussy and Dupleix intended to manage the region ‘according to the Asiatic manner’,16 until Bussy was recalled to the Carnatic and defeated in 1760. The political lessons of this experience in the hinterland of Madras were not 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 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–India House Correspondence, i. (1748–1756), ed. K. K. Datta (Delhi, 1958), p. xvi. Apart from the standard work by S. P. Sen, The French in India 1763–1816 (Calcutta, 1958), other works have revised in detail commercial, military, and diplomatic interaction in Jean-Marie Lafont, Indika Essays in Indo-French Relations 1630–1976 (New Delhi, 2000), esp. chaps. 3, 7; K. S. Mathew

Trade and Dependency

25

The price of such influence was high in military manpower and diversion of trading revenue. By 1751, the Company had increased its military establishment to five companies of infantry and one of artillery; the government sent a squadron of six vessels and a regiment of infantry, on condition that the Company paid for stores for all land forces. At the same time, war reduced profits on trade; dividends on Company stock fell from 8 to 6 per cent in 1750. The Calcutta Presidency was reprimanded for failure to separate civil from military accounts, for ‘faulty and defective’ records of expenditure, and was urged to ‘improve the Revenues of the Presidency . . . without oppression’.18 Consignments of treasure from Madras in 1755 did little to ease the burden on Calcutta, ‘being scarce . . . sufficient for the investments of our [production centres]’.19 As usual, the Calcutta Council and private traders resorted to borrowing 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 directors to end hand-to-mouth methods has also defeated historians. Although Bengal factories under Calcutta supported the largest returns on the import and export trade, there is no way of knowing before the 1760s just how civil and military costs were shared among the three presidencies. Returns from trade were diverted into private ventures, and, at the same time, were required to meet growing defence and administrative costs. Although private fortunes continued to be made as the evidence of remittances by Company servants shows in the period from 1731 to 1756, the risks were higher than ever and personal debt and bankruptcies greater.20 These factors need to be added to the concerns of the Bengal government and the evidence of a breakdown in the reciprocal relationship between patron-rulers and client traders leading 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-free to 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 trade customs-free.21 and S. Jeyaseela, eds., Indo-French Relations (Delhi, 1999), for Dupleix’s experience of trade privileges, banking, extortion by officials, and French dependency at the Murshidabad court in Bengal, 1731–9. 18 19 Fort William–India House Correspondence, i. 158–60. 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.

26 Indian States In a society where politics and patronage were indistinguishable, construction 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 no longer on the waning authority of imperial decrees, but on applying the mix of force and diplomacy Indian princes themselves deployed at regional levels.

2 Reversal of Status W hatever term is applied to extension of Company authority in Bengal—‘revolution’, ‘a world turned upside down’—when the sea power became a land power, there were still considerable continuities in social and political organization. Perhaps ‘inversion’, as used by an Indian historian, rather than a root-and-branch overthrow of the old order, fits the case best.1 From the perspective of Bengal history the discontinuity is more striking because of the eventual demise of indigenous rulers and officials in that state, though not the intermediary layers of notables and landowners. In wider perspective, however, the ‘bridgehead’ did not lead immediately to conquest of the subcontinent, but to a more selective search for clients and allies in the context of a costly war with France and internal warfare between Indian states. The search for subordinate clients from 1756 to 1760 arose from the need to protect the Calcutta base at Fort William. At the death of the Mughal governor of Bengal and Bihar in 1756 his nominated successor and greatnephew, Nawab Siraj-ud-daula, made war on rivals, seized the British factory at Kasimbazar, and marched on Calcutta. Explanations for this aggression suggest a pre-emptive strike against an imperial agency as well as deep resentment of the ways in which Company and private trade threatened Indian monopolies and diminished sources of state revenue. Unlike the coastal forts and 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 administered state. Calcutta was relieved soon enough in January 1757 by Clive as DeputyGovernor 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 seat of government (darbar), taking advantage of the nawab’s need for protection against Durani Afghans who had invaded northern India. He also conspired with Hindu nobles, merchants, and bankers threatened with dismissal from office 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 revolution. 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

M ap 1. India, late eighteenth century

Reversal of Status 29 an alliance, including all privileges for Company trade in Bengal and payment for British troops. The likely replacement for the nawab was sworn to the treaty by Watts in June 1757 and a march began on the capital. The nawab’s forces 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 and devastation of many imperial wars. Clive had some seven hundred and eighty European infantry and artillerymen plus two thousand sepoys, facing perhaps five thousand infantry and Pathan cavalry and a large number of field pieces directed by French artillerymen. In the end, losses were remarkably small for a battle won as much by intrigue, bluff, and luck as by disciplined tactics.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 for confirmation 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 Calcutta in 1758. The nawab, too, was protected against the future emperor, Shah Alam, who had fled Delhi to Awadh in 1759 and had designs on Bihar and Bengal territory. In return for this protection, Clive was awarded a jagir privilege for personal revenues from a fief. Above all, in the manner of Indian military conquerors, the Company took a massive compensation and tribute equivalent to £1,750,000. At the same time a faction of the Calcutta Council hostile to Mir Jafar plotted with his named successor, Mir Kasim, to make him deputy subadar in return for eventual cession of three districts (Burdwan, Midnapur, Chittagong) and their revenues. Mir Jafar was forced out in 1760 and retired to Calcutta on an allowance, to be restored as convenient, following defeat in 1764 at Buxar in Awadh of a coalition of Mir Kasim, the Nawab of Awadh, and the forces of Shah Alam. Arguably a more important battle than Plassey, Buxar set the stage for a limited military penetration of the upper Ganges and changed the regional power balance by improving the Company’s access to revenue. Moreover, Clive by appointment as President and Governor of Bengal in 1764 was in a stronger position to command civil and military factions in the Calcutta Council 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 return for an indemnity and an alliance by treaty. A further treaty with the Nawab of Bengal reinforced supervision through a resident, set limits to his armed forces, extracted further compensation for English losses, favoured Company monopoly of the salt trade and continued the established practice 2

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

30 Indian States of assigning revenue for British military posts. At his death, his son, Najm-uddaula, was installed in 1765, along with his chief minister appointed as a Company client. Thus, Clive on his return to the governorship of Bengal found the nominal headship of the province occupied by a figurehead and the way open for influence in Awadh through restoration of its nawab. The Awadh town and district of Allahabad he regally bestowed on the emperor for his use. More important, he demanded and got from Emperor Shah Alam administration of the dewani financial administration of Bengal, implying, too, control of diplomatic relations with foreign powers. The Company, therefore, won territory and exercised influence by commerce and by a mixture of Indian and British methods of organization yielding access to resources.3 Apart from Calcutta and the other presidencies acquired 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 in 1757 were held as a zamindari title by Clive (a privilege he managed to retain until 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—disguised as a Mughal concession. Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa provinces were now controlled through the mechanism of financial administration, in return for twenty-six lakhs of rupees and thirty-two lakhs to the Bengal nawab (or about £580,000 from a revenue estimated at just over £4 million).4 In this way Calcutta became paymaster for the other two presidencies (see Fig. 1). In addition, the Home government took a share from duties on India goods and re-exports and an annual ‘rent’ of £400,000 from the Company to the Crown, 1765–73. The primary income of the Company remained cash for bills or bonds sold in India to meet the cost of war materials and expanding administration.5 Imports of bullion continued, because of the long-standing trade imbalance on visible goods and invisible services and remittances. On trade accounts, therefore, the Company was technically bankrupt because of the large amount taken by the state and because the Company used land revenue to fund commodity exports. This system of administrative subsidy for commercial transactions (‘investment’) continued till 1813 to meet the requirements of shipowners and shareholders and ‘home’ debts arising mainly 3

McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal; Amales Tripathi, Trade and Finance in the Bengal Presidency 1793–1833 (Calcutta, 1979); Ranjit Sen, Economics of Revenue Maximization in Bengal, 1753–1793 (Calcutta, 1988); Sinha, Economic Annals of Bengal, 102; Banerjea, Indian Finance, 25–82. 4 W. K. Firminger, ed., The Fifth Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the 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 the Late Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), 305–6.

Bengal Revenue

3000

Expenditure 2500 2000 £'000 1500 1000 500 0 1765- 1766- 1767- 1768- 1769- 1770- 1771- 1772- 1773- 1774- 1775- 1776- 1777- 177866 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 Bombay Revenue

600

Expenditure

500 400 £'000 300 200 100 0

1765- 1766- 1767- 1768- 1769- 1770- 1771- 1772- 1773- 1774- 1775- 1776- 1777- 177879 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Madras 900

Revenue

800

Expenditure

700 600 500 £'000 400 300 200 100 0 1765- 1766- 1767- 1768- 1769- 1770- 1771- 1772- 1773- 1774- 1775- 1776- 1777- 177866 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Fig . 1 Presidency finances Sources: Banerjea, Indian Finance, 78–81; Sinha, Economic Annals of Bengal, 79–80; Sen, The Economics of Revenue Maximization in Bengal 1757–1793, chap. 1; Firminger, ed., The Fifth Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Affairs of the East India Company, 1812, ii, appendix. From the Company’s pargana lands and villages the Calcutta Council received some £100,000 to £120,000 annually, 1760–4. After award of the diwani, this form 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 totals unearthed at random estimated ‘revenue realized’ for Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa in 1765 at the equivalent of £4.2 million plus £60,000 from Hyderabad and the Northern Circars.

32 Indian States from wartime expenditure. Debts in India arising from local wars piled up to over thirty million pounds by 1814, when the practice of raising Indian loans began. That came too late to remedy earlier confusion of administrative and commercial finance that left Company governors desperate to access resources to pay for the cost of the civil establishment, 1776–84, amounting to nearly £1 million annually and for annual military expenditure of over £4 million, 1793–1807.6 At the renewal of the Company Charter in 1813 the army stood at 200,000 men and the military establishment absorbed about half 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 there a disjunction in Company methods from the 1760s and much greater willingness to turn to military solutions? Or were the techniques of court intrigue, the bazaar, and the battlefield simply complementary methods applied by a commercial agency turned imperial administrator? In commercial affairs there was continuity based on an understanding of the techniques of clientage and brokerage that made Company men in their official and unofficial capacities a part of Indian internal trade networks. In the 1760s, the Company was not a sovereign power in the land, but still a chartered agency with authority to make peace and war and accept or restore territory. Control could still 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-infeudation was a change in scale, as Clive admitted.8 He hesitated at first to accept this offer made for a share of taxes to Emperor Alamgir II. But by the Peace of Paris in February 1763 agents of the European powers assumed the right to make political settlements for influence and control through the successor states of the Mughal Empire. The results of what was a European form of partition (though no boundaries were laid down) had a bearing on subsequent relations between the Company as an imperial agency and the ‘country powers’. More ominously, there was an assertion of prescriptive rules in the form of treaties and agreements that replaced imperial edicts. Treaties to obtain trading privileges in return for rents extended into support for a Muslim or Hindu prince in return for greater concessions and a share in administration of resources. The more apparent disjunction lay in the administration of Bengal’s resources compared with more usual forms of accommodation with regional states elsewhere by a mixture of military and diplomatic methods. Even so, the change after Buxar was not abrupt. Power was taken to ‘supervise’ the provinces of Bengal, leaving ‘the management to the Old Officers of the 6 7 8

Furber, John Company at Work, 224, 313–14. Banerjea, Indian Finance, for financial records, appendix D; and for military costs, 340. Clive to Pitt, 7 Jan. 1759, in Madden, ed., Select Documents, iii. 148–9.

Reversal of Status 33 Government’.9 Accordingly, the local land revenue system remained in place under the nawab with three appointed Indian advisers and a resident to supervise accounts. With the exception of Burdwan, Chittagong, Midnapur estates, exploited directly by the Company, this improvisation of a patrimonial financial administration left a layer of zamindar intermediaries as client brokers between landholders and the Company. For a period, the British in Bengal followed the idea of a protected state not a ceded state, as a barrier against foreign rivals, and not as a model for further direct administration in India.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 the dewani were administered by a resident and the Calcutta Committee of governor’s appointees. General ‘political affairs’ were said to be divided with the nawab. At the heart of this thinking, however, lay a reversal in the political status of the nawab in favour of control by Company agents, although the terminology 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 material advantage shifted to the patron-power. This proved to be a major weakness in the bargain for the nawab, giving substance to Clive’s belief in 1767 that the prince had ‘but the Name and Shadow of Authority’.11 The Company, in reality, was the new subadar, or imperial governor, paying a stipend to the old one to keep up appearances for a ruler diminished in political functions, but retaining judicial authority outside Calcutta. In the face of Company monopoly of internal resources the client had little left to bargain with. From 1766 the nawabs of Bengal went into obscurity as stipended chiefs.12 More immediate issues, however, were not the theoretical perfection or justification for a method of imperial administration, but the containment of threats and resistance from third parties—foreign merchants who refused dues 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 change through. By a Regulating Act of 1773 the status of the Company for management of territory and revenues in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa was confirmed under a governor-general and council with power to supervise the other two presidencies and with primary responsibility for relations with Indian states. 9

Clive to Court of Directors, 30 Sept. 1765, in ibid. 155. 11 See Clive to Verelst and Select Committee, 16 Jan. 1767, in ibid. 157. 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 and in 1880 the titles associated with the office ceased to exist. 10

34 Indian States A Crown court was introduced with civil and criminal jurisdiction over British and Indian subjects in the ceded territories. That was yet another kind of ‘inversion’, leaving no role for the former ruler. It is no part of this study to follow the outcome of British over-rule in Bengal. Debate about the Company did have a bearing, however, on the ways in which the second choice of methods to access resources and influence rulers was applied.13 Reactions to expansion and change of company status were a mixture of national cupidity for a great source of revenue and unwillingness to tamper with a specialized agency operating in a system of strange values and political customs. If there was no case for reform of monopoly without securing 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 debate ministers achieved some supervision of the Company’s executive machinery by administrative consolidation under a governor-general and through a Supreme Court with Crown judges at Calcutta. Political attacks continued against the alleged failings of a patrimonial and unaccountable system for accessing resources and as an appeal for better standards of administration for the benefit of Indians. For this failure Warren Hastings became the scapegoat until 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 Council, leaving property, territory, and directors’ powers of patronage intact. The Act intervened in the relationship between Company and princes by subjecting the power of making wars and treaties to the prior consent of the directors. More specifically, the directors were to examine Company relations with 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 local details at such a distance. It was difficult to make greater claims to authority by extension of Crown sovereignty, or to separate commerce from administration, while much of the cost of military forces came from Company revenues. Even a reforming governor-general, Lord Cornwallis, argued the Company should be left in place.14 It is not surprising, therefore, that subordination of the rest of the Indian subcontinent from the early 1770s to the first decades of the nineteenth century repeated earlier techniques tried out in Bengal and extended to the principalities and lesser states of Awadh, the Carnatic, the Maratha Deccan, Hyderabad, and south India from Company bases in Madras and Bombay. 13 For the background to British domestic politics and the problems of privilege and empire posed 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.

Reversal of Status 35 Played out against the background of European wars, that complex and lengthy establishment of a commercial and political monopoly in territorial terms contained elements of internal conflict between Indian states in which Company forces and officials appear as extras, rather than dominant players, before the 1790s. Thereafter, strategies applied from Calcutta turned local tactical manoeuvres into a wholesale realignment of territories wholly or partly 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 was important because of close relations between its nawab/viziers and the imperial dynasty at Delhi; it was strategically situated on the frontiers of Maratha and 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 Afghancontrolled territory, leaving his principality vulnerable to occupation or disposal by agreement with the emperor who prudently surrendered to the Company’s forces. The peace settlement, however, did not establish a protectorate or a subsidiary political system outside Bengal. The immediate aim of the Company was compensation and a defensive buffer against other invaders from the west and north-west. To that extent there was a degree of mutuality in the treaty terms with Shuja who was induced to return and open negotiations in May 1765. The Calcutta Council could hardly control him while his army was 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 stationing any troops in Awadh. To achieve this limited aim Company agents infiltrated in small numbers the network of allegiances centred on Allahabad. They used the authority of the emperor as a cloak of legitimacy, as far as the directors were concerned, and they were backed by garrisons stationed at Lucknow and Faizabad in the Awadh heartland. At Faizabad, General Carnac quickly learned how to play this diplomatic game by appropriating ‘Shuja’s mansion . . . for his personal residence, held court for a month in the nawabi style, and allowed local chiefs and officials to come and offer obeisance’.15 This ideal existence did not lead to over-rule. But the experience of using a second-order group of clients from outside the nawab’s immediate entourage and drawing on the services of a senior minister held precedents for later agents. Moreover, Shuja (to his surprise) was cordially received with appropriate deference into the company of his military occupiers. Meetings with Clive at Benares in 1765 confirmed him as Nawab in Awadh. Company troops were withdrawn in return for a war indemnity of fifty lakhs, exclusion 15

Ibid. 70.

36 Indian States of other foreigners and a promise of duty-free trade. For the first time, the use of prescriptive terms to settle conflict, instead of seizures of territory and property, provided a lien on future diplomacy. Shuja quickly paid off his war debt and reduced his army to some 30,000 men. More important from a Company viewpoint was the opportunity for its servants and private traders to exploit the commercial advantage of duty-free access to upper Ganges markets using Indian intermediaries. For the nawab there was a serious loss of income and drain of specie made worse by virtual foreign monopoly over some exports such as saltpetre and indigo. Hastings who got on well enough with Shuja restored a kind of commercial order by personal agreement to end tax-free privileges in 1773. He also tried to put a stop to subversion of resident officers through gifts and honours by paying them a salary of £3,500 a year plus allowances. But it would be too much to claim that these measures prevented Company penetration. Indeed, the patronage available to both the governor-general and nawab ensured continued privileges for a handful of commercial clients; and Hastings’ withdrawal of the official residency in 1774 for appointment of his personal agents ensured that some goods and markets continued to be cornered with the assistance of Indian money-lenders. Just how far this went was revealed in 1783 when Resident Bristow exposed a contract for a loan to the Company for seventeen lakhs of rupees (£170,000) from the Indian bankers Gopaul Doss on the security of the nawab’s revenue receipts. Governors and nawabs were well aware that financial instability could undermine political stability in a strategic buffer state. The Company existed on mammoth debts, and Awadh could not survive without retaining the services of a hierarchy of nobility and landmanagers. Both systems were weak in internal defences against entrepreneurs who could use Indian service gentry to their own advantage. In the end ‘the patrimonialism of the indigenous regional command economy . . . proved its own undoing’.16 This came about because a high turnover among official residents ensured that supervision of private traders from Calcutta was minimal, as successors exploited their opportunities. Faction-fighting in the Calcutta Council increased the dependency of the earliest officials—Middleton, Bristow, Palmer, Harper—on distant patrons who demanded their share. There was a steady stream of complaints from the nawab about residents’ interference with court commercial and financial practices. The death of Shuja in 1775 and succession by his inexperienced son, Asaf, exposed the limits of the Company’s authority in a province where it had only a handful of official spies at court, and military contingents that were outnumbered by the nawab’s forces. The new 16 Barnett, North India between Empires, 89; for finances and loan dealing, see Fort William–India House Correspondence (Foreign and Secret), xv. (1782–1786), ed. C. H. Philips and B. B. Misra (Delhi, 1963), 159, 298–9, 439–40, 697.

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 already in place and by exhortation to pay arrears of tribute. Company defence of Awadh against external enemies increased these obligations, but created no sense of loyalty to Calcutta on the part of the nawab. Moreover, the nawab’s succession exposed the weakness of a patrimonial system in a transition period. Status groups providing court administrators and solders risked displacement during a dynastic transfer of authority. Asaf bought 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 Company control of territory around Benares in a new treaty in 1775.17 Increased debts allowed Resident Bristow to play court politics, while contributions towards arrears were squeezed out of Asaf’s mother and grandmother as custodians of the Awadh treasury, which they kept out of his hands.18 The influence of the resident through construction of his own network was now strong enough for Bristow to broker a peace between rival factions and end a plot to dethrone Asaf, 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 well enough, after a debatable attempt at converting the nawab’s debts into a banker’s loan to the Company. Middleton as Hastings’ man was better attuned to managing Asaf and defending him against the consequences of his own 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 the opportunities for patronage were immense. But few cared to serve Asaf in other senior capacities, until he appointed Haider Beg Khan and his brother Hasan Reza Khan in 1777 as chief ministers on the advice of Bristow. Haider Beg was literate and able enough to become a second-level client for Calcutta through the resident who acted as broker, trader, arbiter, and intelligence 17 The treaty of Faizabad acknowledged Asaf as free and independent in authority, increased the military subsidy to the Company and extended the Bengal practice of assigning revenue lands to 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 when Asaf agreed, for settlement of debts, to maintain Bahu Begam in her estates at Faizabad. In 1801 Bahu 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.

38 Indian States officer. Without this advice and stiffening of the nawab’s resolve there was a danger 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 Hastings made Asaf banish disloyal elements at court and favour trusted friends of his family. But how far could Calcutta push a client state? Continuous extortion imposed a strain on the whole system of revenue assessment and collection in Awadh over which Calcutta and its agents had no direct control. Between 1765 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 Calcutta and residents increased to the extent that assignment of revenues from some districts for support of the brigade of troops and for outstanding debts was agreed by Asaf in 1775. Military officers enthusiastically enforced these obligations on the zamindars and officials responsible. By 1779, arrears and the cost of using the military as a blunt instrument for collection had increased Company claims to about half of assessed land revenue, estimated at R23.5 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 financial records. For the first time the Company was able to make a detailed assessment of internal revenue and state costs. The largest land holdings were the ruling family’s jagirs providing 37 per cent of total revenue lands, followed by court favourites, administrators, and officers. Collection relied less on a landed aristocracy than a handful of professional contractors who farmed taxes 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 exhortation for ‘reform’ and the impossibility of saddling this friable patrimonial structure with further arrears. Relief was afforded by converting a third of the Awadh debt into bonds at 12 per cent, which was much lower than borrowing from Indian bankers. Asaf, his officials, and the tax farmers also defended themselves by keeping as much as possible out of sight of the supervision of residents who could change nothing without threatening the whole hierarchy of interests that made collection possible and served to redistribute resources through revenue farmers and local patronage networks.21 Accordingly, Hastings acknowledged the impasse and visited Lucknow in 1784, where he lived like an Indian noble for five months and struck a new 20 21

Barnett, North India between Empires, 144–5; Fisher, Indirect Rule in India, 382. Barnett, North India between Empires, 191.

Reversal of Status 39 deal to relieve some of the financial burden by lowering exchange rates with the Bengal rupee, writing off defalcations incurred by Resident Bristow (£140,000), reducing the annual charge for troops, and ending the resident’s monopoly of the saltpetre trade.22 Much of the outstanding debt was written down by some £500,000, leaving the contractors in place and ensuring a period of better relations with the Calcutta Council under Lord Cornwallis and Sir John Shore. It helped, too, that Resident William Palmer was patron and friend of Haider Beg Khan, chief minister. Yet political supervision increased. This came about because Cornwallis was highly critical of the methods of extending British influence outside the presidencies.23 Advice, influence, and control of defence and external affairs, but not internal revenues, were to be the limit of a resident’s authority, according to Cornwallis’s instructions to Jonathan Duncan on his appointment to Benares. It is possible to see in this prescription a model for a ‘System of Residents’ developed from the 1790s to keep watch over the rulers of other states and, indeed, to control the emperor through a resident at Delhi.24 Whether this gave the Company any sovereign power is doubtful. The question was, perhaps, beside the main point of political influence in a relationship between unequal parties where the mediation of the resident official could not really be prescribed so accurately. Clearly, it is evidence that Cornwallis was feeling his way towards an administrative method and division of authority that depended on rules, rather than on daily operations between two personalities—prince and resident. Whether such rules could be applied to distinguish between two systems of influence and control in neighbouring states and in the presidency remained to be seen. In practice, actions mattered more than prescribed policy. At the death of Haider Beg, Cornwallis and the resident formally approved the appointment of new ministers. In 1797 Sir John Shore visited Lucknow to secure the dismissal of a dewan and the appointment of an approved candidate, Hussain Khan. At the death of Asaf in 1797 the resident appointed his son, and then changed his mind in favour of Asaf’s brother, Saadat Ali Khan, in return for a new treaty and a very big increase in subsidy to the Company which effectively raised Bengal ‘investment’ in exported goods for 1798 to 105 lakhs.25 Important families began to look to the resident and Calcutta to protect their inheritance from the nawab. The effect of twenty years of treaty relations, therefore, was to lay resources open to Company inspection, grant a monopoly of foreign trade and 22

Fort William–India House Correspondence (Foreign and Secret), xv. (1782–1786), 298–9. Cornwallis to Dundas, 14 Aug. 1787, in Madden, ed., Select Documents, iii. 195. 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. 23 24

40 Indian States military support. Politically, this association created a supervisory role for the governor-general through the residents. Rules were made to settle disputes over debts and trade; and compromises worked until the end of Asaf’s governorship, while there was ‘a regular and diffuse unofficial European presence in 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 during Richard Wellesley’s governorship raised the subsidy to its highest rate at £1 million 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 and surrounding what remained of the nawab’s territory on three sides. Treaty terms were rephrased to describe the relationship as subordination in 1801 and 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 appointed as a minister and the ruler retained internal jurisdiction at this stage under the Company raj who had become ‘the transcendent power’.27 There were lessons in this example applied in the broader strategy of influence and conquest. But it would be mistaken to see in the example of Bengal relations with Awadh a template for relations between the Presidencies and the states and societies of central and southern India. The element of commercial penetration was much more limited. The military power of Madras, Bombay, or Surat factors was not comparable with forces stationed in Bengal or Awadh. Instead of an infiltration of residents to tap resources from the 1750s there was an unsettling export of internal conflicts that turned Company enclaves into dependants rather than arbitrators in events outside their control. A major reason was the existence of the Maratha ‘confederation’ that lay across central India. If the Company was a political factor to be reckoned with in northern India by the 1760s, its closest rival was the set of Maratha states that predominated in Maharashtra and extended their action and influence into west-central and southern India. Their rise under Baji Rao I as peshwa coincided in the 1720s with the Mughal decline. By the 1740s, they were thrusting into the Carnatic and raided Bengal; they threatened to undermine French influence in Hyderabad in the 1750s; and they occupied Delhi in 1771, where Shah Alam fell into their hands. They had to be removed twice from Rohilkhand in 1772 and 1773 by Afghans with some assistance from Bengal forces. No other imperial factor among the successor states to the Mughal Empire wielded such erratic and unpredictable territorial power. Definitions of that power in institutional terms encounter the difficulty of describing a ‘conquest’ alliance of chiefdoms centred on the Deccan and held 26 27

Fisher, A Clash of Cultures, 87. McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal, 13.

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 also played down the ‘factional conflict’ seen as inherent in Maratha politics in older books, in favour of an ideal ‘co-sharing’ of power between military elite families holding land rights and a bureaucratic and dynastic centre.29 This conception goes some way towards explaining linkages and revenue flows between families of chieftains and a hereditary paramountcy, though not the inner circle of bureaucratic power nor the adherence of Maratha communities to their state heads or chieftains. In the end, powerful chieftains reverted to ‘factionalism’ on a grand scale, in the 1780s and 1790s, by fighting each other, the peshwa and the Company. Possibly the most straightforward way of describing the Maratha polity by the 1770s is to regard it as the product of a 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 independent states. Others were Brahmin administrators, sometimes with landholding rights, personal administrators for the peshwa, and army commanders. All could change allegiance as rival claimants to the peshwa title emerged. The coalition, therefore, based on loyalties and perceived advantage was structurally unstable in what was a patrimonial organization achieved by Muslim dynasties accommodating with Hindu cultures. The peshwa periodically reaffirmed the loyalty of military commanders at court; and he took care 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 three occasions 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 his regional officials. The Maratha threat was sufficient to frighten the Bombay Presidency into a treaty in 1775 with the ex-peshwa, Radunath Rao, offering military assistance in return for islands in the vicinity of Bombay port and part of Gujarat. In return, the regent counted on support in an internal faction fight, but this petered out, when the Bombay army was kept at bay. In any case, the Calcutta Council disapproved and sent an envoy of its own to negotiate at Poona in 1776. The resulting treaty concluded with the peshwa’s

28

Stewart Gordon, NCHI, ii/4. The Marathas 1600–1818 (Cambridge, 1993), 1–9. 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. 29

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 assist Bombay by taking Gwalior fort in 1780. Further negotiations with the young peshwa and leading chieftains resolved both the internal crisis and British relations in the treaty of Salbai in 1782 which restored territories all round and had an important bearing on Madras policies in the Carnatic. Salbai provided a basis for an alliance in 1783 between the peshwa, Sindia, and the Company for an offensive against the state of Mysore. In southern India, Company treaty relations dealt mainly with commercial concessions, and there were no formal alliances until all sides—Indian, French, and British—began to use diplomacy as a weapon of war from the 1740s. The more usual techniques of continuing European warfare through Indian allies resulted in French influence in the Deccan and increasing British control of the Carnatic and Malabar coasts. The advantages were by no means one-sided. Company relations through Madras with Muhammad Ali Walajah, as Nawab of the Carnatic, were not based on trade privileges, but on loans to the ruler—to the extent that the debtor could manipulate his European creditors who acquired great influence in running the Madras Council. Unlike Calcutta, the Madras Presidency was not a land power in the Carnatic. This position changed when the Madras Council took up an offer of the northern Circars, as a grant from Salbat Jang, Nizam of Hyderabad, in 1759, confirmed by Shah Alam and by treaty with Jang’s successor, Nizam Ali in 1766. Terms specified an alliance and financial support for a British force equivalent to nine lakhs annually. The Nizam of Hyderabad was not a secure ally. He ruled a relatively autonomous state, while acknowledging his subordinate status and loyalty to the Mughals. French officers, on the whole, had better relations with the nizam’s court than the Company. For most of the late eighteenth century, in any case, the Madras Presidency was insufficiently funded to pledge military assistance. As an alternative, the Madras Council concentrated on constructing alliances to secure Mysore, a Hindu kingdom that had fallen under the Muslim warlord, Haider Ali and his son Tipu. By 1766, Haider controlled the Malabar Coast, and Madras made a defensive treaty with him as part of a peace 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 two Madrassi 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 to internal markets than control of ports protected by British sea power and used for a valuable coastal trade. Internally, the shifting balance between the

Reversal of Status 43 Marathas, Hyderabad, Mysore, and the presidencies called for greater central control over policy and funding from Bengal resources. Madras did not fare well on its own. Employed by the Nizam of Hyderabad to annex the small state of Tanjore on his behalf, the Madras Council fell victim in 1776 to a series of intrigues engineered by Muhammad Ali Walajah and his creditors who 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 prevent Haider Ali from turning to the French for help and attacking the territory of the Nawab of the Carnatic and Madras in 1780. Madras was again saved by financial assistance from Bengal and by an expedition to contain Haider in his 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 Salbai treaty with the Marathas and until peace negotiations in Europe removed the threat of a closer alliance between Tipu Sultan of Mysore and French forces. The period demonstrated, too, that without assured sources of finance Madras could not hope to get the better of Tipu Sultan or influence the politics and coalitions of central India. Cornwallis took the situation in hand in the context of the renewed struggle with France. He began to form his own coalition from 1789, when Tipu attacked Travancore whose raja was a British 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 transfer of half of Mysore territories to Indian allies, while the Company took possession of the Malabar Coast. In the absence of a new legitimizing central authority to replace the Mughals, piecemeal acquisitions by an increasingly predatory commercial and military agency built up regional power centred on Bengal and operating through subordinate presidencies in Bombay and Madras. This change in the power structure of the Company (assisted by regulating Acts of 1773 and 1784), allowed greater authority to Richard Wellesley on his arrival as governor-general in 1798 to play Indian politics and 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 local and 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. 31

Council members were later tried and fined for this coup.

44 Indian States There was also a closer alliance with Hyderabad and support for an enlarged subsidiary force of six battalions. By a further treaty, in 1800, more territory was assigned to the Company in payment for forces and, for the first time, a fixed boundary between Hyderabad and Madras was laid down. The nizam was acknowledged as ‘sovereign’, but was precluded from separate relations with other states. When Nizam Ali was succeeded by his son in 1803, the protocols of ceremonial installation were still confirmed by Shah Alam in Delhi.32 In 1804 the ruler of Hyderabad, Sikander Jah, received back all territories taken by the Marathas. In Mysore, too, there were rewards as well as obligations. A grandson of the last Hindu ruler deposed by Haider was selected by the Governor of Madras, though administration remained in the hands of a Brahmin minister. Treaties confirmed the new order, in return for seven lakhs of star pagodas and a British ‘reserve’ on the state, and laid down formal boundaries. Regular subsidy to the Company and control of foreign relations in Mysore through a resident at Seringapatam and a detailed survey of regional agriculture brought Madras policy on seeking out interior resources into line with Bengal. The end of the war against Tipu also brought to a head the status and perpetual debts of Muhammad Ali, Nawab of Arcot and the Carnatic and with claims over neighbouring Tanjore. He was a client who confounded all would-be patrons. The Board of Control in England ordered complete restitution of revenue, assigned temporarily to Madras. At his death in 1795 the governor pressed in vain for agreement with his son for civil and military control of mortgaged districts in the Carnatic. When Tanjore succession became an issue, the Governor of Madras obtained a new treaty recognizing the claimant, but relegating the status of the Raja of Tanjore to a figurehead under British administration. Similarly, because the fall of Seringapatam had revealed correspondence about the treachery of Muhammad Ali, the British felt free to reduce his successor in the Carnatic to the same subordinate status in 1801. Interpretation of the final phase of the struggle between the Marathas and the British turns on perceptions of the aims of leaders of the principal state families. By 1792, there was only a young peshwa as nominal paramount and a set of rival ministers and local warlords to hold the coalition together. This endured into 1802, when the peshwa came to terms with Calcutta in the form of 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 Raja of 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, 32

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

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 there was little supervision of these states, leaving many of them open to plunder by irregular troops. The final disaggregation of the Maratha chiefdoms was started by treachery against a British client (the gaekwad) assassinated in 1814 in Poona. A further treaty that stripped the peshwa of all status and power in 1817 was followed by attacks on the residencies in Poona and Nagpur and a short campaign against the remnants of Maratha armies. In 1818 the peshwa was removed as the last Maratha houses were turned into princely states. By the end of the eighteenth century the Company, then, had moved towards supervised forms of ‘protection’ in the ‘subsidiary’ treaties of the day for a variety of reasons. Not least was the need to play out in the hinterland of Bengal and Madras the strategy of defending positions already won by a mix of concession and outright conquest. To those ends, closer relations with Awadh and the states of the Carnatic, Hyderabad, and Mysore drew governors and soldiers into a network of shifting Indian alliances and conflicts. But not all enclaves followed this pattern. Bombay and Surat factors made very few commercial or political treaties. For the most part, they wielded influence through a profitable cabotage and by cultivating commercial interests with Parsi, Hindu, and Muslim merchants.33 That position of comfortable commerce began to change, when Bombay became a client of a faction within the Maratha court at Poona in the early 1770s and drew in other would-be patrons within Warren Hastings’s Calcutta Council, where there was great experience of how to make states pay for protection and how to cultivate ministers and other service gentry. The aims were commercial, financial, and strategic in the context of a continuous struggle with French rivals using similar methods. But the methods were ‘Indian’ by employment of residents as a kind of wakil or envoy/assistant, part adviser, part spy in the court of another power; by the prolixity of negotiation and subterfuge of the kind that surrounded the battle of Plassey or ran through Calcutta’s relations with Awadh, the Afghan Rohillas, and the Marathas in the early 1770s; and, not least, by British awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of systems of patronage in government and trade, leading to the kind of corruption that Company 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 in the 1770s and 1780s because of ‘excessive use of patronage’.34 By 1781 covenanted servants of the Company numbered 252—‘many of them the 33 Including Dutch factors at Surat. Holden Furber, Bombay Presidency in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (London, 1965), chap. 3 and 69–70. 34 Banerjea, Indian Finance, 266.

46 Indian States sons of the first families in the kingdom of Great Britain and every one aspiring 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 regulations. Hastings and Cornwallis began to separate trade from administration, reform the judicial system, and entrust management of revenue and justice to officers in the Bengal districts as a system of ‘paternal despotism’, rather than paternalistic obligation in return for services.36 It is not part of this study to follow up the consequences of closer administration in ‘British’ India. Certainly at the opening of the nineteenth century, prescriptive methods were still in formation and different techniques were applied in Madras compared with Bengal. Most of the subcontinent by 1818 still consisted of a vast range of states 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. 35

Banerjea, Indian Finance, Hastings to Dundas, 5 May 1781, 267. 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 and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal, 24 and chap. 17. 37 D. A. Washbrook, ‘India, 1818–1860: The Two Faces of Colonialism’ in OHBE, iii. The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford, 1999), 395–421, and map. 18.1. 36

3 Clients and Brokers Incorporated into a treaty system by alliance and extortion the unannexed Indian states were considered to enjoy separate political status under British protection. Rearrangement of administrative boundaries recognized to some extent older spheres of Mughal and state authority. Mostly, it did not and presented a flexible framework encompassing diverse resources that could be added to states, or denied, by assigning revenue to pay for military occupation and arrears of debt. In extreme cases, districts could be amalgamated into neighbouring British-administered territory. Certainly, there was no central plan ever formulated by the Company or by a governorgeneral in Calcutta that met the permutations of political relations between adversaries and allies whose status had changed. In time responsibility for princely states, large and small, fell on central and regional agencies of the Government of India and its Provinces. It is possible to analyse the princely states according to the type of formal relations their rulers had with these agencies. Or, the analysis can be made in terms of the early and post-Mutiny debate about the status of rulers under the Raj. Neither method furthers understanding of the issues at stake between quasi-independent states and the government of India, unless the role of administrative brokers—British and Indian—is taken into account.1 On the whole it seems preferable to deal with issues of brokerage first, if only because they go back to the earliest experience of residents at courts of government and continue over the whole period of rule by Company and Raj. At the heart of this variable relationship between official agents and rulers lay questions of status and control. At important periods of change, immediately before and after the Mutiny, and at the onset of a reappraisal of the relationship between rulers and the Raj in the following century, there were also issues of definition of status debated by the over-rulers and by the princes themselves. But legal and political questions of governance were probably secondary to the operation in practical terms of the extraordinary subordination of nearly six hundred ‘states’ of many types and conditions outside the formal framework of government in British India. From the outset, even while annexations were still possible, individual agents fashioned the main elements of this subordination in central India, Madras, the Deccan, Rajputana, Sind, and southern India without too much thought 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.

48 Indian States and culturally complex. The heartland of the Maratha chieftaincies in Malwa and Gwalior, Bhonsla territory, became the seat of a supervisory administration—the Central India Agency—cutting a great swathe of territories with new boundaries across the subcontinent. Rajputana states fell under similar separate agencies; and the Punjab ex-Maratha states were further divided by boundaries and administrative methods, after the Sikh wars of the 1840s, on either bank of the River Sutlej. For a period, Awadh constituted an internally autonomous state sited uneasily between Bengal and Sikh, Punjab and Afghan territories. Delhi and Agra territory, like the neighbouring Doab, had been cut away from Awadh and annexed to become eventually part of North West Provinces. In the south, Mysore and some minor states were surrounded by territory annexed to Madras, while the nizam’s territory in a slightly enlarged Hyderabad sat as a solid block of semi-autonomous lands under a Muslim 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, whether defined by treaty or not, was essentially one of qualified ‘subordination’ sometimes titled ‘independence’ in agreements, more usually ‘friendship and alliance’, ‘protection’, ‘subordinate co-operation’, and even ‘close administration’ by a council or a set of commissioners. However graded, the status of a ruler was one of clientage arising from acceptance of defeat and, more usually, from a grudging admission of advantages to be secured from a rising imperial power. His immediate patron was harder to find. After a flourish of treaty-making by senior generals, high-ranking envoys, and occasional governors over the long period of sporadic warfare, 1775 to 1819, British authority was mediated through brokers whose own status was full of ambiguities. 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 eighteenth century than to the peace settlements worked out in the first two decades of the nineteenth. To begin with, residents were not paid salaries until after 1798. Their role as exclusive envoys to a state was difficult to enforce and harder still to fund in 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 overbearing authorities who managed imperial clients. In self-defence, as much as through political influence, they turned occasionally to rulers for financial support. Properly speaking, they were envoys not administrators; and one of their functions was to provide a unique channel of communications. Isolation 2

Fisher, Indirect Rule in India, 107.

Clients and Brokers 49 from other rulers clearly changed a prince’s status. Although he could bring to bear on a ruler the raw military power at the disposal of the Raj, in practice the resident’s predicament was not easy to resolve by force. Rulers sought to 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 presidency. Those sent to Calcutta occasionally reported back confidential secretariat instructions, before they were received by a resident.3 Until matters were resolved by force, the Marathas, Hyderabad, and Mysore, played a diplomatic game of counter-alliances without much influence from residents. From 1792, the Company tried to obtain exclusive rights of representation from 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 confirmation of their status and dynastic succession at the head of a revenueproducing hierarchy of officials, landowners, peasantry, and merchants. Paradoxically, this privilege benefited the dynasties of former enemies as well as 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 British protection through the Indore Residency, guaranteed tributary revenues from Rajput rulers and landowners according to Sanads, or deeds, negotiated earlier. In Gwalior, Daulat Sindia was of ‘independent’ status, 1817–18, with tribute guaranteed from Rajput states. In return, he surrendered forts and assigned revenues for occupying forces and all tribute from the states of Jodhpur, Bundi, Kotah. Freed from overlordship of the peshwa in 1818, a third 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 to the 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 formally recognized as independent, while paying some expenses and tribute to government. Western States agencies followed a similar pattern. Nawabs were replaced by rajas who retained tribute and often escaped all demands. In residencies and agencies there were, too, numerous smaller chiefdoms paying regulated and unregulated tribute from ‘mediatized’ chiefs who had no formal agreements with the Raj before the 1860s. In Punjab it was difficult to 3

Ibid. 278. The Raja of Benares, for example, did not agree to forgo separate diplomatic representation until 1911. 4

50 Indian States conclude any agreement with Sikh clans that did not protect lower orders of chiefs from Maharaja Ranjit Singh, former Persian governor of Lahore and overlord of states of the upper Indus, including Kashmir and Peshawar.5 Exaggerated views about the value of Indus navigation and the felt need for buffer states against Afghans (and possibly Russians) inspired conquest of Sind and the Punjab. After the first Sikh war in 1845, nine states retained sovereignty on the north side of the River Sutlej; some such as Patiala on the south 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 raja created for his services, but with civil and police jurisdiction in British hands, while the state of Bahawalpur remained under a nawab in ‘subordinate cooperation’ as absolute ruler without British jurisdiction. By contrast, a residency in Nepal resulted in no Company control. In 1800, when the reigning raja abdicated in favour of his son and took refuge in Benares, Wellesley sent a mission to negotiate a treaty, to post a resident and guarantee an income to the abdicating ruler. Thereafter, Nepal remained in diplomatic alliance, but managed its own foreign relations and kept the resident isolated within the Nepalese court. Thus, there was a full range of imperial possibilities—from benign neglect to outright cession. In the case of Baroda, the gaekwad had been gradually eased out of tributary relationship to the peshwa and agreed to a subsidiary force for protection in return for ceding Surat in 1802. A supplementary treaty guaranteed the positions of his ministers, their relatives and successors. The Bombay government paid off ‘Arab’ (Omani) mercenaries, in return for an increase of ceded territory in 1805. Following the assassination of the gaekwad and restoration of a lineal descendant in 1819, state debts were underwritten by the Company. In return, Baroda state was bound to make regular 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 and other states, the Rao of Kutch or the state of Cambay, all formerly tributary to Baroda. Local nawabs collected their own revenues and shared them with the Bombay government and the gaekwad. A resident took complete control of Kutch during a minority succession for a period from 1834. In the Surat agency princes were left in authority without formal engagements. In the case of nearby Sind treaties from 1809 with amirs dealt with commercial matters and exclusion of the French. From 1839, troops were stationed there for a subsidy, but there was no British jurisdiction before annexation in 1843. Whatever their guaranteed status, dynasties were still prey to succession disputes. These provided an occasion for intervention. There were early ex5 For the complex intrigues between Persians, Afghans, Ranjit Singh in the early nineteenth century, CHI, v. British India 1497–1858, ed. H. H. Dodwell (Cambridge, 1929), chap. 28.

Clients and Brokers 51 amples in Awadh in the particular circumstances of financial and military relations with the Company. Such rulers could be looked on as puppets, but the administration required to enforce rule through British officials was lacking. Rather, they remained nominal rulers and were bypassed, while governors and residents used other intermediaries. In the early nineteenth century, too, more frequent use was made of commissions or regency councils, when a minor was enthroned. The Company tried to settle a large number of disputed successions, 1798–1839. The manner of intervention differed from case to case; but the succession could not be left to chance, if there was a risk of civil conflict. It was necessary, as residents and agents learned, to reassure dependent 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 usual Company practice of taking a cut of revenue for military costs and allowing the ruler to keep the rest. Occasional stipending arose from buying out or pensioning off a ruler. From the example of stipends and pensions for the financial year 1827–8 supplied by Michael Fisher, cost of this largesse amounted to R10.9 million, or about one-tenth of gross revenues extracted by the Company from the states.6 In many cases, rulers or ex-rulers also retained revenues from state lands outside Company control. It does not follow, however, that the Company refrained from annexing the remainder of state lands because of a high regard for Indian sovereignty. Quite large territories were involved in this self-denial; and altogether they would have required more manpower from the Bengal, Bombay, or Madras presidencies than the Company was prepared to finance and defend against inevitable Court and parliamentary objections. The case of Mysore demonstrated the two central aspects of relations with rulers—succession stability and revenue. The choice of a young boy as maharaja in 1799, in return for payment of a regular subsidy, provided an opportunity to appoint a former minister as dewan who kept subsidy payments up to date. In 1811 the resident formally handed over administration to the ruler who clashed with the dewan over access to surplus revenue. A new resident, James Casamajor, allowed the young ruler to build up his own network of senior clients and bring the state into debt. Governor-General Bentinck sought to redress this loss of influence in 1831, citing ‘moral authority’, rather than the 1799 treaty as justification. He ordered British officers into Mysore to run the administration and pensioned the ruler off with a large income (R350,000 plus 20 per cent of net revenues annually). The residency was abolished in 1843, despite the protests of the raja who regarded the resident 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 6

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

52 Indian States respect for rulers.7 But opinions on the subject were divided, and much still depended on whether resources could be tapped without the expense of formal administration. The Mysore dynasty was not restored till much later in 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 of Madras finance and by reluctance to go through the process of formal annexation. But the fundamental issues were common enough within the general pattern of over-rule and revenue extraction. Treaty subsidies and tribute have been calculated for nine of seventeen states for the year 1832.8 Some like Bengal had been absorbed into Company administration; but apart from that case, seven states paid nothing for ‘subsidiary forces’. Of the remaining nine Awadh and the Raja of Gwalior were big contributors—R13 million and R15 million, or some 36 per cent of the total of net subsidy (£4.3 million) paid over to the Raj. By any count, this was a substantial impost arising from treaties going back to the last decades of the eighteenth century. In all, the subsidy amounted to over 40 per cent of the Company’s military costs in these selected years. After 1833, when there was a better system of accounting, totals of ‘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 monopolies.9 But there were other resources yielded. Nagpur ceded districts in trust for the support of military forces in 1853. The ports of Baroda were taken over as ‘Indian’ ports; and the maintenance of local police and a contingent of cavalry was forced from the state under threat of sequestration of districts. Territory was taken from Gwalior in 1844 for support of forces and payment of debts. In 1853 the Nizam of Hyderabad assigned districts to pay for a local sepoy force—the ‘Hyderabad Contingent’—under British command. Baroda led the way in making over lands for a railway in 1856, a practice that became standard after the Mutiny. Altogether, the patron power exercised a highly arbitrary right to levy payment for troops, tribute, lands for revenue, and some control over debts, in return for treaty guarantees. Not surprisingly, therefore, face-to-face relations between rulers and imperial agents were frequently hostile, however disguised by protocols. Rulers could resist demands by prevarication; they could yield; and they could retire into idleness. Whatever the outcome, residents and agents tried to build up their own network of second-order clients ranging from senior officers of state down to merchants, brokers, and bankers. The technique derived from 7

Fisher, Indirect Rule in India, 414. 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 maharajas seem 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). 8

Clients and Brokers 53 protection of Indian clients in the vicinity of Company forts, though it could not be legally extended to the subjects of a ruler or subjects of the Raj, without treaty concession. For their part, many Indians found aspects of imported English legal practices useful and a safeguard (particularly for inheritance and commerce) against the exactions of a ruler. The privilege of protection was far from straightforward, however, and not to be confused with ‘extraterritorial jurisdiction’ in the nineteenth century.10 One result was to make it easier for private traders to escape the consequences of any breach of state customs and duties, in the absence of any commercial treaty. Protection of Indian employees created a beneficial elite among the service gentry attached to a residency or agency, excluded from the justice of rulers by clientage, rather than by change of nationality or residence in an annexed territory. Furthermore, a large number of Indian employees enjoyed rights of petition at a ruler’s court, backed by the resident. Petitioning and intercession could become a privilege to be rented out for payment to non-employees.11 For the same reason, protection of client nobility by a resident built up a constituency at court or in territorial administration, in return for safeguarding inheritance claims or the interests of favourites of one ruler against a change of personnel by his successor. In short, one patronage system was 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 uncommonly intrusive Company.12 The technique was particularly valuable in securing the services of senior ministers. The status of a recognized minister or a dewan was then advanced by definition of his functions and power to ‘reform’ the state, usually in matters of revenue, but occasionally disguised as protection of ‘the people’ against a ruler. In Hyderabad and Travancore there were protracted struggles to have the resident’s nominee as dewan accepted. Death of the Travancore ruler in 1812 opened the way for an approved successor and created a role for the resident as minister-in-chief, receiving reports weekly from subordinates. In 1814, a trusted chief minister was transferred from service in Mysore. From then on, till 1829, Travancore administration remained firmly under resident supervision. Resident ‘intervention,’ however, is a loose term. It might mean anything from advice and exhortation to active organization of revenue collection. Although the struggle over status and resources can be analysed in terms of strategies and tactics, the basis of the ruler’s state power through patrimonial appointment and the existence of subordinate layers of clientage has to be the 10 W. Ross Johnston, Sovereignty and Protection: A Study of British Jurisdictional Imperialism in the Late Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC, 1973). 11 Fisher, Indirect Rule in India, 202. This was not ‘extraterritorial jurisdiction’ leading to trial before a consular or British court, but a simple extension of clientage to protection of claimants. 12 Ibid., for examples, 206–7.

54 Indian States focus of a resident’s success or failure to achieve Company goals. One defence, of course, was to immerse the resident in court life, in other words, to turn the broker into a client. Bribes by rulers could bring results, especially where residency expenses were paid locally. As late as 1829 a resident in Awadh was proved to be corrupt. The venalities of the earlier period—trade privileges, money-lending to rulers—were outlawed ; but the creation of obligations between ruler and resident was not stamped out. As in other societies, gifts were the currency of mutual cooperation. Employment of friends and relatives of officials incurred another kind of debt leading to rights of succession to a ministerial post. The earliest residents moved easily into such transactions by acceptance of titles, quarters for Indian wives.13 Much of that co-option was evidence of a certain style common to officers and company servants, a fashion for ‘orientalism’, as well as a duty to protocols that became less personalized and more formal by the 1840s. For effective influence the resident had to construct his own client network. Within a residency, use of assistants created a parallel administration from a mix of Hindu and Muslims and some Europeans in the ‘language’, intelligence, and treasury offices of the residency and among its medical staff. Service assistants (munshis) could, of course, serve two masters and act as brokers rather than British 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 appointed staff members followed their patron to a new residency. At the end of service they might be rewarded by a tax-free land grant. Fisher notes that the predominant characteristic of the first period of British over-rule in the native states 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 of candidates who had passed through Delhi College. An even more delicate service was performed by assistant treasurers. In this position, there were openings for members of Indian banking houses arranging transfer of funds and keeping a check on exchange rates. Such appointees worked on a commission basis, acquiring status for their banking families with opportunity to sell the office of treasurer at a later date, or pass it on to an heir. Such a service left residents vulnerable to withdrawal by a client or to defalcations, if faced with dismissal. Accordingly, much of this area of Company access was in the hands of an Indian banking sector using the techniques of bills of exchange and a network of correspondents to facilitate transfers of 13 Fisher, Indirect Rule in India, for the case of Resident John Collins at Lucknow and David Ochterlony at Delhi. See too Fisher, ‘The Resident in Court Ritual, 1764–1858’, 419–58. 14 Fisher, Indirect Rule in India, 331, 337–8.

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 handle large transactions in return for a salary and pensions. Although the main lines of power, compliance, or opposition within the principal states can be described, it is less easy to reach a conclusion about the reasons for the political fate of subordinate states in general. Altogether, between 1841 and 1857 there were some twenty-two states or groups of states in treaty relations. Of these, six were annexed in that period (and Mysore might as well have been). They made up, in 1841, over half of the territory of India, decreasing to about one-third by 1857; and they contained just under one-third of the population of over 200 million. As Fisher rightly concludes, ‘The British themselves never settled on any specific official number of princely states: at various times the official number of states appeared in the range 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 applied by contemporary soldiers and officials. They held divided opinions about the major states, covering their use as strategic necessities or satraps to a Mughal successor power. In the main, however, they dealt with them on an ad hoc basis; and their fate was conditioned by traditional norms of behaviour between superiors and subordinates, by the personalities of rulers, agents, and governors, and by the changed circumstances of the Company after 1833. For one historian, therefore, the legacy of officials of the Company period consisted of both a perpetuation of the past accompanied by a dramatic shift in power and status at the highest levels of government: the reasons for this non-doctrinaire pragmatism are obvious. These men and others of their time were impressed by the institutional framework which they discovered beneath the shell of the Indian regimes they defeated. The first generation of Company administrators found these institutions efficient and the elite strata of Indians who managed 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 of princely India and in annexed provinces where princes were retired leaving, however, zamindars, clan heads, and other local magnates as beneficiaries of the new order. 15 16

Ibid. 264. Burton Stein, A History of India (Oxford, 1998), 216.

4 Rulers and Raj Throughout the period of conquest and consolidation, the Indian states were treated as practical problems in frontier security and as sources of revenue for military posts. As outlined above, this ad hoc approach entailed variable relations between rulers, brokers, and governors, leading, in most cases, to a working arrangement guaranteeing status and succession in return for subordination and finance. At the same time there was uncertainty and debate about Company and Crown relations with rulers. Soldiers and governors expressed contrasting views about alliance or annexation, depending on their experience of warfare and diplomacy. Sometimes actions through annexation contradicted a proconsul’s propensity to preserve states. But their status as patron-administrators was never in doubt. The reasons went beyond security on the frontiers and finance for presidency treasuries. Generals and governors operated in a political and social environment where the privilege of patronage was jealously guarded as a characteristic of rank; and their experience in India reinforced their view that on an imperial frontier the right to confer or withhold office was the best safeguard against too much interference from a distant Court of Directors or a Board of Control. Only in this way could they keep the respect of subordinates and preserve control over public servants. Transfer of the administration of patronage to Leadenhall Street or Whitehall would leave the governor as a ‘useless cipher without power, authority or respect’.1 Although no parallel was ever drawn with similar challenges to a ruler’s control over appointments within a patrimonial system, administrators had a good understanding of how ‘interference’ could create rival allegiance within court politics. Residents, agents, and their masters, therefore, worked to ‘reform’ a system judged to be inefficient—even morally harmful. Hence the contradictions 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 it weaker. Bad regimes were liable to be propped up: ‘The usual remedy of a bad government 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 off every 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.

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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 of treaties. The problem of over-rule through a patrimonial regime was most evident at the highest level. What was to be done with the Mughal? His status remained honourable, while his executive authority was nil. Styled as ‘king’, but forbidden to grant titles from 1832, Bahadur Shah was still venerated by princes and treated with caution by governors.3 A ‘paramount’ chief he certainly was not; but his appeals to directors and despatch of a personal representative to London caused embarrassment. His position was made more anomalous by the tendency of the Company to look on its own titles in government as a succession from the emperor, before the Charter Renewal Act of 1813 reinforced privileges without prejudice to Crown rights. The fiction of administering Delhi in his name through a resident fell out of favour. In the absence of any clear definition of Crown ‘sovereignty’, where princely states were concerned, a vague doctrine of ‘paramountcy’, confirmed by the facts of conquest, took root in the minds of soldiers and governors.4 One consequence of ever-wider military control through annexation, as Munro presciently observed, was risk of rebellion by an Indian army. Further conquests, in Munro’s opinion, would only debase a subject people. He was supported by Henry Russell, Resident of Hyderabad, and by other reformers, including James Mill, who gave evidence against the system of ‘subsidiary alliances’ to a parliamentary committee in 1832. Former governors—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 GovernorGeneral Lord Bentinck, took Mysore under British control, annexed Coorg and threatened the Nawab of Awadh with deposition. If anything, the blunt alternatives of ‘reform’ or relegation applied more rigorously in the decade before the Mutiny, when Dalhousie who refused to sanction princely adoption of successors and took over five Maratha states abolished pensions and titles of former rulers. In 1856, he resolved the long contest between two patrimonial systems run by nawab and resident by annexing Awadh in the name 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 was against annexation on the grounds that an idle and disaffected Indian army might revolt. 2 3 4 5 6

Munro to Wellesley, 12 Aug. 1817, in Owen, ed., A Selection, 795. Edward Thompson, The Making of the Indian Princes (Delhi, 1943), 279–81. Coen, The Indian Political Service, 13. S. R. Ashton, British Policy towards the Indian States 1905–1939 (London, 1982), 11–16. Fisher, A Clash of Cultures.

58 Indian States The Mutiny confirmed the warning, when a reactionary leadership that had lost titles and pensions in the more recently annexed states of Maratha India and Awadh found common cause with a Bengal army in rebellion. This complex and momentous set of events underscored how dangerous it was to tamper with princely India by threatening vested interests, without creating new inducements in their place. Yet, the other lesson of the Mutiny was that most 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 knighthoods—the Star of India—was instituted. In 1858 the monarch confirmed by Royal Proclamation that the ‘rights, dignity and honour of the native princes’ would be preserved within the British imperial hierarchy. If anything, these personal links to the Crown increased and were carefully exploited by princes on tour from the 1870s into the next century.7 Left with a doctrine of paramountcy that coexisted uneasily with treaty rights, the Government of India felt freer to redefine its relationship with the states. Interpretations of the basis for British authority in the states remained fluid. Only a small proportion of states still retained treaty rights from the Company by the end of the nineteenth century, and only twenty of these had received assurances their rulers were ‘sovereign’ over subjects and administration. In any case, by then, the British interpreted paramountcy not as a set of prescriptive obligations ‘but a concept of growth’ that developed and changed with circumstances.8 Constitutional pundits shied away from closer definition and looked to practice and usage.9 From the early period of conquest to the longer period of patronage and guidance after 1857, interpretation of the substance of over-rule in the states was pragmatic rather than doctrinaire. But supervision became more complex as responsibilities were shared between provincial governments and the central government. The central government’s Foreign and Political Department maintained relations either directly through residents in major states, or through political agents in Central India, Rajputana, and Baluchistan. A second category of states was supervised through provincial governments. Among these, Bombay had its own Political Department with responsibility for over thirty-five states. Provincial supervisory officers were termed commissioners or collectors, but their function was political and they, too, corresponded with the Government of India.10 One consequence of this division of advisory authority in Indian 7

8 Coen, The Indian Political Service, 52–3. Ashton, British Policy, 6. 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. 9

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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 distinction was political. For the central government, large states were an embarrassment if badly managed; and, eventually, they were seen as a possible counter-weight to Indian nationalism. For the provinces, however, states were exercises in the politics of persuasion and diplomatic management on the borders of territory run by different rules and precepts. Fundamentally, there was a deeper issue of centralization of policy towards the states or a large measure of devolution of responsibility to residents and agents. The main issues in management remained fairly constant: dynastic succession, reciprocal access to resources, and the creation (on both sides) of a cadre of useful and loyal officials to preserve patrimonial interests or to see reforms through. Although rulers were protected from annexation from 1858, lineage succession was not guaranteed, and they were exposed to deposition and formal acceptance of chosen heirs. Sometimes the succession could be managed by including relatives of the deceased in the minority administration, or ‘interregnum’, as was done in two states, Limbdi and Rajkot in 1867 with some success.12 In other states of the Punjab the Maharaja and some of the chiefs of Patiala agreed to codified succession rules and regency councils in order to avoid this hiatus. Deposition was, however, fairly rare. The most infamous case 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 honours and titles. What the Raj took away, it could restore. Doubts about ‘sovereignty’ over Mysore, taken under British management from 1834, sustained the view that the original treaty of 1799 aimed at finding a Hindu dynasty to rule on 11

12 Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes, 300. Ibid. 117. Though not on the basis of the findings of a judicial commission, but on grounds of ‘gross misgovernment’. Ashton, British Policy, 18–19. 13

60 Indian States condition of good government. From 1868, during the minority of a suitable maharaja, revenues and a civil list were administered in trust, until the ruler attained his government in 1881. There were strict conditions.14 A protocol required allegiance and subordination to the Queen Empress and support for the 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 assessment, coinage, extradition, lands for telegraph lines and railways, and jurisdiction over British subjects. Altogether, these prescriptions represented in detail the aims of the Political Department in many states, where it was not possible to revise treaties. During Lord Curzon’s viceroyalty, some fifteen rulers were either deposed or temporarily deprived of their powers. Despite this 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, when the system of graded states and rulerships had taken hold, there were still numerous cases of investigation into ‘misgovernment’, but the punishment was demotion and loss of ceremonial salutes and honours. There were compensations for such interventions. Access to financial and other resources on the part of rulers improved by removal of the risk of revolt by lesser landowning nobility. The basic premiss of giving and receiving tribute as a formal acknowledgement of patrimonial power did not disappear, though it was open to reinterpretation and definition. In wide areas of British India, as in the states, the idea of kingship resisted prescription, as effective rulers sought new techniques to protect their authority and control. The Hindu prince may or may not have regarded himself as a ‘god incarnate’; but he was, in Indian terms possessed of izzat, or prestige, and an inner source of power. Indian states were still largely patrimonial in terms of centralized authority. There was close mutual support, for example, between maharajas and Sikh leadership in Patiala, a form of religious and secular clientage much approved by the British.15 Whatever the religious basis for a ruler’s status, in secular terms preservation of a dynasty’s prestige through defence of privilege and through government from the darbar as an administrative court was a central issue between ruler and British overseers.16 14

‘Instrument of Transfer’, 1881, in Aitchison, ed., A Collection of Treaties, ix. 232. Barbara N. Ramusack, ‘Punjab States: Maharajas and Gurdwaras: Patiala and the Sikh Community’, in Robin Jeffrey, ed., People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the Indian Princely States (Delhi, 1978), 170–204. For a case study exemplifying this theme in Tamil 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 15

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At lower levels of state administration, therefore, the weight of past history was important. Relations between rulers, their nobility, and the British presented a delicate and complex set of variables in which the overriding tendency was to support princes’ claims to tribute from subordinate landowners. Exceptionally, in Bikaner state in 1871, the nobility took refuge in British territory to avoid the maharaja’s taxes and remained in open rebellion, until arbitration settled their case. More usually, chiefs were upheld in terms of a patrimonial system. It required a keen sense of history to carry such mediation through, especially where ties of fealty had dissolved, because nobles no longer had a military role. Copland cites examples from Cutch, where arbitration supported chiefs against subordinate nobles by giving them unlimited legal jurisdiction over local landowners.17 The India Office took the view that this settlement undermined historic bonds with chiefs of neighbouring Kathiawar. Accordingly, the Office inspired a scheme in 1870 for arbitration through a court of chiefs meeting under a British president. By such mechanisms, where nobles were not represented, ties of fealty were reinvented with a line of power passing through British agents to support paramounts who were elevated in status, classified into grades and protected in their honours, lands, and freedom from military revolt. Agency police dealt with any disorders and were paid for by the darbars. Many of the minor tributaries in Central India passed through a similar confirmation of their dependency as guaranteed or ‘mediatized’ chiefdoms. In Gwalior Residency, seven small chiefdoms paid tribute to Maharaja Sindia in this way.18 Within Indore Residency, some thirty-one mediatized chiefs and minor rajas had agreements laying down the amounts of their tribute to the Holkar and Sindia rulers. On the other hand, the Rajput Agency rulers retained tribute formerly paid to the Marathas. But arbitration was not always successful. Long-standing tensions between the Maharani of Mewar, holders of jagirs (revenue lands) and lower orders of peasantry were only partially relieved by codes of rules and boundary surveys.19 The Maharaja of Jaipur took the process further by claiming ‘historic’ powers to vary nobles’ tribute assessments and reduce their local jurisdictions. In the 1930s, he used a British official to uncover reasons for enforcing this lower level dependency.20 Gradually, therefore, many darbars won wider Rule: State-Hinterland Relations in Pre-Industrial India (Oxford, 1971); see, too, for a case study 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. Aitchison, ed., A Collection of Treaties, iv. 3–7. 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 personal power 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. 18 19

62 Indian States powers in relations with feudatories and jagirdars. Kolhapur Darbar retrieved a right of appeal in criminal jurisdiction in 1903. Gwalior ‘guaranteed’ feudatories who lost protection by the Government of India. The change has been noted as one of the reasons for greater confidence among the princes by the 1920s.21 Confirmation of tribute was only one aspect of larger changes in bargaining for 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 million annually. It needs stating, however, that the amount of tribute paid to central government after the end of the century hardly amounted to more than 1 per cent of ordinary gross revenues; and it decreased to half that proportion in the 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 manufacture of salt and opium in some states. From 1875, Hyderabad arranged a special salt agreement to keep this item out of British territory. An opium agreement in 1883 prohibited cultivation and manufacture for the benefit of imports from Indore state, although Hyderabad made considerable revenue from duties. In the same year, the nizam started a State Railway Company, regulated by agreement with the Government of India. Valuable coal and gold concessions were leased to the Hyderabad (Deccan) Company Limited in 1886, after a scandal concerning shares purchased by the nizam’s secretary had been sorted out in court. These examples were followed in other states where most had railway agreements with the Raj by the end of the century, raising loans in return for ceding jurisdiction within cantonments. Mysore state went further, from 1902, into mining, water supply, and electricity development in cooperation with Madras. In addition to concession of lands for roads and railways, Maharaja Sindia of Gwalior made a loan of 150 lakhs to the Raj for infrastructure in the 1880s and a much larger loan of 3.5 crores of rupees (£3 million) in 1887. Smaller states within the Central India Agency were also in receipt of repayments for interest, salt compensation, loss of past tribute.23 In Jodhpur and Jaipur states the central government took a lease on locally manufactured salt in 1879 for £125,000 a year, plus transit duties. In Rajputana, however, the biggest change may have been in revenue accounts that separated private estate management by nobles and rulers from public funding. The idea that privy purses should only be a small proportion of state revenue spread, even as personal government continued to exist.24 On the 21

Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes, 167. 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 agreements with chiefs of Indore. 24 Rudolph and Rudolph, ‘Rajputana’, 142, 148. 22

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other hand, some small states in Gujarat had to be taken over as bankrupts to manage their debts in 1907. Like the early cases of Awadh and Kathiawar, the aim was solvency and appropriation of sufficient revenue to pay tribute and dues. This may explain the leniency with which a currency Act of 1876 was applied, allowing many states to operate their own mints and strike their own coinage. One other resource to be tapped was manpower. A revived Imperial Service scheme that had begun in 1885 allowed some princes to upgrade their troops to Indian Army standards. But in the absence of detailed studies of state finances, it would be unwise to make judgements about general solvency, state wealth, or poverty. For Mysore we do have a good account of internal development and it is exceptional. States enjoyed a great deal of financial autonomy, compared with their situation before 1857; and that point had a bearing on attitudes to constitutional and political change after 1918. British supervision of state resources, therefore, was limited, unless there were contractual agreements for concessions or infiltration of court government through Indian officials. The complexity of darbari government in the latter half of the nineteenth century weakened the executive authority of rulers who failed to keep up with the demands of financial management and strengthened the service gentry. Among these, the authority of the dewan could be enormous, unless a mere court favourite and not a man of literacy and capacity. Outstanding examples earned British admiration and carried through their policies of financial rectitude. For, within the court, access to resources was a key to personal power, ‘depending on how well the incumbent availed himself of the opportunities for peculation which abounded in the patrimonial 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 castefollowers. Approval of a ruler’s appointments was a fair guide to the quality of relations with agents of the Raj and an indication of a political officer’s supervision. Following the Mutiny, administration of the state of Gwalior was conducted through a minister, Dinkar Rao, as a trusted client of the political agent. When Maharaja Sindia asserted himself sufficiently to install his own ministers and dewans, they were approved and honoured by the Raj for their services. Other rulers were backed up from unexpected quarters. When, in 1876, the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar dismissed his dewan and replaced him with a man out of favour with the Kathiawar Agency, the Home Government allowed 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 introduced a language qualification that helped promote Hindu, rather than 25

Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes 30.

26

Ibid. 132.

64 Indian States Urdu-speakers.27 A strong dewani administration emerged in Hyderabad, independent of the nizam, and kept in power a layer of older Mughal nobility as a check to Parsis, Hindus, and Muslims recruited by the dewan from outside the state. Thus, Dewan Salar Jung was able for forty years to play off factions 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 of Baroda was restored, the Political Department brought in Sir T. Madhava Rao as dewan from Indore state. The young ruler was placed in the hands of an English tutor, F. A. H. Elliot, who competed for influence with the dewan, until both were removed and dewans again ran the state government till 1944. In Hyderabad, Sir Salar Jung presided over a Council of Regency until his death in 1883. When the new nizam came of age he was invested by the viceroy, 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 of Salar Jungs, educated in the nizam’s school and at Eton, continued to serve. In general, then, British influence through Indian ministers was widespread. Court officials at the highest level were favoured for literacy and ease of communication and as a foil against autocratic rulers. ‘As a result many darbari officials came to depend for their livelihood on the patronage of the imperial authorities.’29 Where the darbar was split between factions, as in the case of Junagadh state after 1900, the nawab played off their leaders against each other, until one court official curried favour and recognition from a former governor to give an impression of higher patronage. In Mysore such factionalism was not easily resolved. Three maharajas over the period 1881–1947 saw off eleven dewans (five of whom were knighted for services). The fundamental division in the court politics of this state was between officials 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 on their officials. The agencies and residencies, too, became more bureaucratic, as measured by the sheer volume of paper communicated in English and in the 27

Edward S. Haynes, ‘Alwar: Bureaucracy versus Traditional Rulership: Raja, Jagirdars, and New 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 development in wartime; and he fell foul of the non-Brahmin political movement based on Madras.

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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 same time, there was a trend towards administrative prescription through the issue of enormous volumes on political practice in the states and manuals of departmental procedures. Residents and agents were moved more frequently between posts, diminishing some of the influence of long-tenured brokers, in favour of court officials. To a great extent, the system of supervision began to ossify at the end of the century. Something emerged called ‘Indian Political Law’—‘a strange mixture of contract, usage, interpretation and legislation’.32 In essence, this codification was an attempt to find a legal basis for the patrimonial practices taken over by Company and Raj. Doubts arose as to how far Acts could be applied in smaller states, where there were no treaties, to deal with opium manufacture, for example, without consent of the inhabitants. Appeal was made to Foreign Jurisdiction Acts; and in 1879 a version of these was applied to areas outside British India where the Governor-General in Council was deemed to have power and jurisdiction acquired by ‘usage and sufferance’. By Order-in-Council provincial governors were accorded similar powers in 1902. Despite such legalism, Sir William Lee-Warner, a keen observer of princely states, perceived in each one of them ‘a political community’ at the outset of his own long and very legalistic argument for regarding them as ‘semi-sovereignties’.33 Possibly his initial definition was closer to the structure of a ‘native state’, with its own hierarchy, factions, loyalties, and defections that were at variance with administrative practices taught by the Raj. Application of a very limited jurisdiction and methods of financial audit, to what were historical survivals, therefore, can be regarded as papering over the widening political differences between princely states and British India, where the issue of political representation at local government and provincial levels posed questions that could not be resolved by prescriptive regulation. More importantly, as the Raj faced the huge political problem of reform and representation 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 the Raj and away from supervision by provinces whose governments were to be given a large measure of political responsibility. From 1924, new states agencies directly under central government took over from local governments. Political officers were now part of an Indian Political Service. Nevertheless, by the second decade of the new century the status of princes had improved, at least in British eyes, however much administration in their states had come to be dominated by cliques of officials. This change is sometimes attributed to the more liberal views of Harcourt Butler, as head of 31 32

Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes, 199, table 5.1. 33 Ibid. 211. Lee-Warner, The Protected Princes of India, 30.

66 Indian States

M ap 2. India, States and Provinces, early twentieth century, after The Imperial Gazetteer of India, xvi (Delhi and Edinburgh Geographical Institute, 1931)

India’s Foreign Department, and his patron, the Viceroy Lord Minto. Both favoured the states’ ‘simpler executive form of government’, compared with the ‘scientific system’ [sic] of British India.34 ‘Conservation’ and ‘noninterference’ became the watchwords from about 1910. There was a break with the past. Isolation certainly ended with periodic conferences from 1913, though not all princes welcomed meeting in conclave with others they regarded as inferior in standing. Some were, by then, better educated and more outward-looking. 34 Ashton, British Policy towards the Indian States, 42–4; and for limits to central government control, McLeod, Sovereignty, 69–70.

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Princes had their own agendas. These were narrowly defined in opposition to the growth of ‘political law’ that enmeshed them (as they saw it) in arbitrary interference. Those who had treaties wished to see them reaffirmed as a basis for patrimonialism. In 1919 they won a right of appeal through a viceroy’s commission against removal or dismissal. As Indian politicians and press showed less respect for princes, the Raj hastened to shield them from criticism by a Protection Act in 1922. Such victories were important, but small, in the scale of pending constitutional changes. The princes gave little thought to reforming representation in the variety of state councils and assemblies that they had learned to manage since the 1890s. Rather, they turned to their own ‘trades union’ in the Chamber of Princes, encouraged by the collapse of the non-cooperation movement begun by Congress and by a short period of prosperity and rising revenue from customs and railways. They were optimistic, therefore, about using a new viceroy, Lord Irwin, for their own ends and generally welcomed the Indian States Committee set up under Butler in 1927 to examine their relations with central government.35 Publication of the committee’s report two years later illustrated how far the status of princes was an ambiguous factor in the Raj’s overall responsibilities for a measure of political advancement. Old treaty rights were not enough. The committee admitted that action would not necessarily be taken to protect rulers against popular opposition. Faced with the more arduous task of containing Indian nationalism, the patron power was having second thoughts. True, there was much reinvention of ‘Indian India’ in the Butler report as an example of Hindu ‘traditional’ political organization. The states, however, were really on trial; and protection of the princely ‘Order’ by the Political Department was conditional on finding a place for the states in more general constitutional reform. For the moment, it was conceded that princes’ relations were primarily with the Crown and that paramountcy would not be transferred to new Indian governments without consent. Behind these bland assurances lay a realization there was a new dispensation in the making, though its advent could not be predicted. Some day the Political Department would be taken over. There was a sharp division of views about the consequences of such a takeover. For some officials the states were distinct, politically and administratively, from the provinces and could not join any all-India federation. On the 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 a keen sense of the dangers of endlessly antagonizing the more forthright nationalists, favoured a ‘united’ India. Irwin, therefore, set in motion a series of round 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 India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917–1947 (Cambridge, 1997), 65–71.

68 Indian States that compromises were possible. In the end, most did not agree to join any allIndia federation, though about half of those princes who replied to the viceroy’s offer of seats in an upper house in 1939 were in favour. This would have meant doing battle with Congress during the last phase of nationalist protest; and there was no sign princes had any stomach for such a political fight. On economic grounds, as outline plans for settlement of states’ balances demonstrated, there was little to be gained, either, for the eleven states considered important enough to deserve seats.36 The opinions of historians are also divided on whether it was possible for a set of the largest states to sustain a constitutional identity of their own within an 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, such as Nehru, who viewed them as an anachronism. No ruler wanted to share power with elected politicians; and few ministers would have stayed in office. Even Mysore, in the vanguard of expanded representation, baulked at responsible government through popular sovereignty. On the other hand, Ian Copland has made a case for a less predetermined outcome, blaming the Labour government and its viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, for not taking a firmer line, 1945–6, to defend the treaty rights of the states.38 It is a difficult argument to sustain from international law. What sort of status did treaties, never formally approved by Parliament or by Order-in-Council, have a century later? For nineteenth-century law officers they were, at best, second-class agreements. For twentieth-century officials they held no unbreakable promises and, in any case, did not apply to all the states. In studies of particular states the outcome was less straightforward. From 1911, when the Nizam of Hyderabad took over the running of the state, ceding little to political representation, cultural nationalism merged with a Deccani nationalism and a concept of regional Muslim sovereignty.39 Such a concept existed in tension with local political organizations formed in Hyderabad districts and in touch with politicians who pressed for responsible government within the state. Eventually, the politics of communal opposition would take over, leaving no room for compromise. In Patiala, however, the maharajas who acted as patrons to Sikh religious communities succeeded in maintaining this accommodation through the early years of partition and independence; 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 36

Copland, The Princes of India, 119; McLeod, Sovereignty, 47. 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 40 Leonard, ‘Hyderabad’, 105–6. Ramusack, ‘Punjab States’, 204. 37

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action inspired by Congress in the 1930s, lays emphasis on internal divisions between Brahmins ‘dependent on the court for trade and other patronage’ and literate groups based on local committees. But when these states rejected federation, local committees stayed their hand; and by the time Rajputana’s twenty-two states admitted popular representation, they were amalgamated peacefully into Rajasthan.41 On the other hand, Mysore, where there was increased elite political participation in government from about 1912, illustrated how little danger there was of its ruler facing serious opposition from representative institutions. If anything, his status increased and his personal power flowed downwards through 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 economic Mysorean ‘nationalism’, opposed to external merchants and immigrant workers. There was no sympathy in Congress, however, for the ‘Mysore model’ of industrial progress. It is for this reason, too, that Mysore’s separatism (the state kept out of the Chamber of Princes) was important for lack of political party formation among the princely states. Lines of patronage from rulers, rather than party leaders prevailed. But Congress, after 1947, continued to control local distribution of development resources through a Mysore nobility, through a ‘patronage structure’ reaching down to local development boards and village panchayats.43 Elsewhere, too, it was very difficult for Congress to penetrate the politics of a state before independence. This is well illustrated by Gandhi’s failure to prevail in a trial of strength with the Thakore of Rajkot, 1938–9.44 In the end, the policies of Mountbatten, not the Political Department, carried the day.45 The fate of Indian princes was left to Congress and ministerial implementation of promises made in the Instrument of Accession in 1947 to respect rulers’ administration, except for defence, foreign affairs, and communications. These were easy to break, on the grounds they could not be made to work. Threats and blackmail brought the princes to capitulation and no constitutional alternatives were offered. Most states resisted until the end and were dismantled, rather than reformed or included constitutionally into the new federal India. Historically, their case is instructive for the perils of encouraging ‘traditional’ status in isolation. Princes were permitted to enjoy a greater measure of autonomy in the 1920s and 1930s, encouraging resistance to political 41

Rudolph and Rudolph, ‘Rajputana’, 138–41. 43 Hettne, The Political Economy of Indirect Rule, 202–367. Ibid. 336. 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. 42 44

70 Indian States 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 political base from within the states to contest local elections through a widened franchise. They refused to join in an all-India federation; and by the time that the Muslim League held out for Pakistan from January 1947, the imperial patron had gone. It may well be that the states’ service gentry and dewans did not have local roots and could not adapt their roles towards fashioning political machines headed by rulers.46 This begs a number of questions about finance and experience in running elected local government councils. There is little reason to think that dewans could assist in forming patron parties, when princes showed little enthusiasm for legislative reform or concessions to federalism. Within darbari government, if the traditional patrons did not assert themselves (and many did not against their ministers) such parties did not emerge. In their absence the idea of princes as a ‘counterweight’ to Congress found no political organization within and between states. The states, however, were not simply surrogates for British power in reserve, symbols of autocracy imported into India. They were also products of Indian social and political organization, difficult to reconcile with economic and political change envisaged by nationalists in the twentieth century, and indeed, by some of the princes themselves or their ministers. Contrary to some views, there was no ‘contract’ between Crown and princes. There were prescriptions and protocols, but the basis of the relationship, before and after military conquest, was for mutual advantage between unequal partners. The only way the princely clients might have dissolved the arrangement would have been to construct bridges with Congress. For the British, when there were no further advantages to be had for a retreating power, dissolution of the long and chequered alliances was the most likely outcome. Patrimonialism left its own legacy. There are now sufficient studies to suggest that the politics of patronage were firmly entrenched in Indian society and continued after 1947. The administrative divide between British India and the princes was not hard and fast. Experienced administrators occasionally transferred between the Indian Civil Service and the Indian Political Service. Within the district administration under the ICS, collectors often drew support from zamindars and a landed class; and if these were loyal ‘they were rewarded with honours, invitations to official functions, and other favours in the power of the Collector to dispense, such as tax concessions, and jobs for relatives and friends’.47 Earlier residents and political officers would have been familiar with such bargains. So, studies of ‘clientelism’ have a certain continuity, recognizing that much in the relationship between resident or po46 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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litical agents and the rulers was based on a mutual search for reciprocal benefits—dynastic support for a monopoly of access to ‘subsidies’, trade, and troops—summed up as ‘the political economy of honour’. Even such an instrumental compromise was not without close personal friendships and useful advice. But though undoubtedly many Rulers in their heart of hearts resented the whole set up of paramountcy to an extent which made them look upon their Political Agent as their opponent, 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 arises between a Head of State and a foreign ambassador, existed between a Ruler and his P[olitical] A[dviser]. Again and again a Ruler would ask his P.A. privately for advice on some grave matter like federal negotiations, and it was a tribute to the service that the Rulers, as a whole, trusted the word of their P.A.s and, even when the matter at issue 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 patrimonial regimes. Were methods arrived at for isolating and dealing with a multitude of local hierarchies studied and applied elsewhere? Any answer has to take into account emergent forms of administration in British imperial possessions in conditions of imperial rebellion, global warfare, industrial and commercial expansion, from the last quarter of the eighteenth century to the transfer of responsibility in India from Company to Crown. The whole of that turbulent period saw the loss of one set of settler colonies and the retention of others, soon to be augmented by annexation and settlement in Australia, New Zealand, the Cape of Good Hope, and Natal. Over the same period, there was both expansion of autocratic power in Company possessions in India, as well as experience of ‘dual administration’ and utilization of provincial hierarchies in states covering about a third of the subcontinent. At the imperial centre coordinated policy-making through secretaries of state common to the Home Office, the War Office, Trade and Plantations and the Board of Control gave a certain cohesion to British commercial and wartime strategies. But the major lesson applied abroad to the government of imperial remnants and new acquisitions, especially in colonies where foreign or indigenous populations predominated, was adaptation of an autocratic chain of command to a measure of respect for local customs and leadership. Both in Quebec and Ceylon in 1791 and 1801 the despotism of Crown Colony government was tempered by representative institutions in the one case and by 48 Coen, The Indian Political Service, 76; and for clientage in India, Mitra, Power, Protest and Participation, 90, 216–19; and for a close analysis of patron–client relations behind ‘indirect rule’ in the case of Pudukkottai state in Madras, Nicholas B. Dirk, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge, 1987), pp. xxv, 331, 349. Dirk’s useful phrase ‘the political economy of honour’ denotes the share out of revenues between princes and subordinate chiefs on the basis of loyalty and efficiency, rather than a Civil List.

72 Indian States separation from the over-rule of Madras in the other. Slowly it was learned that in the new Asiatic empire: ‘the art of ruling native races is a thing of infinite variety not amenable to standardisation’.49 Consequently, a historical example of infiltration and control by an imperial trading company in the internal politics of Indian states provides a grand scenario of progression to over-rule through a mix of conquest and alliance, commercial subversion and financial extortion. But it does not provide a historical template for methods applied later in other parts of Asia, in Africa, or in the Pacific. The main reason is that other hierarchies were not themselves replicas of Indian states. There was a considerable difference in the scale of the Company’s financial and military commitment to alliance, investment, and administration, compared with piecemeal ventures in trade and conquest in Africa, Southeast Asia, or the Pacific The creation of a viceregal government responsible through a secretary of state in the India Office to Parliament from 1858 demarcated the British imperial experience in India from other responsibilities handled by the Colonial Office or the Foreign Office. There were no parallels elsewhere with subcontinental dominion over populations that amounted to some 70 per cent of the late Victorian empire’s four hundred millions. There were certainly Indian influences on other parts of that empire in terms of strategic communications to be safeguarded in the Near 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 a reciprocal influence on Indian politics, as leaders of Congress and the nationalist movement aimed at internal self-government and Dominion status in the early twentieth century. But it is unwise to look to British experience in India for guidelines in such a disaggregated collection of dependencies and spheres of influence, as the cases discussed below.

summary Early English contact with India was through the chartered East India Company. From the early seventeenth century Company factors were highly dependent on the patronage of Mughal authorities for the privileges of trade and settlement in restricted enclaves at Surat, Bombay, Madras, and on the lower Hugli River in Bengal. The insecurity of Company factories was compensated by access to imperial licences granting relief from tolls and duties, by the services of Indian brokers, merchants, and bankers, and by participation in the local and regional commerce of India. In the early eighteenth century, as the central authority of the Mughal patrimonial empire declined, political 49 Vincent Harlow, ‘The New Imperial System, 1783–1815’, in CHBE, ii. The Growth of the New Empire 1783–1870 (Cambridge, 1940), 131–87, 165.

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relations with the princes of successor states turned on the potential for assistance from a maritime power and the drain on local revenue arising from fiscal and trade concessions by official and private factors. The Company could be supportive or subversive. The fortification of some posts and a measure of local protection and jurisdiction created, moreover, beneficiaries among Indian service gentry. By development of trading operations the Company enlisted clients of its own and, at the same time, created a potential cause of local conflict by abuse of privilege in Bengal. In addition, the status of the Company as a mercantile power and a factor in regional politics was further advanced by open conflict with French commercial and military interests the 1740s and 1750s in the context of international wars, succession politics in south India and local rivalries between Indian states. The struggle for political influence, revenue, and manpower to defend established enclaves was fought out against the French in the Carnatic and Hyderabad state in southern and central India. Both sides competed ‘according to the Asiatic manner’, as clients to powerful patron-princes and with minor clients and allies of their own. By the 1750s, the strain on the finances of a chartered company that became a national institution increased its vulnerability to debt, disruption of trade, and diversion of profits from investment into the hands of its own employees. Financial crisis became a political crisis between the Company and the government of the Nawab of Bengal and committed the maritime agency to 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 the defence of its base in Calcutta against the Bengal governor, Nawab Siraj-uddaula, 1756–7, in ways that set a precedent for compensation and employment of resident agents at the Bengal capital of Murshidabad. Over the following half-century the maritime agency became a land power on the subcontinent. Parallel with the advancement of the Company’s commercial and fiscal aims in its Bengal ‘bridgehead’, the Calcutta Presidency and the other two presidencies of Madras and Bombay interacted with neighbouring states in ways that sometimes resulted in the subordination of their Muslim or Hindu rulers and at other times resulted in uneasy cooperation. Such relationships were never static, as treaties defining commercial privilege, payment for troops, debt recovery were made and broken. At the same time, assignments of territory by states to each other and to the Company increased in ways that reshaped internal boundaries and demarcated territories under Company control and influence. From the mid-eighteenth century India was being imperially partitioned. The Company’s actions in Bengal also taught its Calcutta administration much about the use of clientage to build up a network of Hindu officials and manage land revenue and tribute. Further defence of this interest against a coalition headed by the Nawabs of Bengal, Awadh, and Emperor Shah Alam,

74 Indian States changed the regional balance of power in northern India at Buxar in 1764 by extending the policy of alliance and indemnity into the upper Ganges. As the Company’s hold over its client state in Bengal tightened through the Mughal Emperor’s transfer of state finances and external relations, the Calcutta Council 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 powersharing with the Bengal nawab until 1766 was followed by exclusion of the ruler and changes in the structure of Company rule under a governor-general. Gradually, official reformers separated trade from administration, extended the 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, the Carnatic, the Maratha Deccan, and the states of south India to secure political influence and access to resources for Madras, Bombay, and Surat. Awadh was successfully infiltrated financially and commercially by resident agents who used ministers and court factions to create a client state with a controlled line of succession and transfer of land revenue by the 1790s. The Company’s agents had less success in influencing the chieftains of the ‘confederation’ of Maratha states dominating central India. At most, treaty-making in 1776 and 1782 secured support for its objectives in southern India. There, the Madras Presidency 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 complex pattern of backing allies and defeating enemies had secured Mysore, Travancore, Malabar, and the Coromandel and effectively repartitioned territories between the Company, the Marathas, and Hyderabad. The practice of stationing Company troops in return for tribute was well entrenched. Recovery of debts from subordinate princes resembled a gigantic protection racket in the minor principalities, where rulers were guaranteed subordinate status at a price. When the major ruling houses of the Maratha chiefdoms refused to pay that price at the end of the eighteenth century, military campaigns and treaties dismantled one empire in central India and replaced it with a Company paramountcy that left most of the rulers in Maharashtra and the Punjab with fragmented domains and subordinate status under a new dispensation. Defining the terms of that paramountcy over some six hundred major and minor states in a good third of India occupied the central and provincial governments 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 bulk of the states outside the jurisdiction and administrative methods of British

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India. Precedents set under the Company, rather than prescriptive regulations, influenced the role of political officers as envoys, agents, and advisers to maharajas and chieftains of client states. In practice they were brokers for more distant patrons located in the executive of regional agencies, the Foreign and Political Department and in the Viceroy’s Council. The basis for a ruler’s survival was straightforward enough: in return for recognition of status and territory, internal sources of revenue, lineal succession and an autonomous court, and the exclusion of alien jurisdiction over Indian subjects, the patronpower controlled foreign relations and supervised the good conduct of internal affairs. Some states had treaties to this effect; most did not. A few were effectively subsumed for greater or shorter periods into more formal British administration under commissioners. But most survived into the early period of India’s independence as historical anomalies alongside an increasingly selfgoverning set of regional states. The methods of supervision through political officers included timehonoured creation of a network of clients of the resident, especially if the services of a finance minister could be secured. Succession disputes provided another entry point for influence and a measure of control during minorities. A very large number of arbitrations were concerned with the tributary relations of former vassal communities and the degree to which they could be regarded as clients of the Raj. Some states continued to pay tribute until the end of the Company period and yielded other resources in terms of loans, rents, territory, railway, and mineral concessions. As in all patron–client relations there were disputes, bargaining for advantage, willing loyalty, and sullen opposition. Some rulers were deposed. But for most rulers, especially in the larger states, imperial honours, tours abroad, and a measure of improvement in the internal administration of patrimonial courts secured their status within the imperial hierarchy, free from the challenge of nationalist politics at local 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 of rulers promoted mutual self-interest, but did not inspire a common political programme on treaty rights or reform of state councils and assemblies. From about 1927 there was less certainty that official patronage for princes would defend 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 divided on whether the princes might have won, or even deserved, a constitutional role in the face of Congress hostility. In the end, the states were among the 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 form of deference to elite status and the politics of patronage. That legacy was

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

Part II

North Africa

5 Egypt and Sudan In North Africa assertion of imperial strategic and commercial interests by European Powers led to the co-option and conquest of Islamic states. The Khedivate of Egypt and the Sultanate of Zanzibar were also entry points to the Upper Nile and East-Central Africa. For the British, moreover, Zanzibar was a political agency of the Bombay Presidency, transferred to the Government of India in 1872; and Egypt, after occupation in 1882, was influenced by men who saw in the decline of the Ottoman Empire an older parallel with the provinces of the Mughals. Morocco, however, escaped Turkish domination at any period before France, late in the nineteenth century, took a commercial and strategic interest in the management of Moroccan government as a reinforcement for imperial power in the Maghreb and naval power on the north-west coast of Africa. For contrasting reasons Egypt and Morocco are prime examples of patrimonial clientage. The first, because of the ways in which foreign powers took over debt-servicing before the British occupation, and then used the khedive’s Civil List to construct a new patronage network of civil and military appointments. The second, because the sultan’s headship of Morocco’s civil and military elite survived French construction of a parallel government under a protectorate. There are differences in chronology and in the historical circumstances that created these two imperial hierarchies, not least, the diplomatic complications surrounding the occupation of Egypt as a province of the Ottoman Empire. In the end, too, the Moroccan dynasty revived politically in the post-colonial period, while the King of Egypt was overthrown by a military coup in 1952. It is not intended here to pursue the comparison in historical terms throughout the half-century of French and British over-rule. Rather, the structures of two patrimonial systems utilized by foreigners will be 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 motivations during the extended crisis over Egyptian finances from the 1860s, internal administration under the Khedivate has been treated as a source of weakness and corruption, rather than a structure exploited by foreign 1

For application of the term ‘indirect rule’ to Egypt and Morocco, see Francis Robinson, ‘The British Empire and the Muslim World’, OHBE, iv. The Twentieth Century, ed. Judith Brown and Wm. Roger Louis (Oxford, 1999), 407–8; C. C. Stewart, ‘Islam’, in CHA, vii. From 1920 to 1942, ed. A. D. Roberts (Cambridge, 1986), 202.

80 North Africa controllers.2 Contemporaries were equally concerned with safeguarding their interests through internal reforms to end what some considered an ‘oriental despotism’, in anticipation of the benefits of European governmental models. The Foreign Office and its agents in Constantinople and Cairo regarded Egypt as a tributary pashalik of the Ottoman Empire, which had considerable commercial and financial autonomy from 1867 with a recognized dynasty, raised to the status of a khedivate. After 1867, Egypt was still tributary to Constantinople, but its Turkish (‘Circassian’) rulers and notables operated the state as a tax farm, while Khedive Ismail borrowed heavily to invest in public works, companies, and agriculture. Revenues from land tax did not keep pace with expenditure and debt-servicing. By 1876, Egypt was officially bankrupt.3 Schemes devised by foreign creditors to ensure interest payments and borrow more on the security of land revenue overestimated the yield from taxes in a society where the richest landowners were unwilling to bear heavier burdens. Egypt, like Turkey, became a mediatized state, first, by establishment of an international Caisse to manage a proportion of revenue directed towards debt repayment under two British and French controllersgeneral, and, second, by management and reform of landholding as a security for loans and by changes in the incidence of taxation. Diplomatic pressure in 1878 insisted on two European officials in the Khedive’s Council to oversee these measures and run the ministries of Finance and Public Works. There was more to intervention, however, than a search for financial probity. Whenever reform of finances encountered internal opposition, diplomatic reaction put the blame on the ‘autocracy’ of Khedive Ismail. From the reports of the British controller, Stephen Cave, it is clear that khedival obstinacy or incompetence was not the central factor. The period 1876–9 saw a struggle between foreign supervisors and the khedive for control over patronage within the ministries of state and especially the Ministry of Finance. The contest of wills had something in common with the efforts of residents in Indian 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 saw that intervention to control the Civil List called in question a whole patrimonial system stemming from the khedive’s entourage and family. Government appointments secured loyalties: ‘from the Pashas downwards every office is a tenancy at will’ kept by intrigue and used to control subordinate layers of employment.4 2

For the debate on motives, A. G. Hopkins, ‘The Victorians and Africa: A Reconsideration of the Occupation of Egypt, 1882’, JAH 27 (1986), 363–91; Alaf Lufti al-Sayyid-Marsot, ‘The British 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: Reports and 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.

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When an international commission of enquiry was set up by the financial controllers in 1878, it soon discovered how the chain of government and personal patronage subverted Egyptian revenue collection and distorted methods of raising short-term loans at every level from village sheikh to provincial governor to minister.5 The lack of reciprocity between a grasping Khedivate and 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 was underfunded and officers on half-pay; provinces were subjected to forced levies; ministers raided the endowments of religious institutions. The commission insisted on tackling patronage at the top by withdrawing the administration of Crown lands from the khedive and requiring the cession of some of his family lands as a basis for further credit; equalization of land taxes was advocated to end privileged exemptions by landowning notables; and management of the khedive’s Civil List was placed under the foreign-controlled Ministry of Finance. Khedive Ismail accepted the commission’s report and authorized his prime minister, Nubar Pasha, to form a new ministry that included Sir Rivers Wilson and the Comte De Blignières to run Finance and Public Works from November 1878. But he did not accept attempts to exclude him from the Council of Ministers; and opinions were divided among European agents on whether he was an obstacle to further reforms or essential to the cohesion of the Egyptian government. That government, moreover, was increasingly at risk from aggrieved notables faced with equalization of land taxes, from sheikhs and peasantry who would bear the brunt of increased taxation, and from army officers without salaries. A short-lived army mutiny in Cairo in February 1879 brought about the resignation of Nubar Pasha and indicated that the Khedivate required outside support as much as internal reform. One explanation of events in 1879 is that Ismail planned to head off foreign advice by installing a ‘parliament’ (chamber of notables) to demonstrate loyalty and allow taxation as usual to meet all debts. The charade did not work; and the money was not raised. In the meantime, the composition and presidency 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 presented his own financial plan, in opposition to that of the commission of 1878. He appointed Cherif Pasha to head a new Council, composed of those who 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 a Civil List. 5

Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt, 2 vols. (London, 1908), i, chap. 4.

6

Ibid., ii. 110–48.

82 North Africa The response of the European powers was to demand reinstatement of their ministers in the government, which the khedive refused; and for this he was deposed and replaced by Tawfiq in June 1879 through formal intervention by the Ottoman sultan. Tawfiq kept the Council of Ministers under his own presidency and called in Riaz Pasha as prime minister. The sultan had to be pressured to allow a return to a measure of Egyptian autonomy, but the khedive’s right to contract loans was not restored. Baring and De Blignières were appointed once more as controllers in a system of joint Anglo-French supervision. A Commission of Liquidation consolidated the Egyptian debt in July 1880, maintaining repayment as a heavy charge on the state, but providing some relief for cultivators. The consolidation of land taxes was formally instituted, thus ending the tax privileges of notables. With a form of control established through the Law of Liquidation, the process 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 controllers and appointment of lesser officials as revenue collectors: ‘England has the principal share in regard to the Heads of Departments, the Port of Alexandria, the Customs, Post Office and Lighthouses being administered by Englishmen, while the Octroi [municipal tax] is under a Frenchman.’7 In short, Europeans displaced ‘the old Turkish party’ and dismissed Egyptians from the lower levels of Customs. The second result was a political shift in power from the Khedivate to foreign officials at the level of European ministers and the consuls-general. The shift increased dependency on outside support and left the khedive more vulnerable to opposition from status groups centred 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 resignation 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. At most, France and Britain tolerated the dispatch of Turkish representatives. Urabi agreed to move his troops from Cairo to Suez. Britain and France sent a few vessels to Alexandria and withdrew them when the Turkish envoys left in October 1881. The episode revealed once again the difficulty of using the khedive as a client, when he was formally subordinate to the sultan. Of two methods of external control, the French were in favour of an Anglo-French occupation by this date, while the British preferred a Turkish occupation, if restricted by prior agreements with the Porte—which was firmly rejected by France. 7 Tenterden, 10 Oct. 1881, British Documents, ix. 22; Currie, ‘Memorandum’, 17 Sept. 1881, 22–5.

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Internally, Cherif Pasha favoured using the Chamber of Notables and keeping it detached from the army and other sources of Egyptian discontent with foreign influence. The colonels, however, drew on the power of popular acclaim, and Urabi was appointed under-secretary for war, in January 1882, to keep him under government scrutiny. With Léon Gambetta briefly in power in France, there was more incentive for backing up Tawfiq by controllers, though Sir Auckland Colvin, as a controller-general, thought that manifestations of ‘nationalism’ were more anti-Turk than anti-European. The main risk was that any extension of financial powers to the Chamber that claimed the right to vote a budget would impinge on financial control under the Law of Liquidation. A British and French Joint Note, therefore, sent through 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 increase in the military budget. The Chamber pressed for overthrow of the ministry and for a ‘national’ government; and delegates succeeded in naming new ministers, including Urabi as minister for war. Again, the khedive and Cherif Pasha considered asking for Turkish intervention, to prop up one crumbling patrimonial regime by another. In the political confusion that followed the formation of a ministry under Urabi, February–May 1882, the powers of the controllers were reduced to nothing. Administration of the provinces broke down. At this period of resignations and reinstatements, official opinion in London and Paris moved towards dispatch of a joint squadron to back the khedive and form a new ministry. In May and July 1882, attacks on Europeans and other foreigners in Alexandria resulted in bombardment and disembarkation of British forces, the formation of a new ministry under Cherif Pasha, dismissal of Urabi, and defeat of his army at Tel-el-Kebir. The reluctant controller had become the reluctant occupier. A formal protectorate was not possible (the example of French protection 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 advise on 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 British presence in Egypt until 1904. Dufferin saw the presence of Europeans in government would continue to be a condition of financial reform, but under British 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, 8 Dufferin to Granville, 18 Nov. 1882, in Madden, ed., Select Documents, v. 721–3; Tenterden, ‘Egyptian Civil Service’, British Documents, ix. 279–83.

84 North Africa 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 interests among Turco-Circassians, Egyptian notables, and the corps of army officers. Replacement of the khedive in 1879 and military intervention in 1882 ended this opposition, when the mediatized state became a client state under a British agent backed by a reformed Anglo-Egyptian army. Within the legal framework provided by Ottoman Turkey and a majority of European Powers, the consul-general ran his system within the ‘veiled protectorate’ by using loyal Copts, Circassians, and Englishmen to control key departments— the Daira, Domains, the Railway Board, and, above all, Finance. European officials already numbered some 1,300 in 1882 and continued to expand.9 Egyptian officials and the Khedivate were familiar with such a system. The new service elite was analysed in detail by Baring, according to their resistance to corruption and loyalty to the new patron.10 Lord Dufferin’s blueprint to satisfy constitutional reformers was enacted in 1883 by Tawfiq to retain the Council of State under the khedive with an advisory Legislative Council and Assembly. Formal authority remained concentrated in the entourage of Egyptian ministers, while power was exercised through departments with the advice of Anglo-Egyptian officials. In the short term, this combination of Egyptian and British patrimonialism satisfied 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, international 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 Egyptian control and destroyed the army, until a frontier force of retrained Egyptian and 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, and many officers of the Nile Frontier Force. In India, the states were, to a great degree, isolated from the mainstream of Indian political development. In Egypt, this was never possible. Flaws in the ‘old system’, as Baring (Lord Cromer) termed his behind-the-scenes influence under Tawfiq, began to appear from January 1892, when the 18-year-old, French-educated Abbas succeeded his father as khedive. Cromer was still in no doubt that he operated a patrimonial state ‘as a sort of unrecognised Prime Minister’. But he was 9 10

Owen, The Middle East, 134–5. Cromer, Modern Egypt, ii, chaps. 36 and 43 (‘The Workers of the Machine’).

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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 highest offices of state.11 There was always a possibility, too, that the khedive might try to lead any nationalist movement to increase his own authority and prestige. Cromer sought to head this off by keeping his own clients in ministerial office. In 1893, however, Abbas dismissed the pliable Turkish prime minister, Mustafa Fahmy, in favour of a client of his own and made a number of other appointments disapproved by Cromer who feared that forced resignation of British officials might follow. Backed by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Rosebery, Cromer vetoed the appointment, but lost the cooperation of a compromise prime minister, Riaz, who joined his khedive in pressing for autonomy in running Egyptian departments and excluding those favourable to the British.12 It became clear that much of the Egyptian official class was behind him; and the move for more autonomy surfaced in Legislative Council demands for reallocation of resources in the budget from army expenditure to education and public works. Tension was increased by khedival criticism of British officers that infuriated the sirdar, General Kitchener, until an Egyptian undersecretary in the War Department was offered in sacrifice. Nevertheless, the khedive and his ministers became, if anything, more autocratic, putting a brake on further constitutional reforms and forcing out of office ministers who disagreed. Parallels can be drawn with the courts of Indian states. The apparatus of Egyptian government was, however, much more complex than an Indian state, where there was no similar command of financial resources by a resident. More importantly, in Egypt, from the 1890s, a nationalist movement revived under the leadership of the moderate minister, Saad Zaghlul with the support of Khedive Abbas. Cromer’s claim to ‘govern through the governors’ sounded less convincing, after his resignation in 1907, when less-talented consuls-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 representation was underwritten by the development of exports that enlisted support for the regime from merchants and landowners who profited from the production of cotton. Sale of Daira lands (formerly owned by the khedival family) added to the class of landlords and notables dependent on improved irrigation, fiscal management, and a stable government. Smaller landholders 11 For the period, Afaf Lufti al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer (London, 1968); Alexander Schölch, 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.

86 North Africa fared less well, squeezed out of production as rents rose; and state debt increased after the occupation, but was better funded at the expense of further investment 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 a popular uprising in 1919 marked a prolonged period of opposition to the autocracy of King Fuad. Proposals for talks on constitutional reform were rebuffed. In the impasse, High Commissioner Lord Allenby arranged for a declaration of Egyptian ‘independence’ in 1922; and a new constitution was promulgated for a bi-cameral legislature with considerable executive power for the head of state. Excluded from parliamentary action, however, were important reserves concerning the security of the Canal, judicial privileges for Europeans, control of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and protection of foreign interests. As the British political grasp loosened, hold over strategic and financial investments tightened. The pattern of change settled into political management of elections by moderate parties to keep power in the hands of King Fuad’s executive and a running argument with nationalist politicians over matters reserved in 1922. A series of short-lived governments made a mockery of ‘constitutional monarchy’, as parliaments were prorogued and the Wafd was kept out of office. When the British pressured for a return to parliamentary government, the way was opened for a clearer distinction between the safeguard of strategic interests in a Treaty of Alliance and a greater measure of independence to the Egyptian state under King Farouk in the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936. Unlike India, the alliance was not a ‘subsidiary’ one: the high commissioner was an ambassador to a country that entered the League of Nations.14 Significantly, too, recruitment of an Egyptian army and the formation of an elite through a military academy opened the way for the resurgence of a status group that had been a political force before the occupation. The officers’ revolt that brought General Neguib to power in 1952 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 international recognition; but the model of over-rule was Turco-Egyptian, as 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-Egyptian Sudan, Newbury, ‘Patrons, Clients, and Empire’, 247; Woodward, Sudan.

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M ap 3. Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, late 1930s

87

88 North Africa interpreted by British military officials. Until 1924, the Sudan was run as a military fief by governors-general who were also sirdars, leaving untouched religious courts administered by cadis. Over time, the ‘garrison state’ found it necessary to expand into civil administration through a government secretary and create the Sudan Political Service in 1900. The model, therefore, was autocratic 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, fostering 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 from traditional leadership within the sedentary Arabized and nomadic tribes of the northern Sudan—Omdas, Shaykhs, Nazirs—who acted as clients for the civil administration in tax collection and petty justice. At the same time, there was an accommodation with post-Mahdiyya religious leaders as props to the Condominium. Those who have used a patron–client model to analyse this co-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 the Kababish nomads of the Kordofan, the Nazir, Ali al-Tom, emerged as broker and paramount over clan chiefs, in return for farming taxes, and was eventually knighted for his services. At a higher level of patronage, the son of the Mahdi, Abd al-Rahman, was cultivated to counter Ottoman influence during the 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 support the endemic hostility of northern Sudanese to Egyptian claims. As trade expanded moderately, Sudanese merchants and petty traders established new networks and gained a vested interest in a strongly hierarchical, if tolerant, regime. The southern Sudan, however, was largely excluded from these changes which had begun to create a new kind of Sudanese state out of ‘an establishment of favoured chiefs and sufis’ and traders associated with religious leaders.18 This clientele was loyal enough for the regime to survive a depression, a rebellion 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 and tribal notables against an ineffective urban intelligentsia. Although some officials 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 experience in the Indian states that encouraged further promotion of new clients of 16

Governor-General Wingate, cited in Woodward, Sudan, 20. Woodward, Sudan, ‘Collaboration’, 29–39; and see G. N. Sanderson, ‘The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan’, in CHA, vii. 755–62. 18 Woodward, Sudan, 38. 17

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the regime, rather than resurrection of long-vanished polities.19 One result was to put a brake on production of potential bureaucrats who might threaten ‘traditional’ regimes. Another was to bolster the financial, legal, and executive functions of the miscellany of tribal and nomadic leaders, so as to isolate rural Sudan from further change. For exceptional individuals ‘who respected traditional hierarchies and detested democracy’, such as the restless probationer, Wilfred Thesiger, it was an ideal political environment in which to recruit loyal personal retainers and cultivate a talent for exploration with a minimum of bureaucratic constraint.20 By contrast with Egypt, therefore, no patrimonial state existed in the Sudan, merely a centralized civil and military hierarchy that made use of administrative clients in some regions of the northern village and riverain communities. In southern Sudan, incorporation of segmentary communities into the state had hardly begun and was resisted by Nuer and Dinka as examples of ‘acephalous egalitarianism rather than baronial power’.21 Despite this major division in the state, there were signs in the 1930s that Abd al-Rahman might become a serious contender for power as patron of a politicized intelligentsia through a modernized Mahdism. But when this movement took the form of the Umma Party, it remained a hierarchy based on clientage and religious faith, not a ‘national’ coalition, to contest for political power through legislative and executive council reforms and elections held immediately before independence in 1956. Government devolved instead to a Nationalist Unionist Party favouring re-union with Egypt, until this winning coalition fell victim to the intense rivalry between religious factions that dominated party politics from the outside. The rapid departure of British officials exacerbated the rush to control central ministries, widened the gulf between government and southern politicians, and left the state fragile and vulnerable to the continued involvement of Muslim sects in transient political coalitions in government. The state had, indeed, been built on military over-rule and patron– client relationships. But clientage encouraged rivalries between factions in Sudanese society, without a patron-power strong enough to replace British military 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 the deliberately marginalised attachment of the southern Sudan.’ As a result the state itself was soon threatened by military successor regimes.22 19 20 22

Sanderson, ‘The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan’, 771–5. Michael Asher, Thesiger (London, 1994), 125–31. Ibid. 236.

21

Woodward, Sudan, 49.

6 Morocco Extension of French imperial control westwards from Algeria in the late nineteenth century was the culmination of a longer involvement in the Maghrib, occasioned by factors common to intervention in Egypt. European commerce and judicial privileges created foreign enclaves at the coastal ports; loans to the sultanate government and low revenue led to French control over debt 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 against Germany. 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 either defeated 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 purpose was to collect taxes, run the army, and maintain control of the blad al-Makhzen (zone of government), based on seaport towns and the fertile coastal plain. Allegiance outside this region in the blad as-siba was endlessly renegotiated 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 of power through political clientage and access to resources from taxes and trade: In theory, appointments to official administrative posts—ministers, customs agents, governors, judges, market inspectors, administrators of pious endowments, preachers, prayer leaders of Friday mosques and even mosque teachers—emanated directly from the sultan. In practice, recruitment resulted from decisions taken by government officials at one of many levels, and usually on the recommendation or intervention of an official or trusted individual from the same city as the appointed individual. All these appointments were ratified by decree of the sultan.3 1 Michael Brett, ‘The Maghrib’, in CHA, vii. 267–328; John Waterbury, The Commander of the 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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M ap 4. Morocco, early twentieth century

Fundamentally, power, as far as it was exercised, was built on this system of subsidiary offices and on financial resources and recruitment of a permanent military force and military levies. The central makhzen administration consisted of the sultan’s court and retinue administered by a grand vizier and a minister of finance. Over time, external contacts required ministers for foreign affairs and for war. Three or four regions were placed under khalifa members 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 similar functions. Courts were administered by cadis, as judges in Shar‘ia law. As in other patrimonial regimes the most dangerous challenges to power came from within the leading family and resulted in civil war in 1907, when Sultan Moulay Hafidh survived with the support of religious leaders. Succession, too, was a time of power contests, despite the practice of designating a son to

92 North Africa rule. Confirmation was required by the grand vizier, regional judges, and governors. In regions outside the makhzen, caids negotiated with a new ruler for relief of taxes, in return for allegiance. Analysis of the structure of modern politics in Morocco, therefore, concedes a large place to continuity of patrimonial rule from above through the sultan’s dynasty, complemented by forms of lower-order clientage, as a way of defending the interests of competing groups and securing access to resources. As in the explanation for patron leadership by Indian rajas, emphasis is laid on segmentation within agnatic descent groups as the foundation for ‘shifting alliance patterns’, movement between groups, and defence against endemic conflict.4 This condition of competition in a political culture such as Morocco was temporarily controlled by foreign over-rule, then increased after decolonization. French ‘protection’ was initially a mixture of military conquest and preservation 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 paramount caids of the High Atlas against resistance in the south, relieving the French of close administration of much of central Morocco, at first, and promoting the status and regional power of leaders centred on Marrakesh. Little of this was by formal treaty or prescription of the administrative roles of tribal leaders. By 1919, expanded roads and colonization in the coastal plain had brought two-thirds of the country under French control, leaving the rest to be subdued in the Middle Atlas, by the mid-1930s, at considerable military cost. Chieftains in the Rif, bordering Spanish Morocco, also became allies, as denial of resources changed minds and access to grain supplies created loyalties. Concentration of investment and colonization in the coastal region left much of the mountainous interior patrolled, rather than administered, preserving the division between the makhzen and regions outside government tax controls—a division equated loosely with ‘Arab’ and ‘Berber’ in French perceptions. Inexorably, a long period of ‘pacification’, 1912–30, absorbed the tribes of the interior, ended the need for a Moroccan army, and fixed the residence of the court in Rabat.5 In Rabat, the French introduced a parallel system of government staffed by Frenchmen—‘an exogenous and basically exotic creation’.6 By contrast with other imperial hierarchies, Moroccans were not co-opted into the new struc4 Waterbury, The Commander of the Faithful, 66–8. Waterbury follows M. G. Smith who treated segmentary lineages as a system of political relations or ‘competition in power’ between groups 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.

Morocco 93 ture at an executive level. The protectorate treaty stipulated reforms through a resident-general, as representative of France and the sultan, by taking charge 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 from him it was willingly or unwillingly delegated to leading officials of the French administration. Thus, as in Egypt, Europeans quickly manned the key public offices; but they did not recruit a Moroccan staff. ‘Once the administration was staffed by the French, it tended to stay that way.’7 Although certain Moroccan offices were maintained for Estates, Education, and Justice, the residency appointed its own officials in all ministries and the three Moroccan ones were supervised by the Direction of Sharifian Affairs. Legislation was drawn 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 Interior and Political Affairs, Finance and Public Works, run by French officials, rather than a service gentry of Moroccans; and behind these lay the influence of chambers of agriculture and commerce and French banks. On the other hand, despite this administrative hegemony at the centre, the French conquest provided security and some development of the infrastructure. French military ascendancy diminished the independence of the tribes in the blad as-siba. Seven regions were administered by chefs de région with a French staff and many of the powers of a metropolitan Prefect. French civil contrôleurs supervised areas of French settlement, agriculture, and commerce, while officiers des affaires indigènes occupied strategic market centres with 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 consolidating administrative 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 apparent elsewhere in Morocco was extended into the mountains. Power, wealth and influence came to be dependent upon a special relationship with the new regime.’8 During the protectorate, new social groups emerged—an urban working class susceptible to recruitment by a religiously orthodox nationalist movement and a small group of intellectuals formed by a French education. The nationalist movement had its roots in Salafism, for Islamic reform, which became linked with other minor nationalist groups from families of notables aiming at expulsion of foreigners. The maintenance of Berber areas as separate juridical units exacerbated the polemic of betrayal and failure to protect the sultanate and Islamic institutions. But not till the founding of Istiqlal in 7

Ibid. 39.

8

Brett, ‘The Maghrib’, 290.

94 North Africa 1944 was there a movement bringing together urban workers, peasantry, and the 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 postindependence nationalist groups. By 1944, the movement had his support, without commitment to constitutional monarchy. By the early 1950s, the king’s identification with Istiqlal was complete.9 The hotly contested issue of Moroccan and settler co-sovereignty in municipal elections and the formation of a mixed Council of Ministers for French and Moroccan citizens ended in 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 and placed the king above political organizations as Head of State. On the whole, then, the conservatism of Moroccans, as much as the patronage of French over-rule, preserved the influence, if not the authority of the sultan sufficiently to keep at bay a more militant nationalism in the style of the Egyptian or Algerian press and Muslim brotherhoods. For most of the period, nationalist activists were limited to a French-educated elite without a party or representative institutions to match the Wafd or the constitutional monarchy of 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 in European 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 in the 1930s. Opinions are divided on whether or not local leadership might have ‘captured mass support’ without constructing a patron party centred on the sultanate.10 In Moroccan eyes ‘sovereignty’ under Islam lay with the ‘community’, and it was difficult for secular leaders to contest the sultan’s secular authority over this community, even after a political party was formed late in the day. Consequently, since independence in 1956, the monarch has supplied central leadership in conditions of increased factionalism, as a spiritual and 9 10

Nationalists used the title ‘king’ from 1934. Compare Brett, ‘The Maghrib’, 328, and Zartman, Destiny of a Dynasty, 2–13.

Morocco 95 secular politician. Moreover, in the wake of French monopoly of central institutions, patrimonialism has revived through state enterprises in the economy, offering jobs and lands to members of the royal family and a loyal elite. Royal strategy has balanced competing alliance groups through favours bestowed on political leaders, even opposition leaders—missions abroad, consultations, honours. Secondly, the monarchy has kept its distance from any major group. For this policy to succeed, the monarchy itself cannot tolerate attack from any faction or an ideology based on popular sovereignty canvassed in the press. The king has not yielded control of the army or ultimate dispensation of justice. As spiritual patriarch and representative of a family dynasty ultimately descended from the Prophet, the king commands a wider allegiance, even outside Morocco, than any politician. As secular patron, the king has appointed a large number of relatives in administration. Having written the rules of the Constitution, the patrimonial monarch was in an unusually strong position to deploy patronage, ensuring that the rules have been kept by the elite, taking advantage of splits in Istiqlal after 1956 and keeping control of army, police, and regional administration.

summary In North Africa there are contrasting examples of European over-rule in patrimonial states. Egypt’s Khedivate was gradually detached in the 1870s from nominal subordination to the Ottoman Empire for the purposes of European debt-servicing and management of its civil service. The Sultanate of Morocco fell under French control in 1912, as a colonial protectorate, based on an agreement 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 imperial hierarchy and produced very different successor governments at independence. In Egypt supervision of public finance and control of the Civil List by British and French officials undermined the stability of Khedive Ismail’s government and he was deposed in 1879 in favour of his son, Tawfiq. Stricter administration of Egyptian debt repayment and European infiltration of government departments exposed the khedival government to active opposition from notables, landowners, and army officers. When the government crumbled, 1881–2, Britain intervened unilaterally to make Egypt into an informal protectorate 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 finances and infrastructure; a new model Egyptian army came under British command and began the reconquest of the Sudan from 1895 to secure the headwaters of the Nile. An intricate political game played out between Lord Cromer,

96 North Africa Khedive Tawfiq, and his son, Abbas, aimed at securing ministerial clients and power over public offices. As nationalist opposition coalesced around a political party, the British and Egyptian executive cooperated to preserve their own strategic, commercial, and dynastic interests in a formal colonial protectorate from 1914. Until the 1920s, the Anglo-Egyptian Government secured sufficient 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 balancing act, while retaining responsibility for the defence of the Canal and the administration of the Sudan as reserve powers which bedevilled relations with a newly-sovereign state until the abolition of the monarchy by a military coup in 1952. As part of the legacy of the period of British over-rule of the Egyptian client state, the Sudan was reconquered, 1896–8, and administered as a joint responsibility. Effectively, it was run by British military officers who created an elite Political Service, using Egyptian auxiliaries till 1924, and, thereafter, Sudanese clients recruited from sedentary and nomadic tribes to administer tax collection and courts. A parallel hierarchy of religious leaders and an urban elite competed for status and political followers in the period of party formation in the 1930s and 1940s and emerged as heirs to the institutions of a civil and military regime which preserved and excluded the segmentary societies of the Southern Sudan. As part of an Anglo-Egyptian settlement in 1956, Sudanese parties opted for independence for a seriously fragmented and divided state. By contrast with British attempts to ‘govern through the governors’ in Egypt, the French Protectorate Government of Morocco exercised power through ministries which largely excluded Moroccan officials. The sultanate provided little more than legitimacy for the regime and administration of strictly Sharifian responsibilities for religious courts, private estates, and education. Outside the coastal zone, where European settlement was encouraged, the French enlisted the services of traditional caids in central Morocco and the chieftains of the Rif, in the wake of a prolonged military conquest. The sultanate, although excluded from real power, maintained a covert and ultimately open support for nationalist opposition and the Istiqlal party from 1944. Consequently, the deposition of King Muhammed ben Yussuf and his restoration in 1955, against the background of a more general revolt in North Africa, marked a period of French concessions to demands for independence. Morocco left the French Union the following year with a Constitution largely fashioned 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

Morocco 97 that placed a high value on allegiance and loyalty, in return for redress of grievances and a measure of public welfare. Thus, a patrimonial Islamic regime was re-created and maintained through its head of state by playing off political and administrative factions against each other, by patronage over appointments and by royal interpretation of the constitutional rules within a culture of political clientage.

Part III

Sub-Saharan Africa

7 Western Africa Forms of economic clientage in relations between agriculturalists and pastoralists and within extensive trade networks have long been recognized as a part of hierarchical political systems in western and East-Central Africa. Examples of access to resources in terms of manpower and surplus production, in return for protection by military aristocracies, are well documented. Political structures among trading states have been categorized according to the type of accumulation achieved through taxation, cattle ownership, 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 bureaucracies displaced informal and patrimonial systems of appointed officeholders is still open to debate. Although furnishing evidence of trade expansion and creation of networks by big men in the early nineteenth century, Sierra Leone had very limited consolidation of political authority in the important market centre of Kambia, in the borderland between Mende, Temne, and Limba kingdoms.2 Port Loko, by contrast, was the capital of a cluster of chiefdoms and the seat of an important commercial, military, and religious elite who constructed alliances with other elites in the hinterland. ‘Landlord–stranger’ alliances gave way to more stratified combinations of hereditary paramountcies among the Temne-speakers, later seized on by colonial officials as administrative brokers and clients.3 The example of pre-colonial Sierra Leone is typical of general features common to the theme of ‘trade and politics’ on the western coast and much of the east 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 leader1 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’) associations and ‘war boys’, Kenneth Little, ‘The Political Function of the Poro’, Africa, 36 (1966), 62– 72.

102 Sub-Saharan Africa ship, which was often in dispute in African societies because there was commonly uncertainty about succession.4

During this transformation European coastal traders remained subordinate to African merchant chiefdoms and those who controlled access to interior resources. This status changed very gradually in the early nineteenth century, as the anti-slave trade campaign encouraged export of tropical staples that increased the volume of transactions and the level of dependency created through extensive credit. More recent historiography tends to play down the hegemonic features of the ‘imperialism of free trade’ that saw the establishment of a small number of British colonial forts and posts between the 1840s and the 1880s, in favour of a more measured appreciation of the limits to British authority.5 For commercial purposes there was much ‘collaboration’, but ‘mutual collaboration, if taken to its logical conclusion, is the reverse of imperialism’.6 Foreign traders in the major region of the palm oil trade, for example, were dealing not with a centralized state, but a series of kin corporations among the Efik, Ibibio, Ibo, Kalabari, and other peoples of the Niger Delta who constructed trading ‘houses’ based on free-born status groups and household slaves.7 ‘Power in this system depended on wealth, but only if used to secure the support of others, and those without wealth could withdraw their support from those who had it if this wealth was not used to their ultimate advantage.’8 Chiefs could be deposed, as several cases in the 1840s and 1850s demonstrated, usually in the presence of foreign consuls, but not because of consular intervention. Combinations among foreign merchants for price-fixing were difficult to sustain. Even the ‘Equity Courts’ which arbitrated and fixed rules for trade prescribed traditional methods of evaluation and fines. ‘Traders looked to local chiefs as “patrons”, married local women in order to give themselves a place in local networks of kinship and influence, and bought titles in local so-called “secret societies”.’9 Not until 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 attempting to enter the import trade. Thereafter, in the Niger Delta more formal authority was exercised through courts and native councils under a 4 L. Wickins, An Economic History of Africa from the Earliest Times to Partition (Cape Town, 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.

Western Africa 103 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 the late 1880s, when European factors traded, but did not usually displace African trade chiefs, there was ample opportunity to observe several patrimonial and military regimes close to the coast. Of these, the Asante confederacy and the kingdoms of the Yoruba provided examples of the political extension of local clientage, while the trading state of Dahomey exhibited features of a more autocratic and military regime (closer to the Zulu Kingdom).10 Nearby Lagos society was dissuaded from slave trading and accepted a client chief installed under consular supervision in 1851 as a bridgehead into southern Nigeria. But Lagos chiefs were minor characters, like those subordinate to Dahomey at Porto Novo, and hardly comparable with the Yoruba states that emerged into European perspectives as major obstacles to commercial penetration of the interior. Extension of influence from Lagos Colony looked more like diplomacy than conquest, when treaties were arranged for trade promotion, railway building, and settlement of disputes. From the period of Governor Glover’s administration in the 1860s and early 1870s, the British representative acted as broker, intervening in conflicts, stipending headmen of outlying villages to keep open trade routes and creating his own network among leading Yoruba chiefs. Such techniques used to make peace and end stoppages followed the market networks already established between a rising trade centre and the Yoruba interior.11 In the 1890s, after armed action against the state of Ijebu, this informality became more formal in the relationship of officials with the oligarchy of Egba chiefs at Ibadan, the paramount Alafin of Oyo, and the Oni of Ife.12 But by contrast with the military imperialism of the Royal Niger Company’s inroads to Akassa and Ilorin, 1896–7, which brought it into conflict with the Sokoto Caliphate, administrative control in the southern protectorate of Nigeria was relatively light. Under Governors McCallum and MacGregor direct taxes were avoided in favour of revenue from trade and internal tolls from which Yoruba states took their share. Diffusion of authority within Yoruba states and clans checked autocratic Obas and made them amenable to treaty obligations and courts under district commissioners, beginning with Ife, Ibadan, Oyo, and 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 Kingdoms (Oxford, 1977), 74–9. 11 Barnes, Patrons and Power, 29–36; C. W. Newbury, ed., British Policy Towards West Africa, i. Select Documents 1786–1874 (Oxford, 1965), 356–73. 12 Olufemi Vaughan, ‘The Impact of Party Politics and Military Rule on the Traditional Chieftaincy 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., West African Kingdoms, 36–69.

104 Sub-Saharan Africa Egba in 1904. Gradually they were absorbed into the Southern Nigerian protectorate by reducing the judicial authority of paramounts and employing a loose system of indigenous councils and a Central Native Council. Relations with the Lagos government were variable. In areas close to the southern capital, Yoruba chiefs retained little judicial or executive autonomy, though stipends were paid; in the larger states the executive authority of chiefs over titles, land, and customary justice was maintained along with paramount and subordinate lineages, orders of nobility, and offices of state.13 In the northern protectorate proclaimed in 1900, however, the view was taken that the Sultan of Sokoto had surrendered sovereignty to the Niger Company by treaty; no stipends were paid; and after military occupation of Kano and Sokoto in 1903, the organization of jurisdiction and administrative authority lay with the High Commissioner, Sir F. D. Lugard.14 In the Gold Coast there was a similar contrast between British relations with coastal states and the Ashanti region. More recent research on Dutch and British contacts confirms the tributary position of European factors, at least to 1874, and revises older portraits of the Asante ‘bureaucratic’ state in favour of a patrimonial model closer to other African hierarchies.15 The Asante paramountcy operated as a patrimonial system based on an inner core centred on Kumasi and its royal clan with an outer protectorate over towns and provinces under quasi-autonomous chiefs with their own patronage links to subordinate clients. The satellite empire of the Asante stretched to Mamprussi and Grunshi in the north, Gyaman and Gonja, and to the coastal Akan and Fanti states. In conquered territories chiefs remained in authority ‘at the allegiance of their own vassals and slaves’, but under an Asante resident chief serving as patron (adamfo).16 Three such overseers were posted to the 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 the Asantehene, not as a hereditary aristocracy, and were controlled by informants. There was less control over military resources, but army reform in 1800 built up new formations of mercenaries and household troops ‘dependent 13 For an outline of Yoruba authority structure in relatively urbanized societies under kings and 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 administration, 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 Africa 105

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

106 Sub-Saharan Africa upon royal patronage’.17 The army was strong enough, in any case, to see off foreign invaders, until the sack of Kumasi by the British in 1874. Thereafter, removal of the Asantehene in 1896 and annexation in 1901 reduced the kingdom to its core clans around the capital. Over the same period the region of the Northern Territories was secured by a series of ‘trade and protection’ treaties for the adherence of Mamprussi, Mossi, Dagomba, and other partially Islamized chieftaincies. From the late 1920s some of these headships were recognized as secular paramounts with powers to promote or remove subordinate chiefs, thus creating ‘opportunities for favouritism and even for corruption’.18 In 1934 a limited confederacy was restored to the Asante leaving the Asantehene paramount only over the Kumasi clan chiefs. The ruling power imposed a large and unwieldy Confederacy Council of chiefs and nominated members as guardians of ‘native law and custom’. This body acted as an electoral college for central representation, a constitutional court to safeguard the position of chiefs, but had limited legislative powers and no powers of direct taxation.19 K. A. Busia found that Asante chiefs, while conserving their status as religious leaders in the 1930s and 1940s, required official protection in the face of pressure for de-stoolments arising from secular disputes over land and taxes.20 Thus, there was a division between the Gold Coast Colony, the interior confederacy, and the northern chiefdoms. Akan (Fanti and Akim) and other chiefdoms in the coastal interior were ruled with a fairly light hand without direct taxation or land concessions, following repeated political opposition in the late and early nineteenth centuries. At most, municipalities were given a measure of local representation; and in 1926 the problem of securing representatives from rural villages and the Akan states of the Colony was tackled by using three provincial councils made up of traditional chiefs as elective bodies for an expansion of unofficial African membership of the Legislative Council.21 On the other hand, it was difficult to incorporate into statutory local administration the disparate collection of some sixty chiefly states whose heads were open to frequent de-stoolments from below, whenever they were thought to be acting autocratically with the backing of the colonial government. Stool-holders with authority over populations ranging from five thousand to fifty thousand were awkwardly placed as brokers between their own supporters and rivals and colonial administrators in what was ‘essentially a structure of personal relationships’, rather than a territorial unit with 17

Wilks, ‘Ashanti Government’, 227. 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. 18

Western Africa 107 prescribed authority in local government.22 One view of Akan chiefs, therefore, is that their effective authority was permitted to grow by default, because they still deployed their ‘considerable powers as patrons in a decidedly partisan 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-stoolment within a power struggle between chiefs, ‘coastal activists’, and disaffected rural 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 councils up to the task? From 1927 the state councils had clearly defined judicial functions in matters of customary law, but very restricted executive functions for public works or welfare in the absence of a general local tax to fund stool treasuries. With impressive political ability stool chiefs defended privileges in conjunction with an educated elite through a vigorous press and Legislative Council which defeated the colonial government on land and other issues.24 Led by Nana Ofori Atta, Omanhene of Akyem Abuakwa, they defined their own prerogatives in order to bolster their patronage roles. ‘Custom’ was upheld on grounds of ‘inherent rights’ against the claims of colonial legislation and courts. In particular they took legislative power to control immigrant Africans, raise rents from immigrant farmers, and access income from land sales and mining concessions. In other words, some stool chiefs reinterpreted ‘landlord–stranger’ forms of clientage to take advantage of new market opportunities. But none of that filtered down to improvements in roads, education, health. From 1937, Colony chiefs and councils were promised a consolidated chiefdom tax and treasuries, as statutory ‘native authorities’ with government backing to prevent de-stoolment. But nothing was done for three years, during an unsettled period 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 territorial administration, except in matters of customary law, because of their extremely restricted power to use such taxes as they collected for local government.25 This limitation was aggravated, particularly in the southern chief22

Lord Hailey, Native Administration, 98. 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. 23

108 Sub-Saharan Africa doms and in Ashanti, by economic depression and by impoverishment through endless litigation over stool lands. Few in administration or among the coastal elite had any faith in chiefdoms as local government agencies by the 1940s. Gradually, therefore, the issue of defining the powers of ‘tradition’ 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 roles of State Councils were restricted to ritual, and local councils with a proportion of elected members were projected. To head off demands for ‘Dominion Status’, Governor Burns forced the pace of political change in 1946 by yielding an unofficial majority on the Legislative Council; and some of these African representatives were indirectly elected through a Joint Provincial Council in the Colony and the Ashanti Confederacy Council.26 From then on, the status of traditional authorities in a new dispensation was at best debatable and certainly at risk, after a constitutional commission made radical proposals for representative and responsible government in 1948, finding that ‘the star of rule through Chiefs was on the wane’.27 The basis for this conclusion lay in the commissioners’ perception of ‘an intense suspicion that the Chiefs are being used by the Government as an instrument for the delay if not the suppression of the political aspirations of the people’.28 Such views did not pass unchallenged—in London, rather than in the Gold Coast. But after the all-African Coussey Commission had prepared the way for elections and eventual control of regions through a Ministry of Local Government, maintaining a role for chiefs looked like a rearguard action, rather than a viable political programme. Once Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party won a majority of seats in the new Assembly in 1951, only the governor’s reserve powers and an amendment to the Gold Coast (Constitutional) Order in Council preserved for a time the position of chiefs, stool property, and definitions of chiefly hierarchy under customary law.29 From that date until independence in 1957 chiefs in the Colony lost status and authority to elected local councils, to African officials at regional level and to party-appointed panels of judges in Native Courts.30 As the number of de-stoolments in26 For a detailed survey of issues and constitutional changes in the 1940s and 1950s, Richard Rathbone, 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 30 Ibid. 276–9. Rathbone, Nkrumah and the Chiefs, chap. 3.

Western Africa 109 creased because of the action of youngmen’s associations, the Colonial Office was 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. They launched a ‘National Liberation Movement’ as a pressure group opposed to the threat of bureaucratic centralization under the CPP.32 In terms of regional organization the NLM was sufficient to worry Nkrumah and his ministers over the issue of ‘federation’, but too weak to defeat a more ruthless party machine in territorial elections. And it made tactical errors by refusing to debate federation in detail in the Assembly or before a visiting commission in 1955. In all, the chiefs’ Opposition failed to make the independence Constitution unworkable, though they may have slightly delayed the date of that event. But the 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 discovered that old treaties of protection for the chiefs of the Northern Territories would have to lapse, as the former patron-power followed a course of retreat from its obligations ‘comparable to the line taken with the Princes of India and the Shan States in Burma’.33 Meanwhile, the search for administrative prescription within a patrimonial system had gone further than anywhere else in the Northern Nigerian emirates. Reinterpretation of chiefly powers under British over-rule by Lugard and his successors provided an autocratic solution to the problems of incorporating a huge area with little British manpower or revenue and, at the same time, a legitimizing ideology, applied, misapplied, and used as shorthand 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 he had no ‘accurate knowledge’ of the resident system in Indian states.34 Indeed, very few of the administrators of Northern Nigeria, except two or three with army backgrounds, had any experience of India and its systems of government.35 They agreed, however, on a common norm of administrative conduct to keep in place the patrimonial structure of the Hausa–Fulani emirates with the manpower available, especially for fiscal and judicial functions of government. Rebellion would be stamped out; corruption and inefficiency, overbearing oppression, and slave dealing would be reformed or abolished. As 31

Rathbone, ed., Ghana, Part i, 337. 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. 32

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 and an 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, and installed a new sultan. Whatever the justification for the campaign, it supplied a legal basis in the eyes of the new conquerors.36 Northern Nigeria was established by conquest, not by treaties, though ruled as a protectorate from 1900. The rulers of Sokoto and Gwandu were considered to have forfeited their ‘sovereignty’, just as the Habe (Hausa) kingdoms had lost theirs to the Fulani from the early nineteenth century. From the outset, it was assumed the new government would 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 officers, Lugard adopted the practical programme of leaving emirs and their subordinates in place, as appointments under a new hierarchy. Successions would be recognized, if approved, and a line of power established to preserve dynastic and judicial office-holders in place, subject to obedience, termination of slave dealing, and mitigation of judicial sentences.37 At the apex of the pyramid of authorities, the details of executive government were concentrated to excess in his own hands through a Political Secretariat consisting of Lugard and his brother.38 Lugard’s successor, Sir Percy Girouard, abolished this nepotism in 1907. By then, the main principles had been circulated in Lugard’s ‘Political Memoranda’ and accepted as guidelines for ‘ruling through the native authorities’ in provincial administration, after reallocating villages to districts and requiring heads to reside there, rather than at an emir’s court. Lugard further insisted on definition of duties for British and Nigerian rulers and a knowledge of local languages, and restricted powers of the Supreme Court in Northern Nigeria, leaving Islamic courts in place and judicial powers for executive officers.39 Lugard’s successors and lieutenants venerated his doctrines, but operated according to their own experience of the hierarchies they were working through in provinces and districts widely separated from each other and the 36 Perham, Lugard: The Years of Authority, chaps. 5, 6; Heussler, The British in Northern Nigeria, 26–7; D. J. M. Muffat, Concerning Brave Captains (London, 1964), Parts i and ii; and Lugard’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).

Western Africa 111 capital at Zungeru.40 As later studies have revealed, they found themselves not so much in a society run by Fulani ‘feudalism’, but in an intricate set of political and social networks governed by patrimonial principles. Fulani ‘kingship’ was not despotic within a single lineage, but revolved between lineages and was subject to frequent succession disputes. Hereditary offices filled with an emir’s approval were the norm. Others held by state officials, religious, legal, and occupational notables and craftsmen were chosen from Habe and Fulani status groups. Vassals of a ruler held estates and were usually heads of a political unit. Officials and vassals were styled as barori, or clients of the ruler, even as the ruler of an emirate was a client of the rulers of Sokoto or Gwandu. ‘Clientage, a relationship of personal loyalty’ existed between superior and subordinate at all levels of the hierarchy, as a basis for confirmation of offices and titles.41 In common with other areas of Hausa and Fulani governance, the principles of pre-European administration that survived the overlay of British or French rule in the region were ‘part of the clientelistic dynamic which in Hausa culture defines the relationship between social superior and inferior and between political ruler and ruled’.42 This structure of kinship and political clientage was the source of so-called ‘indirect rule’; and it continued to flourish, with important changes, until the end of British occupation: Appointment in the Native Administration [observed M. G. Smith for the 1950s] is not governed by merit or technical qualifications, but by ties of loyalty in a situation of political rivalry where the stakes are considerable. Consequently, in much the same way that the Emir appoints his own supporters and kin to office, or the Chief Judge appoints 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 new rulers. Notably, emirs were deposed and officials dismissed at first in Kano, Katsina, Bornu, Yola Provinces, where residents did not regard themselves as mere 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 40 Mary Bull, ‘Indirect Rule in Northern Nigeria, 1906–1911’, in Kenneth Robinson and Frederick Madden, eds., Essays in Imperial Government (Oxford, 1963), 47–88. 41 C. S. Whitaker, The Politics of Tradition: Continuity and Change in Northern Nigeria 1946–1966 (Princeton, 1970), 33; Smith, Government in Zazzau; Peter Tibenderana, ‘British Administration 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 Sokoto Muhammaud Tambari: 1922–1931’, JHSN 10 (1977), 91–134; Alhaji Mahmood Yakubu, An Aristocracy in Political Crisis: The End of Indirect Rule and the Emergence of Party Politics in the 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.

112 Sub-Saharan Africa managers at arm’s length of a system taken over and kept running. Departing from Lugard’s centralizing aims, his successors devolved responsibility onto emirs and residents especially in matters of finance and police and in ways disapproved 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 sides understood 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 a graded system throughout the northern provinces—a kind of league table of competence and reliability that classified emirates, emirate courts, and, not least, the political officers themselves according to their experience. Laid down in 1916 by Lieutenant-Governor C. L. Temple the system allowed a great deal of flexibility and discretion for both Hausa–Fulani and British officials over levels of local salaries, reallocation of funds, and initiatives for local expenditure. Accordingly, too, the role of political officers as advisers, supervisors, and rulers in the hierarchy varied according to the ways in which provincial emirs were judged as administrators and to the degree of political organization in terms of councils, official posts and hereditary offices, and district headmen.47 Much of the business of British officials lay in tours of inspection, court work, verification of assessments and collection, and, not least, in the political management of appointments and successions among emirate subordinates of a ruling house. Their sanctions were ‘Depositions, Fines and Talking’. And in the pioneering phase, when they were feeling their way 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 established a new legitimacy with prescribed clientage and rules for tax-collecting through fief-holders, rather than through slave officials.49 Much depended on how both sides in the hierarchy accessed an improved revenue system and this 45

Bull, ‘Indirect Rule’, 47–62. 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 Michael Crowder and Obaro Ikime, eds., West African Chiefs: Their Changing Status under Colonial Rule and Independence (Ife, 1970), 14–22. 47 Arnett Papers, Box 6/1, fo. 79; Lord Hailey, Native Administration in the British African Territories, 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. 46

Western Africa 113 advantage, in turn, entailed a more detailed management of village officials and productive resources worked by free and servile labour.50 Consolidation of fiefs under overlords posted as district heads to collect taxes on their estates involved considerable reorganization of districts and sub-districts within provinces and continued well into the 1920s.51 Similarly, village units were amalgamated, entailing the appointment of recognized village heads. Thirdly, treasuries funded the emirs’ Civil Lists and served as collection points for a revised system of taxation. Cautiously, Lugard had applied new licences and tolls and claimed for the civil administration a share of revenues collected from emirate chiefs or non-Muslim communities in ‘pagan’ provinces. Revenue proclamations of 1904 and 1906 defined access to resources on both sides of the British and Nigerian ruling hierarchy, though most taxes stayed in the emir’s treasury, as long as cowries remained official currency. In practice, reform of district headships and revenue collection were inextricably bound together; and while the administration was hard-pressed for cash, emirs were still able to appoint members of their family to fief holdings, in return for speedy collections and hefty commissions.52 A more closely supervised revenue system was pioneered by Resident C. L. Temple in Kano Province 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 prerogative over all revenue was simply abolished and all former sources of revenue were combined into a single tax applied to peasant agriculture and collected through the hierarchy of headmen and district heads for the emirate’s central treasury from 1914.54 By the 1920s, this prescription was integral to the system as supervised by British officers and it meant that an emir could 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 subdivisional level. In short, ‘revenue’, or ‘tribute receipts’ as recorded at a provincial capital was a matter of counterfoils and bookkeeping, rather than a consolidated sum collected and allocated by British officials.55 The treasuries were a cornerstone of the ‘Anglo-African’ system of rule and resulted (for the first time) in cash payments for public works labour in silver 50 For an overview, Paul E. Lovejoy and Jan S. Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936 (Cambridge, 1993). 51 52 Fika, The Kano Civil War. 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’s so-called ‘reimbursement-in-aid’ from treasuries to central government, reserved by his successors for specific provincial expenditure where collected. Not even Lord Hailey is clear on how the treasuries evolved. Hailey, Native Administration, iii. 70. The whole topic would repay further research.

114 Sub-Saharan Africa coin, which replaced cowries during 1911. Fief holders appointed by emirs collected rents for government; and this was easily expanded into a land tax by assessments from 1910, complete with a corps of Hausa and Fulani surveyors and clerks. From 1914 fixed salaries for district heads were never less than 20 per cent of all expenditure and larger surpluses encouraged increase of salaries in the inter-war years. By 1936 some sixty-three treasuries under Ma‘aji treasurers systematically funded the reciprocal bargain of sharing power in a hierarchy headed by the British. By then, too, emirs were well paid (the Emir of Kano had a salary of £6,000 and an establishment allowance of £2,500) and exercised considerable local control over spending on emirate public departments (medical, education, public works, police and prisons, judiciary).56 The rapid rise in Northern Nigerian revenues still left the protectorate a fiscal dependency requiring grants-in-aid, prior to amalgamation with Southern Nigeria in 1914; but the establishment of treasuries ranks as the most important single basis for underwriting the authority structure envisaged by Lugard and his successors. A second factor was toleration of servitude on estates of titled owners and the unexpected ability of Hausa farmers with usehold rights to increase their holdings and profit from a boom in groundnut exports. Fortunately, too, official plans for land ‘nationalization’, were not fully implemented, but more efficient tax mechanisms were.57 Although emirs and chiefs were paid fixed salaries, these were nowhere sufficient to meet their obligations to kin and clients. Additional disposable income was collected through officials responsible to a waziri, or minister approved by the British, with greater possibilities for embezzlement and extortion from the peasantry.58 Early in British over-rule, the talakawa peasantry were supported by British officers in their complaints and chiefs were disciplined, but for a substantial period, 1924–33, this right was officially discouraged, in the interests of tax collection. By the 1920s, according to Fika’s study of Kano Emirate, there were considerable reserves on hand invested in capital projects; and Tibenderana suggests increased revenues owed much to ‘unprecedented extortion and oppression’. Further reorganization of emirate treasuries in the 1930s expanded this efficient mechanism for collection and redistribution in ‘staggering proportions’59 (Fig. 2). The lot of the talakawa improved marginally from 1934, when their right to bring complaints against chiefs was restored and forced labour was formally ended. 56

Cohen, ‘The Kingship in Bornu’, 201. 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 for Slavery, 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. 57

Western Africa 115 2500 Revenue Expenditure 2000

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Fig . 2 Northern Nigeria, revenue and expenditure Sources: Nigeria: Northern Provinces Estimates (Kaduna and Lagos, 1923–51); Northern Region. 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 on the status of emirate leadership. At that level, however, there were contradictions between British withdrawal of patronage or support for dynastic representatives, according to performance or political considerations, and the opportunities of emirs and their officials to build up their own patronage networks through beneficial appointments. Succession became as much a matter of politics as dynastic inheritance.60 For example, in the Sokoto Caliphate, the sultan was demoted, as far as his own sovereignty was concerned, from 1903. Thereafter, the fate of sultans depended less on efficiency or corruption than their loyalty to the British in their anxiety about Mahdist conspiracies 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 against him, and there was a promise of lineal succession for his eldest son. All the details of this affair, including manipulation of an electoral council and events leading to Tambari’s eventual abdication, need not be followed here.61 But there were repercussions in the relationships between officials at the British 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.

116 Sub-Saharan Africa end of the hierarchy in ways that suggest considerable misgivings on the part of some officers at the primacy of politics over administrative efficiency. Some had more patience with incompetence than others. For example, a wayward emir such as Aliyu of Zaria was brought down only after two decades of exhortation to reform; and his extortionist sons were sacked, when Fulani subordinates sided with an exasperated resident.62 Like the forced resignation of the Sultan of Sokoto, this episode began with Aliyu’s deposition in 1920 on a mix of charges including forced labour, seizure of plantations and town properties, forcing slave girls into his harem. Underneath lay more serious issues in a political battle with British officials over appointments 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 securing the services of a suitable waziri, or principal minister. At stake, too, as the case rumbled on through several administrative enquiries, were relations within the British hierarchy, particularly between (Acting) Lieutenant Governor 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 to get).64 Nevertheless, what the new patron rulers created they could undo—at the periphery of the emirates, as well as at the centre. Of the seven emirs of Adamawa Province under British rule, 1901–53, four were overturned, and three cooperated with approval (one was awarded the CBE).65 Residents (or district officers as they were termed from 1926) and governors, therefore, wielded great power in legitimization of succession to office at different levels of an emir’s administration and over the emir himself.66 On the whole, new rules of succession within a single dynasty prevailed over rotating successions between 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 posts continued: 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 district level. The mutual collaboration between emir and District Officer in effecting these changes illustrates an aspect of Indirect Rule in Northern Nigeria, namely that an 62

Heussler, The British in Northern Nigeria, 47. The whole episode is usefully reviewed in Arnett Papers, Box 2/2 and 6/2. The inconsistencies 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 Development of a Northern Cameroons Province (London, 1958), 143–7. 66 Heussler, The British in Northern Nigeria, 140. 63

Western Africa 117 emir, even an unjust emir, could get away with almost anything provided he was on good 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 of the country, following Lugard’s attempt to extend his system to Southern Nigeria. Other governors put their own gloss on Indirect Rule, especially Governors Clifford and Cameron.68 But these were swings of mood and the real issue was preservation of a system of clientage reinforcing the power of British officials and emirs, or integration with a more bureaucratic, departmentalized form of government run from Lagos. Cameron did have a point in attempting to mitigate the autocracy of the native authorities by broadening representation in emirs’ councils. Ordinances of 1933 and 1934 replaced provincial courts for protectorate courts under magistrates and made the treasuries subject to audit from Lagos. But, in fact, little changed in the line of power between an elite corps and a Fulani–Hausa hierarchy based on clientage. And in practice appelate jurisdiction to a Supreme Court hardly touched jurisdiction of the emirate Alkali courts, and African lawyers remained excluded, as they did in most Native Courts throughout Nigeria.69 By the 1940s, the northern provinces had 119 native authorities and 113 subordinate authorities varying greatly in population and revenue and headed by emirs and chiefs of various grades, some with councils and some simply headmen with councils. The emirs’ or chiefs’ councils, moreover, had taken on the appearance of ministerial bodies, but with patronage appointments from among notables and royals. District heads were still appointed because of connections with a ruling house or leading family.70 Staffing service departments attached to emirates followed a similar pattern. For, an unexpected result of decentralization of public works, education, health, police and prisons, and agricultural services was increased employment for Hausa and 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, although courts, native councils, and commissioners formed the basis for supervision in the Yoruba states, chiefs’ functions were not prescribed. An experiment with a Central Native Council of Yoruba chiefs, 1901–13, had limited success 67

Fika, The Kano Civil War, 228. 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. 68

118 Sub-Saharan Africa as an advisory body, while an early plan for native councils at village and ward levels failed for want of local government funding.72 Lugard had attempted to change the system, once southern provinces were established as the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria in 1906, by imposing Supreme Court jurisdiction on the Alake of Abeokuta, ending his treaties and subordinating the great states of Egba, Oyo, and Ibadan under the governor in the manner of the northern emirates. Following the amalgamation of Nigeria in 1914 (for which Lugard was one of the principal architects), western and eastern provinces in the South came under much closer rule through chief commissioners. The larger Yoruba states, however, managed to avoid or resist many features of this wholesale extension of Lugard’s Native Authority system, while he was governor of the whole country, 1914–18, except its judicial format, by rejecting his experiment with direct taxation in Yorubaland. Without the financial underpinning that supported emirs, authoritarian obas and bales did not emerge in the South, where they continued to be restrained by councils of hereditary title-holders and age-grade societies. In the populous towns, moreover, administration through ward chiefs and through town councils moved further along the road of popular representation than in Northern Nigeria. For a time, it is true, ‘paramounts’ were in favour. The Alafin of Oyo was raised to this status by Resident Ross over Ibadan chiefs in what one Nigerian historian sees as a ‘new Oyo empire’ from 1906 to 1931. Ross and the Alafin are one of the better examples we have of political symbiosis: ‘The intimacy between 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. Residents still continued to patronize religious figureheads (such as the Oni of Ife), at a time when Governor Cameron questioned the orthodoxy of backing ‘traditional’ rulers and instituted councils of chiefs with judicial functions in 1933. But his administration imposed an unpopular Awujale paramount in that year on the Ijebu states and kept him in place until he was eventually brought down 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 commissioners and Yoruba chiefs. ‘Indigenous authorities’ in the Yoruba states and towns consisted of any traditional chiefs whose duties were prescribed only in 1933 and in 1940 to cover judicial, executive, and fiscal functions. Until late in the day, the basic intermediary between a British official and Yoruba society was simply a ‘chief, aided and abetted by his traditional entourage’, 72

Newbury, The Western Slave Coast and its Rulers, 195–8. J. A. Atanda, ‘The Changing Status of the Alafin of Oyo under Colonial Rule and Independence’, in Crowder and Ikime, eds., West African Chiefs, 219–20. 73

Western Africa 119 underfunded for local government purposes and out of touch with many of the better-educated urban elite.74 But in the end other representatives and brokers were recognized. By the late 1930s and 1940s, political pressure from new service groups such as the Ibadan Progressive Union and other associations forced more autonomous administration within large urban agglomerations and promotion for notables by title creation in urban councils under the chairmanship of a resident. Unlike the Gold Coast there were few depositions and wider acceptance of councillors nominated from outside a ruling lineage and its followers. With a regional population of some 3.5 million in the Yoruba Western Provinces there were some very large units administered internally in this way. Egba State under a paramount Alake as ruler-in-council also had divisional councils of Obas. Ijebu, Ijebu-Remo, and Ondo Province all had councils composed of hereditary title-holders, representatives from small towns and from the Nigerian Youth Movement (led by successful traders and merchants). Ibadan under its Olubadan-in-council co-opted titular heads and members of the Ibadan Progressive Union. There were no formal ‘native treasuries’ in the style of the northern emirates; and councils depended on collection of local fees and licences, court revenue, and allocations from general revenue from the regional government in Lagos. Throughout the pre-war period there was an inconclusive argument about how much of direct taxes and dues, supplemented by central government allocations, should be retained to cover salaries and allowances, or handed over to pay for services and infrastructure. A tax Ordinance of 1940 came down heavily in favour of central control and increased allocations; and under the 1947 Constitution, for the first time, a fixed proportion of revenue was made over to council treasuries under official audit. In return, chiefs and councils served as electoral units for regional colleges and African representation in the Legislature.75 These changes tended, at first, to marginalize traditional leaders, until their utility for national politicians was exploited after the formation of the Action Group as a major regional party in Yorubaland, backed by ethnic associations and an articulate elite, as the pace of competition for power quickened.76 A major blow to an administrative role for chiefs was delivered by the requirement for elected representation at all levels handed down by the Colonial Office in an ‘optimistic and at times naive’ Local Government 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 Southern Nigeria against the background of the Richards Constitution. 76 Vaughan, ‘The Impact of Party Politics and Military Rule’, 152–202; Lloyd, ‘The Yoruba Lineage’.

120 Sub-Saharan Africa Despatch of 1947.77 From then on, most of the larger Yoruba states devolved their administrative functions to subordinate councils and committees which managed a regional budget of some £1.6 million by 1951. The fate of chiefs depended not on their administrative skills (many had none), but on their usefulness to new political patrons running the Action Group. Those patrons, however, like distant observers inside the Colonial Office, would appear to have been in two minds about the place of chiefs and elders in local government. Somehow democratic representation had to be combined with ‘the well-established institution of Kingship, though enlightened Kingship’ pondered one official.78 It was never clear where such enlightened ‘kings’ might be produced. The plight of chiefs was made worse, in any case, by the imposition of a complex and African-inspired adoption of English county administration in 1953. This proved to be unworkable and power passed to elected party candidates.79 But revenues in the Western Region more than doubled, largely as a result of government grants to politically favoured councils run by a permanent staff and by nominated committees under the patronage of government ministers. In other words, ‘local government’ became a conduit for political largesse, increasingly weakened by battles over corruption of local agencies and political in-fighting for control of resources and jobs.80 For some paramounts these changes were disastrous, especially (like the Alafin of Oyo) if they made the mistake of acting as patron to a party opposed to the Action Group.81 For others, if they had a measure of education and the backing of the major party in Yorubaland, there was still a symbolic role in Yoruba society.82 Ironically, while elected local government failed in the regions of the South in the early 1960s and chiefs came under threat, the older system of ‘native authorities’ 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 by increasing ethnic tensions arising from consolidation of party control in the regions, there was a reluctance on the part of the Colonial Office and British officials to detract from the powers of emirs. From 1953 the political leaders 77

Mackintosh, ed., Nigerian Government, 210. 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 significance of this shift from chiefs to party clients has been obscured by the constitutional crisis over the Local Government Bill of 1953 for Western Region and central government relations. Compare the failure of local councils in Ghana over the same period: Rathbone, Nkrumah and the Chiefs, 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 in Nigeria’, 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. 78

Western Africa 121 of the Northern Region could block further constitutional reform and posed a risk of secession.83 Elsewhere in the Sierra Leone Protectorate and in the Gambia, formal prescription of ‘Tribal Authorities’ operated for weaker and divided hierarchies; and provincial commissioners applied moderate jurisdiction and tax collection, 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 terms of ‘indirect/direct’ rule, the model has little explanatory value, unless the detailed management of local hierarchies reveals points of similarity or contrast with a strongly hierarchical model, as in pre-1900 Ashanti or Northern Nigeria.84 There was, however, considerable flexibility in the ways in which officials utilized the structures they found in place. Over the course of time and in the decade prior to independence, it is notable that a more accurate model for ‘leadership’ in Sierra Leone is that of a ‘big man’ in Mende or Temne society, combining a mix of ascribed or achieved status with a measure of education.85 Thus, informal leadership might reinforce or bypass a ‘Paramount’ chief, harking back to the networks of pre-British political influence and power studied by Skinner, Little, and others, and providing a basis for later more militant factional leaders who challenged elite politicians.86 Much of British over-rule, therefore, has now to be regarded as a flexible recognition of old and new authorities, operating alongside evolving forms of accommodation within secular and religious associations, ethnic unions, political parties. Not every society regarded ‘recognized chiefs’ as the most useful or appropriate intermediaries between government and local-level elders and people. That flexibility in intervention may be accounted for better by acknowledging that European administrators were also brokers, as well as advisers. Few works have considered this aspect of official intermediation; and fewer still have included administrators alongside the ambiguous chiefly functionaries caught between nominal subjects and political masters.87 Nevertheless, such an approach gives less weight to lofty prescriptive policies and more to their execution through officials as appointed civil servants and as co-opted service gentry within indigenous hierarchies. It is, after all, the interaction of these two sets of officials and not the ‘directness’ or ‘indirectness’ 83

Lynn, Nigeria, Part i, pp. lix ff. Michael Crowder, West Africa under Colonial Rule (London, 1968), 211–33. 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 (Ann Arbor, 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’. 84 85

122 Sub-Saharan Africa 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 or French Africa, according to official orthodoxies. Both French and British administrators made use of titular (‘official’) chiefs, as well as natural rulers; and some of their successors in Ghana or Guinea had a predeliction for central government control, bypassing, or even abolishing the role of traditional representatives.88 There were degrees of intervention which either worked with or against the prevailing tide of social and economic change towards the emergence of educated elites, urbanization, and the spread of wage employment. In the urban and provincial administration of the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, and Southern Nigeria, ward and territorial chiefdoms were utilized for control of criminal and some civil justice. This practice proceeded from the treaty system of the 1880s and earlier precedents remarkably smoothly, except where experiments in direct taxation or acquisition of powers over land were attempted. The Asante, it is true, were occupied and reconstructed; chiefs were created in south-eastern Nigeria and the Gambia. Overall administrative practice tended towards preservation with some adaptation through expansion of chiefs’ councils. By the 1930s, however, faith in ‘Indirect Rule’ had been shaken by the conduct of ambitious stool chiefs in the Gold Coast and was questioned for its shortcomings in local government and its confusion of judicial and political functions. But it was not abandoned. 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 and protectorates 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 be managed through an old elite, until expansion and reform of the emir’s council by creation of advisory councils from 1952 with a portfolio system and non-Fulani representation. Even so, the verdict of a number of observers was that the emirs’ manipulation of appointments to offices of state, to technical departments and to district headships had substantially increased their authority. It was admitted that ‘corruption’ in making Native Authority appointments 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 are right in noting that French appointed agents were more numerous than ‘natural’ chiefs in their African 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.

Western Africa 123 for generations had no difficulty in transferring their skills to competition for power in regional government. Members of the Northern House of Assembly who formed the Northern Peoples Congress in 1951 did so to head off more radical movements and further the election of Native Authority officials, district and village heads, and relatives of emirs. Thus, ‘the party and the traditional aristocracy became welded into a single network.’90 Equally important was the northerners’ need to make up ground in civil service employment by excluding southerners. In the short term, the initial drive for a Nigerian civil service seemed to work best in the Yoruba West—a region criticized by Lord Hailey in 1950 for its ‘untidy’ organization of chiefly provinces, but praised for inclusion of an elected educated element in Native Authority Councils.91 In the longer term it was speedily politicized in all regions from 1953. The North had most ground to make up with only a quarter 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 Council 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 a Civil Service increasingly dominated by party appointments. At the federal centre, however, there were rich pickings without any firm control by an establishment officer. Posts were expanded to some 5,000 by 1961, 3,000 of which were held by Nigerians (predominantly southerners). Thus, underlying the tense struggle between exclusively ‘regionalist’ parties and those parties seeking to campaign in all regions,1960–6, was an extension of local ‘Nigerianization’ programmes into political and administrative control of the ministries of the Federation. The detailed issues of party alliance and divisions in regional leadership need not be rehearsed here.93 But it should be remembered that basic failures on the part of politicized civil servants to make an accurate census (on which the political predominance of northern parties was predicated) or to prevent ‘rigged’ elections in the Western Region in 1965 did much to undermine the credibility of government through consensus and coalition. The stark alternatives by 1966 were political assassination of the prime minister, northern and western premiers, by (mainly Igbo) army officers, followed by a northern officers counter-coup the same year and descent into massacre of easterners, the Biafran civil war, a proliferation of regional states, and a period of prolonged military rule. 90 Dudley, Parties and Politics, 81; for other evidence that the NPC was a patron party by 1955, 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 Independent Nigeria’, in Paul A. Beckett and Crawford Young, eds., Dilemmas of Democracy in Nigeria (Rochester, NY, 1997), 16–44, esp. 17–20.

124 Sub-Saharan Africa Throughout the period when constitutional government was on trial in the early 1960s, there is every evidence that the pattern of clientage set by traditional elites in Nigeria predominated over any semblance of an ‘independent’ civil service. But traditional chiefs were not necessarily the main beneficiaries for very long. In the North, emirs and the new service gentry of the northern politicians embraced the challenge of taking power together in regional and federal offices, but eventually lost lives and functions to military successors. Traditional Yoruba leadership, on the other hand, showed every sign of being displaced by ‘political chiefs’ (some of whom took titles) and who had no hesitation in monopolizing the benefits of power.94 But they, too, (like Chief Awolowo) ran the risk of party schism, the breakdown of parliamentary government in the Western House of Assembly, prosecution and imprisonment, at the hands of regional and federal enemies. One verdict on the succeeding period of government through army officers is that they acted little differently. Nigeria’s military elite, like the British before them, took ‘their cue from the patron–client culture of the traditional society’ in order to keep themselves in power.95 This conclusion has been supported by other Nigerian historians, even those who base their analysis on an acceptance of the ‘indirect rule’ model. Emirs chose to back NPC candidates, using their Native Authority organizations; and, by 1951, they were the patrons of the party, a position confirmed when Ahmadu Bello, Sultan of Sokoto, became Minister of Local Government in 1953. The price was agreement to elected representation at local government level; and those who refused were deposed. On the whole, emirs conformed to civilian directives, or abdicated, as the Emir of Kano did in 1963. But from 1966, under a military regime, they lost control of local police and the Native Authority courts. One can agree, therefore, with Yakubu’s more general conclusion that chiefs in Nigeria and elsewhere in Central and East Africa entered into campaigning ‘to acquire new legitimacy in the era of party politics’.96 In the longer term, however, they might not succeed. 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.

8 East-Central Africa In this region the political hierarchies that commanded the attention of nineteenth-century missionaries and administrators centred on the Great Lakes. British contacts were filtered through Zanzibar and the Swahili Arab coast; and familiarity with the Sultanates of Zanzibar and Muscat, as an extension of Omani trading networks, made such contacts an extension of British authority and interests in India and the Gulf.1 It did not follow, however, that political influence was extended with any great enthusiasm. Offers of territorial concessions by Sultan Seyyid Bargash to the steamship magnate, Sir William Mackinnon, in 1877 came to nothing; and the Foreign Office refused to act as guarantor for his dynastic succession in 1881. Division of the sultan’s claims to the interior between British and Germans, in 1886, in the context of African partition, paved the way for a British protectorate from 1890: Zanzibar became at first a client state and then a closely ruled governorship, as the sultan’s household was isolated from general administration and the courts. Transfer from the Foreign Office to the Colonial Office in 1913 completed the subordination of this relic of Omani influence to British rule under the East African Protectorate. In the East African hinterland, Islamic models for the structure of government were overshadowed by indigenous monarchical hierarchies that provided useful templates for territorial consolidation by British and German administrations among kingdoms of Uganda and Rwanda-Burundi. In all, between the eastern Congo, the Sudan, Tanzania, and Kenya, lay eight interlacustrine societies qualified as ‘kingdoms’, including, principally, Buganda, Toro, Bunyoro, Ankole, Busogo, Rwanda, and Burundi, and a number of segmentary societies influenced by contact with powerful neighbours and by colonial incorporation into larger states.2 There were certainly other examples of so-called ‘chiefless’ societies in Kenya, such as the Luo or Luyia, where genealogical seniority and personal achievement raised a clan leader to paramountcy over other clans, including those comprised of immigrant clients.3 Like their counterparts in the segmentary societies of the Buganda march lands, 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.

126 Sub-Saharan Africa The characteristics of the monarchical states included ability on the part of representatives 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 performance and myths and subject to review, especially at periods of succession. Above all, there was a monopoly of military force, even a standing army, as in Buganda, and an authority to raise to office members of other status groups, or even commoners.4 This ability to reward and create a dependent bureaucracy based on patron–client principles most distinguished hierarchical kingdoms from the restricted authority of big men. Among the reasons for the emergence of such hierarchies was a need to reduce competition for succession within a royal patrilineage by establishing supervisory headships for non-kin at court and over provinces and local clan chiefs. In time, some of these headships became hereditary. In the case of the Baganda, there was a good deal of room for selection of ‘hereditary’ chiefs from within a large patrilineal descent group according to ability and loyalty. Ascribed status combined with personal achievement for offices of state; and as selection was generally 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, selection from a peasant level could be disguised by fictional incorporation into a lineage. Many posts among the elite in Buganda, termed ‘hereditary’ in the nineteenth century, ‘were in fact filled by selection from among quite wide ranges of eligible persons’, leading to the formation of an ‘incipient gentry’.5 Similar systems have been identified in all the inter-lacustrine states, but notably in Nyoro, where pre-colonial clientage through honours, grants of land, and appointments, in return for service by ranked chiefs, stemmed from the person of the paramount mukama. In turn, chiefs ruled over people who were ‘their dependent clients rather than the subjects of an impersonal administration’.6 Similarly, in Buganda, the kabaka was royal patron to client chiefs (bakungu) set over territorial divisions, officers of royal estates, and military generals. In the smaller state of Busoga with links to Bunyoro and Nyoro selection of commoners for headships bound to the ruler by ties of personal loyalty was reinforced by marriage to a princess or marriage of the ruler to a commoner’s sister or daughter.7 Clientage remained ubiquitous. In the inter-lacustrine states, in the mid-twentieth century, Lucy Mair observed that the system ‘runs through the whole society from top to bottom, everyone 4 Lemarchand, ed., African Kingships in Perspective, 8–14; for a survey of the origins of Ganda 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 the Eve of Independence (Oxford, 1964), 170–6. 6 John Beattie, The Nyoro State (Oxford, 1971), 133. 7 Fallers, Bantu Bureaucracy, 27.

East-Central Africa 127

M ap 6. States and societies of the Great Lakes, after Audrey I. Richards, ed., East African Chiefs: A Study of Political Development in some Uganda and Tanganyika Tribes (London, 1960)

128 Sub-Saharan Africa except the king being somebody’s client, and everyone except the lowliest peasant having clients of his own’.8 Between states there was also clientage and alliance: the Buganda ruler received tribute from Karagwe in Tanzania and from Toro. Europeans were included in such alliances, and early British administrators, after 1894, found themselves acting as brokers to settle disputes between states and princes. Fallers noted: ‘As present-day informants describe these early contacts between Europeans and Soga princes or rulers, it becomes clear that the Soga viewed the European much as they viewed the Kabaka of Buganda—as a powerful patron with whom they might ally themselves in the traditional manner.’9 The arrival of competing religions further complicated the relationship between ruler and clients in Buganda from the 1860s. The task of consolidating power was too much for Kabaka Mwanga (1884–97) who created martyrs and united factions against him. With his flight, the kabaka headship was eclipsed by the oligarchy of the bakungu chiefs under the chief minister or katakiro. Intervention by F. D. Lugard at Kampala as representative of the military arm of the Imperial British East Africa Company in 1890 provided support for the Protestant faction; a treaty brought in resident agents; and, in 1894, Uganda became a protectorate. In the strategy of partition, this collection of large and small states offered a model for management at low cost and control of territory from Kenya and the western shores of Lake Victoria to Lake 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 kingdom through the 1900 Agreement negotiated by Special Commissioner Sir Harry Johnston and the bakungu chiefs. The basis for this cooperative subordination was unusual in its detail and prescriptions, resting on definitions of succession, legitimacy, jurisdiction, and the eventual loyalty of an infant kabaka to ‘the Queen Protectress of Uganda’. During his minority, the administration was largely in the hands of the Katakiro, (Sir) Apollo Kaggwa until 1926. The style and title applied to the ruler (addressed as ‘His Highness’) placed him nominally in the league of Indian and Ottoman princes. Underpinning the agreement was access to resources. The experienced and educated hierarchy of territorial nobility was rewarded by allocation of some 9,000 square miles to 3,945 chiefs, as heritable property worked by forced labour to increase incomes from cash crops. The upper levels of the chiefly hierarchy fared best: ‘The position of the bakungu chiefs was further reinforced by the simplification of the parallel traditional hierarchies which occurred. The bataka chiefs were simply not 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.

East-Central Africa 129 recognised, they had little representation in the negotiations, and lost heavily in the land settlement voted upon by the bakungu chiefs.’10 This dispensation confirmed the primacy of the royal house and a large proprietory class of divisional chiefs with control over tenant farmers. From this hierarchy was created a bureaucracy of landowners as regional and state officials responsible to the kabaka (or to a regency council during a period of royal minority).11 The two main advantages for incoming British administrators were territorial consolidation under a recognized paramountcy and a model for control over neighbouring kingdoms. Buganda doubled in size and influenced societies with different political structures. There was little difficulty with the Toro, Ankole, or Bunyoro kingdoms which followed the Buganda model and were left to operate under similar agreements. But they did not enjoy precisely the same status under the Protectorate government 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 government functions were limited by lack of resources to official salaries and maintaining a few roads and buildings. But in eastern Uganda the Buganda kingdom supplied ancillary administrators, 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 himself in Bunyoro in 1894, became an outstanding example of the continuity of Buganda influence in the region.12 In 1900 he was appointed by Johnston on a salary to administer the western half of Bukedi where he set up his own subchiefs and exempted his Baganda followers from taxes. Praised by Bishop Tucker for his encouragement of cash-cropping, he was reappointed in 1904 and enlarged his control through the use of Baganda agents to the clan chiefs of Teso. There were, however, tensions in a system in which the African administrator’s primary loyalty lay with the kabaka and not the district commissioner. Influence of the Baganda in the minor kingdoms was resented, especially in tax collection, and Bunyoro chiefs rebelled against their advisory role in 1907, when they were removed. Elsewhere, in eastern Uganda the use of ‘Buganda-style client chieftaincy’ from 1906 provoked acts of violence from clan leaders.13 Accordingly, the practice of making appointments of clients for a cut of taxes was frowned on, though Kakunguru was adept 10

Lemarchand, ed., African Kingships in Perspective, 207. Hailey, Native Administration, 180. 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. 11 12

130 Sub-Saharan Africa enough in Busoga to appoint a council of trained assistants to local chiefs paid fixed salaries out of revenue. By 1912, in any case, many of the Baganda officials had transferred their loyalty in the outstations to British official patrons who defined their duties, fixed salaries, but kept in being the district councils in Teso and Lango districts introduced by Kakunguru. Client administration of eastern Uganda from Buganda, however, had long-lasting results. Among the Nilotes of Teso district, for example, Baganda agents operating through the segmentary clan structure had some success in turning local big men into second-order clients in the west of the district, while others resisted.14 This variable response was overcome by the 1920s, as tax and obligatory work produced cash crops and redistribution in the form of increased salaries and multiplication of subordinate offices for councillors, elders, and political party patrons in local council elections. The structure of power was diffused, rather than concentrated at a court or capital, as the big men of different regions responded to privileged access to guns, labour, and the rewards of a money economy: The networks of influence and patronage which engendered Iteso Big Manship provided the New Men of Teso politics with the makings of a political machine that went virtually unrecognised by the British until it was eventually used against them. Big Manship proved not only resilient, but extraordinarily adaptive to the exogenous changes brought about by colonial rule.15

All the details of subsequent manipulation of the labour force during the cotton boom of the 1920s and 1930s cannot be followed here. Eventually, Baganda agency was thrown off by local chiefs, and Teso’s peasantry, like the peasantry elsewhere in Uganda, moved into a period of unrest and opposition to Protectorate administration. The kingdom of Buganda, therefore, served as both a model and a catalyst for political over-rule and economic change. There was little official intervention from the Protectorate government until after the First World War. Regular taxation from 1902 and cotton cultivation increased the level of resources at the disposal of the premier and the oligarchy of regional chiefs, even after the installation of Daudi Cwa as kabaka in 1914. Closer supervision and approved succession of chiefs followed in the 1920s and 1930s through commissioners posted to four districts of the kingdom.16 But central government in 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 officials and a few nominated unofficials. Criticism was open and published in the local press. The Assembly had legislative functions and Buganda Africans 14 Joan Vincent, ‘Colonial Chiefs and the Making of a Class: A Case Study from Teso, Eastern Uganda’, Africa, 47 (1977), 140–58. 15 16 Ibid. 144. Posted as ‘residents’ from 1935.

East-Central Africa 131 were subject to its laws with little power of review by the Uganda High Court. Moreover, the kingdom had considerable financial autonomy by the 1930s over 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 treasurer and finance committee was discussed with a British commissioner. Outside this centralized system in which ministers and notables accessed fees from labour commutations and administered labour for public works, chiefs with status defined by ordinance collected taxes and kept control of customary courts. But they did not control local treasuries centred on provincial offices. They ran their own assemblies at county level as a bureaucracy of landed proprietors, supervised by district commissioners as a channel for other Protectorate 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 the British over-rulers into patrons on behalf of commoners by restricting obligations to chiefs, though it would be too much to claim that the king and peasantry were backed against the chiefs.17 At most, chieftainship was gradually redefined in the direction of prescribed duties for fixed salaries. Treated as hereditary at first, the most senior grades of chiefs were appointed by the kabaka (with official approval) and could be moved to other districts by the 1930s. By the early 1950s, all such appointments were made on the basis of personal qualifications from landowners, gentry, and clan heads.18 Assisted by 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 though the older system of appointment through patronage had been superseded by an impersonal bureaucracy, or ‘native civil service’.19 In practice, there was a political symbiosis (as in Northern Nigeria) between rulers, ministers, and commissioner/residents, but with a clearer demarcation between responsibility for taxes, land administration, and customary law by the indigenous hierarchy and its appointed chiefs, on the one hand, and Protectorate administration of social and technical services, on the other. Moreover, important changes in the central administration of the Protectorate and in the wider context of Uganda politics called in question British support for the kingdom. The advent of Sir Edward Mutesa II to the position of kabaka in 1939 made little impact at first, until the major issue of the place of Buganda in future constitutional relations with the rest of Uganda’s majority population began to surface. Governor Sir Charles Dundas, 1940–4, 17

Lemarchand, ed., African Kingships in Perspective, 210. 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. 18

132 Sub-Saharan Africa encouraged the idea of a federation, devolving powers on the kabaka’s government, contrary to prevailing ideas for a unitary constitution based on expanded representation through the Legislative Council. Oligarchic rivalries between senior chiefs and disorders arising from commoner discontents concerning low prices for cash crops compromised the work of a partly-elected Lukiiko; opposition from the older stratum of clan chiefs and African farmers created the Uganda National Congress in 1952, threatening to bypass the formal leadership of kabaka, court, and ministers. A further threat to the royal 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 an elected Lukiiko, but was vague on the role of a kabaka.20 Worse, Baganda fears of inclusion of Uganda within an East African Federation ignited a more general revolt actively headed by Mutesa II with the assistance of the three kingdoms of Bunyoro, Toro, and Ankole and made more explosive by Cohen’s arrest and exile of the kabaka in November 1953. A wave of pro-royalist and Bugandan ‘nationalism’ overshadowed factional divisions and triumphed temporarily with the return of the king in October 1955. Intense bargaining over the place of Buganda in a new constitution extracted numerous concessions to paramountcy, including power over the appointment of chiefs. Neo-traditional privileges were somehow combined with provisions for a unitary state. Buganda agreed to cooperate in constitutional change in central government, based on a widened franchise and 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-scale representation of the political structure of the traditional monarchy at the height of its power at the end of the nineteenth century’.21 This was a difficult compromise to apply in practice. Although Buganda had only about a quarter of the population, its capital Kampala was the seat of government and a patronage structure was deeply entrenched from the 1930s. Moreover, the return of the kabaka from exile was followed by a purge of chiefs and the creation of an all-Baganda Appointments Board chaired by the king who took advantage of the expansion of government departments through increased aid and technical assistance to secure jobs for the Baganda elite. Writing at the time, David Apter thought he detected a change from a patrimonial to a bureaucratic chieftaincy.22 But the historical evidence suggests that under both the katakiro, Sir Apollo Kaggwa, and the kabaka, before and after exile, transition to any ‘bureaucratic’ system had 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).

East-Central Africa 133 been superficial within the kingdom. The Catholic and Protestant regents who formed a cabinet of notables and the Lukiiko were subordinate in status to both the British and the kabaka, as sources of patronage appointments. Apter concedes this point by recognizing the emergence of a new service elite from the 1920s for whom ‘the patronage opportunities were enormous’ and ‘honour, status and land . . . were distributed by the dominant chiefs to their supporters’.23 The clientage system, in short, remained at the heart of the kingdom and took advantage of ‘modernization’ through expansion of service departments. 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 service appointments, and in the ‘patronage rules’ applied to postings in departments and ministries. Everywhere at provincial, sub-district, and lower chieftaincy levels, where chiefs were paid as much as civil servants, a new establishment emerged with ‘vast patronage at their disposal in the form of clerkships, messengerships, drivers, and minor technical posts such as auditors and smallscale accountants’. After 1955, with increased financial aid these possibilities expanded enormously into areas formerly the reserve of the Protectorate government, especially medical and veterinary services. ‘Tribalism and local service 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 academics with a working interest in the region had failed to see the emergence of neomonarchism and Kabbaka Yekka as a patron party, which made an alliance with the Uganda People’s Congress in 1963, when the kabaka became Chief of State. For a period regional paramountcy combined with constitutional status. This alliance crumbled as Congress gained a working majority, took control of the army in 1964, and attracted some Baganda clients among Members of Parliament and portfolio holders. Bunyoro which was in dispute with 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 from corruption charges against his entourage and leading to abolition of the kabaka’s role, a new executive presidency and destruction of the monarchy in May 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. Audrey Richards observed that the notion of chieftainships as a reward for faithful service to a ruler continued alongside bureaucratic ideals: Modern political leaders have certainly demanded that they should elect their own chiefs, yet both they and the palace party . . . still seem to be thinking in terms of 23

Apter, The Political Kingdom, 119.

24

Ibid. 361.

134 Sub-Saharan Africa control of patronage rather than in those of civil service reform. It is not at all impossible that ‘self-government’ as an ideal may mean to the people a return to more traditional bases of selection of chiefs rather than the reverse.25

Yet, this mild conclusion underestimated the legacy of power inherited from 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 laws and courts. What had been abolished might eventually be restored. As a concession to the Buganda heartland, President Museveni recognized traditional kingship in the Republic of Uganda in 1993; and Kabaka Muteba II headed a local oligarchy, but without constitutional functions. As the case of Uganda demonstrated, promotion of traditional political structures created political factions that might not prevail after independence. The examples of Rwanda and Burundi tend to confirm this proposition. In these territories anthropologists and historians uncovered forms of dependency relationship, styled ‘feudal’ or patron–client, between an older imperialism of Tutsi immigrant hierarchies and sedentary Hutu.26 The most detailed analysis of the various forms of clientship in land, cattle, and military services suggests that German and Belgian rule brought a major change in the development of state power exercised through the Tutsi monarchy and chiefs, by supplementing access to older resources with new forms of tax and labour control, 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 prescribed clientage, mainly through their backing of the Mwami Musinga and appointment 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 faction among the royals (the Batare) was singled out for favourable treatment, at the expense of the Bezi and the kingdom was split up. Later anthropologists came to appreciate that Rwanda monarchy was characterized by the imperialism of a royal clan that maintained distinct political and cultural differences between invading pastoralists and sedentary Hutu agriculturalists. As in Buganda, Rwanda kings suppressed the autonomy of local clan heads and replaced them with loyal retainers. In Burundi, on the other hand, social divisions below the royal stratum of office-holders between the Tutsi minority and the Hutu majority left each group opportunities for advancement and a certain amount of mobility between castes: ‘Many were the Hutu who served 25

Richards, East African Chiefs, 365. 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 Rwanda 1860–1960 (New York, 1988). 26

East-Central Africa 135 as chiefs or subchiefs in the royal domains . . . even more numerous were those who served as . . . councillors at the local or provincial levels; then a number of court offices were traditionally held by Hutu elements recruited from 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 death over subjects were abolished; from 1923 his appointments required the approval of the resident. By creating larger regional units under approved chiefs, the Belgian administration favoured a Tutsi elite. Hostile to both the new order and the Catholic missionaries, the mwami was deposed in 1931 and 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 was continued for the benefit of regional chiefs, rather than the monarchy, and was reinforced in the 1930s by new prestations that fell on the Hutu peasantry. At the same time, the Tutsi consolidated their position by taking advantage of mission education and government posts: ‘As late as 1959, 98 per 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 Conseil Supérieur du Pays consisted of Tutsi elements, and the same disparities could also be observed in the lower and middle-rungs of the administration and the police.’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 oligarchy of chieftaincies both Tutsi and Hutu. Loyalties were transferred to new 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 centre lay in hands of an oligarchy (Ganwa); and the caste cleavage was less well defined because of opportunities for Hutu to rise in economic and social scales as 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 which were reinforced by Bezi control of a regency council in the 1920s. Like the bakungu chiefs in Buganda, they acquired new domains and resources as a result of consolidation of chieftaincies and the use they made of tribute and taxes 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 28

Lemarchand, ed., African Kingships in Perspective, 98.

29

Ibid. 81.

136 Sub-Saharan Africa expanded clientage based on privileged land use and employment of the landless as economic dependents, assisted by the Belgian administration in the name of both ‘tradition’ and ‘modernization’. An anthropologist has simply classified the adapted system as ‘dual colonialism’.30 The rapid pace of Belgian decolonization in the late 1950s left both territories without experience in the compromises of democratic politics and with powerful and antagonistic factions divided ethnically and by class. These divisions were most obvious in Rwanda. There, the Hutu made little headway politically, until the 1959 revolution, in the particular circumstances of Belgian withdrawal and the murder and expulsion of thousands of Tutsis. Hutu republicanism had its roots in historic grievances, in the selection of chiefs and public offices and, in rural areas, in the ‘dissolution of vertical patron–client relationships that once tied the Hutu peasants to their Tutsi overlords’.31 The Hutu began to follow their own big men. Patron– client was redefined as ethnic solidarity between self-made war lords and their followers and served as an instrument for political mobilization. In Burundi, ethnic divisions were less distinct; factional conflict within the Ganwa was translated for a brief period from 1957 to 1961 into political party competition between Bezi and Batare. The Burundi mwami remained in 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 resources to hold the patrimonial state together, the ruling monarchy handed over power to a predominantly Tutsi army, leading to destruction of Hutu elites in 1965 and Hutu rebellion. 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.

9 Southern Africa The range of examples of the demise or survival of chiefly hierarchies can be extended to southern Africa. There are marginal and transient cases such as the patronage extended by Theophilus Shepstone, Natal’s Diplomatic Agent, to Zulu chiefdoms south of the Thukela river outside the Zulu heartland in the mid-nineteenth century, prior to the Anglo-Zulu war. Overconfidence in his ability to manage Zulu encouraged Shepstone as Secretary for Native Affairs and ‘Paramount Chief’ to seek relief for Natal’s land and labour problems by urging war on Zulu north of the Thukela.1 In that region the Zulu patrimonial state and warrior kingdom founded by Shaka was well versed in the politics of alliance and war, though susceptible to internal fratricidal rivalries. By the 1870s, these had been brought under control during the long paramountcy of Mpande and his son Cetshwayo, though there was always a possibility of inter-generational conflict as well as questionable loyalties on the part of pre-Shakan chiefdoms such as those that had come under the protection of Natal. These ‘client chiefdoms’ served Natal’s interests well enough until the late 1870s; and although their judicial authority had been weakened by prescriptive regulations, the protected chiefs responded loyally to the defence of the Colony at the outbreak of the Zulu war in 1879.2 From one viewpoint, therefore, that outbreak might be regarded, paradoxically, as ‘the high tide of colonial/chiefly collaboration’.3 But on any other count the conflict of 1879 begun by the Cape governor and Natal authorities on the pretext of settling Zulu boundaries with the Transvaal was the nadir of Anglo-Zulu relations, ending in the capture and temporary exile of Cetshwayo and partition of Zululand in a ‘settlement’ that surrounded the core kingdom with the territories of thirteen ‘appointed chiefs’. The most prominent of these, related to the Zulu royal house, enlarged on opportunities to consolidate power in their own domains at the expense of Cetshwayo’s followers and the old order of royal officials, army commanders, and tribute collectors.4 So much so that when Cetshwayo 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, The Destruction 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 and the Code of Native Law 1878, 281–4. 3 Ibid. 284. 4 Guy, The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom, 83–94.

138 Sub-Saharan Africa by British client chiefs so as to alter the power balance and lead to his defeat and death in 1884. Caught between the demands for land and labour exerted by both Natal and the South African Republic, Zululand was destroyed by civil war and external pressures. Incorporated into Natal in 1897 the old kingdom inspired little more than a fruitless rebellion in 1906 and, much later, a historical tradition cultivated by Zulu nationalists. Like the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa, or the Imerina kingdom of Madagascar, the Zulu military state was dismembered rather than incorporated politically into a new hierarchy of over-rule. More pertinently, the three ‘High Commission Territories’ of Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland came under British patronage as a defence against the predations of the British South Africa Company or settlement by Transvaal Afrikaners in ways that secured the position of their paramountcies during a half century of benign neglect. In Lesotho (Basutoland), King Moshoeshoe ran the government as a chiefly corporation appointed by the ruler to the Basuto National Council from 1903, in the manner of a traditional pitso (assembly). Few concessions were made 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) very late in the day, after a long history of clientage by Tswana chiefs who actively sought protection from the Crown. Moreover, they confirmed their status at an audience with Queen Victoria in 1895. Lightly supervised through the High Commissioner in South Africa, the paramounts refused tribunals and other instruments of ‘indirect rule’. From 1938, they packed an African Advisory Council with chiefs and headmen of the Tswana, Bamangwato, and Bakwena peoples, and they worked with European settlers in a Joint Council, as a basis for a Legislative Council in 1961. They loyally mobilized for war in 1941 in the expectation of earning continued British protection against South Africa.6 Selected by the departing British for ministerial offices, chiefs dominated pre-independence elections through Khama’s Bechuanaland Democratic Party. Finally, Swaziland, although weakened territorially by mineral and land concessions, survived, after being rescued from the Transvaal in 1903, under Sobhuza II as a patrimonial state supervised by a resident commissioner. Sobhuza stayed in power by making his own appointments of princes and a few graduates to offices of state and packing the Swazi National Council with approved representatives. The endgame of independence was played out with great skill by engineering a mix of 5 John Grotpeter, ‘Political Leadership and Political Development in the High Commission Territories’, Ph.D. thesis (Washington University, 1965), 117–53; J. E. Spence, The Politics of Dependence (London, 1958), 34–54. 6 Ashley Jackson, ‘Motivation and Mobilization for War: Recruitment for the British Army in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1941–42’, African Affairs, 96 (1997), 399–417.

Southern Africa 139 nominations and elections to the Legislature in order to incorporate a European minority and exclude election of African politicians by universal franchise. After a constitution was imposed in 1964 allowing expanded representation in the Legislative Council, the king and the Swazi Council went into 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 a belated move in the structure of internal administration towards conciliar and parliamentary representation; and the response led to a takeover of the institutions concerned by traditional oligarchs. For the most part, ‘indirect rule’ was hardly an issue at all in the High Commission Territories.7 The precepts of Lugard’s Dual Mandate were ritually cited very late in the day; but the fundamental feature of indigenous treasuries was ignored, in favour of administrative centralization, easily captured—not by an educated elite, but by the traditional patrons of new parties. In any case, a debate on administrative methods which ignored the fundamental origins of the systems utilized by European rule was beginning to sound sterile.8 The anthropologists, Rattray, Mair, Richards, Fallers among others perceived (though they were divided on its significance) that the catalogue of hierarchies taken over and segmentary systems with ‘created’ chiefs were less prescriptive than those who framed regulations imagined and allowed considerable scope for chiefs and administrators as brokers within the system.9 After M. G. Smith’s work on Zaria Emirate, moreover, the issue of clientage could not be ignored in favour of ascribed status, and the ramifications of this issue continued into the period of power consolidated under old and new elites, civil and military, from the 1960s, as party patronage and the praetorianism of ‘new states’.10 It is worth pausing to take stock of past and contemporary debate on the use of the term ‘indirect rule’ for the politics of those regions where it has had most currency. Half a century ago, Lord Hailey, old India hand and defender of autocratic princely states in the 1930s, commented thoughtfully, but not conclusively, on the prescriptions for ‘Native Administration’ on the eve of great political changes in British Africa. He rejected the direct/indirect dichotomy for imprecision: ‘the loose use of the word is best illustrated by 7

Hailey, Native Administration, 202, 204, 216–22, 323–5. The revisionist literature on ‘indirect rule’ is vast, beginning with M. Perham, ‘A ReStatement 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 when C. L. Temple, Native Races and their Rulers (London, 1968) was reissued, iconoclasm had reached the point where M. Hiskett in his critical Introduction dismissed ‘indirect rule’ as ‘an attitude of mind’. For continued use of the term, John W. Cell, ‘Colonial Rule’, in OHBE, iv. The Twentieth Century, 232–54. 9 Gluckman, ‘Inter-Hierarchical Roles’, 69–73. 10 Apter and Rosberg, eds., Political Development; Perlmutter and Bennett, eds., The Political 8

140 Sub-Saharan Africa the fact that the Indian States have often been cited as examples of the use of Indirect Rule.’11 Later, at least one former governor agreed; and few of his colleagues were inhibited much by Lugardian orthodoxy.12 Hailey also expressed doubts about parliamentary institutions for British territories and discerned that the absence of a trained indigenous bureaucracy in Africa on the lines of the Indian Civil Service made nonsense of talk about ‘local government’.13 He was wrong to think, however, that ‘Native Authority’ was only 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. Appointments to such institutions, he admitted, were still made ‘by native custom and usage’, that is by exercise of a modicum of patronage and agreement of elders, clan heads, and, in some protectorates, youngmen’s associations. For the bulk of chiefly authorities, however, it is unwise to speak in terms of patrimonialism. For, Hailey also recognized the uniqueness of the largest patrimonial states in Buganda or Northern Nigeria; and he made a broad distinction between appointed native agencies as officials of government, more particularly in East Africa, and agencies that were also indigenous authorities in their own right in central and western Africa. From his Indian experience he came to the legalistic and questionable conclusion (close to Lugard) that the emirs lacked ‘innate authority’, in relation to a governor, compared with princes to a viceroy.14 In the end, Hailey’s monumental survey of administrative structures in British African territories rested on classification of chiefdoms by ‘statutory enactment’, rather than on the ways in which power was actually exercised by and through chiefly hierarchies. His perception that ‘indirect rule’ was conditioned by pre-existing African political institutions was never pressed very far to uncover the political reasons for British and African cooperation, certainly never with the insights available from contemporary anthropology and history. Today it is the monumental African Survey of 1957 which is of ‘historical’ interest, because it may be doubted, for example, whether British over-rule in the thirty-eight Muslim Influence of the Military; Oskar Kurer, The Political Foundations of Development Policies (London, 1997), chap. 6. 11

Hailey, Native Administration, i. 9. ‘I can see now that it was a pity that the system we chose to follow had been named “Indirect Rule”, for the name was misleading and unfortunately attractive. Misleading because “Rule” connotes the powers and functions of the central government, of sovereignty; and unfortunately 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). 12

Southern Africa 141 emirates with a population of some twelve million people had changed very much from patrimonialism in appointments of subordinate district and village heads over the period of British occupation. The realities of power, as opposed to administrative precept, were better analysed by Mair, Richards, Nadel, and others, including M. G. Smith who perceived that authoritarian residents 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 states changed to party politicians, bosses, and brokers, a shift that Hailey foresaw and disapproved of, because of his belief that African tradition, and what he called ‘Africanism’, found popular acceptance through other means than electoral confrontation. That partial insight into patrimonialism and clientage is still relevant. Ultimately, the fate of indigenous hierarchies in the postcolonial state depended on demography, resources, constitutional bargaining prior to independence, and on the ability of rulers to adapt in self-defence to the demands of popular representation. Some of the African examples have been swept away, either because of isolation and inability to recruit and fund patron parties, or because, as in Rwanda-Burundi, they have been crushed by ethnic and political rivals bent on unitary forms of state organization. In a few examples they have survived by utilizing a politicized civil service and entering the political arena supported by ethnic majorities with exclusive claims to resources and offices. Where traditional chieftaincy has been displaced, other forms of leadership rely on status by achievement and access to public resources. What is striking about African examples of this displacement is not so much the revelation of ‘corruption’ in the work of Reno and others as the long accommodation between big men and their networks of clients, operating along trade routes in early nineteenth-century Sierra Leone and in twentieth-century diamond diggings at Kono. The continuities of protective and exploitative leadership are more striking than the demise of a chiefly order. ‘Indirect rule’ should be viewed in the historical context of a variety of economic, political, and bureaucratic arrangements between those with ritual and secular power and those without to secure advantage. Contemporary slums on the margins of urban and industrialized South Africa, internally managed by ‘shacklords’, are another and later example of protective leadership: ‘because a political system entirely free of patron-clientelism in conditions such as in today’s South Africa, is unlikely if not impossible’.16 The sequence of forms of traditional and neo-traditional leadership has been endless. ‘First pre-colonial chiefs, then colonial officials and collaborative chiefs sought outsiders’ help 15

Smith, Government in Zazzau, 293. 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. 16

142 Sub-Saharan Africa in gaining access to the benefits of trade with the wider world economy in order to meet local challenges to their political authority.’17 Fatton, therefore, in the context of Senegal politics, emphasized both the longevity of the system dominated by Muslim brotherhoods and the corrosive effects of the existence of ‘a small ruling class capable of obtaining and controlling the resources produced by the masses; [clientelism] is inherently hierarchic, exploitative, and corrupt’.18 Perceptively, too, Olufemi Vaughan has argued that Yoruba chiefs survived under Nigeria’s first republic and period of military rule by trading title-creation for posts in government corporations, thus joining the new class of politicians, civil servants, businessmen, and soldiers as influential brokers.19 That conclusion confirms the continuity (and informality) of reciprocity between new rulers and old leaders in Lagos politics uncovered by Sandra Barnes 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 an administrative label for political and social structures adopted and adapted for a brief period to European purposes. Those purposes were not exclusive to British imperial methods—a fact which lessens the value of ‘indirect rule’ as an imperial model for hierarchies under French, German, or Belgian rule as clients of a ‘patron colonial state’.21 Co-option of local hierarchies, moreover, supplied a ‘legitimization’ for both sides of the power equation—for chiefs and officials—as one historian has observed for the cases of Kenya and other states of East and Central Africa: The colonial state drew its authority from a traditional basis, as the ideology of trusteeship, with roots in paternalistic and pre-modern authority structures. Its precepts were not the individual political rights of modernity, of an atomised but formally free 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, implicit in the reciprocal authority structure of feudal social relations. As one District Officer said: ‘We were an elite corps of an elite system, created for the benevolent exercise of paternal power.’22

It would not be difficult to extend this observation from the work of African scholars to patron–client examples cited for Malaysia and the Pacific Islands. 17

Reno, Corruption and Politics in Sierra Leone, 108, 128. 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. 18

Southern Africa 143 summary In the region of western Africa widespread practices of economic and political clientage were fairly easily applied to incorporate traders, merchants, and missionaries, for as long as Europeans accepted the terms of trade and residence on the coast. The long campaign to end the slave trade and the establishment of fortified enclaves modified this dependency from the early nineteenth century. Governors and consuls worked to establish a wider sphere of influence and control through local African allies, treaty states, and a 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 reliance on force against the Asante, some coastal states in Yoruba, and through the military action of the Royal Niger Company, which combined treatymaking, trade, and administration as far as the Hausa–Fulani emirates. Partition of territory with other Powers required small numbers of officials to come to terms with the chiefdoms and hierarchies they found in place to meet the obligations of protectorate administration. Chiefs could be deposed; but for the most part they were utilized for judicial and financial purposes. In each of the colonial states carved out of West African societies the pattern of British (and sometimes French or German) over-rule was conditioned by the political structures found in place. In the Gold Coast the Akan and other chiefdoms of the Colony area were allowed considerable autonomy to continue customary courts and extract rents, but lacked regulated treasuries funded from direct taxes. In the Ashanti region the king was removed, and then restored as head of a delimited ‘confederacy’. On the whole, little was done to prepare chiefs and their councils for the responsibilities of local government reforms in the 1940s, though a role 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 a dominant party in the 1950s. Chiefs were forced to fight a rearguard action in opposition and lost control of resources and judicial functions, as party patronage created other clients. Much of that pattern of marginalization of traditional rulers was repeated in Sierra Leone and in Southern Nigeria, though there were considerable differences in the success or failure of chiefs to accommodate with party politicians. One of the more obvious reasons for the survival of chiefdoms in Yoruba states lay in the demographic size and conciliar structure of chieftaincy in rural and urban society. For a considerable period that structure was respected by British officials, after some disastrous experiments in direct taxation. Chiefs’ councils, moreover, with their entourage of client appointments, were forced to widen their membership to include representation from other elite groups. Nevertheless, from the 1940s, Yoruba chieftaincy

144 Sub-Saharan Africa was called into question by further experiments in devolved local government and central funding which increased the power of political patrons within the Western Region. By contrast, British over-rule in the emirates of Northern Nigeria created a joint hierarchy of imported and traditional officials, managed by a mixture of clientage and administrative prescription. Although qualified as Indirect Rule, the system which evolved from 1906 was more symbiotic than bureaucratic, more political than prescriptive in its attention to loyalty and reliability on both sides of the hierarchy. Restructuring within the emirates, moreover, combined with improved peasant production to ensure funding for a reformed treasury system, regular salaries, and close association of technical departments and personnel with emirate government. For ruling houses the risk of deposition and the reward of lineal succession and control over local government and the judiciary within a ‘Native Authority’ were powerful incentives to conform with British demands for reform of domestic slavery and a measure of competence within a protectorate government permeated by patronage. An unexpected consequence of the relative isolation of the North, judicially and politically, from the southern regions of Nigeria was that emirs and chiefs showed little hesitation in funding and running a patron party from 1951 to dominate the northern regional government and to secure a share of civil service posts in the region and at the federal centre, in competition with southerners. Thus, a consolidation of power through traditional leadership in the Hausa–Fulani North deeply influenced the pattern of regional and ethnic conflict, party competition, and alliance at independence in 1960 and after. The kingdoms of the Great Lakes in East-Central Africa also provide historical examples of patrimonial states utilized and adapted for the purposes of European over-rule. In societies where political clientage was ubiquitous the Kingdom of Buganda became the archetype for a stable chiefly oligarchy with guaranteed status and lands, as well as a surrogate agency for administering segmentary clans in the region. The relative autonomy of the kingdoms and the status of their rulers increased to the point where it became difficult to accommodate their political and constitutional position within a unitary state, as Uganda moved towards an elected successor government in the 1950s. The exile of the Kabaka of Buganda and his triumphal return into party 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 of State, until he was removed and his state dismantled under the presidential system 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

Southern Africa 145 clientage exercised by a minority Tutsi nobility over Hutu agriculturalists with additional tax and labour services, divisions close to a caste system were created in Rwanda. By the 1950s, these divisions were reflected in the predominance of Tutsi in government institutions and services. In Burundi, a section of the dominant royal oligarchy was similarly privileged, although Hutu did find opportunities for social and economic advancement in ways that intensified the inter-ethnic rivalries that followed on Belgian decolonization in 1962. In all, the exacerbation of traditional patron–client divisions by administrative patronage could be held to account for the pattern of Hutu and Tutsi revolution and counter-revolution, as both sides turned to military solutions to settle historical accounts. In South Africa, too, within the context of African and settler subordination and politics there are some significant examples of alliance and imperial patronage. For a period from 1879 Zulu chiefdoms on the borders of Natal were co-opted for warfare against the core clans of the Zulu kingdom. Similarly, an important group of client chiefs were instrumental in bringing about the downfall of King Cetshwayo in a dismembered Zululand from 1883. By contrast, Lesotho, Botswana, and Swaziland became imperial client states preserved from the Transvaal and the British South Africa Company. Left largely to themselves under traditional chiefs and assemblies, they formed their 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 over constitutional blueprints. The legacy of British over-rule was the reinforcement of chiefly oligarchical rule in the former High Commission Territories. Elsewhere, in western and East-Central Africa, however, it has been less certain that leadership by ascription can prevail in the face of rule by political or military chiefs and the resurgence of rural and urban leadership by self-made big men.

Part IV

Maritime South-East Asia

10

Malaya

British commerce and regional influence moved south-east from India and Ceylon in the early nineteenth century to found new enclaves and expand new markets. Consequently, there is a tendency to categorize a nineteenthcentury pattern of British administration in terms of British experience in the Indian states. Like that experience, however, contact with the kingdoms and archipelagos stretching from Burma to Malaya was moulded by local conditions for trade, settlement, and rivalry with other powers. There were parallels with the eighteenth-century contest for control and influence on the Asian subcontinent, but the efforts of the East India Company were neither energetic nor sustained during the period of Dutch predominance before 1824. Commercial ambition lay in securing a command of the China tea trade by export of Indian opium; and in that sphere Company servants came at first as supplicants for entry at the Chinese ports, not as builders of forts to defend roadsteads and factories. Elsewhere in the Indies, Company ventures were tentative. The island of Penang was leased from the Sultan of Kedah in 1786 as a staging post for the China 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 formal powers of local jurisdiction and relied on the cooperation of Malay chiefs.1 A promise to furnish assistance against Siam was disallowed. When Penang was ceded in 1791 along with a coastal strip (Province Wellesley), Superintendent Light administered through headmen. A plan for a separate presidency there on a par with Bombay or Madras came to nothing. The Company focused temporarily on Java, 1812–16, occupied by Lieutenant-Governor Raffles. Restoration of Java to the Dutch led the ambitious Raffles to bargain for a second entrepôt at Singapore island, ceded by the Sultan of Johore in 1819 for support in a succession dispute and administered jointly. From 1824, the three enclaves—Penang, Singapore, and Malacca (ceded by the Dutch)—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.

150 Maritime South-East Asia administration there, given time. Entry into Singapore, typically enough, entailed taking sides in internal politics and then retaining the island as part of a partition treaty with the Dutch. Against other mainland powers little progress was made. Penang merchants obtained few trade concessions from the Thai dynasty which dominated the northern Malay states from Bangkok. Calcutta steered clear of involvement in Cochin-China or Siam. The Company was burdened enough by a frontier war, 1824–6, with the ruling dynasty of Burma—‘the fount of justice and patronage, but the target of intrigue and rebellion’.2 The strategies of international rivalry and control of the Bay of Bengal took precedence over ad hoc arrangements worked out by country traders. In the one sphere where commercial penetration really mattered the Company was kept at arm’s length at Canton ‘as persons beyond transformation’, 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 manage debts and disputes through extraterritorial courts and to run a bonded warehouse system that secured revenue and loans for the Peking government. The price was financial indemnity, cession of Hong Kong, and a judicial enclave in Shanghai. 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. The formal 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 regarding the British enclaves as a group of posts requiring separate government. Another was the difficulty of posting India hands to a different environment where they understood neither Malay nor Chinese. Historic interests of China in Siam or Burma were more important than India’s transit trade: ‘The intimate connection which already exists commercially and socially between the Straits Settlements and China, and the very large resort of the Chinese alike 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 the Chinese coast.’4 After more argument and pressure from local merchants, the British government accepted a minimal and autocratic administration 2

A. J. Stockwell, ‘British Expansion and Rule in South-East Asia’, in OHBE, iii. 375–6. 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 Expansion and Law, 83–100. 4 Governor Edmund Blundell to William Grey, 13 June 1859, in Madden, ed., Select Documents, iii. 521–2. 3

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for the Straits and Singapore, in 1866, which did little to meet merchant aspirations for representation and left relations with neighbouring states open questions. Much depended on the strength or weakness of patrimonial regimes in those states, the ability of their service gentry—indigenous or immigrant—to find outside support, and the calculus of costs and benefits in international terms for a patron power. There was no historical reason why British experience in Indian states should be transposed and made to operate elsewhere. Departures from the two Indian solutions to over-rule—by a treaty alliance or by close supervision in the manner of Bengal—had already been made in Ceylon, a captured colony with a very small European population and a subimperial dependency of the Madras presidency. From 1802, Ceylon was a Crown Colony with its own civil service and courts that owed much to Dutch precedents. It might well have incorporated the Kingdom of Kandy under British over-rule as a subsidiary alliance on the Wellesley model.5 But the Kandyan monarchy refused to have its traditional status reversed; and when the king was deposed, Kandyan notables became direct clients of the governor in a convention of 1815 which left them with the administration of civil and criminal justice and outside the system of administration in the maritime provinces until 1833. Other intermediaries previously used by the Dutch were to hand. During Governor Maitland’s administration the British turned to grades of traditional headmen (mudaliyars). Some were ‘attached to the governor personally’ as interpreters and minor functionaries; more usually they were recognized as territorial and village administrators, or nominal chiefs. Some were honorary headmen rewarded for loyalty and bureaucratic support in fiscal, judicial, and land management. The policy was autocratically continued in the 1880s by Governor Arthur Hamilton-Gordon, fresh from his experience of imperial hierarchy in Fiji, when he favoured mudaliyar recruitment into the Native Department ‘through patronage of a few families with aristocratic pretensions’.6 In all, the enlistment of headmen in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) drew on a local political and social resource, creating a beneficial elite rewarded by forced labour and sale of Crown lands as essential clientbrokers and founders of later political patronage networks.7 Elsewhere, the Company made a poor fist of extending Indian state practices. The worst case of mismanaged clientage was that of Burma already 5

Madden, ed., Select Documents, iii. 688–94. 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 and Sri 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 Bureaucratic Systems Emergent from the British Imperial Tradition (Durham, NC, 1966), 46. 6

152 Maritime South-East Asia aggrieved by loss of territory in 1826.8 During a decade of residency representation, British envoys had no authority and little influence over internal succession politics at Ava or Rangoon. The King of Burma replied in kind by establishing a much larger embassy at Calcutta. The resident was withdrawn from the court in 1840; a weak central government under Pagan Min and the eclipse of traditional protection from China made it difficult to find redress for 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 a client state much before 1867, when Mindon surrendered trade monopolies and conceded extraterritorial privileges in mixed courts. Outward compliance sapped internal authority and status. The regime collapsed in a succession war in 1878. Fear of French advances and loss of trade and investment led to a total British conquest. But Burma did not become a princely state. Administration was immediately modelled on that of British India; the king was deposed; and the religious and secular status groups dependent on royal patronage—ministers, military generals, Buddhist orders, and local district headmen—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. He opened 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 and the revenue system, while leaving hereditary governors to run his provinces. His successor, King Chulalongkorn, continued this path of reform through selected clients, using the influence of the British mercantile and banking community to counter territorial demands from France in Indo-China. British conventions with France and the kingdom, 1896–7, provided patron protection for a buffer state and preserved the integrity of the Siamese Malay states. As heirs to the traditions of a Malacca sultanate dating from the fifteenth century, rulers in Malaya operated patrimonial systems based on personal power and prestige through descent and ability to protect and reward state nobility and chiefs. Historiography stresses the legitimizing role of nominal headship over powerful regional chiefs in Malay society with little secular control outside royal districts.9 Income from land revenues and immigrant Chinese miners ensured a precarious stability for some rulers of the western states. The advent of European merchant adventurers offered an additional form of alliance, if early treaties made with the East India Company could be 8

W. S. Desai, History of the British Residency in Burma, 1826–40 (Rangoon, 1939). 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 Systems of Western Malaya (London, 1958). 9

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M ap 7. The Malay States, late nineteenth century, after Emily Sadka, The Protected Malay States (Kuala Lumpur, 1968) and Central Survey Office, Kuala Lumpur, Map No. 226

154 Maritime South-East Asia made to work. Mostly, they could not be invoked, because of Company indifference. British enclaves in the Settlements offered a more proximate source 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 the coast south of Penang Island and along the lower Krian and Kurau rivers. With a large Hakka and Cantonese population run by Chinese societies and investors 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, a sultan and a hereditary nobility had nominal authority over village chiefs and enjoyed a monopoly of tolls and taxes at low levels of collection. Status derived from ‘personality and the prestige of office’; but a legitimate heir to the sultanate 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 the richer rice-growing areas of the north, and two other claimants, Raja Muda Abdullah 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 of disorders in the neighbouring states in 1873, supported to a lesser extent by the ruler of Selangor who invoked Company agreements offering assistance. The Colonial Secretary, Lord Kimberley, in September 1873 ordered the Straits Governor, Sir Andrew Clarke, ‘to rescue . . . these fertile and productive countries’ and uphold states in the interests of a ‘moral protectorate’ throughout the peninsula.11 In private, Kimberley agreed that use of residents as advisers might provide a suitable channel for such ‘protection’. On his own initiative, Clarke prevailed on a suitable client, Raja Muda Abdullah, to install 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 of state under Raja Muda Abdullah. At the same time, the obligation to ask a resident’s advice on all matters except religion and customs and make cost of residencies 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 run the mining area of Larut and extract compensation for damage. Boundaries with the Settlements were adjusted. The fact that seven major chiefs of the 10 Emily Sadka, ed., ‘The Journal of Sir Hugh Low, Perak, 1877’, Journal of the Malayan Branch 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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state were also induced to sign, in addition to the newly recognized sultan, counted heavily in Colonial Office approval, but the executive functions of a resident were implied, rather than conferred by the ruler. Lord Carnarvon continued to stress that only advice was to be given. The resident appointed to Larut, Captain Speedy, fairly easily displaced the Mantri from his fief and administered the Chinese enclave under European officers and Indian police, with total control of revenue and judicial administration according to the Indian Penal Code. Apart from this limited success, the allegedly deposed sultan and his supporters refused to be pensioned gracefully and ignored the Engagement. For most of Perak there was a complete disjunction between Colonial Office views of a mild and beneficial patronage and the realities of local power, where the resident-brokers were authorized by Clarke, before he left the Straits, to use force to secure revenue. When Resident James Birch set aside custom by claiming a monopoly over duties and taxes and encouraged the escape of slaves from their owners he was murdered in November 1875 in a concerted revolt that had the support of Sultan Abdullah and his chiefs. This disastrous breakdown of relations resulted in a brief military occupation. Both rival sultans were exiled. In 1877, therefore, the new resident, (Sir) Hugh Low, arrived to advise in a political structure that was headed only by a ‘Native Authority’, Raja Muda Yusuf, who had doubtful 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 On the ground, there was a considerable expansion in civil administration through treasury, surveys, lands, mines, and customs departments concentrated in Larut and upper Perak. By 1876, the Colonial Office recognized that the residents had political and administrative functions entailing control of revenue and some courts of justice. Little thought was given by Straits governors to the place of Malays in the hierarchy—at most, perhaps appointing stipended chiefs and a sultan to an advisory council. Officials justified their actions, after the tragic events of 1875, in terms of consistency with ‘policy’ or necessary departures from instructions. The material is useful evidence of the place of prescription in dealings with a political hierarchy; but it is not the essential point which was perception of status differences between governor and ruler, and the consequential acts carried out by administrative brokers, as a result of this change of hierarchy. The mistake of Lord Carnarvon was to believe there was a ‘Residential system’ acceptable to a sultan, when there was only a set of working arrangements that broke down, when it proved impossible for Birch to have Abdullah acknowledged as a British client. The mistake of local officials, and especially Clarke, was to push ahead with a system that 13

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

156 Maritime South-East Asia was only experimental in the eyes of the Colonial Office. This, at least, was a wiser approach to clientage, when protagonists among the Malay nobility were still searching for advantages. The assumption behind the Engagement was that residents were desired as advisers. It did not follow (as a Colonial Office minute conjectured) that they would necessarily become ‘virtual rulers’.14 Too much was left for Governor Clarke to rush through; and he was positive that residents should collect revenue and that the mining enclave should be managed entirely through a resident. Wiser counsels pointed out to Carnarvon that it was preferable to carry out public works and revenue improvement through proclamations issued in the name of a compliant ruler.15 And this position conceded that reversal of status accompanied by structural changes in state administration exceeded the advisory tutelage envisioned in ‘engagements’. Difficult to classify, the Malay states were brought into ‘an administrative 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 in this new sphere of imperial influence residents were more than diplomatic envoys, and that annexations were out of the question. The fundamental problem was how to administer through Malays in a hierarchical and patrimonial 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 been among the first of the new administrators to accept that it was preferable to reinvent the indigenous hierarchy of sultan, district headman (raja), and penghulu (village chief) to secure revenue and petty justice as a line of power into village society, leaving specialist departments to European officers, more especially in Larut and upper Perak.17 It was left to Hugh Low to experiment with the details of this instrumental and pragmatic approach. At the same time, a new governor of the Straits, William Robinson, perceived, in his general case against annexations, that there was a condition of reciprocity in supervising through Malay hierarchies, ‘and especially by personally dealing with every matter of detail in the administration’, to make such a relationship work.18 Annexations might, in the end, be inevitable; but, in the meantime, the advantages of protection had to be manifest and compensated by access to resources. In Robinson’s opinion, men of the character of Hugh Low, as Resident in Perak, might broker such an arrangement. An experienced Malay explorer, botanist, and administrator from the 1840s, Low was a client of Raja James Brooke in the government of Sarawak and in Labuan in the 1860s. In Perak, from 1877, his first steps were to curb 14 15 17 18

Sadka, The Protected Malay States (Kuala Lumpur, 1968), 99 and note. 16 Ibid. 100 note. Tinker, ‘Structure of the Heritage’, 47. Sadka, The Protected Malay States, 105. Robinson, memorandum, 29 Apr. 1879, in Madden, ed., Select Documents, v. 546.

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the zeal of the Indian police and to rely on headmen for collections. He made patronage appointments of hereditary penghulus, in return for collection of tin duties and land rents for 20 per cent commissions, thus restoring their tradition of tax-farming; and he restored their powers of jurisdiction in minor criminal and civil cases. Reciprocity ensured that notables as executives and spokesmen for village communities acquired official status and perquisites that 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 elite and not by the peasantry. He refrained from attempting to abolish domestic slavery till the 1880s. His status was unusual, because Raja Muda Yusuf and other rajas, currently without much following, depended on him for survival. He consulted them frequently; and to that extent they participated in government without formal executive positions leading, eventually, to ‘the renaissance 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 tandem with more formal departmental administration by making Malay leaders stakeholders 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 the business of local government. Significantly, he located his headquarters up the Perak river at Kuala Kangsar, close to major chiefs and Chinese communities; he gave away much in personal funding of chiefs and penghulus and he 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 of revenue officers and supervisors of penghulus. Power was diffused, not concentrated in the hands of an official from the Straits Settlements. In Heussler’s phrase: ‘It was European rule with a native apparatus.’ For this reason, the Chinese were included in Low’s system as service gentry, because tin supplied over half of state revenues, and they ran tax farms producing income for both Malay chiefs and the British. In return for recognition of their commercial and financial status, they accepted Low’s duties and taxes on their monopolies. The early period of British over-rule saw different styles among governors and 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 some extent, been exonerated by later historians. His massive diary reveals other 19

Sadka, The Protected Malay States, 113. Robert Heussler, British Rule in Malaya: The Malayan Civil Service and its Predecessors, 1867–1942 (Oxford, 1981), chap. 4. 20

158 Maritime South-East Asia 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 penghuluships. His engineering knowledge was especially useful and rare among British officials. Governor Weld contrasted with most of his predecessors. In some ways, he behaved more like a resident, enjoying travel, hospitality, and great personal authority to dispose of large revenues as he thought fit. As governor, he upheld the continued separation of Perak and Selangor from the Settlements, under a ‘mild, just and firm despotism’ with himself as ruler-inchief.21 He urged the method should be extended to other Malay states; and he was instrumental in preparing the way for an extension of British control into Pahang. Residents were left in no doubt where power lay—in the hands of 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 discussed without reference to Straits councillors or officials. Weld did, however, give competent residents room for manoeuvre, thus complementing his own hierarchy through the initiative of his subordinates in finding competent subordinates of their own. Douglas’s successor in Selangor from 1882 was the scholarly and energetic F. A. Swettenham. He had little confidence in the sultan’s State Council. But he took care to ratify the sultan’s appointment of penghulus, paid out of the revenue they collected and chosen from the junior ranks of the state nobility. In time, 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, and mostly the good amongst the leading lights of the Selangor Malays’. In the view of Swettenham’s biographer such joint appointments through the patronage of sultan and resident were ‘crucial to the survival of the Malay aristocracy and its eventual transformation into a political elite’.22 Swettenham expanded the practice of making loans to Malays to clear land for immigrants under the supervision of penghulus. In other ways, he was less of a broker for the official Malay establishment than the European commercial establishment. Like Weld, Swettenham was a developer working through a 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 into the Straits and into Selangor in 1891. This measure earned rulers’ loyalty by paying them fixed stipends from rents, while, at the same time, giving peasants more secure title and the government a means of assessing and taxing all 21 22

Sadka, The Protected Malay States, 117. H. S. Barlow, Swettenham (Kuala Lumpur, 1995), 257–9, 261–4.

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holdings.23 For the administration, access to a major resource was assured without annexation. Other administrative pioneers extended the residency system, but had less success in establishing smooth relations with Malays. Hugh Clifford helped to coax the ruler of Pahang into a treaty in 1889 and became resident there for ten years, later returning to Malaya as governor. Austere and high-minded, Clifford took a rather severe view of chiefs, while remaining a passionate romantic about the country. Saddled with the poorest of the states, there was little he could advise for development, except to curb the predatory concession hunters of neighbouring Singapore and put down outbreaks of rebellion. Negri Sembilan was also difficult to form into a structured state, until Weld added the territory of Sungei Ujong, in 1889, by the simple expedient of removing its chief. Johore State, on the other hand, resisted supervision under a treaty of 1885, as long as its sultan employed an advisory board of retired colonial officials as ‘ “contact men” rather than overseers’, until replaced by a single adviser in 1914.24 The residents were, therefore, members of a Malay establishment, paid for out of state revenues. They were not servants of the Crown. Indeed, a convenient fiction maintained that they and subordinate officers were servants of the sultan. Patronage over appointments was in the hands of the governor which left him as a kind of resident-in-chief, unrestrained by formal government councils in the Settlements in his dealings with hierarchies in the states. These hierarchies were maintained, rather than controlled closely, by residents, though different views have been taken about the degree of supervision involved. Judgements about the character of over-rule in states that were neither annexed nor formally under protection turn on the status of rulers. If attention is 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 the Federated Malay States (FMS), under a hasty treaty in 1895, without consideration of how power was to be shared between state governments and the ‘central’ government (in effect, the governor of the Straits at Singapore and the resident-general or chief secretary at Kuala Lumpur). The need for pooling 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 governor of the day, Charles Mitchell, envisaged an ‘administrative’ federation through numerous departments with responsibilities in both the Settlements and the states.25 Rulers, it was assumed, would cooperate with each other 23 25

24 Heussler, British Rule, 97–8. Tinker, ‘Structure of the Heritage’, 48. Lucas, Memorandum, May 1893, in Madden, ed., Select Documents, v. 549–50.

160 Maritime South-East Asia

9000 8000 7000 6000 5000

Pahang N. Sembilan Selangor Perak

$'000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 Years

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

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(Negri Sembilan was composed of several smaller states); and they might meet in a common council under a resident-general. In practice, government departments—treasury, lands, customs, railways, etc.—were easily centralized. But the rulers were bypassed, separated from the centre of power and ignored—the very reverse of the process of beneficial joint management of departments and the Malay hierarchy at state level. At federal level, creation of a central council in 1909 with very wide powers over finance and other resources emphasized this distance by reducing State Councils to nullities and confining the rulers to ceremonial appearances with little impact on legislation 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 protection in 1909 and fell under a relatively autonomous supervision through political advisers accepted with many years of delay. To these was added Johore, strategically close to Singapore. Moreover, in important test cases in 1894 and later in 1924, the sovereign status of the UMS rulers was upheld.26 While this interpretation may have been a convenient smokescreen to cover actions taken in the name of a ruler in states not formally annexed or protected, it did have the effect of shielding them from further encroachments on executive authority; and it left in place a rump of rulers in the UMS well aware of the diminished authority of their counterparts elsewhere and, therefore, anxious to have no part in federation. Conversely, the FMS rulers were able to appreciate just how much they lost in comparison. The effects of this disjunction between administrative federation of services and the status of rulers were not uniform; and some ground was recovered by the states in the 1920s and 1930s. Emily Sadka argued that in the late nineteenth century the decline in executive responsibility on the part of sultans was relative to the amount of increased government business. In the 1880s and 1890s, they retired into ceremony and formalities; and, in any case, their scope 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 Perak under a Raja Muda set few precedents. Eventually, even this unpopular candidate was sworn in as Yang-de-per-Tuan of Perak under the protection of the Queen Empress in 1887, providing his authority remained minimal. His Council of State, therefore, accepted him; Malay nobles and Chinese councillors looked to British brokerage to prevent any abuse of power. Sultan Idris of Perak took a similar oath in 1889 as a lineal descendant of one sultan and 26

Smith, British Relations, 6–7. Sadka, The Protected Malay States, 156; and Gullick, Indigenous Political Systems of Western Malaya. 27

162 Maritime South-East Asia nephew of another. With Idris, the idea of a constitutional ‘king’ took root and continued for nearly thirty years. Outside the area of departmental administration applied in the states, the two most important innovations were the use of State Councils for approval of executive control and the development of a civil service. Councils were not simply rubber-stamps used by residents. Much depended on the quality and status of nobility and ministers. While it is true, as John Gullick has argued from his analysis of the councils, that many of the traditional service gentry held sinecures by the end of the century, there were opportunities for better trained men to rise to high office. The ruler’s private secretary, usually a close client and a noble, was not a traditional ‘chief minister’, but he became essential 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 finance officer with supervision of taxes, court fines, and labour, was an innovation in the 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 the royal court. From the records available, it would appear that State Council discussions and minutes were brief. Yet, Sadka discerns ‘an enhancement of prestige and natural authority’ through this mechanism.29 Although it lacked control over a ‘native treasury’, a council could be asked to consider a wide range of executive matters—tariffs, lease of tax farms, pensions and gratuities, agricultural and mining concessions, public works—in short, the functions of the specialist departments. There were, too, important concessions to hierarchy by inclusion of five Malays of the royal lineage and two nobles, as well as the resident. The council was thus inclusive of clients and brokers, but advisory— a meeting-ground for exchanges of views, not a constitutional cabinet. Decisions were taken in the name of the sultan; but appeals from decisions were to the governor. In a sense, the councils continued the traditional assemblies of royals and chiefs, but functions and representation changed to take account of the new hierarchy of governor, resident, sultan, and lesser notables, in ways that differed from state to state. In Perak, the council expanded, by 1895, to seven Malay title-holders, three Chinese, and two British officers. This move was consistent with a restoration of traditional Malay titles to descendants and representation of important economic interests. In Selangor, on the other hand, the council was dominated from its inception by members of the royal lineage who controlled all districts. It was, in effect, a kind of patrimonial court in which state officers were heirs to the highest offices in the gift of the sultan. 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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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 provided a constitutional title—councillor—for self-made leaders. By contrast, there was no representation for Sumatran immigrant communities mediated through penghulus. Both Perak and Selangor councils had an inner committee of resident and notables for routine business, but the resident usually had control of the agenda, including the important area of Malay patronage, allowances, and jurisdiction. Despite this, sultans’ interventions appear to have been effective for pensions and allowances, penghulu appointments, control of religious matters, and Muslim marriage and divorce. They retained the power of pardon over capital cases. In general, they opposed transferring collection of land revenues from penghulus to Malay clerks. In other words, there was an effort to preserve the position of minor chiefs in relation to lower-order patronage, such as relief from land taxes. In Selangor, executive authority on the part of the resident had the effect of displacing a Malay executive officer (the Tengku), while the sultan, semi-retired at Langat, did little more than preside over council meetings. Had he been typical, sultans would have been mere ciphers. In Pahang and in Perak, Tengku Mahmud and Raja Idris, before his accession, took part in judicial administration, a function Idris continued as sultan. Usually, a British officer was present in court, though the sultan was independent in cases relating to Muslim law. It was not unknown, however, for governors and residents to retry cases and review sentences, although they had no formal powers of jurisdiction in the states.30 For the rest, the sultan’s formal seal was required for documents of state and for all commissions approved by the resident. So, although Malays did petition for appointments, the line of patronage was a dual one, formally acknowledged in council. As long as local government for revenue and judicial purposes was largely in 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 role of the British district official, responsible for a multiplicity of initiatives. He was ‘a Resident in miniature’, a general factotum working with, rather than over penghulus.31 Many of their tasks, in time, fell under specialist departments 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 into small secretariats. But the penghulu, as a headman appointed from above, 30

Ibid., chap. 8.

31

Ibid. 215.

164 Maritime South-East Asia remained indispensable, until the end of the century and longer. Again, there were differences between states. In Negri Sembilan lineage headmen, not appointed territorial headmen, were more usual. In Sungei Ujong, penghulus were a novelty and had to be created from village headmen. In Perak and Selangor, their appointments were firmly under the control of the sultan and their commissions were issued in his name. They were a feature of state ceremonials and tied by homage which continued, despite the existence of a new line of power from the residency. Many of them were in fact rajas; a few were Sumatran headmen. Their principal business was local justice and order and collection of some revenues on a commission basis. Land revenues, customs and 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 from the 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 often strangers—‘an official not a village patriarch, a subordinate not a landed proprietor’.32 The change reflected, both the emergence of a new bureaucracy recruited from below and a new Malay elite formed through instruction of the sons of nobles, employed as magistrates, land officers, rent collectors, mines inspectors. They were the foundation of the Malay Administrative Service (State Civil Service in the Unfederated States). A few were promoted further as district officers into the predominantly European Malayan Civil Service, an elite cadre that ‘was often as political as it was administrative’ with a status comparable to the Indian Civil Service. An apprenticeship in the MAS was regarded as essential, however, for ‘the sons of Malays of the Raja and higher classes’.33 Reinvention of the roles of sultans, then, curbed their arbitrary power, but preserved status and respect based on Malay conservatism. Their recommendations for appointment of penghulus were accepted; they assisted the spread of vaccination and some education; and they were important in sanctioning irrigation schemes. A few engaged in mining ventures; and several travelled widely abroad. Essentially, they legitimized British over-rule which might have required annexation or a different treaty system, if they had been pensioned off. It followed that the sultans and nobles, by granting access to resources in land and revenue, had to be supported financially so as to maintain an establishment and redistribute to lower orders. For a time, rulers and rajas were impoverished in the 1870s. Later, the rewards system included increas32

Federated Malay States, Perak Administration Report, 1909 (Kuala Lumpur, 1910), 12. Robert O. Tilman, ‘Bureaucratic Development in Malaya’, in Braibanti, ed., Asian Bureaucratic Systems, 594, 596 and note; for careers, Heussler, British Rule, 299–305. 33

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ing numbers of descendants. As in Indian states, rajas had obligations that put them into debt. State loans on security of salaries and property, arranged with approval of resident and governor, were frequent. In Pahang and Perak royal family members had to be protected from actions for debt in the courts. In the words 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 of Government’.34 Some idea of the steps taken to reward loyalty can be formed from financial reports for the later nineteenth century. Perak and Selangor were relatively wealthy states, though often running deficits and supporting the two weaker federated states from 1896 (see Fig. 3). Revenues more than quadrupled between 1890 and 1905, mainly from tin duties and land taxes. Up till 1928 they would quadruple again.35 At the end of the century, the proportion spent 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 expenditure until the recession of the early 1930s, when there were retrenchments all round. Rulers in the Unfederated States were even better off. In Trengganu, Kedah, Johore, and Kelantan, the proportion of expenditure paid for pensions, emoluments, sultans’ allowances, and other princely charges ranged 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 economic growth in proportion to immigrant groups. By actively farming tin licences, in return for the privilege of opium export, sale of spirits, gambling concessions, Chinese invested capital and reinforced its returns by an internal system of patronage over Chinese clients. The Chinese ‘Protectorate’ was effectively run as a privileged hierarchy of societies under the supervision of one man in the nineteenth century—William Pickering—known as Tai Jin (Big Man), scholar and patron administrator.37 His methods were personal, based on a thorough knowledge of Hakka and Cantonese, by arbitration between factions and threat of deportation for those who failed to comply. For other immigrant groups, British patronage opened up access to land. Land ownership, 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 the technique of long leases. From 1892, ‘customary’ tenure was thrown open to non-Malays and new constituencies of settlers expanded. State loans and remission of rents for Malay settlers enhanced further the role of penghulus as essential brokers in this system. In Negri Sembilan chiefs were encouraged 34

Cited in Sadka, The Protected Malay States, 277. Federated Malay States, Administration Reports (Kuala Lumpur, 1909–30), appendixes; Parliamentary Papers, C. 6858. Further Papers Relating to the Protected Malay States: Reports for 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. 35

166 Maritime South-East Asia by similar credit advances to open mines and develop rice cultivation. Much larger sums, however, were paid to European planters and Chinese investors in urban housing in the early 1890s. Thus, state patronage made political distinctions between these constituencies and accepted considerable differences in the economic return from investment through public works, plantations, or small-scale farming. For the Malays, there was, too, a risk of permanent land alienation. In 1913 the right of sultans to block land sales against nonMalay purchase was restored to prevent the formation of a rural Malay proletariat. Administratively and politically, however, the issue of enlarged control through federation defined both the loss of status for rulers and their eventual re-emergence as an important factor in the process of decolonization. Initially undertaken as a way of supporting poor states from general revenue, federation became equated with administrative centralization and the marginalization of sultans in the southern Malay states. The issue was a battleground for rival policies in the 1920s and 1930s. Much of the battle centred on a power struggle between the most senior administrative patrons; and while it was fought on grounds of local or central administration, in the background lay unresolved issues about the status and authority of rulers in a plural society that were not resolved until after the war. In the end, the personalities and pride of intransigent administrators mattered less than the remarkable survival of rulers in the face of the challenge of party politics. For the period of the 1890s until 1919, federal authority remained with the Chief Secretary to the Federation in Kuala Lumpur. Rulers were frustrated at loss of what little authority they had, but powerless to change their status. With the appointment of W. G. Maxwell as chief secretary and Sir Lawrence Guillemard as governor and high commissioner in 1919, there was agreement that a measure of ‘decentralization’ was overdue, together with an increase in the responsibilities of rulers. In this way, the Unfederated States might be attracted into the fold. For seven years, however, there was a struggle over sacrifice of patron power between Maxwell and Guillemard, between an old Malay hand and a Whitehall civil servant. Worse, some of the rulers raised the stakes by criticizing the system from within the Federal Council; and the Ruler 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 the Federal Council and were entrenched again in their State Councils. Sir Hugh Clifford returned as a governor with high prestige, but little to offer beyond 38

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

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the mild reform already begun. His successor, Sir Cecil Clementi, began in 1930 a more serious reappraisal in a changed climate: loss of financial surplus and reserves put an end to some of the largesse of earlier years and made Malaya more important as a hard-currency earner. Rulers became more, not less, important in a country where Malays were outnumbered by immigrant groups; and if the issue of political representation was taken seriously, how would Malay ‘nationalism’ respond? Would a new treaty system be necessary to redefine the place of rulers? In short, did ‘decentralization’ mean increased powers for state local government? Like the India Office, the Colonial Office viewed any suggestion of revised treaties with alarm and any move towards a status similar to that of advisers in the Unfederated States as impossible. The thought that by ‘decentralization’ Clementi meant ‘union’ called into question the whole disparity in representation of constituencies in the Settlements and the States. But it was never entirely clear that Clementi thought through the consequences of any of his proposals for ‘indirect Government’ or decentralization in a plural society. Resurrecting State Councils offered no solution to the more general problem of representing different interest groups in a system dominated by the rulers of one group. Business and plantation interests feared greater taxation. The Colonial Office under Lord Passfield dampened down any enthusiasm on the part of the governor for demolition of the Federation and allocation of public service administration to State Councils by proposing a timetable of four years. This delay was too much for Clementi who fell out with all opponents of his ideas and was removed from office in 1934. His successor, Shenton Thomas, quietly set about carrying out some of Clementi’s decentralization over seven years. But, in fact, he did little more than abolish the post of Chief Secretary to the Federated States, bringing patronage under the high commissioner/governor. State services administration was kept out of State Councils. Indeed, no progress was made at all in attracting Unfederated States’ rulers into the fold. A protracted succession dispute in Selangor which was resolved by the governor’s choice of candidate did nothing to reassure other rulers who, in any case, looked for a clear definition of federal and state powers in any devolved administration.39 It became clear that the Sultan of Johore and the Regent of Kedah would not join the modified 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 admitted to the existence of ‘sovereign and independent’ rulers, but unofficially deplored their very existence. The Unfederated States’ rulers rejected sacrificing 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 39 Smith, British Relations, 25; and Simon C. Smith, ‘The Rise, Decline and Survival of the Malay Rulers during the Colonial Period, 1874–1957’, JICH 22 (1992), 89.

168 Maritime South-East Asia very different reasons. In India, the princely states faced heavy political competition in any scheme to open their constituencies to campaigning, in return for nominated places in a federal legislature. In Malaya, the political and constitutional pace of change was not nearly so advanced; and rulers faced a form of administrative demotion under residents whose executive powers exceeded anything they were likely to be granted. In one respect, however, the Colonial Office was wrong to reject the idea of Malay rulers’ sovereignty as an ‘ephemeral expedient’ turned into a ‘sacrosanct principle’.40 The roots of rulers’ status lay in Malay society, not in the labels applied to status according to European concepts of royalty. Whatever their utility value in legitimizing 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 patrimonial system to Malays. Its importance was soon demonstrated in the debate over post-war decolonization. The debate began during the war through schemes for a Malay Union, in absentia, while the country was under Japanese occupation. From 1943, the Malay Planning Unit inside the Colonial Office decided to cut through the complexity and expense of administering four different systems by unification of the States with the Settlements and relegation of rulers to little more than an advisory role in advance of self-government. Before that political advance, however, post-war reconstruction would be achieved through close control by a restored colonial administration.41 Called in to advise, Lord Hailey viewed the rulers as an anachronism without ‘sovereign’ claims and in competition with other ethnic settler groups. To give the Crown freedom to reorganize post-war Malaya, the British would have to proceed by turning the country formally into a protectorate through an application of the Foreign Jurisdiction Act of 1890. For this step, the client rulers would have to agree to new treaties; and (to avoid any invidious comparisons with Indian princes) the surrender of their jurisdiction was not to serve as a precedent for any 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 the pressure exerted on them during the mission carried out by Sir Harold MacMichael to secure their compliance in 1945.43 Bluff, brusque, and more suited to browbeating the Amir of Transjordan than brokering a deal with suspicious and sensitive Malays, the British envoy had only one weapon in his armoury. The British could withdraw their recognition, in view of charges of 40

Smith, ‘The Rise, Decline and Survival of the Malay Rulers’, 91. 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). 41

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collaboration with the Japanese. As an example, two successors installed by the Japanese were deposed, and others in the Unfederated States were at risk. So, possibly, was the independently-minded Sultan of Johore who gave his signature with a display of willing cooperation. Under duress, all the rulers complied, though they made it clear they did not agree with the constitutional proposals for union. ‘At a stroke the mission alienated Britain’s traditional collaborators.’44 But the new treaties served their purpose by allowing the necessary legislation to be passed, paving the way for constitutional change. Politically, they were a miscalculation of the first order, betraying a complete misunderstanding of the status of rulers in what was still a patrimonial system. Rural Malaya was deeply shocked by rulers’ loss of jurisdiction. Local opposition coalesced into a Malay Congress in March 1946 as the founder movement of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). In London former imperial patrons—Maxwell, Clementi, Swettenham—and business interests added their voices to the protest. In the reaction rulers repudiated the treaties as obtained under duress. Governor Sir Edward Gent and the governor-general designate, M. J. MacDonald, moreover, began to express reservations about a unitary state and urged caution over the issue of a single citizenship in a country where some two million Malays made up less than half of the population. Emergent Malay political leaders set about drafting their own federal constitution in 1947 which was quickly accepted in the Colonial Office as a basis for fresh negotiations; and early in 1948 the idea of Union was killed off by rulers’ signatures to State and Federation agreements revoking the MacMichael treaties. Significantly, these agreements were confirmed both by Order-in-Council and by rulers’ enactments in their states. There were wider considerations. The need for constitutional evolution to meet United States’ criticism was a factor, but perhaps less important than the need for post-war Britain to consolidate, by an equitable and democratic transfer of power, its long predominance in the Malay economy.45 For rulers and Malay politicians there were advantages in a new dispensation achieved through negotiation. Pre-war prerogatives and jurisdiction were restored to state heads. Unexpectedly the Colonial Office raised no objections to a preponderance of Malay unofficial members in a new federal legislature. For the British, too, rulers in Malaya were a factor in keeping Malay loyalties during the Emergency operations against Chinese communist insurgency. Malay ‘nationalism’, however, was to some extent a creation of bungled preparations for a unitary state. When this was evidently not possible, Malay politicians and rulers combined to meet the threat of devolved representation and 44

Ibid., p. lviii. 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: Documentary Perspectives (London, 1988). 45

170 Maritime South-East Asia extension of the franchise. A Rulers’ Conference was organized to examine and approve constitutional proposals; and, in so doing, it was acknowledged that citizenship by naturalization might be granted to the subject of a ruler on an oath of allegiance.46 Clearly a new and complex set of bargains was in the making that would entrench elements of patrimonial rule in a framework for responsible government. But in Malaya cooperation was not completely harmonious between rulers and politicians. New political leaders were careful not to reject sultans. But Dato Onn, as a Johore minister and a founder of UMNO, could not simply manipulate rulers for party purposes, as he discovered, when they refused to accept his proposals for a Malay deputy-high commissioner in 1949. Onn was forced out of office in Johore and out of the party.47 The new president of UMNO, Tunku Abdul Rahman took care to work in tandem with rulers, as a son of the Sultan of Kedah. Displays of homage were organized to secure their acceptance of an elected majority over nominated members in the Federal Legislature; a higher proportion of Malays to other ministers was secured in the interim government of 1951. Paradoxically, too, the long and expensive emergency military and police action against the Malayan Communist Party ‘reinforced Anglo-Malay collaboration’, by hastening the pace of Malayanization in the civil service and by inducing a greater level of investment in social services and rural development.48 From 1953, after the formation of the Alliance Party (from UMNO and the Malayan Chinese Association), High Commissioner General Sir Gerald Templer (as controller of military and civil administration, 1952–4) had no hesitation in accommodating the ambitions of this conservative, broad-based, organization, even as it pressed for self-government. Significantly, too, the Malayan Civil Service was in 1953 thrown open to local recruitment more especially from the ranks of the 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 concession of a large measure of internal self-government, Malayan ministers felt confident enough to allay rulers’ suspicions concerning the future of State Councils and the composition of a Commonwealth commission of jurists formed to examine the proposed constitution. In the end, both the British Government and the commission made it clear in 1956 that the position of rulers would be respected; and this assurance was emphasized by Tunku Abdul Rahman in his ‘Political Statement of the Alliance’, proposing a Malay Head of State and a part-elected and part-appointed Upper House.50 46

47 48 Stockwell, ed., Malaya, Part i, 351. Ibid. 371. Ibid., p. lxx. 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. 49

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Accounting for the survival of a hierarchy of royal houses as constitutional guardians within this structure, then, involves more than tracing their fortunes as necessary adjuncts to a fairly unique form of colonial over-rule, or as a spiritual and ritual dimension to a highly secular modern state. As the head of the Commonwealth commission of jurists noted: ‘It was not usual to have sovereigns as units of a Federation.’51 By the endgame of constitutional bargaining that led quickly to independence in 1957, the leading political party clearly felt rulers to be no threat, because ‘the Alliance controlled all the Councils of State and loyalty was to the party’.52 Moreover, under the independence Constitution the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, as paramount ruler, had the duty to safeguard the disproportionately high ratio of Malays in the public services and, thereby, guaranteed the ethnic structure and composition of the MCS.53 At the same time, it has to be remembered that unlike other examples of traditional rulers in India or in Ghana post-war rulers in Malaya had been at the centre of opposition to a cavalier imperial proposal to restore British rule and impose a unitary constitution on the restored state. It was not the first time, however, that rulers had blocked imperial plans. Resistance by rulers in the Unfederated States undid much of the purpose of the federation of 1895; and the long debate over decentralization did little to resolve the dilemmas of augmenting rulers’ powers in devolved states, or reducing them to nonentities by enforced Union. In the end, their political, rather than their administrative, weight was revealed, when their approval was sought for a last legitimization of British rule, in order to set in motion constitutional change after 1945. Malay nationalism found a potent and symbolic institution that restored a measure of federal autonomy as a framework for decolonization. In the face of a respectful cooperation between senior Malay politicians and rulers, the advice of Lord Hailey to dispense with princes, or the machinations of Sir Harold MacMichael intended to suborn them into compliance, backfired. In the politics of competitive ethnic representation and government, traditional institutions had their place. But they were not mere templates of hierarchy from the mid-nineteenth century. If anything, the status and powers of Malay rulers had increased by the 1950s, after they had passed through several phases of demotion and preservation. The executive responsibilities of residents, operating through the State Councils, cut into their independent status, especially in matters of finance. It could be argued, however, that they enjoyed greater stability in succession and more regular perquisites from taxes, compared with their predecessors. Their lowest status came with federation, followed by a slow climb back to a measure of restoration by the end of the 1930s. Typically, they survived the Japanese occupation by cooperation and compliance. In the period 51 53

52 Lord Reid, ibid., Part ii, 326. Ibid., Part ii, 327. Tilman, ‘Bureaucratic Development in Malaya’, 597.

172 Maritime South-East Asia of decolonization, they found a new role within one of the first patron parties in new states. Awkward questions regarding their ‘sovereignty’ kept cropping up—a concept imported with colonial and international law. Education, legal advice, an appreciation of their bargaining power in the period of the Emergency and constitution-making, made them very different political animals from their ancestors two generations previously. They were not Indian princes to be preserved, or not, from the intentions of Congress leaders. They were active participants, as well as symbols of an ethnic nationalism intent on keeping the patrimonial system for survival and advantage in a competitive political system. There was no such India-wide loyalty for princes, though there was some respect for rajas, even in the provinces. In Malaya, loyalty tested against the British or the demands of UMNO politicians was grounded not in mere sentiment, but in older practices of deference in return for protection. Thus, the basis of patrimonialism continued to survive, reinvented in the tradition of kerajaan—the condition of having a raja as a communal focus and a defence against political rivals. At the same time elections to State Councils outweighed a ruler’s privilege in nominating his chief minister without election; and the balance between nominated and elected interest groups in the Upper House made it clear that traditional leadership was subordinated to party management in the independent state. A new kind of collaboration between traditional and elected representatives emerged from the older pattern of administrative management within the hierarchy of residents and rulers. The concept of elite ‘collaboration’ is the historical model most usually applied to the interaction of the British with South-east Asian societies.54 While such 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 for analysis 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 administrative brokers on either side of the power equation. Another, is that it is easier to label administrative systems in terms used by European rulers, even where these are imported from quite different regions and historical cases. Thus, the illuminating discussion of British Malaya by Simon Smith draws heavily on parallels with Indian princes, ‘monarchical collaborators’ in the Middle East, and ‘indirect rule’ in African hierarchies (which Swettenham and others claimed was invented in Malaya first).55 Smith, fortunately, does not extend the parallels of Lugard’s ‘Indirect Rule’ to Asian cases, or perceive a ‘residency system’ derived from British practices in India. His general theme of ‘kingship’ in the empire is a useful reminder that administrators had to 54 55

Stockwell, ‘British Expansion and Rule’, 392–3. Smith, British Relations, 12–17.

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make do with what they found, or face the cost of abolishing it for some other system. Yet, the view from Whitehall or Government House does not encompass the fundamental reasons for the existence and continuity of local hierarchy. Sociologists reviewing changes in peasant societies in the region have taken a different approach which has little in common with historical analysis.56 One justification for hierarchy, as a traditional order, was informal protection of land users, through the brokerage of their household leaders and loyalty to aristocratic rulers. In the Malay states, such traditional structures were probably ‘more modest’, resting on the personal capacity of local leaders to mobilize 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 of land 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 creature of the locality who dealt with the center [officials] became increasingly creatures of the center who dealt with the local community.’58 Over the whole colonial period, increasing pressure for commercialization of agriculture and allocation of land for other uses such as communications and mining disrupted the protective nexus between indigenous rulers and local peasantry. In Malay society the division between wealthy and poor villagers had probably widened by the end of the British period, with the emergence of an official and landowning class, closely connected through recruitment and training with state ruling families. From this constituency was built the support for state patronage through federal politics, as younger sons and relatives of the nobility entered the ranks of the Administrative Service and the Malayan Civil Service. Another approach to the consequences of preserving hierarchy under a colonial regime and a democratic constitution has been to fix on the advantages 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 anxious not to devolve control to local representative institutions. The British government reacted much more favourably than business to the victory of the Alliance in 1955. Underwriting stopped well short of any official insurance scheme for business in the Federation. Individuals, corporations, associations were diverse and not coherent in their defence of interests in Malaya; 56 James C. Scott, ‘The Erosion of Patron–Client Bonds and Social Change in Rural Southeast Asia’, JAS 32 (1972), 5–37. 57 58 Ibid. 13. Ibid. 18. 59 Nicholas J. White, ‘Government and Business Divided: Malaya 1945–57’, JICH 22 (1994), 251–74.

174 Maritime South-East Asia and they resented paying a high cost for counter-insurgency operations. They lost their special representation in the Legislature or Senate. The British government, not British business, favoured Federation patronage of rubber replanting schemes for Malay smallholdings and support for Chinese miners. The verdict is, therefore, that for Malay politicians local lines of power were more important than the influence of an old metropolis, though they did not go out of their way to cut off sources of investment. Malay economic nationalists were not curbed by the British, but by local Malayan Chinese Association entrepreneurs who restrained wilder schemes for state control and favoured a vigorous, open economy. Ties with British capital loosened not tightened. The new lines of economic patronage were between the Alliance and Chinese, as major stakeholders, and smaller Malay and Chinese estate owners and miners. Some political scientists, therefore, have seen in the remarkable economic development of Malaysia increased power of the Federal government over State governments through taxation and ‘the extensive use of federal patronage at the state level’.60 At the same time, state autonomy and importance to federal parties has been preserved and increased through the powers vested in Malay 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 enterprises deploying greater proportions of government expenditure. Special rights for recruitment and promotion for Malays enhanced the position of these 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 centralize planning within the Prime Minister’s Department. It is the Prime Minister, as patron-in-chief, who is ultimately in charge of institutional bargaining; and inter-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–client linkages often extend beyond ethnic boundaries and can involve multi-ethnic corporations to defend jointly-shared interests’ as, for example, in ventures undertaken by UMNO and the Malay Chinese Association.61 Gordon Means discerns in this politicization of public services the emergence of a ‘Patrimonial State’, reinforced by a Malay army, a symbolic and fairly compliant set of ‘Rulers’ and ‘Paramount Ruler’. Under Dr Mahathir Mohamed, the patron60

Gordon Means, Malaysian Politics: The Second Generation (Singapore, 1991), 296. This interpretation is consistent with analysis of patronage politics in conjunction with village elites and deployment of state resources in Jayannatha, Electoral Allegiance in Sri Lanka, 20–203. 61 Means, Malaysian Politics, 299.

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age system has expanded further than any previous ruler might have dared through layers of subordinate brokers, thus increasing obligations from beneficiaries and the risks of defection by those whose benefits are reduced. As in any patrimonial system the test of continuity of laws and constitution over arbitrary redistribution for political loyalty will come during a transfer of power on succession to the highest office.

summary The long period of British mercantile dependency on staging posts within the south-east Asian archipelagos followed the extension of East India Company commerce to the markets of China. By the early nineteenth century, experience of war and politics in the region resulted in forced entry into Chinese ports and possession of a few coastal strips and islands of the Malay Peninsula, nominally administered from the Bengal Presidency. As the case for India’s control of the Straits Settlements and Singapore weakened, local governors found reasons for coming to terms with local rulers to keep order in their mines and markets. No Indian blueprint was applied. Precedents had been set in Ceylon for administration through headmen. But in Burma no client state could be created by treaty and the kingdom was conquered and annexed. The kings of Siam managed foreign agents better, played off the French against the British, and were fortunate to be guaranteed independence as a buffer state under Anglo-French agreements. British intervention from their base in the Straits into the politics and administration of Malay states from 1874, however, established a form of overrule through residents and governors without the formality of a colonial protectorate. The innovation was flexible in style but accompanied by some of the regulation and services of the Settlements. Experience in managing the Malay nobility and district heads within patrimonial systems of state government 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. Malay headmen and district officers acted as brokers between the two lines of authority. In return for legitimizing this method of British control, Malay rulers suffered a loss of status, but preserved their line of succession, patrimonial functions, much of their resources, and their courts and religion. In return, the British and their settler clients gained access to plantations and mining and expanded British trade and investment. From 1895 there was a risk that the autonomy of state administrations would be further diminished in favour of centralized federal government. Counter to this trend, four of Siam’s Malay states were taken under British advisorships from 1909, and together with the State of Johore they refused to sacrifice their sovereign status to federal over-rule. Consequently, no simple generalization covers the variety of

176 Maritime South-East Asia 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 different ways by sultans and residents. Some were opened up to representatives of the Chinese community. Others lapsed and were rarely called in the period before 1919, when federal authority was exercised from Kuala Lumpur. Thereafter, there was a long and inconclusive debate about how far federal services should be decentralized. From 1926 rulers were permitted to withdraw from the Federal Council and a measure of State Council responsibility was restored. In other ways, the patronage exercised through sultans and residents over 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, allowances, and pensions underpinned much of the compliance of rulers and their followers with British over-rule. At the same time there was a risk that indigenous Malay rights and territory might be lost to increasing numbers of immigrant settlers. Japanese occupation and the restoration of British over-rule called into question the basis of this combination of annexed enclaves and informal protectorate by requiring rulers to sign away their sovereignty in 1945, in order to prepare Malaya for constitutional change as a unified colonial state. Rulers joined forces with other political elites to oppose loss of jurisdiction and the role of State Councils. The idea of union died in complex political bargaining to entrench elements of state autonomy within a federal framework leading to responsible government and independence in 1957. The broad base of Malayan party coalition and the rapid pace of Malayanization of the civil service helped to secure the constitutional position of rulers in the institutions of central and state government and as Head of State. Thus, traditional leadership revived, after decline, as a symbol of Malay nationalism and as a functioning element of party and patronage in the new government hierarchy of independent Malaysia.

Part V

Pacific Islands

Pacific Islands 179 Historians of Pacific societies have no difficulty finding analogous examples of centralized chieftaincies utilized or destroyed by European over-rule. In more recent studies, however, some of the older stereotypes dividing Melanesia and Polynesia have been modified by re-evaluation of chieftaincy in many forms, so as to take into account leadership by both descent and achievement.1 The topic has come a long way from structuralist concern with social organization and ‘reconstruction’ of the pre-European period to a search for evolutionary or cultural principles derived from ecological factors or status rivalries in the work of Marshall Sahlins or Irving Goldman. Although there are still sound reasons for making a distinction between Melanesia and Polynesia for the way in which Fijians, for example, classified kinsmen, other similarities in the hierarchies of central and eastern Pacific societies 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 encourage attempts by some of them to achieve positions of political power.’2 Over the broader canvas of systems of leadership it has now been possible to reassess the typologies Sahlins and Goldman attempted earlier and break down some of the distinction between big man and chiefly status.3 A recent survey of ‘chiefly models’ in Papua New Guinea discerns an older linguistic ‘lexicon of hierarchy’ common to Austronesian-speaking peoples, as well as drawing attention to the ways in which European officials later modified this hierarchy.4 With the board cleared of prior assumptions about pathways to rank and power, 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) rank and power were correlated, because the ideology of descent was reinforced by secular 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 Polynesian Society (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; Maurice Godelier, ‘Sociétés à Big men, Sociétés à Grands Hommes: Figures du Pouvoir en NouvelleGuinée’, 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.

180 Pacific Islands tribes as descent groups and territorial units ‘commonly absorbed unrelated individuals and groups, and rationalised the process in kinship terms’.6 The observation agrees with other evidence that in the Lau group of eastern Fiji the complementarity existing in the past and today between chiefs (turaga) and the people (iTaukei) of a chiefdom influences the inclusion or exclusion of outsiders (vulagi) as an issue in local power struggles.7 In this revision of earlier typologies, therefore, several points have a bearing on the emergence of patron–client systems. One is the growing consensus that in many Pacific societies the ideology of descent was reinforced by secular power derived from a variety of alliances and pacts close to patronage mechanisms and enlarging a chief’s following in territorial terms. The idea, touched on rather than developed, by Bronwen Douglas, has also been reviewed by Oliver in his general survey of cultures in Australia and the Pacific. Some of this material deals with the ‘politicization of descent units’, including the 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 descent units of Fiji. Secondly, given the small scale of Pacific societies, closer attention has been paid than in many of the Asian or African examples above to the exploitation of limited resources and the results of rapid population growth for competition, warfare, and stratification, more particularly in the Hawaiian Islands and in Tonga.8 While domination of productive systems was not the only factor explaining hierarchy, nevertheless, archaeology and evaluation of population densities have thrown considerable light on the rapid evolution of chiefly corporations to accumulate and redistribute within and beyond island groups. Trade contacts and commercialization of local production and services frequently assisted the construction of chiefly monopolies over such resources. A third idea which is not explored very far in general anthropological revisions 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 Raymond Firth’s earlier work that traditional chiefly systems have changed because of an ‘external source of authority arising from the need of a small-scale community to draw upon external sources of power and wealth’.9 Chieftainship has been in most cases incorporated into colonial administration, though the terms of that incorporation call for a further notion of brokerage by mission6

Douglas, ‘Rank, Power, Authority’, 17. 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 Bishop Museum Bulletin 88 (Honolulu, 1931). 9 Firth, cited in Feinberg and Watson-Gegeo, eds., Leadership and Change, 22. 7

Pacific Islands 181 aries, officials, and a new elite in the transition from traditional leadership to patron leaders.10 More recent assessments of leadership in the Pacific, therefore, are aware of the historiography devoted to the incorporation of chiefs into state administrative structures. White and Lindstrom make the useful observation that earlier 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’ communities.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 by prescription, 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 obvious 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 many areas an invention of colonial expectations but that their status was emergent, fashioned in transactions with outsiders who had come to trade, missionise, and otherwise colonise.’13 A more subtle conclusion from the essays they 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’ for the maintenance of chiefly status.14 A final point raised by Pacific historiography is whether ‘bureaucratization’ partially or completely replaced patronage networks in island administration. There is reason to believe that older forms of informal patronage have 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 patrimonial systems in island kingdoms (Hawai‘i and Tonga) and the incorporation of chiefly hierarchy in a segmentary state (Fiji) into Crown Colony 10 Alan Howard, ‘Money, Sovereignty, and Moral Authority on Rotuma’, in Feinberg and Watson-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 Experiment in 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.

182 Pacific Islands administration. All three examples were deeply influenced by techniques of prescribing for government and authority introduced by missionaries, settlers, and administrators. In all cases their indigenous hierarchies have undergone different historical experience in reversal of status, subordination, and survival.

11

Hawai‘i

The historiography of the Hawaiian Islands is dominated by two themes: the consolidation of a military and political paramountcy by a single lineage among island chiefs; and, secondly, settler command of the Hawaiian economy, leading to annexation by the United States. Taken together these central issues illustrate the total reversal of the authority and status of an indigenous hierarchy in the space of a century of demographic and economic change. Such changes were not unique to the Hawaiian Islands, but with few exceptions the displacement of a political kingdom by a settler oligarchy was rapid and complete, even by the standards of late nineteenth-century imperial takeovers in the Pacific. Seen, therefore, as an example of political subversion largely for economic reasons, Hawai‘i’s history contains an element of predictability in standard works, beginning with a swift cultural displacement of Hawaiian religious beliefs by American and other missionaries early in the century and an even swifter overthrow of the monarchy by revolution in the early 1890s. The demise at the end is usually explained by settler prominence in Hawaiian government at the beginning—a kind of self-fulfilling ‘manifest destiny’ begun in missionary tutelage which expanded into opportunities for control of a plantation economy. Thus, a planter-settler community became annexationists with the backing of a major Pacific power. The role of Hawaiians in this dramatic shift in authority is well documented, more so at the beginning of their travail than perhaps after annexation. There has been little on the role of the Hawaiian community in island administration, apart from royals who headed the executive. It is argued here that one of the more persistent myths for the period of intensive contact with outsiders 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 revolutionary period 1887–93. The reason for this misunderstanding has been concentration on the high politics of Honolulu to the neglect of the more mundane district government of O‘ahu and other islands of the archipelago through 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 functioned and settler zeal to reform, incorporate, or abolish one of the Pacific’s ‘native states’.

184 Pacific Islands

M ap 8. The Hawaiian Archipelago

The origins of that regime have been recounted often. Political consolidation of the islands of the Hawaiian group under a single dynasty in the late eighteenth century coincided with increasing European maritime contact and sporadic settlement. The period of the 1780s was one of intensive warfare conducted by chiefs and warriors from the island of Hawai‘i for the conquest of O‘ahu and other islands of the group. Even so, the hierarchical pattern of island chieftainship under paramounts (mo‘i) over sub-districts (ahupua‘a) remained the framework for diffusing power to smaller units supervising and working demarcated resource zones. The basis for political power over island districts and, eventually, over the whole archipelago, lay in the allocation of supervisory rights to followers of the paramount chief, in return for extraction of tribute from tenant producers who farmed their own lots in residential households and accessed as usehold areas of fishing and forest. The eight inhabited Hawaiian islands were intensely cultivated where soils were suitable for dry and wetland agriculture, supporting a population of at least 300,000 by the period of European discovery.1 While population pressure on resources may have been a reason for intense competition between island paramounts, over a longer period social differentiation through descent and warrior achievement created a political system of structured classes in which the lower order lost genealogical connection with superiors and, therefore, title to most of the lands they worked. Commoners paid tribute in produce 1

Coulter, Population and Utilization of Land and Sea in Hawaii, 1853.

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 politically into a number of territorially defined, bureaucratically administered ministates (some of them not so ‘mini’) far beyond the stage reached in any other Polynesian (or Oceanian) society.’2 In 1795, at the end of a long period of warfare and rebellion among island ali‘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 possession of Kaua‘i.3 A developing fur trade between the American north-west coast and China materially assisted this empire-building by traffic in arms and cooption of seamen deserters. But the essential features of Kamehameha’s patrimonial kingdom were concentration of kin and other island paramounts at his court as counsellors and allocation of governorships over island estates to lesser ali‘i and followers, including his European companion, John Young.4 Warrior forces from Hawai‘i settled on O‘ahu as tenant farmers; the standing army was much reduced; and by the process of sub-infeudation a bureaucratic taxation structure was established throughout the archipelago. Kamehameha took control of the arms trade, levied duties on visiting ships and founded a ship construction and repair industry at the beginning of the next great trade boom in sandalwood which became a chiefly monopoly over the period 1810–30. Following the king’s retirement to Hawai‘i island in 1812, management of the patrimonial state fell to the corporation of ali‘i in positions of power throughout the group. As long as Kamehameha was alive and the sandalwood trade flourished they were kept under control through island governors and agents who organized a division of spoils from sales and duties. His ministers, Kalaimoku, John Young, and lesser chiefs were appointed to oversee collection of taxes and arrange sandalwood shares on O‘ahu. It has been argued that the aggrandisement of ruling chiefs during the sandalwood period was accompanied by control through white settlers who reconstructed the kingdom in the 1840s and had command by the 1850s.5 The mechanisms of the patrimonial kingdom were not surrendered so easily. Diffusion of power to a handful of island chiefs as officers of the paramount and the construction 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. 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 royal clients who intermarried with senior ranking women. Young fathered three sons including John Young (Keoni Ana) 1810–57, who became Kamehameha III’s chief minister and kuhina nui. 5 Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, i. 2–3, 45, 101. 3

186 Pacific Islands gentry were recruited in return for advancement and revenue. Chiefs prospered from the allocation of shares in sandalwood trading, but abused their position of power over commoners. In the record and critique of Hawai‘i’s historians in the early nineteenth century the ideal of commoner protection by chiefs was contrasted with extortion of labour and produce from a hapless tenantry.6 Both on O‘ahu at the centre of paramountcy and in the outer islands authority was imposed through agents in the wake of Kamehameha’s redistribution 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 nui or became konohiki in communities where frequently they had no kin.’7 Spoils accumulated in the top segment of society and there is little evidence that chiefs or stewards redistributed wealth accumulated from trade. On the other hand, there was an end to warfare and no conscription of warrior forces after 1804. There is also evidence that many commoners became adept at concealing and retaining some of the produce of their labour, or migrated (as they 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 with obligations to those in positions of superiority. In short, much of the central patrimonial authority structure was reduplicated at lower levels and survived the early period of trading contacts reinforced by the material trappings of high status.9 Alien white settlers—missionaries, traders, and seamen—were not exempt from the ties of allegiance and reciprocity that obliged different grades of society to treat with superiors. However much they may have resented their position, in time the formality of swearing allegiance to monarchy became part of their status recognition and a prerequisite for a position in government. More immediately in the 1820s, however, at the centre of power on O‘ahu chiefs and notables were engaged in securing positions as companions and attendants to the royal lineage. A measure of depopulation among chiefly families and the prescriptions of Christianity reduced the number of suitable marriage partners for royals from among siblings or near-siblings. This change of rules left an opening for marriage to members of the ‘service gentry’—kaukau ali‘i.10 For this reason, Ka‘ahumanu gathered about her at Waialua and at Honolulu a client group, combining chieftaincies of Hawai‘i and O‘ahu, the royal heirs-apparent, Liholiho and Kauikeaouli, and a 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 Rapid Cultural Change’, JPH 19 (1984), 23; Stephenie Seto Levin, ‘The Overthrow of the Kapu System in Hawaii’, JPS 77 (1968), 420, 430. 8 9 Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, i. 113. Ibid. 32–3. 10 Kanala G. Terry Young, Rethinking the Native Hawaiian Past (London, 1998), pp. xi, 44–5.

Hawai‘i 187 number of other notables and siblings who were important in the subsequent consolidation 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 held her own with the help of loyal chiefs by redividing the kingdom among her officials and her collateral brothers under the nominal kingship of Liholiho for the period of his short reign (1819–24). Arguably, too, by encouraging the heir-apparent to break with the institutionalized priesthood in 1819 she initiated secularization of the kingdom with the effect of ‘making succession completely hereditary’ through primogeniture, thus increasing the power of central government.12 Among settler groups missionaries benefited first from co-option into this service gentry. Arriving in the aftermath of Ka‘ahumanu’s abolition of Kapu observances and, therefore, much of the foundation of Hawaiian religion, Hiram Bingham and his companions from the American Board of Missions were welcomed cautiously by Liholiho, and more warmly by Ka‘ahumanu and her brother, Kuakini.13 They were allowed to land on Hawai‘i and put on probation for a year until rulers were convinced of the advantages to be had from their teachers, doctors, and printers. It helped, too, for foreign relations that a schooner promised by Captain George Vancouver to Liholiho was delivered on time. An embassy by the king and his spouse to England was arranged to cement a twenty-year-old tradition of British goodwill and informal ‘protection’, prematurely disrupted by the death of the royal couple abroad in 1824. By then, some twenty-three chiefs were nominal Christians on O‘ahu, legitimized by a new religion and by association of missionaries with the secu-lar rulers of a single lineage. With the accession of Kauikeaouli—a boy of 11 years—in 1824 as Kamehameha III, the dual monarchy continued, but with increasing risk of factionalism and reaction. At issue was the validation of the royal lineage in power as a political order which favoured loyalty above kinship; and to this order the American mission was an important adjunct. Ka‘ahumanu used conversion (largely through control of the printing press) ‘to locate an alternate source of authority, during a time of uncertainty’.14 Precepts of the Decalogue became the law of the land which brought the royal government and its clients into conflict with seamen and merchant settlers backed by dissident notables. In addition, acceptance of Christianity and the more distant patronage of the British Crown brought recognition and advice on how to rule. 11 For Ka‘ahumanu’s antecedents and the position of her relatives on Hawai‘i and O‘ahu, as the ‘Ka‘ahumanu ma’ (Ka‘ahumanu people), Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, i. 45–9; and genealogy of 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.

188 Pacific Islands Advice was taken on Hawaiian terms. Boki, as a chief of Maui and governor of O‘ahu who went with Liholiho to England accepted British attentions within the framework of his own knowledge of patrimonial government by acknowledging King George IV ‘as my landlord and myself as tenant (or him as 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 allegiance, a system of property leases under chiefly authority, centralization of taxes and port duties, justice by king in council, as precepts in accord with their own ideas about authority and status. Throughout the 1830s, therefore, following the death of Ka‘ahumanu in 1832, the inner circle of royals, notables, and their clients used the technology of codified prescriptions to come to terms with external powers and to command allegiance as a counter to factionalism from within. Kamehameha III 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 in conditions of naval and consular intervention and in the internal struggle to retain command of sources of revenue in the last years of the sandalwood trade and the beginnings of an expanded service industry for whaling fleets. It is an exaggeration, however, to interpret the outcome of this period of institutional change as a surrender by royalty and chiefs to haole control over government. The process was more syncretic with selection and rejection of constitutional and moral advice, reinterpretation of outside models (mostly from Great Britain) to suit Hawaiian nobility’s sense of what was fitting and advantageous. Moreover, chiefs did not forfeit to outsiders their command of trade in sandalwood or provisions for whaling traffic. For the moment, in conditions of population decline, their ability to extract resources for their own conspicuous consumption from trade was remarkable and without loss of lands or sovereignty. Governors such as Kuakini and Ke‘eaumoku ran their islands as private fiefs well into the 1840s and turned their abilities to sugar milling and cattle ranching with mixed success.17 They and their counterparts in trade throughout the group were increasingly in debt, of course, to merchant-importers, and, therefore, subject to the injunctions of consuls and visiting naval officers. But by 1843, with haole client advice, months of French naval intervention and five month’s of British naval protectorate ended with a joint declaration by France and Great Britain to respect the independence of the kingdom. As yet, the United States sought no treaty and 15 16

Cited in Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1778–1854, 79. For the change from royal regent to chief minister with this title, Levin, ‘The Overthrow’,

420. 17

Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, i. 110.

Hawai‘i 189 gave an assurance to British and French ministers in 1844 that the group’s independence was not at risk.18 By the early 1840s there were signs, then, that Kamehameha III had emerged from his secondary role during the period of Ka‘ahumanu’s dominance and acted as a patron paramount. Although the period is usually interpreted in terms of ‘centralization’ of government under a haole-constructed constitution,19 Hawaiian initiatives and practices did not disappear. Rather, the long tradition of royal patronage absorbed new clients into the structure of administration at the centre and throughout the group. By 1851, there were some forty-eight whites in royal service; and during the previous decade the kingdom was dependent on the services and abilities of Dr G. Judd, Lorrin Andrews, R. C. Wyllie, and others who thought highly of their own position and incurred the envy and resentment of merchant-traders, foreign consuls, and transient visitors. Several points should be noted about this executive coterie. They did not impose themselves on the king, but were appointed by him in the style of kaukau 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 as agents for foreign consuls or for outside governments, but, on the whole, remained loyal to their source of employment and status. They were supplemented by Hawaiian kaukau and retainers from among the ali‘i sent to govern the outer islands and estates of O‘ahu. These were further increased by a group of younger kaukau and kahu schooled at the Lahainaluna institution 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 to status as a prince in 1883), and other clients of the king who found posts for them 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, stand out. Kamehameha III’s most dependable clients included the governors of Maui, Hawai‘i, Kaua‘i, plus John Young (Keoni Ana) sometime governor and kuhina nui, and the long-lived patriarch, Mataiao Kekuanao‘a, Governor of 18

W. P. Morrell, Britain in the Pacific Islands (Oxford, 1966), 81–4. 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. 19

190 Pacific Islands O‘ahu and father of two heirs to the throne. Other close companions as kaukau prospered in other ways. John I‘i rose by service through the judiciary, land commission, the House of Nobles and was one of the framers of the 1852 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, took charge of royal lands, was promoted to ali‘i, ventured successfully into money-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 Dr Judd as a former missionary filled a variety of cabinet posts over the period 1842–53. What is remarkable about such men is not that they exercised unique influence (they did not), but that they worked fairly harmoniously along with royals, Hawaiian clients, and nobles to give the kingdom a degree of recognition and independence and accessed for their own benefit and that of fellow-kaukau the labour, land, and fiscal resources they helped to administer. One historian has perceived that traditional ‘server-superior’ relations were quite compatible with co-option of outsiders: ‘Men like John Ricord, Robert Wyllie, and Walter Murray Gibson served during different reigns and because of their abilities were attractive to the respective mo‘i they served . . . What is more these foreigners replaced the kaukau ali‘i when the demand for Western expertise arose.’23 Replacement, however, came late in the day, particularly where outerisland governorships were concerned; and some of the haole clients were not so expert. Their contribution at the outset of constitutional government under Kamehameha III was to translate the norms of Hawaiian patrimonialism into legal precepts and institutions within ‘an appropriation of AngloAmerican law by the Kingdom’.24 The process began by codifying tax and labour obligations to king and chiefs in a Declaration of Rights, 1839, which protected commoners against arbitrary imposts. The actual tax laws were drawn up and revised by the Hawaiian, Boaz Mahune.25 Under construction was not so much a ‘constitutional monarchy’ as a strong hierarchy of royals and officials backed by regulations. The first Constitution of 1840 began, therefore, with a list of the king’s prerogatives based on the general principle of royal protection in return for loyalty and ‘correct deportment’ [pono]; the preservation of dynastic succession; power to manage all lands; direction of all executive means of government; reserve of royals’ private lands and lands 22 24 25

23 For his career, Young, Rethinking, 116. Ibid. 112. Merry, Colonizing Hawai‘i, 44. Translation of the Constitution and Laws of the Hawaiian Islands (Lahainaluna, 1842).

Hawai‘i 191 taken for non-payment of taxes or fines; control of treaty relations and external commerce.26 Under the king, the executive and legislature consisted of a premier as a ‘special counsellor’ (an echo of the former kuhina-nui) and four governors of the islands, a House of Nobles, and a representative body to discuss legislation. They attended only three sessions of the embryonic legislature in the 1840s.27 In 1850, the House of Representatives was expanded by royal authority to twenty-four, elected by Hawaiian adult males and foreign residents of naturalized status. The judiciary was nominally ‘independent’, but in fact was linked closely to island governors and responsible to a Supreme Court consisting of the king and chief justice. In his preface to the 1846 edition of the Constitution, John Ricord was forced to admit that little had been changed by the 1839 Bill of Rights: the Constitution was still patrimonial because ‘engrafted on the ancient form of government’.28 The political principles underlying the code of civil laws centred on the king ‘whose executive functions are assigned to the management of five ministers, dependent solely upon him, but controllable by a majority of ministerial voices’. In practice, there was no ministerial veto over the king or his executive before 1887. Governors, however, as royal appointments were accountable to the minister of the interior from 1845; and all ministers were ex-officio members of a Privy Council of selected nobles accountable only to the king and premier. In short, Hawai‘i’s ‘constitutional monarchy’ was still far removed from the compromises and conventions being worked out in the United Kingdom and closer to the royal supremacy claimed by the early Stuarts. The influence of haole ministers and officials, therefore, has to be viewed in the context of a struggle to uphold royal prerogatives in the face of a restless House of Representatives at loggerheads with a House of Nobles, Cabinet, and Privy Council. A commission consisting of Judd, I‘i, and a haole judge drew up a new constitution, debated and amended by the legislature and approved by the king in 1852. Styled as ‘democratic’, even ‘liberal’, its prescriptions guided government for a decade. In theory, the king was checked by the kuhina nui—his own appointee. Ministers sat with the nobles, appointed as usual 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, ministers served at the king’s pleasure and met with him as a cabinet. They joined with island governors in the Privy Council and any other councillor the king cared to appoint. Legislative power was shared between the king, nobles, and representatives, but the king could veto bills. Representatives in the lower house were elected by male suffrage and enjoyed a constitutional right to 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.

192 Pacific Islands initiate budget appropriations. The result was to place in doubt funds required for public expenditure, without control over borrowing by the executive. As a result, from 1856, the executive resorted to the practice of biennial legislative sessions and appropriations covering two years. But throughout the 1850s officials and ministers backed the monarchy in its privileges, particularly Wyllie and Judd, before he was dropped from the Cabinet in 1853.29 From 1854, when Alexander Liholiho came to the throne as Kamehameha IV, there was a running debate in cabinet committees on the power of the royal prerogative. Constitutional amendments were considered in 1859 and 1860—all framed for the purpose of restoring and augmenting the royal executive at the expense of elected representation. This monarchist programme stalled for lack of a legislative session in 1863 and because of the death of Kamehameha IV. It was left to the Privy Council of nobles and ministers to proclaim his brother, Lot, as the new king, confirmed by his sister and kuhina nui, Victoria Kamamalu.30 At the wish of the king a new constitution was produced and a convention of nobles and delegates was appointed to examine it. Most of its eighty articles were agreed quickly, but there was lengthy discussion on voter qualifications. Kamehameha, therefore, dissolved the convention and ‘gave’ the 1864 Constitution, after Cabinet discussion. It contained most of the objectives of the 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 Assembly which helped to outweigh the independence of those elected through a qualified franchise. In a sense, the old pre-1852 monarchy was restored in its patrimonial style, backed by prescription and a formal legitimacy which lasted for the next two decades. Much of the style and efficiency of the state depended, therefore, on the personalities of its rulers, as well as their selection of officials. Succession crises 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 monarchs usually designated their successors without dispute, but the Kamehameha dynasty ended in 1872 with the death of Kamehameha V (Lot) whose heir and sister, Victoria Kamamalu, predeceased him. It was decided by Privy Council and nobles to continue the succession through the female line which left four candidates, effectively reduced to two—William Charles Lunalilo and David Kalakaua—by exclusion of Ruth Ke‘elikolani (who spoke only Hawaiian) 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.

Table The Kamehameha Dynasty and Kaukau Ali’i = Ø Kaheiheimalie Ø -------------------------------------------------| | | | | | | Ø Kina‘u = D Kekuanao‘a = Ø Pauahi | | | | | | Ø Ruth Ke‘elikolani | | -------------------------| | D Alexander Liholiho D Lota Kapuaiwa | | [K. IV 1854–63] = Ø Emma [K. V ‘Lot’ 1863–72]† | | Kaleleonalani | | D Kana‘ina = Ø Kekauluohi | | D King William Charles Lunalilo | [by election 1873–4] |

Ø Ka‘ahumanu = D Kamehameha I = Ø Keopuolani [regent 1824–32] [1795–1819] | --------------------------------------------------D Liholiho D Kauikeaouli [K. II 1819–24] [K. III 1824–54]

= 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] D Kapa‘akea

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 Chiefs Bibliographical Abstract’. ‡

Hawai‘i 193

†

194 Pacific Islands and Bernice Pauahi (married to an American banker).31 Lunalilo won a plebiscite and was approved by the legislature for a short reign; and his brother, Kalakaua, succeeded by the same mechanism in 1874. Both ali‘i continued in the monarchical style of the last Kamehamehas, a tradition taken up again in unfavourable political circumstances by Queen Lili‘uokalani, sister of Kalakaua, in 1891. The question, however, is not so much the dynastic integrity of the succession of kings, but the longevity of kingship over the Hawaiian group, in the face of external and internal pressures for reversal of status in favour of factional leadership by haoles, or cession of sovereignty through consular or other brokers to a foreign power. The answer is not to be found simply in constitutional management or ‘centralization’. Indeed, it could be argued there was a considerable diffusion of authority and administrative power to governors and officials, providing they had the confidence of the king. Like other patrimonial regimes, Hawaiian kingship rested its security not merely on status differences among chiefs and between chiefs and commoners, but on access to resources by those who would otherwise make political trouble for the paramount. Hawaiian nobility and, to a lesser extent, haole residents of long standing were in competition among themselves for office and economic advantage; and they were in continuous economic relations with external agencies for production and trade. As anthropologists have noted for the earlier period of trade relations in the nineteenth century, in Weberian terms ‘the Hawaiian kingship was coupled to an estate type of patrimonial domination, enabling those with seigneurial rights “to conclude compromises with the ruler” ’.32 The profitability for chiefs exploiting these rights in terms of productive labour has been amply demonstrated for the period of the sandalwood, services, and produce trade, leading to exportable staples in the 1850s derived from early experiments in ranching and plantations.33 The possibility of ‘compromises’ for mutual advantage can also be extended to haole officials and 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 predicated on a theory of royal control of all domain and a willingness to strike a bargain with ali‘i and their subsidiary estate managers and clients by allocating lands to king, chiefs, and commoners in freehold title, as had already been attempted for fishing grounds in 1842.34 Behind this ‘reform’ lay the desire of king and chiefs to improve revenues in decline in the early 1840s as well as an 31

32 See Table. Cited in Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, i. 59. 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 Tenure in Hawai‘i’, HJH 30 (1996), 29–52. 33

Hawai‘i 195 expectation of new wealth from ranching and plantations. Thus, the Mahele was coupled with a more general attempt to regulate sales to foreigners, while opening land to investment and production. The process began, therefore, with a plan to adjudicate claims to land titles acquired before 1846. To this end, a committee of Privy Council consisting of Young, Judd, Pi‘ikoi, and Kekuanao‘a in 1846 set about drawing up guidelines on which to base its decisions, but restricted its case work to house lots near Honolulu. Formally constituted as the Board of Commissioners to Quiet Titles (Land Commission), it made the basic recommendation for the tripartite division between king, chiefs, and commoners with a further share of one-third to government in return for title grants. It had no power, however, to make any division itself until 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 satisfy the desire of chiefs and their client land managers to settle freehold titles among themselves first.35 Untitled applicants had to wait; and no foreigner could be granted a title in fee simple until an oath of allegiance had been administered. In 1848, king and nobility came to terms: some 245 chiefs granted one-third of their estates to the king in return for freehold title to the rest. The king then divided these and his own lands into private holdings, Crown lands, and government lands. It was stipulated that commoners would be able to claim title to lots in their possession, from whatever source, at the time of the division. By 1855, the king held as Crown lands some one million acres (24 per 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). Commoners were left with under 1 per cent. The main reason for this spoliation was the refusal of chiefs and other Hawaiians who secured titles to recognize commoners’ usehold rights to forest and grazing land outside allotments and the failure or inability of many commoners to lodge title claims.36 Principal beneficiaries were the Crown, the ali‘i, and the rising members of the service gentry who administered lands, taxes, courts, and commissions, and, not least, the important group of island governors. Foreign purchasers of titles were also beneficiaries, 1845–60, in fewer numbers and for larger areas. Much of this foreign purchase was government land and most of the total of 3,458 sales made before 1893 were concentrated in the period 1846–65, when some half a million acres changed hands for a low average price of about $2 per acre.37 In this way, a major resource was accessed by Hawaiian nobility and their clients and by a growing class of foreign investors and settlers who came to have a considerable stake in the political competence and stability of the 35

HSA, Interior, Letterbook, vol. ii, Young to Kekale’i, 19 Feb. 1847. 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’. 36

196 Pacific Islands regime. The closer they were to royals and officials of that regime, the less likely they were to turn to outside brokers and patrons for support or even a change of regime altogether, as long as their basic interests in plantation and commerce were safeguarded. Much depended, therefore, on the ways in which the monarchy and its servants accessed and administered the second major resource—public revenue—and made its benefits available through expenditure on capital projects and emoluments for Hawaiian and haole supporters. To these ends, the monarchy created a civil service and appointed envoys, largely by patronage and based on principles of loyalty, kinship, incorporation through marriage, rather than through recruitment according to qualifications and experience. Fortunately, such experience was available; and compared with many other Pacific communities, including those under colonial rule, Hawai‘i was a fairly well-administered state for much of the nineteenth century. But its continued existence as an independent state rested on ability to satisfy the aspirations of royalty, gentry, foreign investors, and (last of 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 state through foreign brokerage leading to its demise. The question might well have been answered by annexation to the United States in the early 1850s, though internal pressures and external foreign policies favouring such a solution were weak.38 The possibility was never entirely absent before the revolution of 1893, but further changes in the internal politics of the kingdom were necessary, before opposition to the patrimonial state gathered strength. Hawai‘i’s civil service owed its existence to the king. Created in the 1840s to assess and collect taxes, administer titles to private and public lands and to run the kingdom’s courts, police, army, schools, and representation abroad, five administrative departments embodied an older tradition of nobility and gentry at the service of a paramount, as well as precepts and rules introduced to regulate the services of a developing society. These two arms of administration—functionaries drawn from the ranks of island ali‘i and from a literate Hawaiian and haole elite—were embodied in the persons of four island governors and five ministers, all appointed by the king as a gift to loyal followers. All other offices were filled by commissions to individuals awarded at senior levels by King in Council, or for lower ranks by ministers or governors. Kamehameha III’s Acts of 1845 expanded the fiscal and supervisory functions of the king’s friends mainly through his premier as minister of ‘interior affairs’ in ways that concentrated much of the islands’ judicial and executive business within this ministry. As the largest spending department responsible for public works, the Ministry of the Interior was also the largest employer and 38

Kuykendall, Hawaiian Kingdom, 1778–1854, 416–27.

Hawai‘i 197 the main channel for communications from island governors. In this way, much of the governors’ responsibilities for tax collection, police and island courts, lands, roads, the militias and forts, swelled the business of the Interior. The department paid all salaries. Its responsibility for public works ramified into 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 powerful 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 under two 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 ministerial salaries escalated over a period of forty years to $5,000 or $6,000.39 For both categories of senior officials there were other means of supplementing incomes. Governors and ministers appointed by royal patronage were the principal recruitment officers for a second order of clientage throughout the Hawaiian administration.40 In the absence of formal methods of application, selection of officials down to the most menial posts was through recommendation by sponsors—relatives and friends. There was a bias towards securing Hawaiians for collectors, assessors, judgeships, police, and towards haoles for more senior offices of sheriff, departmental posts (clerkships), senior judiciary, 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 unusual for senior Hawaiian ministers to nominate haole officials, just as it was usual for the monarchy to place great trust in its naturalized European service gentry. For Hawaiians with some education advancement was through the patronage of island governors, as assistants and judges. Complaints of favouritism were frequent; and public petitions to ministers of the interior could sometimes work to the disadvantage of governors and their staff. In the absence of a clear division of powers, moreover, judicial decisions could be overturned by governors and King in Council at the request of a minister. At lower levels, the posts of tax collector and assessor were coveted for the opportunity of relieving friends and relatives from obligations. Competition for paid office, however humble, was keen, because it freed a public 39 For comparison, the chief justice was paid $5,000 and chief clerks of ministries $2,500 annually. 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.

198 Pacific Islands 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 surveyors and land valuers in the wake of the Mahele. There is a record of island governors making public land purchases on their own behalf in the 1850s and sometimes falling into arrears on payment.41 Like the konohiki they had superseded, governors and their agents took over the task of supervising the interests of royals in plantations and ranching. Much ordinary business for sales and lease of government lands was handled through governors and the Interior; and much was delegated to locally appointed commissioners of private 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 offered lucrative work for friends of governors, nobles, and legislators between biennial 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 corruption or embezzlement. Some taxes were misappropriated on Hawai‘i in 1860; and there 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 misappropriate public funds; but it was easy for interior officials and their ministerial masters to overspend beyond legislative appropriations on salaries, public works, and extravagant schemes for embellishing royals through accommodation and allowances, additional titles and functions, the accoutrements of military and civil office. Most of this was handled through the Interior, the biggest spending ministry in the kingdom. After a period of relatively modest budgets (under $1,000,000) till the early 1870s, public expenditure suddenly took off during the reign of David Kalakaua, beginning with the very necessary Ali‘iolani Hale which housed government offices. Thereafter, public spending rose to three or four millions biennially and government borrowing and 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 opportunity for less than loyal envoys to indulge in policy-making for special interest groups among the settler and business community. By 1878, representatives had increased to no fewer than fourteen commissioners and consuls in capitals abroad, including a resident minister in Washington, and some 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 41 42

Newbury, ‘Patronage and Bureaucracy’, 25. The Hawaiian Register and Directory for 1878.

4500 expenditure govt. debt revenue

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Hawai‘i 199

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 issue of 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 Critical Years (Honolulu, 1953), 192.

200 Pacific Islands major powers, Great Britain, France, and the United States, helped to reduce the risk of loss of sovereignty, while flattering the pretensions of the sovereigns. Through diplomacy, too, negotiations were opened to reduce the kingdom’s vulnerability in overseas markets. The first projected treaties to breach a 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 of economic salvation. Its importance politically lay in the amount of leverage reciprocity supplied to those anxious for annexation by the United States. But promotion of reciprocity at the level of American government depended on the political opinions of American resident ministers in Honolulu and on complex political canvassing of successive administrations to sell economic and 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 no gain economically, but were persuaded by the case for influence through commercial means. In Honolulu, there were serious doubts: the Foreign Minister, De Varigny perceived the risk in signing a treaty for a short-term measure of prosperity followed by a change of terms or cancellation later. Such a loss of advantage 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 raw sugar in return for a long list of duty-free US imports. In Hawai‘i, the legislature supported the treaty. Cabinet and king were offended, however, by the presence of an American warship in harbour whose commander was a suspected annexationist. It was known, too, that a visiting Congressman had arrived to report covertly on the effects of reciprocity. In Washington, the draft 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 reciprocity. This time producer anxiety coincided with a steep upward trend in public expenditure, public borrowing, and consequential rises in taxes on real estate and personal property, paid mainly by the Hawaiian and haole elite.44 The deficit financing that marked Kalakaua’s rule began in earnest in 1874 and made him and his cabinets eager to secure commercial and fiscal returns from increased trade without sacrificing sovereignty. So the king supported reciprocity at this stage and joined the mission of his envoys E. H. Allen and H. A. Carter to Washington. As is well known, Hawai‘i was accorded free entry 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 43 44

Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1854–1874, 210–19. Newbury, ‘Patronage and Bureaucracy’, 9; The Hawaiian Almanac and Annual, 1887, 31.

Hawai‘i 201 Pearl River as a strategic base was allowed for by a Senate amendment to the treaty denying to other powers strategic concessions. The Hawaiian government reluctantly approved. The Senate ratified the treaty in March 1875; a much 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 primarily a means for the United States to exclude other powers at the price of a tariff concession.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 for Hawaiian sugar were extremely clear over the period from 1876 and through the 1880s in terms of quantities exported. Thereafter, there was a price fall, following the loss of advantage through changes introduced under the McKinley 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 in plantations and other business dependent on sugar to take action leading to constitutional change in 1887, the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893 and annexation 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 strategic interest and anxiety about the actions of other powers. But it has to be tested by a closer examination of those ‘interest groups’ and their motives, as well 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 imports from the United States in a steady upward trend from the 1860s.48 More important, reliance on sugar as an export discouraged diversification into other staples; and the tariff advantage for raw sugar discouraged investment in local refining with one or two exceptions such as Claus Spreckels, largely through his financial patronage of the Hawaiian government in return for land and water rights.49 Spreckels’s example demonstrated that there was not complete 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 several ways the results of the 1876 treaty were contradictory. Leases of government and Crown lands expanded, creating a vested interest among the Hawaiian elite of nobles and royals with income from sugar and ranching. Because of 45 Sumner J. La Croix and Christopher Grandy, ‘The Political Instability of Reciprocal Trade and 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).

202 Pacific Islands labour imports the demography of the group changed in structure.50 Immigration under labour contracts, moreover, reinforced planter dependency on this low-cost alternative to local labour, antagonized Hawaiians, and made the topic of supplies from China and Japan a serious issue in negotiations. American rights to exclusive use of Pearl irritated Hawaiians, but acted as a magnet for speculative investment in land around the harbour. In 1883 both sides considered renewal or abrogation, but there was no stomach in Hawai‘i for a radical change. Congressional committee reports were cool to the domestic effects of the treaty in the United States, but thought it was worth modifying to keep a strategic advantage. American fiscal losses were substantial in terms of revenue foregone, if viewed in isolation. A sevenyear renewal was agreed by both governments in 1884, together with a more open declaration of exclusive rights to Pearl for coaling and naval repairs. Given the scale of American and other foreign investment in sugar estates and associated business—some $32 millions by 1892—there is, indeed, a prima-facie case for claiming that this special interest would exert pressure for continued protection. Whether that pressure could be turned into political action through the Hawaiian or American governments depended on the weight of business representation locally and abroad. In Hawai‘i, moreover, as Kalakaua turned against renewal of reciprocity on grounds of loss of sovereignty by concessions over Pearl, the pressing question in the 1880s was the financial 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 loyal service. Much of the politics of the Kalakaua period (1874–91) turned on losses or gains in financial advantage for a noisy set of interest groups among whom sugar growers and exporters were important but not unique. Overall, the period was characterized by a loss of ability on the part of the monarchy to satisfy its clients and assure a majority in the legislature (by using officials as legislators). There was no shortage of rewards for those in public office. For officials of the Interior about one-third of biennial appropriations was paid out in salaries, wages, pensions, and the Civil List for royals which was a high proportion for a department also responsible for capital expenditure. But that did not satisfy those legislators and voters excluded from access to such resources 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 general expenses on current account were topped up by issue of government bonds at high rates of interest there was pressure to raise ‘internal’ (direct) taxes and indirect taxes from customs to meet interest charges. By the late 1880s, 50

Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu, 1977), 25. ‘Hawaiian Public-Debt Statement’, Papers Relating to the Annexation of the Hawaiian Islands to the United States (Washington, 1893), 6263. 51

Hawai‘i 203 direct and indirect taxes accounted for two-thirds of a three million dollar budget which fell into deficit for four of the six biennial periods, 1878/80 to 1890/2.52 The deterioration in Hawaiian public finances, by itself, was not enough to bring down the government, given the constitutional authority of the king over cabinet and legislature. But the regime became vulnerable to attacks on waste and privilege from haole interest groups. Their targets were the monarchy and its host of functionaries, the charmed circle of Kalakaua’s appointments 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 entrepreneur, Claus Spreckels.53 While the issue of public finance has been recognized as a factor leading to a forced change of constitution, there are points about 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 to about a third of revenues, while taxes on real estate and property doubled to about 20 per cent. There is fair case for associating these imposts with a rising propertied class, Hawaiian and haole. But all classes paid poll taxes, general licences and fees, including road and school charges, and the burden of these 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 taxpaying population, mainly 2,600 Americans and Europeans, paid 44 per cent of personal, real estate, and other internal taxes. Hawaiians numbering over fifteen thousand paid less than a third, while unrepresented Chinese and others paid one-quarter of such taxes.56 A similar observation has been made for the biennial period 1891–2.57 Perhaps all that can be concluded is that there was a shift towards direct taxation in the rapid economic expansion of 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 Annual for 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 conspiracy 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 United States 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).

204 Pacific Islands the 1870s and 1880s, and this was felt more by vociferous interest groups critical of government waste. In per capita terms it is clear enough that taxes rose from $2.8 in 1876 to $5.8 by 1891. The population as a whole faced a higher cost of living from duties on imported goods and contributed a declining proportion in the numerous petty imposts which had been the basis for internal taxes from the 1830s to the 1870s. There was more than enough combustible material to ignite political protest about taxation from those who paid most and were frustrated in their effort to influence or control government before 1887. Increasing ethnic tensions may also have played a part in sharpening haole disaffection with the regime. But analysis of Hawaiian cabinets and the legislature and administration on ‘racial’ lines encounters increasing cross-ethnic divisions on grounds of ideology (republicanism against monarchy) and the king’s reliance on a mix of favourites, many of whom were Hawaiian-born descendants of immigrants. Personalities such as Gibson—a fluent Hawaiianspeaker—defy racial interpretations of Hawaiian politics. What was at issue was not ethnic origins, but access to privilege through government service or through protection of real estate and commerce. In practice, Kalakaua appointed more Hawaiian nobles and cabinet ministers than his predecessors from Kamehameha III onwards. He had come to the throne promising jobs for Hawaiians. None of that promise had been forgotten by nobles or commoners; and the records of the Interior for the period demonstrate that more appointments were made available for Hawaiians in executive positions, where less education and no bonds or sureties were required.58 Hawaiians still commanded a majority in the legislature. The House of Nobles and the Council of State, on the other hand, reflected, through appointments made by the king, a decline in the numbers of ali‘i descendants and an increase in haole loyalists. Where racial origins really mattered in local politics was in the continued exclusion of resident Asians from the franchise. Until 1887, moreover, the king dismissed cabinets frequently and selected his ministers on his own initiative. Politics still turned on personalities rather than parties.59 By any standards elections were corrupted by the executive to secure support from Hawaiians and some haole, while a growing foreign electorate favoured candidates opposed to increased taxes, extravagance, and favours to the king’s friends. By 1878, the Cabinet was under attack for financial maladministration and the costs of servicing Loan Acts. The elections of 1882 centred on the debt question and brought in Walter Gibson to the premiership with a programme of welfare, further loans, and an ambi58

Newbury, ‘Patronage and Bureaucracy’, 13, 23, 28. 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 and note. 59

Hawai‘i 205 tious scheme for diplomatic cooperation with Samoa, Tonga, and the Cook Islands. It was at this period that Claus Spreckels, as one of the government’s bankers, was able to solicit a large land grant, back a new Loan Act, carry through a lucrative agency contract to displace American gold and silver coins with Kalakaua’s own currency. Other extravagance such as a coronation, tours abroad, increase in the national debt were issues in the elections for 1884, when a business and planter group emerged in the campaign in opposition to Gibson and gained control of finance committees in the legislature. Cuts in expenditure were agreed and then ignored. Some saw an attack on royal prerogatives as the only way out of a patrimonial regime. A group of ‘Independents’ led by the lawyers William Kinney and Lorrin Thurston made some headway at new elections in 1886, though twelve of their twenty-eight candidates were Hawaiians. Among the pro-government candidates were only one haole and many Hawaiians who had held public office as judges, assessors, schoolteachers. On the whole, government candidates prevailed, and Gibson was able to form a new ministry which was unable to deal with corruption charges surrounding the issue of government opium licences or criticism of patronage appointments to the civil service. To the US minister, Merrill, it seemed that native Hawaiians might take over all posts; W. D. Alexander, official surveyor, thought that the government might become ‘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 which Spreckels did not want. Kalakaua’s client circle began to fall apart, just as the loose group of Independents led by Thurston and Sandford B. Dole mustered enough 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. It was not, at this stage, backed by the US representative, Merrill, but it had a monopoly of available force through command of the volunteer Honolulu Rifles and a local German militia. On 30 June, Thurston declared an end to the Hawaiian government, but not the overthrow of the monarchy, and served his party’s resolutions and constitution on the king. The king yielded to the demands of the conspirators in the bloodless ‘revolution’ of 1887 and reluctantly signed away many of his prerogatives in a Constitution that made a number of reforms. Nobles were subject to election and merged with other members of the legislature from which officials were excluded. The king lost his right to dismiss ministers unless on a vote of confidence, veto bills, or make constitutional amendments. The franchise was 60 Merrill to State Department, 25 July, 16 Oct. 1886, cited in Tate, The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom, 81.

206 Pacific Islands extended to male residents of all nationalities (except Asians) with property qualifications 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’ government, as Kalakaua retained the right to appoint his own Cabinet, rather than accept the advice of elected ministers. There is little sign that for the nobility a patrimonial culture was uprooted by a few constitutional prescriptions. Former League members who now regrouped as the Reform Party expected to benefit from a spoils system, but were not entirely satisfied, and few civil servants were replaced below the rank of minister. At most, the king was made to repay ‘gifts’ from nobles and business friends and settle his debts. Elections the same year confirmed the dominance of Reform in the legislature and Thurston became Minister of the Interior. One immediate consequence was the passage of two Acts to remove most of the powers of island governors and bring control of police and lesser judiciary under the attorney-general. The practice of appointing royal relatives and retainers to the most senior administrative 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 of political factions. It was evident that the royal militia of under a hundred recruits could not handle public riots or an armed insurrection. Control over arms 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 from marines. Secondly, political groups remained fissile, incorporating a wide range of republican and monarchical opinions. On the whole, Reform was run by moderate conservatives; a National Reform Party composed mainly of part-Hawaiians looked back to the Constitution of 1864; and from 1892 there was also a Liberal Party bringing together Hawaiians and European artisans.62 In the 1890 elections the Hawaiian vote rallied sufficiently to place Reform in the minority. The king was able to choose his own Cabinet again as 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 Francisco in 1891, when he was succeeded by his sister, Lili‘uokalani. The queen’s short reign brought to a head the patrimonial and reformist tendencies of opposed factions in government and culminated in the revolution of 1893. Behind the revolution, of course, lay more than mere dissatisfaction with a spendthrift monarchy or the determined effort of Lili‘uokalani 61 Newbury, ‘Patronage and Bureaucracy’, 30; Biennial Report of the Attorney-General to the Legislative Assembly of 1888 (Honolulu, 1888), 2–3. Governors were restored for a short period by 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.

Hawai‘i 207 to reverse the loss of status and prerogatives under the 1887 Constitution. The most usually cited factor has been American economic predominance built up through sugar, shipping, banking, and the early effects of the Reciprocity Treaty. The overall background of foreign relations with an emerging Pacific power in the context of late nineteenth-century formal and informal imperial control placed the Hawaiian state at the same kind of disadvantage as other Pacific communities in a region where spheres of interest were being consolidated. Not least, Hawaiians were becoming a minority in their own state. By 1890, they made up 45 per cent of a population that included 36,000 (40 per cent) Asian and Portuguese immigrants. Hawaiianborn and other European foreigners accounted for only 13 per cent of a total population of 89,990.63 In terms of voter registration, however, the demographic disadvantage for Hawaiians was less obvious. Of a total of 18,593 registered voters in 1890, Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians could still command just over half of the electorate. The Portuguese were reported to vote for monarchy, adding, perhaps, another 10 per cent. Even if all local-born and enfranchised foreigners had been opposed to the monarchy (and many were 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 on some support from British and German settlers. This stark fact—that anti-monarchists and annexationists could not win a referendum or abolish the monarchy through a political programme—doubtless increased their frustration with legal methods. It can be argued, of course, that their economic preponderance far outweighed their numbers. A patrimonial regime that lost control of returns from public taxation and depended largely on public loans and sale or lease of remaining government and Crown lands was in a deteriorating position and risked loosing loyalties at senior levels of government and lower levels of administration. To some extent, Kalakaua had been skilful in shoring up the monarchy’s position by playing off his ministers one against the other, changing them around, and keeping control of the legislature by appointments of nobles and by corrupt electoral practices. One historian of this electoral corruption defines the regime at this period as ‘an oligarchy and aristocracy with monarchical trappings’.64 But urban native-Hawaiian electors were an uncertain factor in local politics. After loss of land, many commoners lived in and around Honolulu as part of a small, wage-earning class that emerged at the 1890 elections as the Hi Kalai‘aina party. Few Hawaiian commoners of the eight thousand or so in Honolulu supported Hawaiian radicals like Wilcox, or, indeed, gave active street support to Lili‘uokalani during her struggle with her cabinet ministers. It may be, as Ching has suggested, that commoner 63 64

Papers Relating to the Annexation of the Hawaiian Islands to the United States, 60. Ching, ‘A History’, 21–32.

208 Pacific Islands loyalties were difficult to mobilize around lofty ideals such as the ‘Hawaiian nation’, though their opposition to Asian immigration was strong enough to produce 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 of intimidation and enlistment of external brokers and patrons. There is a temptation to equate annexationists with those closely involved in the sugar industry. Historians have not been slow to see a connection between depression in sugar exports and prices after 1890 and ‘the fermentation of revolutionary ideas’ in Hawaiian politics.65 The movement for change to a republic centred on the Annexation Club of Honolulu businessmen. Its nucleus consisted of the 1887 Reform leaders and never numbered more than seventeen. Founded as a precautionary measure against a monarchical return to patrimonialism, the leadership sounded out official attitudes in Washington and in New York and San Francisco business circles. One method tried by the Reform group in the short struggle with Lili‘uokalani’s ministries was to pack the Cabinet with annexationists and control the legislature through election of haole ‘nobles’ in alliance with the Hawaiian Liberal faction. It did not work, because the queen could not be made to accept ministers she did not want, as the Constitution of 1887 did not formally prescribe a system of ministerial responsibility to a majority in the legislature. Ministries chosen by the queen could be voted out, however; and by refusal to pass appropriation bills the legislature could hold the civil service to ransom. Worse, the queen did not have power to dissolve the legislature and call elections under the 1887 Constitution. In desperation, she allowed George N. Wilcox (Liberal) to form a ministry of mainly conservative Americans, followed swiftly by yet another ministry headed by the part-Hawaiian, Samuel Parker. In a sense, Lili‘uokalani was allowed to regain a measure of control over the executive and was tempted into framing and issuing a constitution of her own, in January 1893, which her ministers refused to accept. This attempt to revert 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, and were assured of assistance from the US minister, Stevens, and Captain Wiltse of the USS Boston. By 16 January 1893, the queen had been induced under threat of force to keep the 1887 Constitution. Marines were then landed under protest from ministers. Reluctantly, Sanford B. Dole agreed to head a provisional government and formally joined in the process of abrogating the monarchy on 17 January and forming an executive and advisory council which took over public offices without much difficulty. 65 Tate, The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom, 114; La Croix and Grandy, ‘The Political Instability of Reciprocal Trade’, 171–5.

Hawai‘i 209 The episode has been analysed many times in detail. There is a consensus about motives in a revolution usually seen as the climax to a conflict between the Hawaiian monarchy and ‘sugar interests’, or (more vaguely) Hawai‘i’s missionary descendants in alliance with businessmen.66 Evidence produced some time ago by William Russ and explored by Merze Tate is not so hard and fast. The revolutionary declaration of 16 January drawn up by Thurston and others was never issued; so we do not know who its signatories supporters were. 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 of sugar stocks. Arguably, of course, William R. Castle, son of the founder of Castle and Cooke, was a lawyer and legislator who stood in for his father’s agency interests. The next biggest capitalist was Thurston who had invested modestly in sugar and ranching and was primarily an attorney. Other annexationists outside the committee such as Alexander Young of British origins held $648,700 in sugar stocks and agreed with their aims. H. Baldwin who held over $1 million in sugar stocks and Spreckels who controlled about the same in sugar and much else backed legislative opposition to the queen, but they did not play an active part in the revolution. It has to be remembered, however, that plantations were not free-standing companies.68 Nearly three-quarters of their capital was owned by Americans and about one-quarter by British and German business. Some sixty of the estates were developed by nine agencies, two of which—W. G. Irwin & Co. and Claus Spreckels—had good economic reasons for not supporting annexation. Either they did not want to see US immigration laws applied to Hawai‘i, or (in the case of Spreckels) they profited from a unique vertical integration with refineries at San Francisco and a well-organized shipping monopoly.69 The proprietor of a third agency, Theo H. Davies & Co., was no annexationist either and actively supported the dethroned queen and the heir apparent, Princess Kaiulani.70 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’ in Donald 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, Wilcox withdrew, 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 Inside Story of a British-American Family in the Pacific and its Business Enterprises (Honolulu, 1983), 46.

210 Pacific Islands In short, the conspirators did not speak for all plantation owners. They had the ear of most local businessmen and some resident in the United States, such as Charles R. Bishop, a former member of the House of Nobles and married to Princess Bernice Pauahi, though he favoured a protectorate not a republic; and they had lukewarm support from Benjamin Dillingham, a railroad entrepreneur who sided with Spreckels but blamed Lili‘uokalani for the breakdown in constitutional government. The provisional government was not very different in composition from the committee of public safety, although sugar interests were more firmly represented for about half of the $482,000 held in stock by government members. But in the executive Dole was a justice not 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’ commissary; S. H. Phillips, long an attorney-general and firm royalist under Kamehameha, renounced his Hawaiian citizenship and became an annexationist; 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 government and 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 departmental heads 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 change were not immediately visible in the five years before Hawai‘i was annexed as an American Territory in 1898. The path to that end was by no means straightforward. Annexation was not accepted as a solution to Hawai‘i’s economic or constitutional problems by the administration of President Harrison which could not secure Senate approval; and President Grover Cleveland withheld approval of a draft annexation treaty prepared and delivered to Washington by Thurston and others, pending an investigative mission by Senator James H. Blount. Unexpectedly, Blount put a stop to use of the American flag and turned in a report favourable to restoration of the queen and highly critical of the collusion of Minister Stevens with the revolutionaries.71 Refusal by Lili‘uokalani to offer an amnesty to the rebels, if restored, and American reluctance to use force against the republican regime, however, left the provisional government free to consolidate power, while Cleveland turned the issue over to Congress, at 71 James Blount, Report of the Commissioner to the Hawaiian Islands, US Congress, House Executive Document 47, 53rd Congress (Washington, DC, 1893).

Hawai‘i 211 the end of 1893. This move made the status of the islands a football in Congressional politics. Republicans tended to support Stevens; Democrats defended 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 to 1898. Hawaiian reactions were to issue a reasoned protest against the coup and to form two royalist organizations—the Civil Rights League and the Patriotic League. A new version of the Annexation Club supported the government. At the same time, the government reluctantly continued to pay Lili‘uokalani and Princess Kaiulani from the Civil List. While decisions hung fire in the United States, the annexationists dug in and set up their republic under an American-style constitution which became law by proclamation, in July 1894. 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 the United States. Annexationists then consolidated their position through elections 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 with the 1890 total of 14,000. Mass petitions were signed and sent in vain to the president and Congress for redress. With the pro-annexation government recognized by the bulk of foreign representatives in Hawai‘i, the American administration and Congress could afford to debate the finer points of an imperial takeover. Congress had authority to acquire new territories, but the Constitution did not specify how they should be governed. Thus, arguments for or against annexation did not turn 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 economic and strategic advantage. Among the economic issues, reciprocity or incorporation of Hawai‘i within the American tariff system was not central to US concerns about Hawai‘i in the 1890s. The McKinley tariff shattered the illusion of protective economic dependency, while the United States retained all export privileges till 1895. The effect was to prolong local depression relieved, to some extent, by application of the Wilson–Gorman tariff of 1894 which abolished bounties on domestic-produced sugar and restored Hawaiian sugar to a privileged place. Consequently, there was no wave of bankruptcies in Hawai‘i nor any decline in plantation investment. Locally, fear of action by the 72 Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu, 1968), 282–3; Hawkins, ‘Economic Diversification’, 67–8.

212 Pacific Islands 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 Japanese and Chinese, 1893–9, as the largest single immigrant movement in the islands’ history. By 1900, native Hawaiians made up only one-quarter of the population. Despite the case made out for reciprocity as a factor behind annexation, its force was limited to the period before 1890. The main factor in the timing of annexation was simply a change of administration in March 1897, when McKinley’s Republicans succeeded to Cleveland’s Democrats. Progress on the 1893 annexation treaty was immediate, though the Senate was divided in its views over the racial composition of the new territory, expansion of trade in the Pacific, and the legality of using joint ratification at all.73 On the fringes of the debate were the grand strategists such as Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan who was certain the Hawaiian Islands were the key to Pacific hegemony; and he had supporters such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, and much of the United States Navy. In the end, a two-thirds majority could not 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 both Houses in March and May 1898. By then, the United States was at war with Spain from April 1898; and, on 1 May, Captain Dewey destroyed a Spanish fleet in Manila. Hawai‘i became an ally and a staging post for troopships on their way to the Philippines. On 1 June and 6 July the resolution passed in both Houses for McKinley’s signature. More generally, it can be argued that reversal of status came as much from the willingness of a major power to acquire territories, as from subversion by a settler community. In the United States the change was more of a shift of emphasis from protection of lives and property of American citizens to an active interest in strategic posts. By the end of the 1890s, the United States had acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, part of the Samoan Islands, and followed up with a virtual protectorate over Panama and control of the Canal Zone. The Hawaiian Islands became more desirable as a naval base than a plantation territory. Paradoxically, the administration least likely to annex Hawai‘i to meet the demands of planters was the most likely to annex on strategic and international grounds. There was no need to do so to secure American trade—most of it was in American hands anyway. Rumour of Japanese intervention was a different matter; and when a Japanese warship was sent to Honolulu in 1897 to investigate refusal to accept contracted 73 Thomas J. Osborne, ‘Empire Can Wait’: American Opposition to Hawaiian Annexation, 1893–1898 (Kent, Ohio, 1981).

Hawai‘i 213 labour, local annexationists were provided with a weapon they used throughout their campaign in Washington, even when the Japanese withdrew their protest against pending annexation. There were other long-standing issues preventing a reconciliation between business interests and Lili‘uokalani’s regime. Taxation and the queen’s attempt to undo the constraints on the monarchical executive under the Constitution of 1887 were enough. The queen would have reverted to government of a patrimonial type and would, perhaps, have reduced the right of franchise for immigrant foreigners. The essential cause of revolution lay in irreconcilable views about the nature of government in Hawaiian society towards the end of the century, when demographic changes had eroded, but not ended, the weight of native and part-Hawaiian franchise in politics. It is usual to label the two competing views as ‘royalist’ and ‘republican’. Strangely, the issue of democracy was not foremost among revolutionary republicans. If anything, they wanted it limited, because they found it almost impossible to muster sufficient votes, even under a system with a property or literacy qualification. Strangely, too, most of the Hawaiian monarchs would have agreed with this limitation on democracy. The principal cause of frustration among the haole elite in the 1880s and 1890s was that they could never be certain in Hawai‘i’s electoral system of putting into office a party with policies that answered their case for diplomatic protection and lower taxes. Constitutional monarchy did not answer either, because Hawai‘i did not have time to evolve the conventions of constitutional government entailing the retirement of the monarch from the executive. Hawaiian government remained essentially patrimonial in a small society, where office depended on loyalty to a superior. That was why governors were stripped of their powers in 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 the islands responsible for putting down riot and rebellion, a duty countered by the conspirators who moved first and had their own militia and the backing of US marines. In the end, Hawaiian politics and government provide the basic reasons for settler discontent and the overthrow of Hawaiian kingship by an oligarchy based on a community of financial interests. One oligarchy replaced another and proceeded to govern on a very limited mandate. Not till 1900 did Hawai‘i have an Organic Act passed by Congress in an attempt to balance the need for legal continuity with the facts of political power. Patronage did not disappear, in the absence of a civil service commission to oversee appointments and promotions. Under the Resolution of Annexation in 1898, local municipal legislation (with all the electoral and judicial disqualifications that entailed) remained in force with one important exception. In helping to frame the Organic Act for the Territory of Hawai‘i, Sanford Dole and his Republicans kept to strict property qualifications for

214 Pacific Islands candidates and voters. To their dismay Congress threw out this restrictive view 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 once more in a position to disrupt Republican and Democrat Parties in the islands by supporting a Home Rule Party which threw up Robert Wilcox as a quixotic and unstable leader elected as delegate to Congress. Business in the legislature was as chaotic and irresponsible as it had been after 1887, when Hawaiians had unseated Reform from its temporary dominance of cabinet. As then, there was a risk appropriations would not be voted, and Dole had to call 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 the monarchy under Kalakaua and Lili‘uokalani, to join their camp, stand against Wilcox, and attract enough Hawaiian votes to become delegate to Congress. Kuhio, in short, became the government’s client, as a personable and influential prince in Washington. In return, the envoy was granted status and affluence, and, more importantly, the chance to make more jobs available for Hawaiians through the implementation of county government throughout the islands from 1905. Ironically, the patronage of the new oligarchy restored to a limited degree some of the advantages bestowed on Hawaiians by former ministers and governors. But it did not restore land. Indeed, Crown lands were confiscated; and the failure of the niggardly leases made available through the homestead programme, 1917–21, among the twenty thousand Hawaiians entitled to resettlement did nothing to redress the loss.74 But then Hawai‘i’s aristocracy never had been generous towards commoners. They were 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 by 1910 resembled an eighteenth-century ‘family compact’ that made appointments to boards, ran commissions, and co-opted by marriage suitable clients from the service gentry. The new haole aristocracy was not so different in its commercial endogamy from the old ali‘i caste endogamy and engendered just as many businessmen and politicians as chiefs and followers in succeeding generations. They filled the legislature with Republicans until 1940. With one 74 The number of Hawaiian farmers fell from 679 in 1920 to 445 in 1940. M. M. Vause, ‘The Hawaiian 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 “Big Five,” 1898–1940’, WHQ 30 (1999), 295–326.

Hawai‘i 215 exception, the governors of Hawai‘i were nominees of the sugar gentry, just as island governors had been nominees of the monarchy.76 Unlike most other reversals and imperial takeovers, the Hawaiian case resulted in a form of constitutional incorporation, not constitutional devolution and independence. Statehood came late in the day in 1959, as resentment built up over military occupation and congressional wardship and has even been regarded as a form of ‘decolonisation’—a strange term for this example of assimilation and ‘the triumph of American values and institutions over those indigenous to the islands’.77 76

The exception was Joseph Poindexter (1934–42). 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. 77

12

Fiji

Neither centralized nor a patrimonial state, the scattered archipelagos of Fiji owed their unification to colonial rule from 1874. Usually treated as a model of ‘indirect rule’, as invented by Governor Sir A. H. Gordon, the social and political structures of the Fiji group might well have been taken under an administrative protectorate, leaving variants of local hierarchy and their methods of subordinating conquests in place. Fijians were exposed, instead, to the formal prescriptions of a Crown Colony system introduced with a large measure of paternalism embodied in the 1874 Deed of Cession and to a great deal of administrative regulation prescribing the place of their chiefs in 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 representation 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 society derives from both the paternalism and the formalism of British over-rule and, in a large measure, from pre-colonial status of lineage leaders by descent and by achievement. It can be argued that the patronage of governors created a new hierarchy by incorporation of chiefs into a line of administrative power easily understood by Fijians as a way of safeguarding land rights and cultural identity. It can also be conceded that officials may have ‘reinvented’ chieftaincy in the process by curtailing some of its authority and use of force. But the reasons for Fijian acceptance of over-rule lie in earlier political structures within the variety of chiefdoms and confederations that competed for territory and ‘the possession of many followers, subjects and allies as possible’ through war, diplomacy, trade, and enlistment of outsiders. Ultimately, Fijian leaders submitted their competitive disunity to a form of political unification within a colonial state.2 With a population of some 140,000 Melanesians inhabiting about ninetyfive 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 Experiment in Indirect Rule, Royal Anthropological Institute, Occasional Paper No. 10 (London 1951). For words in Fijian the usual conventions for pronunciation have been followed, as indicated at first mention in the text: b as in mb; c as in th; d as in nd; g as in ng; q as in ngg. Alternative orthography is provided in the Index. 2 S. A. Sayes, ‘Cakaudrove: Ideology and Reality in a Fijian Confederation’, Ph.D. thesis (The Australian National University, 1982), 96. My interpretation of early Fijian chieftaincy relies heavily on this work and on David Routledge, Matanitu: The Struggle for Power in Early Fiji (Suva, 1985).

Fiji 217

M ap 9. Pre-colonial Fiji: Confederations and Chiefdoms, after W. P. Morrell, Britain in the Pacific Islands (Oxford, 1960) and Fiji Department of Surveys (Misc.) 271E

218 Pacific Islands and political organization than allowed for by later administrative organization of local government through chiefs.3 Nevertheless, there were some common characteristics that lasted into the period of European over-rule. One was the territorial location of patrilineal descent groups (yavusa) in defensive villages as chiefdoms (vanua) under the leader (tui, turaga) (turanga) of a senior lineage. A second was the formation of wider coalitions and conquests into confederations (matanitu) under paramounts whose warrior and ritual status was certainly high, but whose security of political tenure was open to challenge from kin rivalries and defection to other leaders. Some of that territorial expression of political status survived into colonial provinces and divisions. Key issues in defining status were access to material resources to reward supporters in a system of power through appropriation and redistribution, the widespread use of gifts, and the extension of kinship obligations through high-ranking marriages.4 But nothing in Fiji’s recorded history leads one to believe that the aggregation of chiefdoms into confederations frequently at war was stable enough to give rise to a patrimonial system with offices of state or able to produce leadership capable of welding together large island territories for very long. One consequence of Fiji’s fluctuating and mobile power structures, therefore, was probably a readiness on the part of chiefs to extend to foreigners and settlers the techniques of incorporation and alliance that played such an important role in their own internal struggles. The easiest sources for such support lay in historic contacts through trade and settlement by Tongans in all parts of the group, but more especially in the Northern Lau islands, and, more significantly, in sporadic European trade and settlement from 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 highest ranking patriclan as the cornerstone of local hierarchies, pre-1874, recognizing 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 organization, groups of successful villages, or great confederations could retain other villages as ‘border’ clients (bati) (mbati) which fought on behalf of their overlords, but which could, in the manner of clients, change their allegiance. Or as Oliver puts it: ‘Bati were more or less voluntary affiliates, more allies than tributaries. They were members of villages whose leaders had for some reason or another (including shrewd political expediency) been 3 The problem of ‘reconstructing’ Fijian social and political structures, following redefinition in 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 are analysed in Routledge, Matanitu, 35–6.

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persuaded to render respect to those of a (usually more powerful) confederation 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 physically excluded from a dominant descent group.6 Hocart also recognized that there were levels of alliance and clientage, so that: ‘There results a relativity which is typically Fijian: a group which is noble to another may be border to a third.’ This may be taken to mean from the examples given by Hocart that there was a hierarchy of states or vanua, owing allegiance to a central dominant capital (such as Somosomo in the case of Cakaudrove and Taveuni matanitu), 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 subordination by conquest were not the sole methods of organizing a political hierarchy in Fiji, although there was a high degree of internal kinship or affinity within a village and ways of cementing socio-political obligations through the claims of sisters’ sons on a brother. Fijian society was both hierarchical and fluid in physical settlements and in loyalties, leaving room for clientage and alliance under outsiders, as, for example, on the offshore island of Moala which has been 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 incorporated European factors from the 1850s, there was also a ‘Tongan model’ present in the north-eastern islands to provide a patrimonial precedent which the more normative patriliny of Fijian descent groups and political leadership did not. But ‘patrimony’ has to be used with caution in the Fijian cases. The power of Fijian chiefs as tui or roko tui at the highest levels of confederacy remained disputed, and it is not certain that senior members of ranked lineages survived long enough to found dynasties in the Tongan manner. There would seem to be, too, a lack of assigned offices over estates or associated villages. Bati ‘borders’ may be regarded as warrior shock troops for an overlord and with a 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 institutional paramountcy in Fijian political structures in the early nineteenth 5

Oliver, Oceania, ii. 1173. A. M. Hocart, The Northern States of Fiji (London, 1952), 27–33; Peter France, The Charter 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. 6

220 Pacific Islands century, emphasizing less the divisive presence of European clients and brokers 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 its leading titled lineage from any of its rival chieftaincies. Like Cakaudrove, it was, in Hocart’s phrase, one of the ‘upstart states’.10 Its paramount chief, the Vunivalu, Tanoa, had been defeated and deposed in the late 1820s. His son, Cakobau (Thakombau), built up his own band of clients and mercenaries during the period of opposition to his father and defeated the rebels in 1837 at the age of 20. The presence of deserters, sandalwood and bêche de mer traders made little difference, although some serviced arms. They fought both for and against Bau; and Wesleyan Methodists, their way prepared to a great extent by Tahitian and Tongan missionaries, settled first in neighbouring Rewa and did not open a station at Bau until 1854. Moreover, they broke the usual pattern of European clientage by opposing warfare (though they allowed 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 In order to build up matanitu alliances, patriclan leadership employed the technique of strengthening numbers by incorporation within a maximal lineage through 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 loyalties by installing a chief of Rewa as vasu to his victorious neighbour and by incorporating 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 and so was not available for redistribution as a reward for allegiance or hereditary offices. At that stage external alliances had an important bearing on the traditional warfare and diplomacy of Fijian chiefs. For the most part, European contact by traders, missionaries, and visiting warships was concentrated on the offshore islands and coastal anchorages of south-eastern Viti Levu in the first half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, Tongan settlement, mercenary warfare and backing for a Wesleyan Methodist version of Christianity influenced the power balance between chiefdoms of the Lau group and those of confederations on Viti Levu and Vanua Levu. The main focus of 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.

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Europeans’ attention was the small island of Bau, the neighbouring coastal plain and the fertile Rewa and Wailevu deltas. Two reasons for European intervention lay in outside support for wouldbe 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 a paramount chief. A crucial stage in this transition lay in the notion of a formal contract or treaty, enforced by outside arbitration, and occasionally contested by rival patron powers. That stage was reached at Bau through J. B. Williams’s intervention as an American Commercial Agent on the side of Rewa 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 brand of Wesleyan Methodism, the Lotu Tonga, which made headway in the Lau group in the 1840s, and through the political action of Ma‘afu who stood within 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 enhance Cakobau’s status, if victorious in the struggle with Rewa, or to reduce it by making him the client for Tongan consolidation of power in the Lau group and eastern Viti Levu. In the event, Cakobau’s nominal conversion and Tongan intervention were instrumental in eliminating the power of Rewa in 1855. Thus, the two sources of external influence, Tongan and European, left the most prominent chief in Fiji as client to outsiders, as well as patron in local politics. King George of Tonga who brokered a peace extracted material benefits 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 Levu and northern Lau. Cakobau’s debts remained unsettled which left him open to the influence of Williams’s rival and British Consul, W. T. Pritchard, who persuaded him to sign the first (unacceptable) deed of cession to Great Britain to 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 acceptance of the brokerage of Pritchard who ‘became virtually arbiter between the 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 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).

222 Pacific Islands chiefs later to secure a form of protective paramountcy, when further experiments with centralized government failed. Cakobau was not a strong enough personality to control access to resources by outsiders in the fragmented state of Fijian politics, and, thereby, regulate the market for land to his own advantage. Ma‘afu, by contrast, was successful in the role of patron-chief and his administration worked better in the Lau group than the beach factions, chiefs, and consular brokers in Bau. This was because Ma‘afu mastered many of the European techniques for management of lands and taxes and enjoyed a special status as a cousin and envoy of Taufa‘ahau, cemented by a treaty of friendship in 1865 between Tonga and the Fijian chief of Lakeba (Lakemba). It helped, too, that Ma‘afu was regarded locally by the ruling family as linked with their lineage and had other kin ties in the Moala group. Such was the basis for the formation of a new state in Lakeba and a base for Tongan influence in the outliers and eastern Fiji. Ma‘afu was also able to meet a need on the part of Fijian chiefs for methods to deal with outside pressures for plantation lands in the 1860s. He mobilized his own Tongan clients as officials to survey and arrange leases for Tongan and Fijian lands in the form of individual allotments. But he kept his position as patron-overseer and could take back titles in default of rent or tribute. He was careful, too, to cede only unoccupied lands. In this he was assisted by his European client, R. S. Swanston (formerly Pritchard’s vice-consul), who helped to draw up a constitution of the North-eastern Confederation in 1869; and it helped that the King of Tonga formally ceded all his rights in Fiji into Ma‘afu’s hands. From 1865, therefore, there were two political centres in Fiji: one under the Vunivalu of Bau and the other consisting of the loose confederation between two of the principal paramounts of Vanua Levu and Ma‘afu as Tui Lau at Lakeba. A chief by ascription, Ma‘afu was also a big man by achievement, moving throughout the 1860s between the roles of patron-administrator and broker in Fijian affairs.13 On the other hand, at Bau, Cakobau fell into the hands of a mixture of advisers from the beach community and forfeited land in settlement of debts. Projects for a centralized authority to bolster his position continued. Successive attempts at framing a constitution were evidence of a search for legitimacy in the face of settler lawlessness and an aim of wider confederation on Viti Levu through periodic assemblies of chiefs. Prescriptive remedies adopted and adapted from Hawai‘i provided salaried offices for European client officials and applied taxes and laws. But government from Bau did not work for the rest of Viti Levu or Vanua Levu. The sale of land was not brought under control; and the first boatloads of imported Pacific Islands labour from Tanna (Vanuatu) for cotton plantations in the 1860s heralded a 13 A. C. Reid, ‘The Chiefdom of Lau’, JPH 18 (1983), 183–97; I. C. Campbell, ‘The Alleged Imperialism of George Tupou I’, JPH 25 (1980), 159–87.

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new source of unregulated conflict for consular arbitration and missionary protest. A revised constitution drawn up in 1871 by an assembly of chiefs from most of the vanua went further towards the creation of a central government by instituting a royal Cabinet responsible to the ‘king’, a Privy Council of governors (vanua chiefs), and a Legislature of Europeans from twenty-one districts of the two main islands.14 There was a Bill of Rights, provision for poll and labour taxes, licences, and taxes on European-held land. An elaborate Act established a Supreme Court and Provincial Courts under wardens (chiefs’ European secretaries) and provided for jury trials. Such an elaborate structure presumed a budget of over $120,500 and a civil service likely to absorb about half of revenue.15 Essentially, the 1871 Constitution was an attempt to set up a kingdom based in Bau on the model of Hawai‘i, but without the loyalties of provincial chiefs and appointed civil servants implicit in that model. Cakobau’s government had the greatest difficulty recruiting chiefs and planters as regional ‘governors’; direct taxes and port duties provided inadequate revenue; without power to allocate lands, Cakobau had no real patronage to dispense. The British Consul hardly recognized the regime at all; and within the administration itself the king’s chief secretary, John Thurston, a sympathetic broker and adviser, came to favour annexation, in the face of intractable problems of control, jurisdiction, and debt.16 It is possible to take the view that such an embryonic government by a small faction of settlers and chiefs left the ‘Tui Viti’ as a mere figurehead who failed in the face of settler violence. But that does not square entirely with the agreed language of the 1871 Constitution which exalted the position of the paramount in relation to other chiefs, or with his part in eventual negotiations for cession in 1874. A more balanced analysis perceives a large degree of cooperation between chiefs as governors and magistrates and merchant-planters which provided a short-term stability in chiefdoms near Bau, but failed, ultimately, to settle tensions between planters and Fijians in the interior and in northern and western Viti Levu.17 For the first time, too, minor district chiefs, or buli (mbuli), were enlisted into a regional police raising armed opposition from some settlers and consular accusations of ‘despotic’ rule.18 The major weakness of the settler–Fijian government, however, was that it had insufficient resources to command loyalty from regional chiefs throughout the archipelago and risked bankruptcy in financing administration from 1872 on 14

RHL, 919 5.5, The Constitution Act of Fiji [1871]; Constitution and Acts of Fiji. 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 buli and roko tui titles, France, The Charter, 108. 15

224 Pacific Islands a series of debenture issues held by Australian and New Zealand banks. These had to be serviced by sale of produce collected as tax through the firm of Rabone, 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 salaries could not be paid. A new constitution was circulated in the Fijian language to the chiefs, unratified by the Legislature, giving greater powers (so Consul March claimed) to European ministers and giving them effective control. But it was never in force, after Thurston was persuaded by a British naval officer to suspend it in October 1873, pending the results of an investigation by British commissioners into the future of Fiji. Although there were many settler and some government voices in favour of annexation, it was not easy to find an outside patron power willing to accept Cakobau’s regime at Bau as an instrument for controlling lawlessness and the rate of settlement in the group. The Australian Colonies formally resolved in 1870 this should be done by proxy of Great Britain on behalf of Australian interests, before Germans or Americans moved in. At most, Britain agreed to recognize the Bau government in 1871, but not to accept further responsibilities, under the goad of humanitarian pressures, without a formal enquiry by commissioners who were not empowered to negotiate terms.20 The acrimonious and tortuous relations between Thurston, as champion of Fijian rights, and Commissioners Goodenough and Layard who sought to safeguard the settlers do not concern us here. Neither side said much about the extent of the Tui Viti’s powers outside of Bau; and Thurston hankered after a change of constitution to replace settler representation by a ‘strong nominee government similar to that of the colonial regime’.21 In the Colonial Office, between 1871 and 1873, opposition to cession weakened, as the powers that might be exercised through a consul or resident under a protectorate were considered to be inadequate to deal with British and foreign planters and traders. By the date of the commissioners’ enquiry Lord Kimberley, as Colonial Secretary, had come round to the view that annexation was probably the only way to control 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 emerged from the debate between assembled chiefs, Cakobau, his ministers, and Goodenough and Layard in the intense negotiations between March and October 1874, illustrating the failure of constitutional prescriptions to create 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 the interior on trial and 300 were condemned to forced labour on plantations in conditions of doubtful jurisdiction.

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a centralized state. One was the degree of disunity in the ranks of the Fijian chiefs, 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 archipelago. It is also clear that G. A. Woods, as Cakobau’s premier, had ‘failed in his promise to establish a Fiji-wide government’, even on Viti Levu, which made some of Cakobau’s pretensions to local paramountcy untenable.22 Furthermore, at the height of the debate on whether to cede sovereignty, all Cakobau’s ministers resigned, leaving only the Vunivalu and Thurston to speak for Bau, together with an assortment of provincial chiefs, who were not at 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 by the 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 high chiefs of confederations. Several among the remaining eight represented Bau and were kinsmen of the Vunivalu. But most were certainly not subordinate to Cakobau and are listed separately in the final document brokered by Sir Hercules Robinson, Governor of New South Wales, on behalf of the reluctant patron power. There were signs that a form of patrimonialism was in evidence during 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 did his 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 agreement for British over-rule, because they could not risk being left out and losing the positions they had won by war and alliance. A much more extensive form of alliance was in the making between the leadership of Fiji and an imperial power 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 the British Empire by annexation or protectorate, the 1874 Deed of Cession did not formally guarantee the existing political structure, but only arranged a 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 be retained and a half-promise to investigate and award any lands, pensions, or allowances they might claim. Any form of indigenous paramountcy by a single title-holder was unacceptable to the chiefs: Fiji was not Hawai‘i or Tonga; and part of the purpose of the cession was to delimit chiefs’ authority 22

Ibid. 287.

23

Routledge, Matanitu, 216.

226 Pacific Islands in conditions of rapid land transfers and demands for local and imported labour.24 The cession left the incoming administration a fairly free hand to determine the place of indigenous authorities in the hierarchy of a despotic form of colonial rule and to manage Crown lands as it thought fit. Reversal of status, therefore, was abrupt in Fiji. In the long debate about what type of administration emerged from the cession, the place of ‘custom’ or the indirectness of ‘indirect rule’ as official orthodoxy, it is sometimes lost from sight that Sir Arthur Gordon and his successors aimed not only at protection of a social system, but at political solutions to the problem of exercising power as a form of regulated patronage. Financial necessity was not the only argument for utilizing existing structures headed by chiefs: ‘For, be it remembered, the legal non-recognition of their position would not have in any way deprived them of the power they possessed over those who yielded to them an instinctive and unquestioning obedience. As it is they are cheerful and willing assistants to the Government . . .’25 For ‘assistants’ one may read ‘clients’. Whether they were so cheerful is open to question. In any case, it has been forgotten how much Gordon owed to the diplomacy and actions of his immediate predecessor, acting as temporary governor—Sir Hercules Robinson—who had considerable experience in utilizing high-caste Sinhalese headmen at local government levels in Ceylon and in curbing the aspirations of small, unrepresentative minorities of settlers in a Crown Colony. It was Robinson who laid down the formal structure of some twelve provinces under recognized roko tui, as chiefs and high chiefs of vanua, and the subordinate stratum of districts (tikina) under eighty-two chiefly agents (buli). No doubt he received guidance in this from his chief secretary, Thurston; but he also took the initiative in putting an end to Cakobau’s poll tax, designed to force Fijians into plantation work and commuted it into a corvée for more general purposes. Equally important, he initiated the system of mixed courts of European and Fijian magistrates and the more extensive system of Fijian stipendiary magistrates.26 From the outset, territorial divisions—provinces and districts—were regarded as fixed political units with chiefs as agents, rather than as disputed and highly variable domain for mobile patrilineal clans based in villages. In mitigation for this rather arbitrary organization, it has to be remembered that the underlying premiss of warfare in a set of competitive chiefdoms had been removed. Sir Arthur 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 24

Morrell, Britain in the Pacific Islands, 167–8. Sir Arthur Gordon, ‘Native Taxation in Fiji’, 18 Mar. 1879, cited in Roth, Native Administration, 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. 25

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chiefs in Java, where a patrimonial administration was reformed and preserved to further peasant production.27 The essential point of Gordon’s policy, however, was not slavish adherence to some formula he had acquired from the Dutch, but a piece of power brokerage in which the status and political territories of a hierarchy of chiefs were formally recognized, delimited, and allowed a great measure of judicial independence and financial selfadministration, in return for loyalty to a foreign ruler and controlled access to lands. There was a novel, dominant power in the land and a new dispensation hardly possible in pre-1871 conditions. In short, together with limited guarantees about ‘native usages and customs’ 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 was dropped from any position of ‘paramountcy’) and an incoming administration in which the governor himself, 11 September 1875, was received as ‘supreme chief’. This obeisance was no mere piece of protocol, but a carefully considered decision by a council of ten rokos and their buli, plus the Vunivalu, Cakobau, to render homage (tamaki) to a foreign paramount (and agent for the queen) who intended to govern ‘Vakaviti’ according to Fijian custom, ‘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 government’s wishes, but he did not explore very far the implications of this dependency for the local administration, saddled with native regulations elaborated in 1877 by the governor’s board of officials and Fijians and facing the difficulties of collecting a produce tax in an increasingly monetized local economy. Left undefined, too, was the relationship between statutory political units of provincial and district government and social units under patriclan and village chiefs responsible for administration of lands. Assessing how this hierarchy worked in practice and evolved as the instrument of ‘Fijian Administration’ has exposed the ways in which Fijian ‘tradition’ has been reinvented, as well as safeguarded, especially in matters of land ownership. Historians are less conclusive about the extent to which traditional leadership became a formal civil service or left behind the reciprocal obligations of ascribed leadership of kin units and the clientage obligations of 27 Ian Heath, ‘Towards a Reassessement of Gordon in Fiji’, JPH 9 (1974), 81–92. Gordon may well have seen parallels between roko and regent; but the networks of medanas, mantries, and chiefs 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 Affecting British India, 2 vols. (London, 1861), i. 212–24. 28 RHL, 919 5.5, ‘Notes of the Proceedings of a Native Council, Ovalau, September 1875’, in Acts of Fiji. The meeting went on for nine or ten days and Gordon attended. Subsequent annual councils 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 for Gordon’s attachment to this status, in the manner of a Highland chief, France, The Charter, 106, 124.

228 Pacific Islands lesser chiefs to their seniors. The anthropologist, R. R. Nayacakalou, recognized in the 1950s that underneath the system of ‘utilizing the personnel of traditional leadership to carry out the policies of a colonial government’ there were anomalies and tensions between different layers in the chain of command.29 A village patrilineal chief had his own following of kin and ‘quasimembers’ incorporated as a result of population change, wars, and migration into a land-using locality. But in many ways he was sidelined into ceremonial functions by provincial roko and buli chiefs of subdivisions (tikina) as territorial units.30 A village headman was client to a buli and more like an agent of government in an unpopular job, responsible, like his patron, for carrying out the regulations handed down from above to the district chiefs. A roko as a provincial head and traditional chief of considerable status appointed buli, subject to government approval, and was a source of provincial funds. All dozen or so roko were de facto members of the Council of Chiefs, an important link with the Fijian Affairs Board which created new regulations and with the Legislative Council, the only body empowered to create new laws with application to all Fiji. Powers were derived from above, and representations were made from below. Appointments at each level were supervised, but generally tolerated by provincial commissioners. The Fijian Affairs Board also paid for the whole hierarchy on a budget supplemented by a grant from general funds to make up the shortfall in provincial revenues. Anthropologists, like historians, have, therefore, distinguished between a buli as enforcer of government rules (though he might also be of minor chiefly rank in his own district) and the roko who as a coordinator with wider responsibilities was not necessarily a chief in districts where he worked. Where he was, traditional status reinforced administrative training. Part of the difficulty in documenting this kind of general and nuanced analysis from different periods and locations in Fiji so as to account for the evolution of Fijian Administration lies in the absence of a survey of appointments and careers since 1874. Some of Nayacakalou’s statements about financial administration, moreover, do not square with nineteenth-century records; and important events such as rapid depopulation in the 1870s and a slower decline till the end of the century probably had a bearing on territorial amalgamations and, therefore, on title succession among kin and political units, as well as making more land available for sale and lease. More attention has been paid to the classification of social and landholding units, as a result of the land commissions of the 1890s and 1912, than to the reasons for the decline in the numbers of roko per province by 1905 and their re29

R. R. Nayacakalou, Leadership in Fiji (Melbourne, 1975), 85–9. 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) was client services, not the tidy demarcation of social and territorial units. 30

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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’ or Fijian 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 supplemented by rations and transport. The whole budget for the Fijian branch of local administration was modest indeed, hardly ever amounting to more than one-tenth of the total colonial budget (excluding extraordinary public works 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 paid between £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 on salaries for the Fijian establishment (including those of European officers) stood at only £6,000. The roko had been reduced to ten, supplemented by eight commissioners, plus eight stipended Rotuman chiefs and a proliferation of 182 buli at the usual bargain rates of under £10 a year. Now it is true that if the accounts are examined more closely a number of other Fijian personnel were paid as native inspectors of taxes and as native stipendiary magistrates, constables of police and as armed native constabulary under other departments. Their salaries, nevertheless, would add no more than about £3,000 to those of the Fijian Administration. In all, the picture is one of extreme parsimony towards personnel who must have used their positions to supplement their income. To some extent case studies of the ways in which appointments were made and power used within the ranks of the approved hierarchy of chiefs and agents support this contention.32 One might conclude that what was established in the 1870s was not ‘indirect rule’ but a ‘line of power’ along which subordinate social and political units were dependent for access to new resources and services on the actions of chiefly administrators with ascriptive status 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 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-traditional Order under British Colonial Rule prior to World War II (Canberra, 1982); Deryck Scarr, ‘A Rokotui 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).

230 Pacific Islands tui of fourteen provinces were entitled to allegiance and services from local polities, as well as use of prison labour and a share of land lease moneys. In turn, the lesser order of buli acting as brokers for headmen and villages ensured tax collection and government work in return for status, small salaries, and a share of lease moneys. Authority in the line was enforced through stipendiary magistrates applying articles of prescriptive regulations. ‘Tradition’ was codified for a system of rewards and penalties, but it was still suffused with reciprocal obligations and access to goods and services on the part of office-holders. His general conclusion on the period of the nineteenth century is that some of the chiefs’ hereditary privileges were removed, and others enlarged: ‘There is little evidence to suggest that Fijian chiefs amassed fortunes in office, but much to show that they lived beyond their means to meet the reciprocal obligations attached to their privileges.’34 In other words, British over-rule did not disrupt second-order clientage between roko and buli, or buli and headman, and, indeed, may have enhanced the relationship by making the overthrow of a chief impossible. A second conclusion is that there were avenues for advancement on the part of chiefs turned ‘big men’. There are documented examples of access to new sources of income for high chiefs with a measure of education and military careers and reputations for loyalty, obedience, and respect.35 To those we can add Nayacakalou’s example of Ratu Emosi who combined the offices of village chief and headman in the 1950s to refurbish and modernize his village, went into church and house construction as a business, and then into religious prophecy.36 Similarly, Deryck Scarr found that beneath the regularities of meetings and duties supervised by the governor’s native commissioner and the provincial office, the tendency of Fijian magistrates to restrain officials below the rank of roko had to be curbed, in order to allow buli to participate in a share of district rates and labour. Tensions arose when some European magistrates tried to supplant a roko and control the subordinate village system, counter to the assumption of Fijian leaders that they could make appointments at all levels. This assumption becomes clear from his example of the Roko Tui Ra, a selfmade chief recognized by Cakobau, given to selling land and appointing close relatives to the posts of magistrate and buli in the 1870s.37 Such ambitions ran counter 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 and selection of loyal subordinates is also illustrated in the more complex case of the Lomaiviti chieftainship as a provincial dependency of Bau. Candidates from local patriclans were ignored in favour of appointment of clients of the 34 36

35 Macnaught, The Fijian Colonial Experience, 28. Ibid. 49–63. 37 Nayacakalou, Leadership in Fiji, 88–9. Scarr, ‘A Rokotui for Lomaiviti’, 13.

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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 Des Voeux and then by Thurston, against the wishes of Lomaiviti buli and former enemies of the Cakobau lineage. Thurston’s view was that government patronage prevailed over any hereditary claims to office; and he actively carried out this form of patronage as acting-administrator and governor, in order (ironically) to preserve the privileges of chiefs and retain their ‘voice in the land’.38 The examples raise the more general question of the emergence of a civil service. 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 the provincial office. Mobility at these lower levels, however, diminished provincial loyalty and confirmed the status of functionary. Cases of venality provide evidence of the increased expectations of appointees and the need for protection by a roko. A further conclusion is that at the buli level a candidate required status by primogeniture and agnatic descent to succeed. Higher up, there would also appear to have been emphasis on ascribed status. Of all appointments of roko tui, 1889–97, two could be regarded as hereditary successors, 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 large enough to identify a firm movement from ascription to bureaucracy. What does emerge is the continued importance of local networks in the ‘line of power’, where rank and eventually experience assisted in the formation of a loyal 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 no foreigner to the province could have done, basing on his kinship group. He established a new village for himself where his own house could be regarded as the chief’s, with the object of eclipsing the existing Nadi villages, identified as 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 customary deference, especially by magistrates towards chiefs in office, worked against the emergence of a professional, detached service gentry.41 There was a drop in the number of roko heading provinces, however, in favour of administration by commissioners. In 1911, Fijian leaders were still described ‘as subsidized native chiefs’, not as civil servants.42 In any case, by the 1930s, the trend 38 Deryck Scarr, The Majesty of Colour: A Life of Sir John Bates Thurston, ii. Viceroy of the Pacific (Canberra, 1980), 146–96, 198. 39 40 Scarr, ‘A Rokotui for Lomaiviti’, 27. Ibid. 30. 41 Macnaught, ‘Chiefly Civil Servants’, 2–20. 42 May, 30 June 1911, cited in ibid. 11.

232 Pacific Islands was towards closer supervision. All the remaining roko had to channel their correspondence through the district commissioner who controlled provincial funds. This change did not necessarily mean the end of lower order clientage, of course, but simply a change of patron. The shift is confirmed by the increased use of ‘Native Assistants’ recruited from chiefly families to help reduce disputes over claims to status and precedence and keep the European commissioner 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 fiefs and kept strict enforcement of regulations at bay, in the less isolated provinces, as the Native Department became part of the Colonial Secretariat, commissioners were intolerant of such initiatives. In recruitment of labour for the gold mines, however, the roko was permitted to turn a blind eye on the agency work of chiefs and headmen, so long as there was a flow of cash back into the local economy.43 More work would be needed to confirm the suspicion of commissioners that lower-level Fijian officials exercised patronage by allowing remission of head taxes which were in continuous arrears behind assessments. Matters were allowed to drift in the 1930s until post-war investment and reforms. In general, the incomplete history of Fijian administration exposes the inherent contradiction between the obligations of chieftainship at various levels and official incorporation of client-chiefs into a different order of obligation and rule-making. As in other Pacific societies, a chief’s following was made up of various kinds of social units including ‘those that adhered . . . by virtue of their kinship with him, need for his protection, prior conquest, or long co-residence’.44 Allegiance was hard to express on a map of village or district boundaries; and the process of segmentation meant that some kin groups took their allegiance and services elsewhere under their own buli. Macnaught’s analysis of the social origins of buli, 1900–40, suggests that most combined high rank with influence in a district derived from access to outside sources, remission of tax in return for services, or other forms of reciprocity. A good quarter were outsiders serving in a tikina where they had no kin; and a few were commoners promoted to de facto chieftainship. It was not difficult, in any case, for a strong roko to appoint buli from members of his own extended family, securing, as the Roko Tui Lau did (1901–30) a loyal band of clients. With this kind of precedent from ‘custom’ reconstruction of the Fijian Administration after 1944 and amalgamation of many districts failed to turn buli into civil servants. The principal change was revision of Native Regulations by the reconstituted Fijian Affairs Board which took over 43 44

’Atu Emberson-Bain, Labour and Gold in Fiji (Cambridge, 1994), 65–7. Macnaught, ‘Chiefly Civil Servants’, 19.

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all the finances of Fijian local government In this way the Board, as a supervisory body, came under the Council of Chiefs and the five Fijian representatives in the Legislative Council who had to approve its regulations. The chiefly hierarchy, therefore, was well entrenched by the 1950s to take advantage of expanded economic development. Chiefs held the majority of posts in the Fijian Administration, including those of Economic Development officers and Fijian magistrates. On the other hand, they were unapproachable by many commoners and costly for villages to entertain ceremonially. Many of them were insufficiently educated to undertake the more complex responsibilities 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 advancement for those of non–chiefly status.45 In the absence of advancement by merit, the continuation of patron–client relations was confirmed by later studies of the ways in which Fijian officials had to work through village headmen as brokers and entrepreneurs to make any development programme work.46 Paradoxically, too, senior Fijian chiefs extended their role as brokers and patrons to include Indian leaseholders of Fijian lands.47 Fiji moved towards a Westminster-style constitution with separation of powers and elections in a complex system of communal and a few ‘general elector’ seats. By 1967, there was a full ministerial system with portfolios distributed evenly between Fijian, Indian, and European members of the House of Representatives. Until then, the Council of Chiefs continued to elect seven to ten Fijian members of the Legislative Council and determined the composition of the Fijian Affairs Board which regulated much of the Fijian Administration including the duties and privileges of chiefs.48 After 1970 and independence, there was a measure of decentralization to Provincial Councils with an elected element, still under the supervision of the Board, and a new land rating system in place of the old head tax, as approved by the chiefs. At the centre, Fijian rights were firmly entrenched under the 1970 Constitution; and at the election of 1972 the Fijian Alliance obtained a substantial majority of 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 invitation of the Governor-General, Ratu Sir George Cakobau, and his party 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 Rodman and 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.

234 Pacific Islands retained a majority after a second election. The Alliance remained in power till 1987. Political changes contingent on subsequent military coups have been the focus of most academic commentary. The testing time for democratic politics and the inherent power of Fijian status groups came towards the end of the 1980s when the long rule of the Fijian Alliance was challenged by a coalition of Labour and the Indian National Federation Party under the Fijian, Timoci Bavadra, who, while not anti-chief, was a democrat and union leader opposed to the establishment of chiefs from eastern Fiji, an opponent of corruption, and partisan of commoner voters.49 The reply of the Alliance was to brand any attack on chiefly privileges as near-sedition. Attacks on chiefs were equated with threats to Fijians’ lands.50 Whether ‘tradition’ could be separated from politics remained doubtful; but the reasons for this conflation lay less in ideology than in the long practice of clientage for the loyal supporters of government ministers, chiefs, and officials. The Fijian community and its leadership had been in competition, since the 1960s, for places in an expanded civil service, government corporations, and to a lesser degree in the expatriate and Indian-dominated business sector. In an underdeveloped country, the prizes were rich. Forty per cent of ordinary government expenditure in the 1970s went towards public service emoluments; and Members of Parliament and the Senate with modest salaries and allowances (by outside standards) were, nevertheless, reckoned to be in the top 13 per cent of income earners, including businessmen.51 In preparation for ‘localization’ of the civil service before independence ‘imbalances’ in recruitment of Fijians, Indians, and others had been noted.52 With the prospect of some five hundred posts held by temporary expatriates becoming vacant, it was perceived that the 1960s pass rate for the Cambridge Overseas and New Zealand School Certificates put Indians clearly in the lead. Indians also took over half of the local New Zealand University Entrance passes.53 Colonial Office advice was circumspect, recommending a ‘fair’ racial balance, but leaving this objective to be determined by ministers, especially where ‘sensitive’ departments such as Police and Judiciary were concerned. In time, it was hoped the ‘communal’ aspect of government employment would be eliminated. In the meantime, Fiji began as an independent state with the lower 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 49

Bavadra did not hold a chief’s title but was a member of a chiefly lineage; and his wife had chiefly 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 of Fiji (Suva 1974). 52 Sir Richard Ramage, Localisation of the Fiji Civil Service: A Report (Suva, 1968). 53 Ibid. 2–3.

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local magistrates were Indian. Some departments were difficult to fill at all, particularly Agriculture, Lands, Mines and Survey, which required qualifications at tertiary levels. On the other hand, Fijian Affairs and Local Government were largely in the hands of Fijians, backed by the Council of Chiefs and the provincial council system; but posts under Education and places at a projected University of the South Pacific were expected to go to better-qualified Indians above the level of primary teaching. Clearly, the Fijian Public Service Commission would bear a heavy responsibility for civil service manpower selection on equitable grounds. By the end of the 1970s, a report found that the Commission had largely failed in this task, because of government interference, undermanning, and removal of its permanent secretary in 1978, leaving considerable influence with ministers in selection of the Commission’s staff.54 The Tange Report of 1980 was circumspect but clear on two points: although Fiji had attempted to follow the British tradition ‘of eliminating political patronage’, power over promotions lay with the Commission, and choice of its members to exercise that power was restricted by politicians.55 Secondly, Tange was moved by his evidence to recommend that a ‘racial factor’ should not be considered, when promotion decisions were made.56 Less surprisingly, the investigation reviewed the many statutory bodies employing a quarter of Fiji’s public servants who lay outside the Commission’s authority and were responsible only to ministers.57 It was unlikely that Fijian ministers would restore safeguards for an independent Public Service Commission. Like other patron parties the Alliance had 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 of moneys from rent of lands and concessions to business companies through the Native Land Development Corporation. There has been little investigation of this area of Fijian business and politics to explain indigenous Fijians’ poor record in running local companies, compared with appointments to directorships in state and expatriate enterprises ‘for their political influence and the potential benefits they might bring to the corporation in the form of contracts and licenses obtained from government’.58 Little of the commentary has risen above the level of newspaper speculation, accusation, and rumour, 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 accountable to 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 posts be forfeited by the Cabinet to the Commission and the Ministry of Finance. It is not clear this was ever done. 58 Durutalo, The Paramountcy of Fijian Interest, 36.

236 Pacific Islands though there was considerable force in the charge that the near 30 per cent of Land 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; but Bavadra’s announced plan to set up a National Lands Commission went to the heart of a sensitive issue by threatening access to resources on the part of the hierarchy. The corruption charge exposed even higher levels and involved Ratu Mara’s property deals with the Department of Education, the use of hurricane relief money, writing off Development Bank loans to ministers, issue of tax permits, backhanders from companies in return for relief from duties on imports. All this could be found in many political contexts and not just in ‘new states’. The point here is that Alliance leaders had personal and party favours to lose under a change of government in April 1987, a change subverted by the military coups of the same year, although the government was not entirely dominated by Fiji Indians.60 Moreover, one of the immediate results 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 many appointments 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 leadership thought in the face of Indian competition. There had already been considerable unease at the style and relative wealth of Fijian parliamentarians, a loss 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 Indian and civil service supported) Labour Party. An element of class politics cut through some of the ethnic polarities, not very far, but sufficiently in the ethnic Fijian case to swing voters against appeals to ‘tradition’ and ensure that the Labour Coalition with National Federation won twenty-eight seats to twenty-four in the House of Representatives. Moreover, from 1973, only a handful of the sixty-six members of the Great Council of Chiefs (as they were now styled) were appointed because of their chiefly status. Most of the remainder were there because they were Fijian Members of the House of Representatives (some of whom were also chiefs) or nominated appointments from Provincial Councils. The majority of the Council, therefore, were not chiefs by descent or title; but they were members 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 History of Fiji to 1992, Political and Social Change Monograph 15 (Canberra, 1992), 196–7.

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of a powerful oligarchy to advise ministers and appoint members of the Fijian Affairs Board and the Trust Board. In effect, they acted as a standing committee for Fijian representatives at parliamentary and local government levels as guardians of the provisions written into the Constitution on the status and land rights of ethnic Fijians. As such, the hierarchy of appointed and elected notables protected the ‘communal way of life’ regarded as ‘traditional’ (and sacrosanct), as the chiefs’ spokesman Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna had reported to the Burns Commission in 1959.62 Appeal to the ‘traditional’ has been the focus of considerable argument in the light of seventeen years of Fijian political dominance, followed by a swing to Indian dominance in 1987, military government, constitutional debate and reform.63 Critics of this emphasis on a political ideology to safeguard vested interests take their stand on the propensity of elites to invent reasons for legitimacy from the historic past and play on genuine fears of dispossession. Some also point out that much of the entrenchment of ethnic Fijian land rights has a dubious basis in the models of land-holding units set up by late nineteenth-century land commissions, as well as in the promotion of chieftainship for the purposes of government in the colonial period.64 What matters, more recently, is the political and constitutional action taken to defend this ideology. It can also be argued that pressing reasons arising from competition for public office, rather than the land issue, lay behind Fijian insistence on a monopoly of the highest posts. Details of the subsequent revision of the Constitution in 1990, endorsed by the Great Council of Chiefs, are beyond this survey, except to note that limits were set to return of Indians to a guaranteed number of seats, allowing governments to be formed without them on a purely communal system without cross-voting. Urban constituencies as the source of much Fijian and Indian Labour support were deliberately under-represented. Apart from this gerrymandering, an appointed Senate of Chiefs ensured a permanent veto over legislation on Fijian affairs. All this entrenchment was revised again under the 1997 Constitution, of course, to permit equality of voting rights for a slightly reduced Indian population.65 Under both constitutions, however, the Great Council of Chiefs reverted to a more exclusive status group than before, excluding many untitled Fijians from its ranks and won the power to nominate 62

Cited in Nayacakalou, Leadership in Fiji, 136. 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 the South 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 resistance from President Ratu Mara or the Council of Chiefs, and the army once more held effective power in a state of emergency. 63

238 Pacific Islands 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 political programmes. But on the Fijian side of the electoral equation were continuities in the authority of the institutions of Fijian Administration, however reformed by a democratic process and inflated as part of the Public Service. For ethnic Fijians governance derived from the status of titled chiefs; and, secondly, there was an acceptance of Fijian possession of land as a cultural artefact, as well as a source of wealth, and a belief in non-alienability. That these two ‘traditions’ were deeply influenced, even constructed, with the help of British administration from the nineteenth century is a good debating point for those who see a contradiction between the aims of conservation and change implicit in the concept of Fijian Administration, roundly criticized by Nayacakalou 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 rented lands 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 powersharing maintain the leadership’s reciprocity with commoners, within the system of government and the public service since the 1960s there have been opportunities for advancement through patronage and nepotism which an alternative administration bent on a measure of reform placed under threat in 1987. An appeal to the continuity of protection through patronage, in return for loyalty, has resonances that reach back to the role of heads of great confederations (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 Once British 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 validations did 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 will affect Fijian views of ‘tradition’ as a safeguard against change. One is that the chiefly establishment which promoted a new patron-party in the early years of the decade—the Soqosoqo ni Vakavulewa ni Taukei (SVP), as ‘nationalist’ 66

Nicholas Thomas, ‘Regional Politics, Ethnicity, and Custom in Fiji’, CP 2 (1990), 136. Brij V. Lal, Power and Prejudice: The Making of the Fiji Crisis (Wellington, 1988). 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). 67 68

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successor to the Alliance, failed to dominate elections for communal Fijian seats in 1992 and 1993 or prevent internal party factions from contesting seats. Few chiefs, moreover, won seats among the thirty or so SVP parliamentarians in a party dominated by commoners. By contrast, Labour appealed to both Indians and Fijians, though less in the towns than in the rural canegrowing areas.70 At the same time, there is some evidence of a conciliatory bridging role played by chiefs between Fijian and Indian leaders.71 Little explanation is given for this rift between the chiefly establishment and 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 to the 1980s by a considerable Indian and foreign service sector, by an uneven production and trade performance and by inward investment and overseas aid. Without these inputs Fiji’s civil or military leaders have little to redistribute in the shape of employment or opportunities for social and educational advancement to meet the aspirations of a new generation of Fijians who may be less impressed by inherited status, if, as in the distant past, it is not matched by achievement. Economic achievement, however, faltered in the late 1980s, measured in GDP growth rates and in per capita terms, while consumer prices rose.72 Average incomes were still higher than in most other small states (at some $US 2,000 per head); but this may reflect a much larger earnings gap within the dual economy of Fiji between the monetized and mainly subsistence/monetized sectors. The view is confirmed by UN data for the early 1990s reflecting ‘deep inequalities’ and relative poverty for a quarter of Fiji’s households. 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 National 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 establishment of chiefs and inexperienced commoners can assure budgets for social services and administration that take 30 per cent of revenues is problematical, especially if the country becomes a pariah state, because a parochial view of ‘traditional’ hierarchy has prevailed over imperfect but equitable democratic and communal power-sharing. 70 71 73

Lawson, Tradition versus Democracy in the South Pacific, 68–74. 72 Norton, ‘Chiefs for the Nation’, 30–1, 37–8. PEB 13 (1998), 177. Ibid. 1–17; UN Development Programme, Fiji Poverty Report (Suva, 1998).

13

Tonga

Of the Pacific hierarchies considered here, the Tongan archipelago has the most durable claim to patrimonial consolidation over a period of some three thousand years of settlement. The group may have had a paramount chief with a Tui Tonga title as early as the thirteenth century.1 If so, it did not mark a stable paramountcy at that early date; and traditional and genealogical evidence suggests that rivalries and title segmentation resulted by the fifteenth century in a division between the religious leadership of the Tui Tonga 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 descent group (kainga) with a chief (‘eika) and a group of households remained unchanged. At the same time the ten to fifteen maximal lineages (ha‘a) commanded by the most senior title-holders throughout the Tongan archipelago developed into political corporations within island settlements and formed alliances around a number of core paramountcies, expanded by numerous refugees, commoners, and chiefs by warfare and conquest.2 By the period of intermittent European contact at the end of the eighteenth century, leadership at the highest level was a matter of competition between the highest-ranking lineages of such political corporations; and this competition gave increased importance to a long tradition of outside alliances and marriages within the Tongan group and as far as Samoa and Fiji. At lower levels there was a sharper division between chiefly corporations commanding land resources and the bulk of chiefs of local descent groups and commoners dependent on military protection, allocations of estates, in return for tribute to paramounts of ha‘a lineages.3 At both levels, a retinue of relatives, fighting men, and executives distinguished a chief by agnatic descent or by headship of a maximal lineage from the commonality. The basis of power, however, remained land held 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 to matapule 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 the South Pacific Ocean, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1827), ii. 208–9.

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M ap 10. The Tongan Archipelago, after W. P. Morrell Britain in the Pacific Islands (Oxford, 1960), Map 1

242 Pacific Islands This evidence of a tension between status by rank within a senior lineage and political power as the prerogative of a successful military chief has been taken further to distinguish between a ‘titular’ system and a ‘hau’ system in Central Polynesia and in Tonga in particular. A dual chieftaincy such as that between the Tui Tonga and the Tui Kanokupolu was a recognition of the split between candidates from the highest caste within a number of ranked lineages, on the one hand, and those who made their way to titles by military means.4 Other examples can be found in the chieftaincies of the Leeward group of the Society Islands; and there were variants in the concept of a royal caste with appointed or hereditary executives in the hierarchies of Hawai‘i and Tahiti. In Tonga, the concept was refined from the 1840s by paramountcy of the Tui Kanokupolu lineage in the person of Taufa‘ahau as founder of the Tupou dynasty which became paramount in the 1860s. A further consequence of the duality within the Tongan hierarchy and the geographical dispersion of contenders through the archipelago was a constant quest for manpower, as well as titular legitimacy. ‘Like his Malay counterpart contending for an Indonesian sultanate, the Tongan challenger required men and economic 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 of goods and people within the archipelago and with Samoa and eastern Fiji. Domination of the inner core of islands from the seat of religious and secular power at Lapaha on Tongatapu entailed assignment of junior relatives to chieftaincies on ‘Eua, Ha‘apai, Vavau, and the northerly outliers as far as Uvea, as part of a maritime empire. Chieftaincies were reinforced by making use of the superior rank of female siblings by exchange of chiefs’ sisters and daughters with other lineages, and by recruiting Fijian, Tongan, Rotuman matapule retainers and officials into the entourage of a paramount.6 The picture of an ‘empire’ dominated by a centralized secular paramountcy on Tongatapu, is, however, an idealized construction, though some of the elements 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 kilometres within the archipelago and well beyond: Kinship alliances linked the paramount lines with those of the local ruling chiefs in the core islands and the outliers. Such alliances were confirmed by marriage relations, for which 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 4 Niel Gunson, ‘The Hau Concept of Leadership in Western Polynesia’, JPH 14 (1979), 28–49. 5 6 Ibid. 42. Kirch, The Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms, 225–6.

Tonga 243 inwards towards the paramounts, prestige goods outwards to the local chiefs. Monopolisation of the sources of prestige goods by the paramounts helped to secure their power over the system as a whole.7

Nevertheless, there is little evidence for authority exercised by appointments throughout the archipelago as in patrimonial regimes. It is acceptable that a thousand years of occupation, a rich agricultural endowment, and population increase to between thirty and fifty thousand led to paramountcy through competition and increasing division between chiefs and commoners to the point of class stratification. But archaeology does not explain the eclipse of some senior titles and the fusion of others after several generations.8 Whatever their claims by descent and military support, secular title-holders in the principal groups still lived through a period of intense rivalry and civil war from 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-patrimonial status of local chiefs of senior lineages, in the sense that Tongan aristocracy was 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 corporations of lineages was probably limited (and contested) on the main islands of the group. The amount of effective centralization in the group as a whole should not be exaggerated; and the patrimonialism of the Tui Kanokupolu could be matched by at least two other paramounts, one of whom (the Tui Tonga) had claims to religious legitimization. Possibly such sanctions had weakened; but the place of religion in secular politics was still important, as incoming mission sects demonstrated in their bid for support from paramounts. It may also be that one of the contributions made by missions was to reaffirm the combination of sacred and secular elements within the hau of a single lineage of the chiefly caste by the 1840s. At lower levels, however, the influence of Europeans was specific and their position one of dependency for much of the first half of the nineteenth century. From the considerable evidence we have of casual contacts and longerterm residence by Pacific islanders and Europeans, as a result of exploration 7

Ibid. 241. 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 and power 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. In 1820 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 of Tauafa‘ahau, was elected Tui Kanokupolu on Tongatapu in 1827. 10 Kirch, The Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms, 226. 8

244 Pacific Islands and trade, it would seem that no simple generalization sums up the influence of the muli (foreigners) in Tongan society.11 They stood outside the traditional tapu system which may have given them a certain freedom of action; but they still required a measure of status by personal achievement and a protector to survive and succeed. Transients consisting of deserters, convicts, the earliest London missionaries, and occasional traders and whalers could be said to have made little political impact and were valued only for their artefacts or their knowledge of firearms. Such clients were useful muli in the 1790s—‘and the chiefs were eager to patronize them’.12 They could, like William Mariner and George Vason, integrate fairly well into Tongan society and even associate with the highest title-holders at considerable risk when patrons were removed by violence. The main business of transients was warfare, entrapment of unwary vessels, service of armaments, and intermediation between Tongans and other outsiders. Like their counterparts at Tahiti, therefore, the earliest pioneer missionaries failed the test of useful brokerage and withdrew.13 A few converted Tahitians who came as missionaries two decades later integrated more easily, paving a way for the Wesleyans in 1826.14 A second category of resident foreigners, like their Fijian and Samoan predecessors, influenced Tongan politics more permanently, to the extent that they assisted the highest-ranking chiefs to gain an ascendancy. In the later 1820s and 1830s Wesleyan missionaries came as brokers and teachers, and one, William Brown, rose to become an executive for Finau, chief of Vava‘u, while in 1822 the missionary, Walter Lawry, was taken under the protection of Palu, chief of Mu‘a on Tongatapu. These events coincided with changes in the local balance of power. The most consequential was the defeat of the son of 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 political threat from the lineage of Pau.15 In the Vavau group the Finau family rose to paramountcy as Tui Vava‘u and appointed their own governors. But on Tongatapu there was no paramountcy or immediate succession to the Tui Kanokupolu title. In short, from the beginning of the new century there was a vacuum in Tongan politics and little evidence of centralization. Paramounts had been murdered or were ineffective. A small trade in arms did not influence the balance of power within the core group of islands decisively, even after Taufa‘ahau’s rise to paramountcy on Ha‘apai. 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 in 1809. 14 Niel Gunson, ‘The Coming of Foreigners’, in Rutherford, ed., Friendly Islands, 90–113. 15 Ibid. 105; Campbell, Island Kingdom, 52.

Tonga 245 For their part the Wesleyan missionaries could not be said to have influenced political change either, while they were protected by local chiefs at Mu‘a and Hihifo on Tongatapu in the early 1820s. Indeed, they had been discouraged from trying to set up their own local network of commoners and converts which had led to accusations of aiming at chieftaincy. It was not until 1827 that Tahitian missionaries of the London Society and the reinforcement of three Wesleyans headed by the resourceful and diplomatic Nathaniel Turner began to make headway, when the highest chiefs perceived that candidates for conversion could be co-opted as followers. Aleamotu‘a was the first to do this on Tongatapu, though he outwardly recanted in return for 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 alliance against Tongatapu.16 Progress with literacy in the embryonic church founded by John Thomas at Ha‘apai was also a factor in persuading chiefs to lead, rather than follow, this trend. Not to be outdone, Taufa‘ahau carefully extended his patronage to the mission in the late 1820s; and in 1831 he accepted Christianity and baptism as Siosi (George) as an act of statesmanship and faith in the efficacy of the new god. In 1833 he was nominated by Finau to succeed to his title and had the support of his uncle, Aleamotu‘a, the Tui Kanokupolu of Tongatapu. While it is possible to see in this alliance of religious innovators and high chiefs the outlines of centralization and title consolidation, clientage was divisive as well as a support for secular authority. Opposition on Tongatapu led to warfare in 1837. Two Catholic priests who settled there in 1842 were coopted by a lineage opposed to George Taufa‘ahau. They converted a chief, Moeaki, at Pea and associated themselves closely with the Tui Tonga at Mu‘a.17 As religious and political competitors in Tongan affairs, Wesleyans and Catholics played out their rivalry at international levels of support and intervention by naval commanders. Internally, the issue of secular dominance was settled by Taufa‘ahau’s succession to the Tui Kanokupolu title in 1845, as the new hau with titles in all main groups. His titular position was confirmed by 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, while George’s act of statesmanship in protecting defeated Catholics and accepting religious tolerance in a treaty with a French officer in 1855 marked the first international 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 16 17 18

S. Latukefu, ‘The Wesleyan Mission’, in Rutherford, ed., Friendly Islands, 125. Hugh Laracy, ‘The Catholic Mission’, in ibid. 136–53. C. Newbury, ‘Aspects of French Policy in the Pacific, 1853–1906’, PHR 27 (1958), 45–56.

246 Pacific Islands were important for a society slowly acquiring literacy by religious recruitment with the sanction of chiefs. The paramount, George Tupou, embraced Wesleyan endorsement of hierarchy and kingship through the Old Testament and 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 down at a council of chiefs. A subsequent code of 1850 which applied to all the group was probably modelled on one of the Society Islands’ codes and created a secular arm for enforcement through island governors and judges. More significantly, the Tui Kanokupolu, or George Tupou I as he became, was styled as ‘the root of all government’ with control over land sales and taxation: chiefs held authority from him under the law with a right to traditional services.19 In any case, for an ambitious paramount there was no shortage of advice on how to expand a patrimonial role by acquiring the charismatic function of law-giver. Tupou visited Sydney in 1853 to see how a foreign government worked; he corresponded with Sir George Grey as Governor of New Zealand 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, Shirley Baker, as client, confidant, and friend for thirty years.20 A code of 1862 ended serfdom 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 of chiefs in September 1875. Tupou was its inspiration, reinforcing his patrimonial position by gaining a right of kingship through primogeniture for his lineage in return for allocation of estates to some chiefs and creation of noble titles for twenty others. The executive was the king’s to command through appointment of ministers, judges, island governors, and an elementary civil service of magistrates, clerks and land recorders, gaolers, and road inspectors. In this way succession questions were settled without the politics of 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 created in 1882). A Lands Act the same year fixed in perpetuity the scattered estates of nobles and some stewards, creating a lower level of patronage over untitled male Tongans by lease of hereditary allotments.21 From a central executive of king, Privy Council (ministers, chief justice, and governors) laws were handed down to an occasional assembly of thirty appointed nobles and thirty elected by chiefs and stewards which could not initiate bills, but had 19

Powles, ‘The Persistence of Chiefly Power’, 243–4. 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. 20

Tonga 247 some control over finance. ‘Constitutional monarchy’ hardly applies to such a system where so much was in the gift of the king; and to say that Tupou created ‘a constitution under a monarchy’ may fit the facts better, but does not meet the patrimonial realities of ‘patronage and sycophancy’ that held the kingdom together.22 The essential mechanism was the large measure of resource allocation made through estate grants which created a vested interest for nobles, chiefs, and matapule executives, allowing subsequent rewards for loyalty. When a central treasury was established, by far the largest expenditure was for offices held by ‘powerful Chiefs who might object to the new state of things, by appointments as Secretaries of State and other high salaried office’.23 For commoners, too, there were distinct advantages in guarantees of tenancies 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 independent Free Church of Tonga in 1885, outside the Wesleyan Conference at Sydney, and for enforcement of its precepts. Until his removal in 1890, Baker remained, therefore, both secular adviser and effective chairman of a religious institution headed by a king who thus acquired much of the spiritual mana formerly associated with the Tui Tonga title. As chairman and first minister from 1880, Baker was a good example of the ‘lopsided friendship’ characteristic of clientage relations. His status was certainly not one of equality with Tupou. The most careful assessment of his position demolishes any idea he managed the king or was a clandestine power behind the throne in the manner of the Revd George Pritchard in Tahiti or Father Honoré Laval in Mangareva.24 Reforms and codes owed much to his advice—but that was no more than his function as a client. The supersession of the Wesleyan mission by the Tongan Free Church also owed much to Baker’s agency work, but the change was an article of Tupou’s policy of spiritual headship of his people in a unified institution which led to severe persecution of Wesleyan dissidents on Tongatapu and a long schism. Baker was the faithful draughtsman of the 1875 Constitution to prescribe internal authority and as a defence against external criticism. Recognition by Germany and Great Britain followed the French example of two decades previously. Baker’s temporary removal from office in 1879 through the machinations of Governor Gordon in Fiji in no way affected his standing as the king’s man, and he returned in time to reform financial administration and advise on a method of ensuring commoners’ access to land leases, while assigning a share to nobles’ hereditary titles. This move created enemies from among lesser title-holders who, in conjunction with European traders, became a focus for opposition through other patrons 22

Ibid. 264. Maudsley to FO, 3 Jan. 1879, Foreign Office Confidential Print 4285, ‘Correspondence Respecting the Pacific Islands’. 24 Rutherford, Shirley Baker, 176–7. 23

248 Pacific Islands centred on the so-called Mu‘a parliament of 1881. A further source of internal faction derived from Baker’s rivalry with the Revd J. E. Moulton over control of education and adherence to the Free Church. His position was not helped by the critical reports of British consuls which attracted outside attention and threatened the independence of the Tongan state. With Europeans forbidden to purchase land, the only danger to the Tongan state lay in a reversal of status as a dependency of a foreign power. As in other Pacific societies there were two potential causes of intervention—foreign debts and disorders arising from a disputed succession to titles. The constitutional right of Tupou to nominate his successor was called in question by Sir John Thurston’s deportation of Baker in 1890 and installation of a premier whom 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 withdrew from government, leaving taxes in abeyance and no means of patronage to the opposition. When, therefore, Basil Thomson was sent by Thurston from Fiji to advise on finance, the rival line withdrew from competition. When Tupou died in 1893, Taufa‘ahau was proclaimed as Tupou II and replaced his premier with his own client, Saketi, who immediately alienated nobles, commoners, and foreign settlers by tightening up on arrears of tax and bypassing local traders. More seriously, the king’s failure to distinguish public revenue from his privy purse led to a financial crisis in 1897 and loans from the principal German trading firm in the Western Pacific, increasing British fears of foreign intervention. Tupou’s independent kingdom could well have fallen victim to partition negotiations, until, in 1898 and 1899, other bargains struck with Germany and the United States over their claims to the Samoan group, 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, and advice 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 Treaty was ratified, 16 February 1901. The Tongan state entered a dangerous phase, risking total loss of sovereignty. In practice, consular agents found it impossible to alter the Constitution or command resources, though they did insert officials such as a chief justice and a treasurer into key positions at cabinet level. It was difficult, however, in view of earlier treaties, to apply British Orders-in-Council to the kingdom, when not all jurisdiction had been ceded and Tupou refused to sign all articles in the 1900 Treaty which became unworkable. Governor Sir Everard im Thurn, therefore, intervened at the end of 1904 to install as members of the Cabinet his own clients enlisted from disaffected chiefs and deported the 25

Their respective claims are discussed in Rutherford, Friendly Islands, 173–5.

Tonga 249 premier, Saketi, his son, and several other ministers.26 None of the new men were from the Free Church. A questionable Order-in-Council was rushed through to legalize the High Commissioner’s action. For the time being the Colonial Office backed the governor and im Thurn’s nominees kept him informed of anything that might have served as a pretext for annexation. Until 1909, the British Consul, Hamilton Hunter, was an effective agent for outside control. His successor, W. T. Campbell, however, provoked a Colonial Office reaction against interference by his attempted suppression of an independent Tongan trading company, 1910–11, which threatened the position of foreign merchants. What had begun as a cooperative to channel benefits to Tongans ended as a form of resistance against British intervention, undermined the High Commissioner’s clients in Cabinet, placed Consul Campbell on the wrong side of the law, and stiffened Tupou II in his dealings with a new Fiji High Commissioner. The consular agent was called to heel; the Tongan Constitution was upheld; and it was acknowledged that 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 Malay state, 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 assured her of loyal supporters and control of an institution more in touch with the Tongan people than their Parliament. Indeed, the history of the Free Church makes a good example of a second-level patronage system, ever since the Revd Jabez B. Watkin was appointed its president, as Tupou’s client and dispenser of church moneys to chiefs.28 When Salote decided to take to herself this privilege, Watkin was deposed and replaced by her own nominee. Factions formed around the key question of access to resources on the part of appointed church ministers, until it became clear that patronage had passed to the royal family. One historian, therefore, has found in this religious and institutional hierarchy ‘a paradigm of Tongan life’.29 Congregations and church committees had no control over funds; ministers could only be appointed or removed by the head of Church and State. So, too, in the secular field of government an attempt in 1940 to impeach Salote’s ministers demonstrated how ineffective the Parliament was in criticizing royal appointees. While such internal factions could be mastered, there was still an external source of danger to the body politic in the presence of a British chief justice appointed by the Fiji High Commissioner with a seat in the executive and the 26 The most detailed analysis is A. Lavaka, ‘The Limits of Advice: Britain and the Kingdom of Tonga, 1900–1970’, Ph.D. thesis (Australian National University, 1981). The opposition was led by 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.

250 Pacific Islands legislature from 1905. This influence was countered from 1915 by royal appointment of an acting chief justice and attorney-general—a European married to a Tongan, and, therefore, an ideal papalangi client. He enabled Salote to play off advisers one against the other and reduce the influence of foreigners in her Privy Council.30 There were further contests of will, however, with the chief justice over title successions among the nobility which she did 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 of the Treaty of Friendship in 1970. Over the century from the 1870s, then, one might conclude that political patronage overtook status by ascription and achievement, so far as the nobility and chiefs were part of government in Tonga.31 Although royal ministers were usually hereditary nobles or related to aristocrats, their functions in the state were defined by political appointment. Further down the ranks of Tongan society such ‘chiefly values’ are reflected in kinship ranking. Hierarchy by ascription has been assured through ‘custom’ and a Constitution in which the line of political power is patronage and access to resources on the part of those chiefly functionaries engaged in making the Constitution work. Accordingly, the doctrine of political accountability to Parliament and people has 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 leadership that such a transformation through constitutional prescription using existing social and political structure changed that structure by creating a wider set of clients among the male population at large. Internally, all senior chiefs were beholden to the king. Allocations of town and country lands to nobles and commoners for rent and diversion of tax to a central treasury entailed less dependency on chiefs and more ‘fealty to the king and government’.32 Other studies of Tonga’s land tenure, however, are less sure of this wholesale transfer of loyalties and have pointed to the difficulty of ensuring commoners’ access to resources which is the contract for allegiance.33 Lower-level clientage is at variance with affection and respect between king and commoner, be30

Elizabeth Wood Ellem, ‘Chief Justices of Tonga 1905–40’, JPH 24 (1989), 21–37. 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). 31

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 from the would-be land holders’.34 Clearly, throughout Tonga’s historical battle to adapt to some aspects of imported values and technology, while rejecting others, personalities were as important as changes in principle. Only a personality of high status like Taufa‘ahau, Tupou I, could have pushed through the prescriptions for laws, emancipation, a constitution, by offering titles and hereditary estates to those who were the most likely source of political trouble by their territory and numbers of followers. In a sense, the Tupou dynasty was also able to ‘deconstruct’ (in James’s phrase) some of the mystique of rank by depriving the majority of former aristocrats of titles and leaving them to improve themselves as members of a ‘gentry’, but not the service gentry owing appointment and allegiance to the royal house.35 The appearance of constitutional monarchy may well have helped to keep foreigners at bay. Unless a foreign power was prepared to invade and set the constitutional hierarchy under a new overlord—governor or high commissioner—the structure remained intact as a defence against factionalism in secular affairs, though not in commercial or religious affairs. Even so, the reversal of the royal clientage system was far from impossible after 1893 during disputed succession, in conditions of private and national debt, or simply for the strategic value set on Tonga’s harbours by an external power. It is not hard to imagine ‘treaties of friendship’ becoming the basis for a more formal protectorate or annexation, condoned willingly by Australian colonies and New Zealand, if Britain had accepted more extensive responsibility than a patronage role and five years of formal protectorate.

summary Chieftaincy by descent and achievement has been important to the study of alien over-rule in the Pacific islands, first, for incorporation of visitors and settlers as dependents, and, secondly, for provision of local government structures for imperial administration. In a number of cases such leadership serves still as a political and cultural artefact of indigenous identity. In other cases ‘traditional’ leadership has been superseded by self-made entrepreneurs and elected politicians. Historically, the politics of alliance, friendship pacts, and patronage were as essential as warfare and religion to the structure of many indigenous hierarchies. European traders, missions, and officials added a new 34

Ibid. 68.

35

James, ‘Rank and Leadership in Tonga’, 55.

252 Pacific Islands dimension to the hierarchy, or created one of their own from rival factions. In small successor states habits of deference to lineage leaders, as well as kinship and clientage obligations are still part of administration, business, and politics, not least where alien settlement and competition are still issues. The Hawaiian Kingdom provides an example of territorial consolidation by a paramount lineage and a patrimonial government through incorporation and appointment of Hawaiians and Europeans to offices of state. Acceptance of foreign models of law, literacy, and religion, on Hawaiian terms, maintained the primacy of the royal executive over its own nobility, its ministers, and its system of island government through appointed officials and their subordinates. In short, American and European settlers with skills to offer were employed on much the same terms as Hawaiians and integrated within a Polynesian hierarchy as ‘service gentry’. Like that nobility, too, they benefited from division of landed estates and definition of property titles undertaken by the monarchy from 1848. Because, too, the Hawaiian islands were open to a profitable trade in staples based largely on ranching and plantations, the monarchy and its clients profited from direct and indirect taxes, sale and rent of lands, and from rising salary scales in government departments and services. Moreover, recognition by foreign powers from the 1840s allowed the ruling lineage to manage succession to the highest offices of kingship and island governorships, while securing a loyal civil service and control of political representation and the judiciary in ways that kept opposition at bay until the 1880s. During that decade more critical factions from among the plantation and business community, resentful of rising taxation and royal extravagance, refused to tolerate government through the king’s ‘friends’ in the manner of monarchs and extracted constitutional concessions to the Legislature. At the same time, the political and commercial risks of a reciprocity treaty with the United States, contracted in 1876, exposed the Hawaiian economy to changes of tariff policy in the American market for raw sugar and to American naval interest in Pearl Harbor as a strategic base. The domestic and foreign policies of a patrimonial regime were challenged through the Legislature and within ministries by a vocal minority of lawyers, businessmen, and would-be republicans. Moreover, the ability of the monarchy to fund largesse to officials, governors, and supporters was called into question by deterioration in public finances. On Kalakaua’s death in 1891, Queen Lili‘uokalani inherited a kingdom in which royal prerogatives were under threat, foreign relations and trade depended on American good will, and where Hawaiians were becoming a minority in the face of Asian and some European immigration. The balance of political power in the executive and the electorate, however, denied anti-monarchists a clear mandate. A militant faction, therefore, overturned the monarchy in 1893, leaving the way open for eventual Congressional approval of an illegal settler government and

Tonga 253 Territorial status. But patronage politics in the administration did not end there, surviving into the 1930s under the influence of the Territory’s business corporations and Republican Executive. By contrast with Hawai‘i, Fiji’s communities were fragmented, segmented, and vulnerable. Chieftaincy over the patrilineal clans and confederations of Fiji’s many islands was defined by seniority in descent and by achievement through warfare and the construction of alliances. No single paramountcy prevailed 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 from European missionaries, traders, planters, and official agents who looked to the chiefdom of Bau and its neighbours in south-eastern Viti Levu as a bridgehead for conversion, commerce, and arbitration. By 1871 the initiative of a few settlers and intervention of consuls and naval officers encouraged an embryonic constitutional government based on the person and influence of Cakobau the Vunivalu of Bau. At the same time his authority was rivalled by a 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 importation of labour, Fijian chiefs agreed in 1874 to cede the group to the British Crown, 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 Colony government. The early practice of consulting provincial chiefs became institutionalized within ‘Fijian Administration’, as headed by governors, their officials, and the most senior of the provincial hierarchy. In the course of nearly a century of British over-rule many selective features of Fijian ‘custom’ were established on the model of those provinces best known to officials. Nevertheless, there was room for bargaining over chiefly successions and appointments at all levels of the hierarchy. Fijian leaders did not become civil servants and retained considerable initiative in the ways they accessed rents from lands, labour services, and secured posts for subordinates. None of that compromise prevented considerable alienation of Fijian lands under government control or the importation of Indian labour and settlers. Over time, the distinctiveness 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 legislative authority to meet economic and political challenge to the line of power arranged between chiefs and British officials. Accordingly, ethnic loyalty and deference to protective superiors became an important factor in party politics, as Fiji moved towards responsible government and independence in 1970.

254 Pacific Islands Although Fiji’s politics can be understood in terms of ethnic tensions over land and jobs, the entrenchment of chieftaincy within the Constitution and local government had other consequences in terms of competition for control of civil service departments and the management of public corporations. Underneath the ethnic polarization of party contests there were issues of clientage and corruption during the long administration of a patron party headed by Fijians and challenged temporarily in 1987. At the end of a period of military coups and constitutional revision, however, a Great Council of Chiefs is still entrenched in government as a legacy of the hierarchy constructed by British over-rule and preserved as a defensive mechanism by Fijian political leaders. Tonga, too, has a long history of chieftaincy over maximal lineages by descent and alliance that continues to the present day. Power to allocate lands to subordinate kinsmen and stewards as governors and office-holders within settled islands and small groups of islands of the archipelago provided a foundation for extending political control over competing lineages. From the 1820s a warrior chief followed this pattern of paramountcy, when Taufa‘ahau used his titular base within the Ha‘apai group to win the leading lineage title in Vava‘u and then the Tui Kanakupolu title in the central island of Tongatapu. From 1845 through war, title succession, and adroit patronage of Wesleyan missionary conversions, Taufa‘ahau emerged in the manner of Kamehameha in Hawai‘i as a territorial paramount through descent and achievement as King George Tupou I. A notable part of this achievement was his acceptance and adaptation of codes of laws, courts, taxes, and elementary institutions of a centralized state as laid down in the Tongan Constitution of 1875. In return for legitimation of the Tupou dynasty, the most senior chiefs in the group were recognized as nobility by tradition and in law. They were appointed as executive ministers, governors, and magistrates with titles and lands sanctioned by the king, on condition of provision of tenancies for commoners and an end to arbitrary tribute. To complement his secular status as a Polynesian paramount with an Executive and Legislature defined and circumscribed, Tupou became head of an independent Free Church of Tonga in 1885 outside the Wesleyan mission. For the first time, secular and religious titles were held by one chief. Such an accumulation of authority within the Tongan state created dissident factions from among lineage chiefs excluded from office, among Tongans loyal to the Wesleyan Church and within a small but influential number of commercial agencies. Unimportant by themselves, they were dangerous in combination with the agents of imperial powers in the context of late nineteenth-century rivalries for island posts. From 1893 the king’s great grandson and successor, Tupou II, faced a series of interventions by Fiji’s governors, in their role as Western Pacific High Commissioners. In 1901 a Treaty of Protection opened a way for British control through consular officials and

Tonga 255 Tongan clients within the Tongan Cabinet. Consistent opposition from the king and some adroit manoeuvring won a measure of respect from the Colonial Office and acknowledgement of Tonga’s autonomy as a sovereign state from 1911. Treaties of Friendship, rather than Protection, allowed Queen Salote to consolidate her dynastic position over Church and State and neutralize the influence of a British chief justice in her Executive. Foreign settlement and foreign over-rule have been kept at bay by a patrimonial state that 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 resources, remittances from Tongans abroad, and international aid provide productive employment and services and preserve the state from factional schisms from within.

Conclusion The Resident has to deal with an Emir or Chief possessed of an extremely sensitive character, not by any means always inclined to play a fair game, or averse to doing a little extortion for his personal advantage; with a group of powerful subordinate Chiefs, each of whom is playing for his own 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 play off the Resident against the Emir . . .1 (Resident Charles Temple, 1918) No one who has not lived among us can fully appreciate to what extent the giving and taking of bribes occupies the attention of all degrees to the exclusion 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 surface of a formally prescribed system of Native Authorities would probably not have surprised other administrators in the darbars of Indian states, in a Malay sultan’s Council, or at a meeting of Fiji’s Council of Chiefs. The allegations made by Nigeria’s future premier in 1950 underlined just how little had changed in the operation of clientage and gift exchange underpinning the structure of emirate government.3 This public reasoning was not pursued very far. But it did point up the continuities between an earlier orthodoxy and the entrenched authoritarianism that had grown and prospered in northern Nigeria over half a century, as British pragmatism joined forces with Hausa– Fulani patrimonialism. Essentially the relationship between leaders of rulers and ruled was a political one, couched in the terminology of administrative hierarchy. Because indigenous leadership was subordinated within this relationship, patrimonial and clientage features of indigenous politics continued at subordinate levels and occasionally between the European and indigenous rulers in the upper levels of the hierarchy. Governors and residents or commissioners were not ‘chiefs’, but they sometimes behaved like chiefs. Indigenous chiefs and their subordinates 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. 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. 2

Conclusion 257 Egypt, administrators ‘governed the governors’.4 Convenient as it is to term this governance ‘indirect rule’, the relationship was more political than that administrative typology suggests, if only because there were strategic and economic interests at stake in many of the territories concerned. In Egypt diplomacy and force were used to establish and defend control of an informal protectorate on a vital imperial link between Africa and India. At the periphery of empire among lesser hierarchies the first Resident of Perak began his administration by playing off shaik against raja in political manoeuvres centred on the State Council.5 More distantly still, following Sir Arthur Gordon, Governors Thurston and Des Voeux manipulated selection of Fijian provincial chiefs so as to favour clients of government. Imperial bureaucracy could not work without imperial bargaining. The alternative is to fasten on proclaimed policies, the analysis of men and methods 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 prefect, dedicated to an ethos of service for the betterment of his inferiors. Africans were like children—they must be raised slowly in the scale of civilization. Colonial officials should simply ensure that the natural evolution of Africans would take place without undue interference. This notion was usually coupled with a historical belief that latenineteenth-century Africans were in a stage of development on a par with the ancient Saxons and Celts or, at best, with mediaeval Englishmen.6

Even if this kind of cultural relativism is to be found in the more personal diaries and letters of European officials, I doubt it survived the pressing need to manage tax, land, legal, and practical problems in public works, health, and education in cooperation with indigenous leaders. At stake were results in civil government based on a line of power and local officers’ authority; and imperial authority depended, among other factors, on ‘the support for it of traditionally legitimate, if newly established, indigenous political authorities’.7 Moreover, the more closely the politics of over-rule are examined in different regions, the more they are seen to derive in large part from pre-colonial structures. That point was made in 1950 by Lord Hailey who rejected the dichotomy of ‘Direct’ and ‘Indirect Rule’, or any parallel with Indian administration, and who saw that administrative systems elsewhere were conditioned ‘by the nature of the indigenous political institutions . . . found in existence and the social structure to which the procedure of local rule had to be adjusted’.8 This is especially evident for societies with ranked lineages, where competition for power was ‘inherently segmentary’.9 For this reason 4

5 al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer, 68. Sadka, ‘The Journal of Sir Hugh Low’, 37, 98. Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of British Africa, 339. But see their suggestive analogy between imperial state construction in Africa and the royal courts of Early Modern Europe, 344. 7 8 Low, Lion Rampant, 28. 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. 6

258 Conclusion over-rule was not a matter of ‘indirectness’ or remoteness from internal politics. Fulani and British ‘chiefs’, like Malay chiefs and political officers, Fijian chiefs and officials, associated as ‘co-ordinate units’ (to borrow M. G. Smith’s phrase), each with recognized status grades in a changed political order. Coordination in Fiji, it has been claimed, created a new hierarchy as a ‘projection by the Fijians of their own rank and status systems into the colonial situation’, so that European officials became their ‘chiefs’, ‘and the Queen the greatest chief of all’.10 This bold interpretation of status reversal is unusual in the literature of imperial rule but not too far removed from assurances of ‘allegiance’ and ‘loyalty’ on ritual occasions in other dependencies. In the case of Indian princely states, it might be argued, however, that such coordination was an objective that political officers never completely reached. Compared with other hierarchies, the Indian darbars and their states were difficult to penetrate and under-administered by the paramount power. In smaller territories ‘segmentary lineage systems’ might be a more accurate term for localized descent groups (as in the Sudan, Southern Africa, Fiji, Tonga), where there were corporate political units, but fewer political offices. Immigrant advisers and settlers added to existing offices, most notably in the Hawaiian Kingdom and to a lesser extent in the Society Islands and Fiji. The hierarchies they influenced were less complex in their range of political segmentation than more populous and extensive structures in Asia and Africa. But however stratified or decentralized the structure, eventually the game of administrative politics had to be played out between rival networks of officials (as at the courts of Indian princes), by augmenting the status and authority of some chiefly grades at the expense of others (as in Buganda), or by recruiting lineage or clan elders as officials. A variation on this political theme was control through a subordinate service gentry applied in Egypt and in the administrative service recruited from 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 royal lineage; and the fact that influential European and American settlers were included, or excluded, gives point to the political crisis undergone by that kingdom 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 reciprocal advantages implicit in the patron–client construct used by anthropologists and political scientists might serve historians better than formal administrative terms or informal euphemisms for accommodation with over-rule. It is not likely that ‘indirect rule’ (even in its reified and capitalized form) or the shorthand of ‘collaboration’ will disappear from academic 10

Watters, Koro, 40.

Conclusion 259 vocabulary. But before these terms are applied, perhaps thought should be given to the utility of a much older model, illustrated by the cases collected above. There is a distinction, of course, between the historiography of ‘indirect rule’ as administrative orthodoxy and its usefulness as an analytical category. The limitations inherent in adopting an outmoded administrative model in all its variants for an exposition of the structure of over-rule in practice are amply demonstrated in the long and controversial literature devoted to the model itself. That is no less true of a more recent overview of British administrative 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 of trade through indigenous networks to partition and consolidation of power, the basic relationship within the ruling hierarchy was political, in the sense of sharing, contesting, and defining the purposes of imperial power. The political struggle began with the appearance of European traders and isolated settlements and ended only with the final transfer of power to decolonized governments. Analysis of that power relationship between different orders of the 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-colonial and colonial periods. Secondly, it offered nothing to assist our understanding of the continuities and changes in power structures of post-colonial states, the survival or disappearance of ‘traditional’ authorities, or the invention of new brands of civil or military rulership. Fundamentally, ‘Indirect Rule’ was an illusion—an ideology of improvement through administrative reform—that masked compromises reached through political argument and the use of force to allow the hierarchy of imperial over-rule a modest breathing-space to face up to greater ‘reversals’ and change. This consideration from a longer perspective weakens, too, any comparative analysis of European styles of over-rule limited to cases drawn from one region, as, for example, in the rather hard and fast distinctions drawn by Michael Crowder and Obaro Ikime between French and British systems in West Africa.13 Indeed, they felt obliged to make the point that considerable confusion has arisen from the extension late in the day of a model fashioned for the treasuries and emirate authorities of Northern Nigeria to other British territories where administration at local level through self-governing traditional authorities was already practised. But they were right to fasten on local government as the key area for the rather manipulative and authoritarian 11 John W. Cell, ‘Colonial Rule’, in OHBE, iv. The Twentieth Century, ed. Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis (Oxford, 1999), 232–54. 12 13 Ibid. 234, 242. Crowder and Ikime, eds., West African Chiefs, pp. vii–xxix.

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 power base to influence local society or a source of potential opposition to aspiring politicians from the new educated elite. Hence their conclusion that French ‘official’ chiefs with less civil jurisdiction and financial resources may have had ‘no patronage to offer’ to a political following of their own and on the whole were unsuccessful in forming patron parties. By contrast, chiefs in British areas may have had more to bargain with and to defend, when caught up 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 they were rather better at political alliance within the structure of mass parties than were chiefs in French areas or in Ghana; and the reason lies in the survival, indeed, enhancement of traditional and conciliar authority in ways that made chiefdoms a useful power base for successor politicians who were not ideologically fearful of ascriptive status as a source of political rivalry. The weakness of using attitudes to local government units to illustrate styles of imperial administration, however, is that they are very specific to particular territories and times and that they are defined in terms of prescriptive regulation. As the dynamics of the establishment of European over-rule or its political endgames illustrated, the fortunes of chiefs and their following depended on coming to terms with political change, or being swept aside. Moreover, if the range of cases is extended beyond neighbouring European territories of one region a larger number of exceptions to the stereotypes of particular ‘national’ styles of administration becomes more apparent.15 Focus on styles of local government also leaves out of account the broader purposes of imperial co-option and subordination of local rulers. Those purposes included expansion of commerce and some capital investment; acquisition of judicial rights to protect nationals; abolition of the international slave trade; land acquisition, at first through acknowledgement of aboriginal title and increasingly in the later nineteenth century through a positivist legal argument in favour of imperial claims to ‘unoccupied’ estate.16 Apart from annexation by conquest, the cooperation of ‘natural rulers’ was an essential, 14

Crowder and Ikime, eds., West African Chiefs, p. xxii. 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 protectorates where administration was marked by ‘an informal power-sharing collaboration among traditional chieftains’ and French officials. See Robert Aldrich, France and the South Pacific Since 1940 (Honolulu, 1993), 297–8. Compare, too, British treatment of the Sultan of Zanzibar, the kings of Kandy or Zulu chiefs, after conquest, in ways that did not match the principles of ‘indirect 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 Interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi’, in I. H. Kawharu, ed., Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi (Auckland, 1989), 92–120. 15

Conclusion 261 widespread feature of these invasive techniques. Above all, treaty signatories were 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 subordinate status 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 the Bechuanaland Protectorate of 1891 and applied in West Africa, Central Africa, and the Western Pacific. Because of these precedents—legal and diplomatic—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 which secured British control of Northern Nigeria, the Secretary of State for Colonies laid down that ‘there is no desire on the part of His Majesty’s Government to destroy the existing forms of administration or to govern the country otherwise than through its own rulers’.19 That view was entirely consistent with older British practices in Africa and elsewhere from the 1880s and earlier. Much more than ‘local government’ was at stake. In this way international obligations to protect foreign nationals could be met without annexation; slave-raiding could be stopped (though it would take much longer to tackle the issue of domestic slavery); with expanded trade and access to exportable staples, revenue could be raised to pay for the politics of subordination; and in a colonial protectorate the Crown could rule by Order-in-Council without recourse to Parliament. If necessary, of course, refractory chiefs could be deposed and compliant ones supported in office. ‘Natural rulers’ and imported officials became coordinate units, however, not because the British suddenly invented a new system of colonial government at the end of the nineteenth 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 conjunction with chiefs who retained status and authority.20 In the longer perspective of imperial expansion, therefore, a patron–client model fits the wide variety of cases of diplomacy, conquest, accommodation, and subordination better than a prescription for a method of ‘local 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.

262 Conclusion government’ with its resonances of committees, boards, and councils.21 Taken beyond its simple connotation of ‘face-to-face’ (dyadic) relationships between individuals and groups of unequal status for mutual benefit, the model, rather, is one of interaction between hierarchies than a blueprint for administration. Patron–client relations were ‘a feature of patrimonialism’ preserved within the new colonial order.22 Governing officials constituted one status group, graded in rank and responsibilities, as a line of power stretching back to metropolitan officials and ministers and company directors. Indigenous hierarchies constituted a subordinate form of local and sometimes regional government with its own status grades. Both hierarchies usually continued to administer laws and courts in parallel though frequently modified by the over-rulers. At the point of interaction between the two systems relations were political, in the sense of determining access to resources, confirmation of status, and were defined in a great deal of prescriptive regulation, sometimes with the participation of consultative councils. As in all political systems, disagreement, clash of aims and values, compromise, and rewards were part of the business of running regional empires with the cooperation of the governed. Both sets of officials, it is worth remembering, were not immune from removal and redress from within their own hierarchies. Describing this complex administration shared by officials of different cultures as ‘collaboration’ misses two essential points inherent in patron–client relations: differences in status and the ‘mediating mechanism’ common to the brokerage roles of both chiefs and European officials.23 It is not claimed that this joint stratification operated as a total patron–client system (except, perhaps, in a metaphorical sense) throughout the societies of imperial dependencies. Levels of social and political stratification were too complex and differentiated for that. Divisions of race and loyalties precluded complete trust. But in the cases examined above there are sufficient examples of patrimonial governments incorporated as subordinate hierarchies and other cases of patron–client layers within chiefdoms to illustrate the argument that an incoming imperial government usually seized on a ready-made machinery of administration for its own purposes. The argument can be further extended into the period of the formation of political parties, constitutional government, and, eventually, independence, to demonstrate that the mechanism of using patron-brokers to mobilize support has its part in the politics of post-colonial states in continuity with their colonial and pre-colonial past. 21 Cf. Crowder and Ikime, eds., West African Chiefs, pp. xvi–xviii. Attempts were made, of course, to reduplicate European models of French communes and British municipalities in African towns and elsewhere. 22 Brimnes, Constructing the Colonial Encounter, 57 note 117. 23 Weingrod, ‘Patrons, Patronage and Political Parties’, 382–3 and sources cited.

Conclusion 263 From the vantage-point of their own disciplines, social scientists interested primarily in social or political structures have given different emphasis to the model. In social anthropology there has been a large measure of agreement that clientage can be discerned as a necessary part of patrimonial chieftainship deploying power through appointment of kin and non-kin within ranked lineage systems. Among political scientists, some have followed anthropologists in stressing the utility of clientage in conditions of factional politics to overcome the weakness of links between kin groups at the periphery of a state and ‘patrimonial-like bureaucracies’ operating from the centre of preimperial and imperial state structures.24 Although the very large theoretical literature on clientage models contains many 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 asymmetrical in terms of power and yet operated with seeming cooperation and a measure of solidarity against ‘outsiders’ beyond defined boundaries.25 On the whole, force was held in reserve, while the line of power was established by pragmatic instructions and practice. Access to resources on both sides brings imperial practice, however, into the definition of clientage as a specific exchange expanded by internal production and foreign trade.26 But political scientists such as Eisenstadt and Roniger avoid the problem of hierarchy and ascriptive roles in colonial government by simply regarding ‘imperialism’ as totalitarian and monolithic, controlled from the centre.27 This rather rigid view of political behaviour in ‘ascriptively based’ hierarchies is at odds with the evidence of cases reviewed above and is certainly not in agreement with current historical thinking about the role of political achievement in combination with ascribed status in many Pacific or West African hierarchies. The argument for interpreting subordinate imperial relationships in clientage terms is not simply ‘instrumentalist’ in economic exchanges or totally respectful of hierarchies based on the ascriptive claims to chieftainship by local leaders. It rests, first, on the social and political structures of pre-existing hierarchies taken over, largely (but not uniquely) by Europeans.28 There were good reasons in terms of manpower and resources for incorporating an 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 notably by Fulani conquest of Habe kingdoms.

264 Conclusion indigenous hierarchy, whether in Muslim or animist societies, if it could be forced or persuaded to serve imperial ends. Pre-imperial structures were taken over by a mixture of force and internal co-option and patronage based on allocation of offices and lands and established the formal pattern of overrule in a remarkably large number of imperial territories well into the period of political devolution of power. Thus, imperial administration was in a sense autochthonous, except in settlements with substantial settler immigration. Even in such territories, a form of internal partition could be attempted to safeguard some indigenous structures and interests, although the risk of demotion, even disintegration, of the status and functions of chiefs was high (as in Kenya, Natal and Cape Province, the Hawaiian kingdom). In others, such as Fiji, Malaya, the small South African protectorates, indigenous hierarchies have held out remarkably well against the economic and political challenge of immigrant settlers, while in other areas of settlement they have been dismembered by pressures on land and labour. A third reason for adopting the model is that it accounts better for some of the advantages extracted by indigenous rulers 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 predations of neighbours, legitimization of internal authority under the auspices of a new ruler. There are very large differences, however, in the scale and complexity of societies and political structures taken over, ranging across the heterogeneous states and principalities of nearly a third of the Indian subcontinent, emirates of the most populous region of western Africa, paramountcies of the southern African High Commission territories, chiefdoms of the Malay peninsula and archipelagos of the Pacific. It is evident that neither the British nor any other imperial power thought up an administrative plan of such universal application—hence the emphasis on pragmatic adaptation of structures available. There was, however, a preference for ‘kingdoms’ and ‘chiefs’ as institutions to do imperial business with; and there was no reluctance to experiment in the ‘creation’ of chiefs as ancillaries if necessary. How much imperial experience was applied from one region to another through central policymaking or transfer of officials is still an open question; and on the whole the conclusion of this study is that despite the ubiquity of official terms such as ‘resident’ or ‘paramount chief’, local pragmatism prevailed. For legal terms such as ‘protectorate’ a case might be argued for some cross-fertilization of administrative methods, particularly towards the end of the nineteenth century. 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; and in those that were (French Morocco, East Africa, Zanzibar, the Mandated Territories of Rwanda-Burundi) administrators were not always deferential towards local kings and paramounts. In the end imperial formulas do not

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, to classify them (as Lord Hailey did) by ‘statutory enactment’, as distinct from their political roles in a new dispensation.29 Where there are parallels between territories under foreign rule they reside less in the application of any preconceived policy than in the type of patrimonial structures utilized, or in the chieftainships and headships of segmentary lineages taken over. The kingdoms of Hawai‘i or Tonga have much in common structurally (though not in scale) with the kingdoms of the Great Lakes region, especially in the ability of their rulers in senior lineages to establish supervisory headships through kin, fictive kin, and nobles bought off from making trouble by allocations of land. The fact that the techniques of royal control were supplemented and made more effective by co-opted missionaries and helpful administrators reinforces the point that (among the Soga states of Uganda, or in Hawai‘i, for example) Europeans were regarded at first as allies, not usurpers. Annexed Fiji with its provincial and district chiefs has something in common, too, with Stool chiefs of the Gold Coast Colony who emphasized their ‘inherent’ rights over control of land and rents and were backed by colonial administrators in this interpretation of ‘tradition’. Emirs of Northern Nigerian provinces were the product of conquest and patrimonialism, as were many of the princes of Indian states, though both sets of rulers were subject to very different guidance on the internal administration of their courts, treasuries, and subordinate offices. Patrimonially, too, the Khedivate of Egypt operated like the Alawite Sultanate of Morocco (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 administrative form of client regimes, the model offers other advantages by reaching back into the pre-imperial period of early European contacts and forward to the post-colonial period of successor states in which patronage and a measure of patrimonialism have not disappeared. Four stages have been applied in the survey to the materials we have for interpreting the role of hierarchical government in accommodating with or resisting political change inspired by immigrant or indigenous elites. The first phase of European contact was marked by the dependency of commercial agents, missionary and other settlers on the patronage of indigenous rulers. The experience of East India Company factors and separate traders on the coasts of Africa illustrates, respectively, their clientage relations with officials and brokers of the Mughal principalities and with chiefs and middlemen of trading states created by the Atlantic slave trade. The few posts 29

Hailey, Native Administration, iv. 9.

266 Conclusion and enclaves permitted or won from rival clients were established as defensive forts and anchorages, rather than flourishing entrepots. It is possible to see them (especially Calcutta, Saint Louis, Lagos, Zanzibar) as future staging posts into the interior. But the period of European dependency was long; administration was limited to British subjects and protected Indian or African dependants. It is also possible to see in early grants of local jurisdiction and the operation of mixed courts in Madras the beginnings of ‘mayors’ courts’ in other presidencies and the notion that imported law might be applied to Indians as well.30 But this assumption that Europeans carried their law with them had very limited application at first in West or East Africa; and whether it could be held to apply to British African subjects outside the coastal colonies was not decided until the mid-nineteenth century. Similarly, in South-east Asia East India Company officials and traders came as supplicants to the ports of China and as client brokers to sultans. Experience with the kings of Burma or the Kingdom of Kandy in Ceylon demonstrated the limits of informal influence without recourse to military and administrative power. And where such power was achieved, as in Ceylon, it was exercised by the British through a hierarchy of local headmen in the manner of their Dutch predecessors. Some paramounts, not least the Emperor of China, refused to become clients or even patrons for good reason; and he warned the Burmese king against allowing foreigners to remain.31 ‘It is not proper 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 buildings it spreads and takes such firm hold that it is scarcely possible to be removed or eradicated).’ Doubtless many Indian princes would have endorsed this warning. In the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, too, where commercial and evangelical pressures for change were relentless in the early nineteenth century, paramounts and their officials took steps to make a selective control over settler agencies and the codes and institutions they imported. For this reason the Hawaiian case, explored in some detail above, provides one of the better documented examples of the consolidation of a kingdom under a senior lineage, reinforced by constitutional and legal precepts and a large extension of patronage practices from within the Hawaiian hierarchy of island chiefs and notables. The stability of the patrimonial state depended, too, on confirmation of the hierarchy’s titles in land, to the exclusion of commoners, and a beneficial partnership with foreign plantation and mercantile business over some four decades. It also contained within that economic partnership the political seeds of resent30 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 British Residency in Burma, 473.

Conclusion 267 ment of monarchy and subversion of its status with the assistance of a major republican power. There is a distinction, however, between the agencies that indigenous leaders had to deal with. Chartered companies with powers of administration posed a more formidable threat than religious and secular agents operating under an uncertain and limited consular protection, unless a special case could be made for backing them (anti-slavery, commercial debt, strategic competition). It is no historical accident that the second phase of ‘reversal’ of status between European agencies and African or Asian rulers is exemplified by the East India Company and by other chartered companies in Africa or South-east Asia. The course of that commercial and administrative reversal (or ‘inversion’) has been treated at some length, therefore, for the Indian presidencies. Because of the ambiguous structure of the Company, its transformation into a land power was marked by commercial subversion and extraction of revenue through an existing service gentry, a mixture of military alliance and military conquest, leading, eventually, to administration and jurisdiction in Bengal without the intermediation of a paramount ruler. The examples of intervention in the commercial and financial affairs of Bengal, Awadh, and the states of central and south India, illustrate, too, the mechanisms of court and presidency politics, at a period when the East India Company was becoming a territorial power in the last half of the eighteenth century. Reversal of status stemmed from many local issues—currencies, credit, abuse of trade privileges, and loss of state revenue to rulers. There was also an increasing company commitment to cover the costs of administration, war, and investment in trade by enlistment of allies and defence of clients. In this process the work of residents as administrators and spies was essential to ‘inversion’ of status among Bengal rulers and the Calcutta presidency. Plassey was as much a product of intrigue as firepower. Run as a ‘protected’ prince for a short period, by 1773 the Bengal nawab had no executive role; and Bengal served as an example for later annexations and closer control of land administration and revenue. On the other hand, Awadh (for a period) and many other greater and lesser principalities of India survived into a much less bureaucratic ‘reversal’ of status and preservation within an imperial hierarchy. Overall, Indian rulers remained essential and sometimes cooperative clients in the long rivalry with France; or they were demoted and their territories 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 of government.32 By the end of the Company’s monopolies in 1833, ‘inversion’ 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.

268 Conclusion on such a scale, unprecedented in British experience, left the imperial overruler with a choice of methods: annexation and close management of revenue, law, production, and trade on the model of Bengal’s ‘Permanent Settlement’, or a more distant supervision through political officers of the administrative courts and tributary systems of client rulers left in place. By 1858 this duality under the Raj was confirmed by the practices of resident officers and, to a lesser extent, by the prescriptions of formal treaties. Elsewhere, reversal of status for African or Asian and Pacific islands hierarchies occurred gradually by negotiation and in treaty forms, or abruptly by failed negotiation, military defeat, demotion, or preservation. Indian states did not set any precedents for the variety of ‘treaties’, ‘agreements’, ‘engagements’ regulating the status and privileges of chieftains, emirs, kings, and paramounts. But the universality of treaties arising from the anti-slave trade campaign 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 of protectorates. Reversal of status could also come about through ‘mediatization’ to settle international indebtedness in the case of the Egyptian Khedivate in the 1870s, leading to a British monopoly of influence within a patrimonial state. In similar conditions of debt and strategic vulnerability two decades later, British patronage of the Sultan of Morocco failed in the face of instability within the Sharifian government and determined French insistence on construction of a compliant protectorate. Both Egypt and Morocco were strategically and commercially important pieces on the imperial board. But parallel techniques of mediation and partition were applied in lesser dependencies in the Pacific to overcome, for example, the difficulty of finding an acceptable recognized authority in Western Samoa in 1889.33 Apart from treaties and assumptions of international jurisdiction, force cannot 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, secondly, a dangerous propensity on the part of the largest states to contract foreign debts. In the cause of ‘free trade’ the Yoruba state of Ijebu was made an example by military force in 1892; and the road to new markets up the Niger was stormed by the monopolist Royal Niger Company, much in the manner of the longer and more complex subversion of princely monopolies and revenues by East India Company public and private agents. In such conditions of pressure for revenues or competition from rivals, reversal of status could be sudden, as the Nawabs of Bengal and Awadh, the last Zulu king, or the Emirs 33 For the background, Richard Gilson, Samoa 1830–1900: The Politics of a Multi-Cultural Community (Melbourne, 1970).

Conclusion 269 of Nupe or Ilorin discovered. Arguably, too, the consequence of maladministration of public finance in the name of a patrimonial state as well as commercial vulnerability through a reciprocity treaty were factors in bringing about the downfall of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893; and foreign debts and a doubtful system of royal accounting very nearly undermined the Tongan monarchy in 1904. The underlying premiss of imperial force has caused difficulty, however, for some critics of the patron–client model who prefer to find ‘class’ differences in imperial or hierarchical systems.34 But such assertions sit uneasily with evidence of ethnic and social structures; and no account is taken of the political and administrative cost to imperial regimes of recourse to enforcement of unpopular measures for internal security.35 Such critics ignore, too, the cooption of indigenous allies by incoming rulers and the settlement of older conflicts within the armed reckoning of imperial occupation. Cetshwayo’s Zulu kingdom was dismembered as much by civil war as pressure from colonial Natal. But such conflict was not continuous, unless land and labour were dominant issues. Apart from India, remarkably small regiments and militias were held in reserve in imperial dependencies and, on the whole, they were locally recruited. Force was deployed more at the beginning and end of empire and in the interests of wider global strategies than in suppression of rebellion. Revolts against tax and forced labour, loss of land, and curtailment of representative government are a feature of imperial ‘inversion’ and the endgames of political concessions. For this reason the once-fashionable ‘resistance-orcollaboration’ dichotomy in imperial administration is less useful than explanations in terms of excessive demands on local resources through tax and labour to account for revolts at the ‘periphery’ of imperial over-rule.36 Like the patrimonial states they took over, European imperialists sought political rather than military solutions to the problems of territorial incorporation and governance, if only because of the high cost of imperial defence.37 Once subordinated to a new ruler, princes and chiefs either waxed or waned in authority during the third stage of imperial clientage. Their fortunes in the princely states of India ran the whole gamut of consolidation and prosperity down to demotions and controlled succession, loss of sources of tribute, and, more rarely, disappearance into a district administration of British India. From their experience of alliance, counter-alliance, and conquest in central and south India the British did not elaborate any ‘system’ of over-rule. 34

Flynn, ‘Class, Clientelism, and Coercion’, 133–56; James C. Scott, ‘Patronage and Exploitation’, in Ernest Gellner and John Waterbury, eds., Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies (London, 1977), 21–40. 35 Featherstone, Colonial Small Wars; and for the small size and composition of imperial forces 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.

270 Conclusion Rather, there were a number of practices applied that derived from the notion of supporting and reforming ‘kingship’. One was confirmation of subordinate rulers in their status and titles with the possibility of dynastic succession. A second was control of foreign relations. In addition, considerable use was made of power to partition and reallocate territory, sometimes to the advantage of the presidencies, and at other times as part of a peace settlement between indigenous states. Through residents as envoys, spies, and brokers they learned to supervise, rather than manage, administration of finance. In any case, definitions of the status of princes were less important than the manoeuvres of agents of the Raj within the patrimonial structures they were attempting to influence. There were big differences compared with hierarchies of protected states elsewhere. One was sheer numbers and variations in size which led, in practice, to numerous transitions in and out of direct supervision during periods of minority rule or suspension of a ruler. Political officers did not set up administrative departments, but worked through a court hierarchy, sometimes creating clients and networks of their own, sometimes forced to concede that little ‘reform’ could be accomplished in the face of a determined ruler. It was difficult to apply external rules for audit, unless a political officer also had influence over a dewan imported from British India. There was no stipending of rulers with independent resources unless (as in the case of Mysore) the legitimate ruler was effectively suspended for a long period. More important, technical and service departments were kept out of the states, unless they had special railway, telegraph, or other agreements. Altogether the two principles pursued on both sides were confirmation of dynastic rights and tributary rights, in return for manpower for the Indian Army, and a degree of order and propriety among princely rulers, under the patronage of the Queen Empress. There were other topics to negotiate—opium and salt trade, repayment of debts, the protocols of salutes, honours and travel abroad, and, eventually, the status of princes in a period of constitutional change. But that item was postponed 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 politics through conciliar representation. Princes could be deposed and restored, but their states could not be abolished. The trend by the end of the nineteenth century was towards a measure of bureaucratization and codification of relations with the agents of the Raj, but little in the way of political reform of the structure of the states. By contrast the patrimonial states of Egypt and Morocco present examples of political and bureaucratic influence and control over internal central government hierarchies and peripheral provincial and tribal leadership. The British consul-general continued and extended the system of ministerial and

Conclusion 271 departmental appointments applied before 1882 in the Khedivate to reform revenue collection, service debts, and to improve infrastructure. Much of this technique rested on the political skill of Cromer and the khedive’s willingness to contain sources of official and public opposition to exercise of patrimonial authority by foreigners. In Morocco, on the other hand, a resident-general excluded the sultan and his officials from key departments of state in the Makhzen. Among the Arabs and Berbers of the Atlas, however, considerable use was made of local caids, recognized or invented. In effect, Egypt continued to be run as a patrimonial state, though the exact source of favours was disputed, while Morocco was run by a parallel and predominantly French administration at the centre with assistance from indigenous leaders elsewhere. In all the regions of sub-Saharan Africa discussed above, the process of inversion redefined the status of rulers. Nigerian emirs were held to lack ‘sovereign’ powers, but political officers were careful, indeed required, to preserve a chain of command through the provincial or district chief whose prestige and authority were upheld.38 The Sultan of Zanzibar who also had a claim to a limited territorial ‘sovereignty’ was reduced after 1890 to the position of a royal dependent, like the Sultan of Morocco, and marginalized from administrative authority. For a long period from 1895 the executive authority of Malay rulers in the Federated States, as opposed to their nominal status, decreased as control over district administration and service departments passed to residency secretariats. On the other hand, the effective power of Nigerian emirs and Bugandan territorial chiefs could be said to have increased in the 1920s and 1930s. Buganda became a model for a surrogate colonial administration within the Great Lakes region. In Northern Nigeria, residents and lieutenant-governors after Lugard encouraged a diffusion of authority, with some reorganization of territorial and village chieftaincies, to the advantage of the emirs who were better funded from a successful and nearly autonomous system of provincial and local treasuries. They could be deposed, as British officials entered into the game of succession politics; and they could be tolerated, despite abuses of power, if loyal. None of them (not even the Sardauna of Sokoto Caliphate) enjoyed the status bestowed on the Bugandan kabaka by the Agreement of 1900 that reinforced the position of the highest grades of territorial chiefs and elevated their paramount to the level of an Indian or Ottoman prince under the Queen Empress. To a lesser degree the paramounts and chiefly oligarchy of Rwanda and Burundi had their status and service roles confirmed under German and Belgian administration, applying new forms of taxation and labour obligations within the structure of clientage relations with the Hutu peasantry. 38 Sir Bryan Sharwood-Smith, ‘But Always as Friends’: Northern Nigeria and the Cameroons, 1921–1957 (London, 1959), 54.

272 Conclusion In the Yoruba states and in Sierra Leone over-rule was less hierarchically structured, after rejection of Lugard’s model before 1918. Chiefs were kept in check 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 organization than the encouragement from the 1930s of pre-existing councils of chiefs with judicial functions. But chiefly clientage continued in urban administration, together with appointments to office and title creation. Titled chiefs found 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 authority by decapitation and by restoration of the Asantehene to a diminished sphere 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 articulate urban elite in a ‘rhetoric of rights’ to defend ‘customary’ claims to land against claims of the administration. But there was much less formal bureaucratization of offices, compared with East-Central Africa. Even in Buganda there was a shift from tribute to fixed salaries, coupled with clientage through an increase in subordinate offices. In both regions power was diffused to territorial chiefs and councils and local big men. Resources from revenue and labour services improved chiefly resources. In Buganda this pattern altered once again, when Mutesa II began to assert patrimonial leadership (with some encouragement from a British governor in the 1940s) and resisted constitutional change directed towards a unitary state. Asante chiefs would make a similar and less successful resistance, while Northern Nigerian emirs made a bid to delay and then to take charge of the pace and balance of federal allocation of powers as they affected their region. Malaya falls into no easy administrative typology that ignores the basis of patrimonial rule in Malay states. In those states there was no formal protectorate conceded. By ‘agreements’ residents were posted in the guise of ‘servants’ of the sultans, but in reality they were a political arm of the Governor of the Straits Settlements. From the beginning they worked through senior officials 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 patrimonial chieftaincies they advised and administered. The content of that advice aimed at improving revenues, especially from tin mining and other concessions in land leases, keeping order through district officers and Malay officials, and opening the states to further trade and plantation development. Implicit in the administrative bargain was a political one—support for dynastic rulers in return for legitimizing a diplomatic and official presence. As in Northern Nigeria the new political order struck a balance between British and Malay officials in a hierarchy of ‘co-ordinate units’.39 Institutionally the sultan’s 39

Smith, ‘On Segmentary Lineage Systems’, 63.

Conclusion 273 council became the focus for that form of cooperation. But there was no ‘native treasury’ system; sultans and officials were stipended and rescued from debt and given access from 1891 to rents from land. Parallel with this political 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. In both sectors of government, therefore, a British and Malay elite administered under joint authority. Thus, power was diffused, as it had been in the preBritish period, but the sultans were freed from dynastic competition. Inclusion of Chinese representatives on the councils recognized an important status group. Diffusion of power was curtailed to a large extent, however, by federation of administrative service departments from 1895 for the four southern states, while the unfederated states retained much of their internal autonomy under political advisers and used a greater share of revenue on salaries and emoluments. Relative loss of status and some functions lasted into the 1930s, while the question of federation was debated and surfaced in post-war bargaining for constitutional change. In Pacific dependencies the chronology of foreign over-rule followed quite local political patterns of co-option, alliance, resistance, or submission. Reversal of status in the Hawaiian group in 1893 by an illegal settler putsch brought to an end any possibility of administration of the Territory through a monarchical hierarchy. Tonga’s experience of over-rule was transitory, when clients of the Western Pacific High Commission were established in the executive for a short period of protectorate control. Fairly early in the nineteenth century the paramountcy of the Society Islands succumbed to French over-rule in 1842 and became an example of a dual political administration that lasted into the 1870s. The Cook Islands fell into a similar pattern from the 1880s and retained for much longer the authority of senior island lineages under British administrators who acted as local ‘paramount’ chiefs. A similar role was played out by Governor Solf in German Samoa, but not by his successors in the New Zealand Mandate that tolerated a diffusion of power back to village and district title-holders and officials.40 In Fiji the ‘Bau’ model of a hierarchy of provincial and district lineage chiefs and village headmen became ubiquitous, even in islands under Tongan influence. Once the more dynamic elements of competition were removed, a certain regimentation of political structures under Crown Colony rule worked to the advantage of Fijian and British elements in the new hierarchy. Gordon and Thurston constructed a political system of ‘co-ordinate units’, like administrators in Northern Nigeria, because there was common ground in political aims, providing rule was vakaviti—in Fijian style, reinforcing the powers of a chiefly 40 For these examples, see Newbury, Tahiti Nui; Malama Meleisea, The Making of Modern Samoa: Traditional Authority and Colonial Administration in the Modern History of Western Samoa, Institute of Pacific Studies (Suva, 1987); Richard Gilson, The Cook Islands 1820–1850, ed. Ron Crocombe (Wellington, 1980).

274 Conclusion oligarchy over people, lands, and the application of regulations, in return for stipends 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, providing an appearance of judicial as well as political authority. ‘A feature of British administration in Asia’ it has been claimed ‘was the blending and blurring of the executive and judicial functions of government.’41 The same observation applies to colonial territories in Africa. There was an important departure, however, during the nineteenth century from the inability of political officers to assume judicial functions over Indians in the protected states, on the one hand, and the growing assumption, confirmed by the consolidated Foreign Jurisdiction Act of 1890, on the other, that ‘protection’ carried with it a duty of jurisdiction, especially over other foreign nationals. The view was subject to the requirements of diplomacy. No jurisdiction in Yoruba states was ceded at all in the 1890s by treaties that had to be renegotiated for this purpose after 1900.42 When jurisdiction was assumed, more often it was exercised as a form of judicial review (as in the Malay States), while indigenous courts continued to apply Islamic or ‘customary’ law. Where no such jurisdiction was ceded it was exercised in criminal cases by political officers in Northern 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 for reform of customary authority or the role of religious sects. In Fiji the Western Pacific High Commission, accustomed to operating courts through a chief justice and European and Fijian magistrates, attempted to install chief justices in Tonga, as part of a reversal of status begun by the Governor of Fiji after 1901—a move deftly countered by Queen Salote. More unusually, the ruling hierarchy of independent Hawai‘i reinforced its status by ‘appropriation of Anglo-American law’, a process eventually turned against the monarchy by republican-minded attorneys.44 Such a view of power through jurisdiction agrees in part with the view taken by Mommsen and de Moor of the co-existence of colonial and customary law as a joint system of arbitration and jurisprudence, forensic and Supreme 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 and the dispute-management of many lineage-structured societies arising in the context of political competition and rank rivalry. It needs to be added that the 41

Tinker, ‘Structure of the Heritage’, 49. 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. 42

Conclusion 275 use and modification of customary law by missionary or imperial arbitrators rested on normative values imported and applied more especially in criminal law and civil sanctions, as well as on instrumentalist objectives such as access to land, taxes, and labour through administrative jurisdiction. A preliminary conclusion is that the flexibility of indigenous systems of personal and public justice led to a ‘symbiosis’ through a mix of reform and toleration under colonial law compatible with the reciprocity of clientage, though this whole area needs to be explored much further.46 The proposition agrees well enough with case studies on the reinterpretation and amalgamation of Hindu Shastras (codes), together with English common law in British India in ways that produced a rich dialogue and the emergence of a Hindu Code with external borrowings in 1955. But in Indian princely states no such ‘duality’ developed, given the very limited cession of jurisdiction to the Raj in cantonments, though Indian princes and the Indian service gentry exploited for their own ends opportunities afforded by imported statute and imperial courts in British India. By contrast, in other dependencies, the colonial powers upheld chiefs’ powers of judicial decision in family law or land tenure, but restricted them in criminal jurisdiction and in commercial cases involving Europeans. Although this observation has been argued with reference to Central and East Africa, it could also be applied to Crown and chiefs’ control and division of lands in Fiji and to chiefly control of lands in Hawai‘i, Tonga, and the Gold Coast. Occasionally, allocatory powers over land thought to be the prerogative of chiefs had to be curbed and regulated by powers assumed by Crown officials. But Martin Chanock, for one, is in no doubt that the recognized legal authority of chiefs reinforced the ‘system of hierarchies flowing down from the Crown through chiefs, subchiefs, clan heads, and family heads’, thereby increasing the dependency of agnatic and collateral kin (and one may add stranger-dependants in West Africa).47 While this may have been so for non-Islamic systems of local jurisdiction, administrators in Morocco, Egypt, or northern Nigeria were careful for additional reasons to respect the learning and power of Mallams and Alkali courts. In the Nigerian Protectorate the whole issue of preserving indigenous jurisdiction as well as executive control of appellate jurisdiction came to a head in an internal debate over extension of the powers of the Nigerian Supreme Court in ways that would have replaced district officers by professional magistrates in the late 1920s. The necessity for restricting English law and preserving Hausa–Fulani and animist ‘political and social organization’ was stoutly argued on behalf of his political officers by Acting LieutenantGovernor G. J. Lethem who based his stand, interestingly enough, on the 46 F. von Benda-Beckmann, ‘Symbiosis of Indigenous and Western Law in Africa and Asia’, in Mommsen and de Moor, eds., European Expansion and Law, 307–26. 47 Cited in ibid. 288.

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 nonIslamic jurisdiction over Europeans and Nigerians in the North, the administrators’ Provincial Courts were held to be adequate and cheap to run. There was an additional reason supported by political officers to a man—the felt need to keep out African barristers licensed by the Supreme Court and regarded, for example, by Edward Arnett on the basis of his experience as resident in Cameroon as ignorant of ‘native law and custom’ and as politicians on the make.49 Apart from prejudice and resentment of a potential challenge to the authority of political officers, Arnett’s opposition also gave a more substantial 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 education and by his official standing in relation to the Supreme Court attracts without effort a number of followers who forward his interests by seeking out and fostering all disputes 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 the time 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 1933 and 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 chiefs within the administrative hierarchy. The confirmation of tributary obligations to Indian princes was one of the more important legacies of settlement of disputes with subordinate chiefs and landowners. In African hierarchies with supervised treasuries and in the Malay states levels of personal taxation tended to remain static, in proportion to overall sources of revenue. But expenditure through the treasuries, supplemented from central or federal government sources, tended to rise. A large percentage of this expenditure— between 45 and 60 per cent—went towards remuneration of indigenous authorities shortly before and after the Second World War.52 Some territories, 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 appears to have used Lee-Warner’s The Native States of India (London, 1910), which recognized that there were a few British courts in Gujarat states and in the cantonments. Occasionally a British magistrate might be ‘loaned’ to some of the larger states. 49 50 Arnett Papers, Box 6/4, fo. 123. 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.

Conclusion 277 such as Fiji, were less fortunate in remuneration for chiefs, though there were other privileges; and for all states approaching independence sources of spending on local government and central government recruitment created a vested interest in the transfer of political power for old and new status groups exercised, too, through management of public corporations. A third feature common to many of the examples was construction of secondary layers of brokerage and clientage. In some systems this feature was simply a continuation of hereditary and nominated offices that had existed under an emir, sultan, kabaka, or ali‘i. It was exploited in the Indian princely states by residents and political officers seeking administrative leverage through nomination or influence with court finance ministers, bankers, and imported officials. Over time, there were running battles with princes and between princes and their subordinate officials over the creation of personal networks in courts and princes’ councils. Recognition that British officials were, like chiefs, brokers and patrons, and that their subordinates were also patrons with influence and obligations to friends and relatives is not a feature of most studies of administration. But some time ago Lemarchand observed that in Africa administrative integration by colonial powers ‘can be viewed in terms of pyramiding of patron–client ties’.53 Uncovering this facet of working arrangements in a prince’s or an emir’s court goes a long way towards meeting objections from Kaufman and others concerning the application of a ‘dyadic’ model to group relations. ‘Patron–client’ is not ‘a concept for all seasons’, but a recognition of the fluctuating fortunes of chiefs and big men under changing economic and political circumstances.54 Those who, like Sandra Barnes and Robert Fatton, have explored the evolution of political and administrative linkages between Lagos notables and the outer villages of Lagos, or the continuation of political clientage in Senegal through the colonial period to independence, would agree, I think, that: ‘Clientelism is a many-tiered phenomenon.’55 It is clear that the creation of a civil service in the Hawaiian 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 the monarchy. The creation of a civil service in the Federated Malay States from 1909, or in Fiji from the 1950s, eventually revealed similar mechanisms at work. At least one study has broached the difficult topic of ‘bribery and other 53 Lemarchand, ‘Political Clientelism’, in Schmidt and others, eds., Friends, Followers, and Factions, 107. 54 Kaufman, ‘The Patron–Client Concept’, 284; and the more sceptical counter-factual argument 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 the changing 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.

278 Conclusion forms of corruption’ in the Malaysian Public Services, revealed in 1955.56 In Sri Lanka the grades of territorial and village headmen essential to British over-rule lasted well into the 1960s as the basis for emergent patronage politics.57 In short, there is enough material to indicate continuities in local-level and upper-level forms of clientage for economic and political organization of resources and power between the period of imperial over-rule, when political officers were also brokers, and successor regimes under civil and military rulers utilizing local networks for support.58 There was always a danger, of course, in a more interventionist period of over-rule, that chiefs as brokers became too dependent on their official patrons. They could, in short, be ‘reinvented’ according to a novel ideology of a successor regime, or according to some bureaucratic goal of turning them into more mobile functionaries. There is a good example of ‘reinvention’ in the view of Lord Hastings in 1814 that the East India Company, as successor to the Mughal Empire, might hold principalities such as Awadh ‘as vassals in substance though not in name’, internally sovereign, but rendering military forces for defence and submitting disputes for arbitration. The idea of substituting for the Mughal system did not really survive loss of Company responsibility and power to a representative of the Crown or the practice of creating internal constituencies at Lucknow or other state courts.59 Lugard, as High Commissioner, also had the idea of placing himself at the apex of Fulani and British over-rule, thus displacing the rulers of Sokoto and Gwandu whose sovereignty 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 too much thought for questions of ‘sovereignty’. On the other hand, in societies of the northern Sudan or south-eastern Nigeria, whole new orders of ‘chiefs’ were created either from local heads of nomadic clans and religious sects, or from clan heads and heads of clan councils, dignified as ‘Warrant Chiefs’.61 In the 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 56 Tilman, ‘Bureaucratic Development in Malaya’, 599. Tilman pointed to the inexperience of junior officials dealing with the general public and to a cultural acceptance of ‘tea money’ as a way 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 Southeastern Nigeria 1891–1929 (London, 1972).

Conclusion 279 where ‘Fijian Administration’ remained inseparable from the privileges and practices of chiefly hierarchy, compared with the effort made in Malaya to recruit an ‘Administrative Service’ as an adjunct to the Malay Civil Service. It is 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 ascription, as well as a measure of election.62 The simplest conclusion may be that all chieftaincy that survived under colonial rule underwent a certain amount 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 that chieftaincy leadership and the obligations of patrimonial hierarchy have survived; and this is an additional reason for pursuing the patron–client model into a fourth stage—decolonization. The reasons for the interest of political scientists in the operations of clientage in contemporary Asian or African states, of course, are not exclusively to do with the survival of chieftaincy in many of them. In India the expansion of the National Congress from an amalgam of elites centred on the cities into local and provincial organizations in the early 1920s was predicated on creating lower-level ‘machines’ for mobilizing votes to man local and district boards, as well as a political movement based on opposition to the Raj. In the ‘political undergrowth’ of Indian government the role of the rais as patron-broker has been continuous.63 Princely states stood outside this development and princes disappeared. But the Gandhi 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 much more closely to the fate of political parties. Where these failed to take root under the pressure of ethnic conflict, as in Rwanda-Burundi, the chiefly aristocracy was among the first casualties. Even where a party and prince were one, as in Buganda, the period of constitutional legitimacy for a kabaka was short. On the other hand, in Namibia, South Africa, Nigeria, Fiji, rulers have been incorporated into the constitutional system in advisory and consultative councils. In Lesotho and Malawi chiefs dominate senates. Some eight hundred traditional leaders, or amakhosi, survive in local government and 62 James West Turner, ‘Continuity and Constraint: Reconstructing the Concept of Tradition from 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.

280 Conclusion administer to about half of South Africa’s 42 million people. The Sultan of Sokoto was deposed in 1996; but the Kabaka, Muteba II, has been revived without constitutional office. More remarkably, in the Kingdom of Nepal, foreign aid and the transformation of a maharaja into a monarch from 1960 elevated the royal palace to the apex of a patrimonial government that outlawed political parties and ruled through a nominated Council of Ministers, army, and police.65 The politics of chieftaincy are capricious, however, notably under military regimes, though the institution of ‘chieftaincy’ itself has been defended as necessary to the ideal of ‘mixed government’ in Ghana and other states and has, perhaps, been underestimated.66 While that may be so, the unanswered question about chieftaincy at different levels is whether it perpetuates or simply adds to the politics of clientage in states with civilian or military regimes. From the above cases it could be claimed that clientage through patrimonialism is still fundamental to the politics of Morocco, Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland, Nigeria, Tonga, and, probably, Fiji. In the transfer of power from one oligarchy to another in Sierra Leone, chiefs remained ancillaries to incoming political parties and profited accordingly.67 But it is now better understood just how ‘inherently unstable’ chieftaincy was in post-colonial Sierra Leone, leading to re-emergence of selfmade leaders and ‘war-boys’ as protectors of impoverished and marginalized citizens.68 In Malaysia, though State Rulers have been reduced in executive functions, they enhance the role of the Federation and its premier as patronbenefactor in coalition politics. Patrimonialism and party politics have been in 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 described for the Sudan, Indian state politics, Senegal, and Sri Lanka.69 For Nigeria 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 legitimation of titles, succession, privileges, and relations with local government councils in order to safeguard ‘custom’ from political attack through a ‘Chiefs Law’ of 1957.70 Other sources have detected a fairly robust and 65 Merrill R. Goodall, ‘Administrative Change in Nepal’, in Braibanti, ed., Asian Bureaucratic Systems, 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 Modernization Process 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 postcolonial 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 in Yorubaland’, JHSN 9 (1997), 63–74.

Conclusion 281 subtle capacity for survival in the face of political change in the Yoruba south and a necessary attachment by military leaders to the patronage values of Hausa/Fulani society in the north of the country.71 Much of this verdict would agree with the scarce material we have on the role of ‘politician princes’ as big men in civilian and military regimes in the Hausa community of the Niger Republic.72 Chiefs have also survived in Cameroon in alliance with a dominant party, more particularly in former British areas of the Grassfields and among the Bamiléké. Thus, old colonial ‘protegés’ have become new political clients retaining authority in tax and judicial management.73 On the other hand, survival among Yoruba chiefs and enforcement of local government regulations has 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 relationship with 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 indicated, ‘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 to categorize chiefs as ‘statesmen’, ‘chiefly bureaucrats’, and even as chiefs in opposition to the new political order, rather than to explore whether they influence recruitment into political and civic office.76 A further point raised by Pacific historiography is whether ‘bureaucratization’ partially or completely replaced chiefly patronage networks in island administration. There is reason to believe that older forms of informal patronage have subsisted.77 The pattern of contemporary ‘clientelism’ has been more carefully observed in the politics of France’s Overseas Territories and Departments, where local and metropolitan networks are a ‘key element’ for understanding the reciprocal benefits of elite cooperation in return for material benefits. In former British 71 Vaughan, ‘The Impact of Party Politics and Military Rule on the Traditional Chieftaincy in Western 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: Départments et Territoires d’Outre-mer (Cambridge, 1992), 199–203; Durutalo, The Paramountcy of Fijian Interest, 36–7; Peter Larmour, ‘Corruption and Governance in the South Pacific’, PS 30 (1997), 1–18.

282 Conclusion territories the history of island civil services is under-researched. But from the evidence we have, a preliminary conclusion might be that new service groups and hierarchies in small-scale communities were not easily transformed into administrative bureaucracies in the Weberian sense of the term, though indigenous elements of prescribed office may have been present in the co-opted system. To do so assumed a willingness to invest in close supervision, education, reform, and the codification of ‘customary law’ that imperial rulers preferred to avoid, if the society could be managed under its indigenous authorities, in return for a share of resources and confirmation in office. If such authorities were unequal to the task of more complex administration or were displaced by a better-educated elite (as in French Polynesia, for example) particular attention has to be paid to a stratum we can call ‘notables’ (or ‘service gentry’ in the terms of Indian history) who might be from immigrant groups or a mix of immigrants and the indigenous elite. All that can be said at this stage of Pacific political science is that hierarchies—‘traditional’ or modified by elite recruitment—have not disappeared, especially in Fiji and Tonga. Indeed, in the Cook Islands traditional title-holders have been exploited in the cause of ‘ethnic nationalism’, especially at ariki level, while being excluded from the offices of central government.78 The main example of hierarchy and patrimonialism examined here—the Hawaiian Islands, suffered a very different historical fate, though it can be argued that the haole (foreign) political and business elite who succeeded the royal dynasty behaved for a time as political patrons. As Jack London wrote of the Territory, after his sojourn in 1907: ‘Hawaii is patriarchal rather than democratic. Economically it is owned and operated in a fashion that is a combination of twentiethcentury, machine-civilization methods and medieval feudal methods.’79 There are, however, other successor states not absorbed by a metropolitan power, where a patron–client model accounts for continuity in systems of government. As a French anthropologist has remarked, in the post-colonial period independent decision-making has entailed wholesale replacement of expatriates in the public sector by ‘the sons, daughters, nephews and nieces of Polynesian and Melanesian politicians and notables. One form of nepotism has been replaced by another . . . Indigenous nepotism has a wider range of recruitment than European nepotism. Pacific clientage systems in a subtle way reflect older status rivalries and distribute the windfall better.’80 For students of developing economies, however, such an observation smacks of complacency with the failure of many new states to overcome the 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 sociétés océaniennes’ (MS Noumea, 1994), 261.

Conclusion 283 dangers of a political ‘spoils system’. At the end of his detailed survey of forty years of economic underperformance in Ghana, after promising beginnings in the 1950s, one specialist is forced to concede the inefficiencies implicit in political use of public bodies and subsidized enterprises to ‘generate rents and patronage opportunities’.81 Worse, the leadership exhibited by Nkrumah and his civil and military successors resembled old-style patrimonial chieftainship on a much bigger scale, rather than devotion to national goals: Big men were trusted to look after their followers. And politicians were expected to live 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. This was not a post-colonial novelty but had always been so; disinterested administrators detached from the people they governed had been only a temporary and alien implant in the body politic.82

One may take issue, of course, with the notion of complete ‘disinterest’ on the part of imperial administrators anxious to access resources. But the point of continuity in a political culture is well made and there are many characteristics of Ghana’s history relevant to hierarchies in other Asian, African, and Pacific societies. In a sense post-colonial politicians have revealed themselves all too often to be old chiefs writ large, while some are legitimately descended from former chiefs turned party politicians. The aim of this study has been to show how hierarchical leaders have long acted for political and material advantage in terms that go beyond the specifics of imperial policies and resort to an older model of relationships at the interface between rulers and ruled—as old, indeed, as the Greeks and Romans.83 In this way, the argument for recognition of patrimonialism and clientage is consistent with a more ‘dynamic’ interpretation of ‘traditional’ societies confronted with external agencies. The contemporary reaction against the alleged ‘passivity’ of colonial societies is, of course, not so new or limited to Indian historiography and was confronted in African and Pacific studies earlier.84 But it is difficult not to agree with Brimnes’s conclusion that: ‘In general, it seems most fruitful to look at the relations between the colonial power and indigenous inhabitants as a result of a dialogue in which both sides participated. They did not of course participate from 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 dynamics of the ‘dialogue’ is that it can be applied to the pre-colonial phase of 81

Douglas Rimmer, Staying Poor: Ghana’s Political Economy, 1950–1990 (Oxford, 1991),

224. 82

Ibid. 222–3. 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. 83

284 Conclusion early contacts and settlement, where it has its political and social analogies within the structures of indigenous societies. It is particularly useful in dealing with missionary and merchant settlement to investigate at what stage, if at all, these harbingers of social and economic change reversed their situation of dependency and became secular authorities as well as brokers. The notion of brokerage has also been drawn on because it is implicit in the patron–client relationship for trans-cultural communication. The role of the political and economic broker has been well recognized moreover in anthropological and political science to account for the ways in which clientage operates at different levels in relatively complex African or Asian societies, including the level of foreign administration. Finally, it is not difficult to extend the model into the post-colonial period, where local clientage operates within a civil service or as patron-party politics, or where, by analogy, ‘clientelism’ is a feature of economic dependency for an underdeveloped state.

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Index Abbas II (Khedive of Egypt) 84, 85, 96 Abd al-Hafiz (Sultan of Morocco) 90 Abd al-Rahman (son of the Mahdi) 88, 89 Abdullah (Sultan of Perak) 154, 155 access to resources 74, 263, 264 in Egypt 81, 85 within imperial hierarchies 1, 6, 13, 32–4, 37, 38, 43–4, 47, 53, 63, 115, 121, 129, 135, 144, 154, 156, 159, 161, 164, 175, 229, 236, 262–3, 272, 282 in Indian states 32, 43, 52, 60, 69, 74, 270 by indigenous leaders 2, 9, 13, 22, 81, 85, 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, 176 military 26, 104 in Morocco 90–2 in patron–client relations 8, 59, 60, 278 see also labour; land; reciprocity; revenue; taxes; tribute achievement 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, 120 Adamawa Province 116 adamfo (patron) 104 administration, imperial, see Belgian; British; Dutch; French; German; administration; jurisdiction; service departments administrators, see commissioners; district officer; governors; political officers; residents Afghans 22, 27, 35, 40, 45, 50 Agra, India 19, 48 Ahmadu Bello (Sultan of Sokoto) 124 ahupua‘a districts (Hawaiian islands) 184, 186 Akan people (Gold Coast) 10, 104, 106, 107, 143 Akassa, Nigeria 103 Akbar (Mughal Emperor) 21, 22 Akim people (Gold Coast) 106 Alafin of Oyo (Yoruba paramount) 118, 120 Alake of Abeokuta (Yoruba paramount) 118, 119

see also Egba Alamgir II (Mughal Emperor) 32 Alawite lineage, Morocco 90–5 Aleamotu‘a (Tongan paramount) 243, 245 Alexander, W. D. 205 Alexandria, Egypt 83 ali‘i (Hawaiian chiefs) 185–6, 196, 204 Ali al-Tom (Sudan chief) 88 Aliyu, Emir of Zaria 116 Allahabad, India 30, 35 Allen, E. H. (trade envoy) 200 Allenby, Edmund Henry Hynman, Viscount (field-marshal) 86 Alliance Party: Fiji 233–4, 236, 239 Malaya 170, 173 Alwar state, India 63 Andrews, Lorrin (Hawaiian minister) 189, 190 ‘Anglo-African’ government 113 see also British administration Anglo-French Conventions: (Siam) 175, 152 Anglo-Zulu war 137 Ankole state, Uganda 125, 129, 132 Annexation Club: in Hawaiian politics 208, 211 anthropologists: and chieftaincy 139, 263 contribution of 2, 6 see also Busia; Fallers; Goody; Lloyd; Mair; Nayacakalou; Oliver; Richards; Smith Apter, David (political scientist) 132 Arcot, India 24 see also Carnatic armed forces: in the Hawaiian islands 185 Hyderabad Contingent 58 and imperial administration 3, 269 in India 11, 25, 32, 63, 72 in Morocco 93 in patrimonial states 126 see also police arms trade: in Pacific Islands 185 Arnett, Edward John (Resident, Acting Lieutenent Governor) 116, 276 Asaf-ud-Daula (Nawab of Awadh) 37–40

308 Index Asante, Ashanti (Gold Coast, Ghana) 103, 104, 106, 107 109, 132, 143, 156 confederation 108, 272 and constitutional change 272 Asantehene (Asante paramount) 104, 106 ascribed status 8, 9, 139, 179, 181, 216, 250–1, 253–4, 263 see also achievement; chiefs, chieftaincy Atahiru (Sultan of Sokoto) 110 Australia 71 and Fiji 224 Awadh state, India 11, 22, 29, 30, 34, 45, 51, 54, 57, 58, 63, 73, 267 annexed 57 as client state of Bengal 38 and Company penetration 35–8, 45, 74 loss of territory 48 and resident agents 74 revenue 38, 52 reversal of status 40 Awolowo, Obafemi (Yoruba chief and politician) 124 Awujale of Ijebu (Yoruba paramount) 118 Ba (Mba) province 231 Baganda Appointments Board 132 Baganda people 126, 129, 130, 132, 133 see also Buganda Bahadur Shah II 57 Bahawalpur state 50 Baker, Revd. Shirley 246–8 bakungu chiefs, Buganda 126, 128, 129, 135 Bakwena people, Botswana 138 Baldwin, H. P. (Hawaiian sugar merchant) 209 Balewa, Sir Abubakar Tafawa (Prime Minister of Nigeria) 256 Baluchistan Agency 58 Bamangwato people, Botswana 138 Bangalore 60 Bangkok 150 barantaka (political clientage) 117 Baring, Sir Evelyn, see Cromer, Evelyn Baring, Earl Baroda state 41, 50, 52, 59, 64 barori (clients) 111 Basuto National Council 138 Basutoland National Party 138 bataka chiefs, Buganda 128 Batare lineages, Burundi 134, 135 bati (mbati, border clients, allies) 218 batongole chiefs, Buganda 126 Bau (Mbau chiefdom) 219, 220–2, 224, 253, 273 Bavadra, Timoci (Prime Minister of Fiji) 234, 236 bêche de mer (trepang) 220

Bechuanaland Protectorate, see Botswana Begams of Awadh 37 Belgian administration: in Rwanda-Burundi 134, 135 Benares 35, 37, 39 Bengal 11, 12, 21, 22, 29, 32, 34, 35, 38–40, 43–6, 48, 51, 52, 72, 73 army in rebellion 58 as a client state 74 Company authority in 27 ‘dual system’ in 33 and imperial administration 1, 23, 267 Nawab of 23, 30, 33, 267 and South-East Asia 175 trade 19–20, 22–3, 25, 29, 30 Bentinck, Lord William Cavendish (governorgeneral) 51, 57 Berbers in Morocco 93 Bezi lineages, Burundi 134, 135, 136 Bhonsla (Maratha chieftain) 41, 48, 49 big man leadership 10, 141, 146 in Pacific societies 179 in Sierra Leone 121 in Uganda 130 ‘war boys’ 280 Bihar, India 21, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33 Bikaner state 61 Bingham, Hiram (American missionary) 187 Birch, James (Resident in Perak) 155 Bishop, Charles R. (Hawaiian businessman) 210 blad al-Makhzen (zone of government) 90 blad as-siba (unadministered zone) 90, 93 Blingnières, Comte de (Controller in Egypt) 81, 82 Blount, James H. (Commissioner to the Hawaiian Islands) 210 Board of Commissioners to Quiet Titles (Land Commission) 195 Board of Control: and East India Company 44, 56, 71 Boki (chief of Maui and Governor of O‘ahu) 188 Bombay 19, 20, 34, 40, 41, 43, 45, 50, 51, 58, 59, 63, 72, 73, 74 and Marathas 41 Political Department 58 Presidency 79 ‘Bond’, 1844 (Gold Coast) 10 Bornu (Nigeria) 110 Botswana (Bechuanaland) 138, 145 Brahmins 22, 63, 69 as administrators 41, 64 bribes: in Nigerian administration 256 see also corruption

Index 309 Bristow, John (Resident in Awadh) 36, 37, 39 British administration 259 in Burma 152 in Ceylon 151 in East Africa 125–33 in Egypt 96, 270 in Fiji 216, 226–7, 230, 238, 253, 273 in the Gold Coast 106–8, 122, 143, 272 in Malaya 149, 154–9, 164, 166, 167, 173, 175, 271, 272 in Northern Nigeria 110–17, 144, 271 in Sierra Leone 121, 272 in Southern Nigeria 117, 272 stereotype of 257 in Uganda 129–31 in West Africa 122, 260 British India, see India British South Africa Company 138, 145 brokerage, brokers: administrative 12, 48, 75, 91, 121, 149, 155, 161, 172, 173, 175, 188, 230, 233, 262, 277, 284 commercial 20, 32, 72 Brooke, Raja Sir James 156 Brown, William (missionary) 244 Buganda 125–35, 140, 144, 279 Agreement 1900 128, 271 Bukedi district, Uganda 129 buli (mbuli officials) 223, 226–32 Bundella 45 Bunyoro state 125, 126, 129, 132, 133 Burdwan, India 29, 30, 33 Burma 150, 151, 172, 175, 266 Burns, Sir Alan Cuthbert Maxwell (colonial governor) 108 Busia K. A. (anthropologist) 106 businessmen: in Africa 142 and Fijian politics 235 and Hawaiian politics 3, 198, 201, 205, 252, 253 in India 23 in Malaya 167, 169, 173 Busoga state 125, 130 Bussy, Charles Castelnau de 24 Butler, Harcourt (Indian civil servant) 65 Buxar (battle of, 1764) 29, 32, 35, 74 Byron, Lord (naval commander) 188 cadis (judges) 91 caids (district chiefs) 91–3, 96 Caisse de la Dette Publique, Egypt 80 Cakaudrove (Thakaudrove, province) 219, 232 Cakobau (Thakombau, Vunivalu of Bau) 220–6, 230, 253

Cakobau, Ratu Sir George (GovernorGeneral of Fiji) 233 Calcutta (Fort William) 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 30, 35–9, 41–5 Calcutta Council 25, 27, 29, 36, 74 Cambay state 50 Cameron, Sir Donald Charles (colonial governor) 118 Campbell, W. T. (consul) 249 Canton 150 Cape of Good Hope 71 Cape Province 264 Carnac, John (general) 35 Carnarvon, Henry Howard Molyneux Herbert, Earl (Secretary of State for the Colonies) 155, 156 Carnatic, India 19, 24, 26, 34, 40, 42–5, 74 Carter, H. A. (trade envoy) 200 Casamajor, James (resident) 51 Castle, William R. 209 Catholic missionaries: in Rwanda-Burundi 135 in Tonga 245 cattle ranching 188 Cave, Stephen (Financial Controller in Egypt) 80 Central India Agency 49, 58, 60, 61, 62 Central Native Council, Nigeria 117 Cetshwayo (Zulu paramount) 137, 145, 269 Ceylon 71, 149, 151, 175, 226, 266 Chamber of Princes 67, 69 Charles II, King 19 Charlton, Richard (consul) 188 Charter Renewal Act of 1813, see Statutes Chartered companies: as imperial agencies 267 see also British South Africa Company; East India Company; Imperial British East Africa Company; Royal Niger Company Chaudhry, Mahendra (Prime Minister of Fiji) 237 Cherif Pasha (minister) 81, 83 chiefdoms: alliances 40, 41, 220 competition 41, 45, 216, 226 disaggregation 45, 74 origins 7, 101, 102, 218 and over-rule 107, 108, 122, 137, 140, 143, 145, 223, 262, 264 and politics 260 status 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, 232 by ascription 6, 10, 145, 161, 222, 231, 250, 279 basis for 14, 61, 179 as ‘civil servants’ 230, 232, 256, 278 as 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 236 creation of 278 and decolonization 108, 142, 252, 279 deposition of 57, 59, 94, 108, 112, 119, 144, 161 and foreign debts 268 and jurisdiction 1, 40, 61, 117, 131, 140, 157, 169, 248, 260, 251, 274, 275 and lands 194, 240, 275 and legitimation 22, 116, 126, 142, 164, 171, 187, 243, 254, 264, 280 and missionaries 135, 186, 244, 245 as ‘native authorities’ 7, 107, 121 and offices of state 85, 104, 122, 138, 181, 186, 252 as 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, 278 and revenue 49, 61, 101, 102, 130, 134, 276, 280 status 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, 142 see also ali‘i; big men; caids; emirs; headmen; kings; maharajas; obas; paramounts; roko; sultans; turaga Child, John (governor) 21 China 152, 175, 26 Chinese: in Fiji 234 in Hawaiian islands 203, 212

in Malay States 157, 161, 163, 165, 273 in Straits Settlements 150, 154 Chittagong 29, 30, 33 Chulalongkorn, King of Siam 152 Civil Lists: in Egypt 79, 60, 81, 95 in Fiji 229 in Hawaiian islands 202, 211 in India 60 in Malaya 154 in Nigeria 113 Civil Rights League 211 civil servants: indigenous agents as 54 civil service: in Fiji 231, 234, 236 in Hawaiian government 196–8, 210 in Malaya 170 in Nigeria 123 in Pacific island states 282 Clarke, Sir Andrew (Governor of the Straits Settlements) 154–6 Clementi, Sir Cecil (Governor of the Straits Settlements and High Commissioner) 167, 169 Cleveland Grover (US President) 210 client, see patron–client relations. client states 38, 74, 75, 84, 86, 95, 96, 125, 133, 145, 152, 175 clientage 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 79 in Indian states 32, 33, 42, 48, 53, 54, 60, 73, 80 in Morocco 90, 92, 94, 97 in Sudan 89 in Pacific states 197, 219, 227, 230, 232, 234, 245 see also patron–client relations clientelae 2 clientelism 5, 7, 8–10, 14, 197 see also patron–client relations. Clifford, Sir Hugh (Governor) 116, 117, 159, 166 Clive, Robert, Baron (Governor of Bengal) 1, 11, 24, 27, 29–33, 35 Cochin-China 150 coercion: 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; police Cohen, Sir Andrew Benjamin (Governor) 132 coinage: in Indian states 63 in Indian trade 21, 23 ‘collaboration’ 1, 4, 5 in imperial historiography 262 in South-East Asia 172 Collins, John (Resident at Lucknow) 54 colonial administration, see Belgian British, French, German administration colonial administrators: as ‘chiefs’ 256 see also commissioners; governors; political officers; residents ‘colonial compacts’ 4 Colonial Office 75, 125 and chieftaincy 109, 119, 120, 155, 167, 168, 261 and Fiji 224 and Malay States 155, 159, 166, 167, 169 and Tonga 249, 255 Colvin, Sir Auckland (Indian and Egyptian Administrator) 83 commissioners 260 East-Central Africa 73, 74, 75,130, 131 Fiji 229, 231, 232, 242, 243, 244, 245, 255, 256, 257 in India 48, 58, 75 Malaya 94, 95, 97 Southern Africa 79, 80 in West Africa 67, 68, 69, 103, 117, 118, 121 commoners (‘youngmen’): Buganda 126 Fiji 232, 233, 238, 239 Gold Coast (Ghana) 107 in the Hawaiian Islands 186, 190, 194, 195, 204, 207, 214, 226 Condominium, see Sudan Confederacy Council (Ashanti) 106 confederations (matanitu) 216, 218, 220, 225, 238, 253 Congress, see Indian National Congress Conseil 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 monarchy consuls, consuls-general, consular agents: as administrators 82–3, 85 and chiefs 102, 143, 188, 189, 224 Hawaiian 198 and settlers 221, 248, 253

Convention People’s Party (Gold Coast, Ghana) 108 Cook Islands 273, 282 ‘co-ordinate units’: in imperial administration 273 Coorg 57 Cornwallis, Charles, Earl, Marquis 34, 39, 43, 46 Coromandel Coast 19, 43 corruption: in Fijian government 235, 239 in Hawaiian government 198, 204, 205, 207 in Malaysian civil service 278 in Northern Nigerian government 122 in Senegalese politics 142 in successor states 141 see 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, 233 Gold Coast 107, 108, 109 governors’ 20, 159 Indian states 15, 51, 59, 67, 75, 218, 227 Malay states 161–3, 166, 167, 170–2, 175–6 and politics 119, 120, 172 in Nigeria 119, 272 provincial 106, 233, 236 in Uganda 129 see also local government Court of Directors, see East India Company courts: appellate 15 in India 20, 34 in Southern Nigeria 103 see also Crown Courts; jurisdiction Courts of Equity 10, 102 Coussey Commission: Gold Coast (Ghana) 108 credit: in African trade 102 in Egypt 8, 81, 84 in Indian trade 20, 42, 55, 267 in Malaya 166 see also debt servicing Cromer, Evelyn Baring, Earl (Consul-General in Egypt) 82, 84, 85, 95, 256, 271 Crowder, Michael (historian) 259 Crown (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, 275 see also Supreme Court Crown lands: in Egypt 81 in Fiji 225, 226, 275 in the Hawaiian islands 195, 201, 207, 214 Crown prerogatives: in imperial administration 261 Curzon, George Nathaniel, Marquis (Viceroy) 60, 65 custom, see chiefs; chieftaincy; ‘tradition’ customary law, see jurisdiction customs privileges: in Indian trade 19, 21 Cutch, India 61 Dagomba 106 Dahomey kingdom 103, 138 Dalhousie, James Andrew Broun-Ramsay, Marquis (Governor-General) 57 Damon, C. A. 210 darbar (administrative court) 11, 27, 38, 48, 60, 61, 64, 256, 258 dastaks (licences) 23 Dato Onn (politician) 170 Daudi Cwa (Kabaka of Buganda) 130 Daulat Rao Sindia 49 debt servicing 2, 25 and China trade 150 East India Company 36, 73 and Egypt 80, 82, 86, 95, 268 and Fijian chiefs 221, 222, 248 and Hawaiian government 188, 202, 204–6 and Indian states 37–40, 44, 47, 50, 52, 63, 73, 74, 270 and Malayan nobles 165, 273 and Morocco 90, 95 and Tonga 251 and subordination 79, 268, 269 Deccan 24, 34, 40, 42, 47, 74 Deccani nationalism 68 Declaration of Rights (1839): in Hawaiian government 190 decolonization: in Fiji 233 in High Commission Territories 139 in Malaya 168 in Rwanda-Burundi 136, 145 Deed of Cession, Fiji 227 Delhi 12, 29, 35, 39, 40, 44, 48, 57, 60 Delhi College 54 Democratic Party, Botswana 138 Des Voeux, Sir G. W. (governor) 231, 257 de-stoolments, see chiefs dewan (finance minister) 29, 37, 39, 64, 51, 53, 63, 64, 70, 80, 270

dewani (financial administration) 30, 33 Dillingham, Benjamin 210 Dinka, people 89 Dinkar Rao (Minister in Gwalior) 63 district officers 15, 116, 123 as brokers 175 as magistrates 275 in Malay States 163, 272 Malays as 164 see also commissioners; political officers; residents Doab 40, 48 Dole, Sanford B. (Hawaiian politician) 205, 208, 210, 213 Douglas, W. B. (Resident in Selangor) 157 Dufferin, Frederick Temple Blackwood, Marquis, Ambassador at Constantinople 83, 84 Duncan, Jonathan (Resident in Benares) 39 Dundas, Sir Charles (Governor) 131 Dupleix, Jean François, Governor of Pondicherry 24 dustucks, see dastaks Dutch administration: in Ceylon 15 Dutch East Indies 226 Dutch merchants: in South-East Asia 149 East Africa Protectorate (Kenya) 125 East African Federation 132 East India Company 9, 19, 23, 72, 268 alliances and military support 42, 44 Charter of 1661 20 Charter Renewal Act, 1813 57 dependency on Mughal authorities 12, 19, 72 finances 25, 30, 43, 51, 73 and imperial administration 267 ‘Indian’ methods of influence 45 and Indian states 19–58 legacy of over-rule 55 and Malay states 152 methods of expansion 30, 35 monopoly 20 as Mughal successor 278 private traders 25, 27 Regulating Act, 1772 33 relations with rulers 11, 35, 265 reversal of status 32 in South-East Asia 149–51, 175 tribute to 29, 52 see also Indian princes; residents Egba people 103, 118 Egypt 2, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88–90, 93, 94, 258 administration in 95 army mutinies 82

Index 313 British occupation 83, 95 Chamber of Notables 83 as a client state 84 Commission of Liquidation 82 Constitution, 1922 86 finances 81, 82, 84 King of 79 as a mediatized state 80 merchants and land-owners 85 nationalist movement 85 opposition groups 82 as a patrimonial state 271 Treaty with Britain (1936) 86 tributary to Ottoman Empire 80 Wafd political party 86 see also Khedivate; Sudan eika (lineage chief) 240 Elliot, F. A. H. (tutor to prince in Baroda) 64 Elphinstone, Hon. Mountstuart (Governor of Bombay) 57 Emir of Kano 124 salary 114 emirs: councils 117, 122 in Northern Nigerian politics 120, 122, 124 status 110, 116, 140, 271 emirates: classification 112 courts 126 see also Nigeria Epeli (son of Cakobau) 225 ethnicity and government: in Fiji 234, 238, 253 in Hawaiian government 204 euphemisms, see collaboration; indirect rule European treaties: influence in India 32 extraterritorial jurisdiction, see jurisdiction factionalism: in Hawaiian government 208, 252 in Tongan government 254 see also segmentation Faizabad Treaty, 1775 35, 37 falefa (court) 243 Fallers, L. A. (anthropologist) 6, 139 Fanti states (Gold Coast) 104 farman, imperial decree 21, 23 Farouk I (King of Egypt) 86 Farrukhsiyar (Mughal Emperor) 21 Federated Malay States, see Malaya, Malay States Fiji islands, Fijians 151, 181, 258 annexation, 1874 224, 253 Civil Service 254 Constitutions 223–4, 233, 237 Crown lands 225, 253

Deed of Cession 216, 221, 225 economy 239 government (pre-1874) 221–3 independence, 1970 233 Indians 234, 236, 253 jurisdiction 226 land commissions 228, 237 Legislative Council 228, 223 plantations 222 Public Service Commission 235 Senate of Chiefs 237 social and political organization 218 taxes 226, 227, 232 territory and population 216 and Tonga 222, 225 ‘tradition’ 227 Fiji High Commissioners 249, 254 see also Western Pacific High Commission Fijian Administration 216, 228, 229, 231–2, 238, 253, 279 and chiefs 225–33 Native Assistants 232 Native Department 232 Fijian Affairs Board 227–8, 232–3, 237 Finau (paramount chief) 244, 245 force, see armed forces; coercion; police Foreign and Political Department, India 60, 64–6, 75 Foreign Jurisdiction Acts 65, 261, 274 Foreign Office (British) 72, 80, 125 Fort St George, see Madras Fort William, see Calcutta France: and the Hawaiian Islands 206 and India 24, 73 in Indo-China 152 Overseas Territories and Departments 281 and Tonga 245 Free Church of Tonga 247–9, 254 French administration: in Morocco 79–96, 268, 270, 271 in West Africa 122, 260 French Polynesia 282 French Union 96 Fuad, Ahmad (King of Egypt) 86 Fulani, people 8, 109–14, 116–17, 122–3 fur trade, Pacific 185 Furidkot 50 Gaekwad of Baroda 41, 45, 50, 5, 64 Gambetta, Léon 83 Gambia 122 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, ‘Mahatma’ (Indian nationalist) 69 Ganges delta 91, 21 Ganwa chiefly oligarchy: in Burundi 135, 136

314 Index George IV, King 188 George V, King 88 German administration: in Rwanda-Burundi 134 in Samoa 273 Gibson, Walter Murray (businessman and minister) 190, 203–5 gift exchange: in patronage systems 26, 36, 54 Girouard, Sir Edward Percy (Governor) 110 Glover (Sir) John Hawley (Governor of Lagos Colony and Protectorate) 103 Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate (Ghana) 10, 104, 119, 265 constitutional change 106, 108 chiefdoms 104–6, 265 European intervention 10 use of chiefs and councils 122, 143 see also Akan; Akim; Asante; Northern Territories Goldman, Irving (anthropologist) 179 Gonja 104 Goodenough, J. G. Commodore 224 Gopaul Doss (bankers) 36 Gorakphur 40 Gordon, Sir Arthur, see Hamilton-Gordon Gorst, Sir John Eldon (Consul-General in Egypt) 85 Government of India, see India governors 4, 14, 15, 20, 256 in Africa 116, 117, 143, 268, 271 East India Company 32, 40, 45, 48, 51, 55, 76 Egyptian 85, 96 in Fiji 216, 233, 256 Hawaiian 185, 191, 194, 197, 198, 206, 213, 215, 277 as high commissioners 254 in Malaya 155, 157, 159, 175 in Morocco 90, 92 as patrons 159, 248 in Sudan 88 Tongan 240, 244, 246, 252, 254 in Zanzibar 125 governors-general 33, 34, 36, 40 Grant, H. E. W. (consul) 249 Great Britain: and Fijian cession 224, 225 and the Hawaiian Islands 200 and Tonga 248–51, 254 see also British administration; Colonial Office; Foreign Office Great Council of Chiefs 237 see also Council of Chiefs Grey, Sir George (governor-general) 246 Grunshi, West Africa 104

Guillemard, Sir Lawrence (Governor of the Straits Settlements and High Commissioner) 166 Guinea, West Africa 122 Gujarat 19–21, 41, 63 Gwalior state, India 41, 42, 48, 49, 52, 61, 62, 63 Gwandu, West Africa 111 Gyaman, Gold Coast 104 ha‘a (maximal lineage) 240, 246 Ha‘alilio, Timothy 189 Ha‘apai 242, 243, 245 Habe (Hausa) kingdoms 110, 111 Haider Ali (ruler of Mysore) 42, 43 Haider Beg Khan (Minister in Awadh) 37, 39 Hailey, 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) 210 Hamilton-Gordon, Sir Arthur Charles, Baron Stanmore (Governor) 11, 14, 151, 174, 216, 226, 227, 247, 257, 273 hanai (fostering) 192 haole (foreigners, white settlers) 183, 188, 191, 194, 196, 198, 204, 208, 214 Harlow, Vincent T. (historian) 72 Harris, Charles (Minister in Hawaiian government) 200 Harrison, Benjamin (US President) 210 Hasan Reza Khan (Minister in Awadh) 37 Hassan II (King of Morocco) 94, 96 Hastings, Warren (Governor-General of Bengal) 33, 34, 36–8, 42–6 hau (secular rule) 242, 243, 245 see also chieftaincy; paramountcy Hausa, people 6, 8, 13, 109–12, 114, 117, 123 Hausa culture: patronage in 111 Hawai‘i, Hawaiian Islands 179, 181, 184, 185 as American Territory 210 annexed, 1898 201 and foreign investment 209 immigration 215, 212, 227 political and social structure 184, 185 population and resources 180, 184, 207, 212 Hawai‘ian Kingdom 252, 258, 264, 266, 269 acknowledged as independent 188 and Anglo-American law 274 Civil Service 196–9 committee of public safety 209

Index 315 constitutions 190–2, 205, 207, 208, 192 finances 196, 252 foreign relations 200–5 franchise 207, 214 House of Nobles 190, 191, 204 House of Representatives 192 and land 195 monarchy 188, 190, 192, 201 nationalism 208 overthrown 201, 252 as a patrimonial state 181, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190–2, 194, 196, 205–8, 213 politics 202, 207, 211, 214 provisional republic 208, 211 see also France; Great Britain; United States of America Hawaiian League 206 Hawaiian nationalism 222 Hawkins, William 19 headmen: 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, penghulus Heussler, Robert (historian) 157 Hi Kalai‘aina party 207 hierarchies: in colonial government 256 duality in 242 fate of 141 in Fiji 227–8, 237, 253 in Hawaiian government 282 in Malay States 173 terminology for 172 see also line of power; over-rule High Commission Territories 145 see also Botswana; Lesotho; Swazi High Commissioners 268 in Egypt 86 in Malaya 166, 167, 170 in Nigeria 104, 110, 278 in South Africa 138 Western Pacific 248, 249, 251, 254 Hihifo (Tongatapu) 245 Hindu, 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, 269 diffusion of power 4, 185, 273 and imperial chronology 10, 12, 13, 79, 265, 273 and ‘imperial discourse’ 2, 16 imperialism of free trade 102 and ‘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, 262 of Pacific societies 181 of patrimonial states 71 HMS Blonde 188 Hocart, A. M. (anthropologist) 219 Holkar Marathas 41, 44, 49, 61 Home Rule Party 214 Hong Kong 150 Honolulu 183, 185 Honolulu Rifles 205, 206 Hugli, port 19–21 Hunter, Hamilton (consul) 249 Husain Kamil Pasha (Sultan of Egypt) 86 Hussain Khan (Dewan in Awadh) 39 Hutu people 134–6, 145 Hyderabad state: and East India Company 34, 40, 42–5, 52–3, 73 and foreign alliances 21–4, 49, 74 and residents 62, 64 and Indian politics 68 Hyderabad (Deccan) Company Limited 62 Hyderabad State Railway Company 62 I‘i, John 190, 191 Ibadan, Nigeria 103, 118, 119 Ibadan Progressive Union 119 Idris (Sultan of Perak) 161, 163 Ijebu state 268 Ilorin 103 im Thurn, Sir Everard (governor) 248, 249 Imbokodvo Party, Swaziland 139 Imerina kingdom 138 imperial ‘discourse’, see historiography imperial administration: autochthonous 264 cross-fertilization in methods 264 national ‘styles’ 260 and political theory 263 and protectorates 264 pragmatism in 264 purposes 260 symbiotic relations in 4, 118, 131, 14, 258, 273, 275, 276, 280 see also Belgian; British; Dutch; French; German Imperial British East Africa Company 128 imperial patronage: and business 173 imperial policy: co-ordination of 71 Independents: in Hawaiian politics 205

316 Index India, Indians 23, 34, 53, 55, 234, 236–7, 239, 266, 274 banking houses 54 in Fiji 234, 236, 253 population and territory 55 trade routes 19 see also Indian Government; Indian princes India Office 58, 61, 72, 76 Indian Army 270 Indian Civil Service 70, 164 Indian Government (Raj): agencies 48, 50, 53, 61, 62, 63, 64 commissioners, collectors 58 Foreign and Political Department 60–6, 75 patron rivalry in 59 Indian Mutiny and Civil Rebellion 57, 58, 63, 74 Indian National Congress 68, 69, 70, 72, 75 Indian nationalism 67 Indian opium, see opium Indian Penal Code: in Perak State 155 Indian ‘Political Law’ 65 Indian Political Service 65, 70 see also political officers; residents Indian presidencies, see Bengal; Bombay; Madras Indian princes, princely states 3, 6, 7, 11, 45, 47, 55, 57, 60, 65, 69, 139, 168, 258, 275–7 and arbitration 61 area and population 55 competition between 12, 35 conferences 66 and constitutional change 67, 270 defined as a ‘political community’ 65 finances 60, 62, 63 loans to government 62 protected from annexation 59 salutes and honours 60 status of 47, 65, 69, 270 succession disputes 50 treaties, treaty rights 58 Indian States Committee, 1927 67 ‘indirect’ rule 5, 122, 141 and Indian states 11, 59 political content of 257 and pre-colonial structures 140 see also historiography Indore state 41, 49, 61, 62, 64 Indus, River 50 ‘informal empire’, see historiography international rivalry: as patron rivalry 12 in India 24 in South-East Asia 150

‘inversion’, see reversal of status Irwin, see Halifax Iskander (Sultan of Perak) 166 Islam 79, 93, 9, 96, 97, 110, 125, 274 Ismail (Khedive of Egypt) 80, 81, 95 Istiqlal Party (Morocco) 94 iTaukei, commoners 180 Ives, Edward (Resident in Awadh) 39 izzat (prestige of a ruler) 60 Ja Ja (merchant chief) 102 jagirs (revenue lands) 29, 38, 61 Jahangir (Mughal Emperor) 19 Jaipur 61, 62 Jam Sahib of Nawanagar 63 James I, King 19 Japan: and Hawaiian annexation 212 Java 149 Jodhpur State 49, 62 Johnston, Sir Harry (administrator) 53, 128, 129 Johore State 161, 175, 205 Judd, A. F. (Hawaiian attorney-general) 210 Judd, Dr Gerrit (medical missionary and government minister) 189, 190–2, 195 judges: administrators as 15 Crown 34 Hawaiian 197, 205, 213 Islamic 90, 91, 92, 111 Malayan 162 in Native Courts 108 Junagarah State 50 jurisdiction: Alkali courts 275 in Buganda 131 extra-territorial 53, 150, 152 in Hawaiian government 203, 210, 219 Hindu Shastras (codes) 275 and imperial power 274 in Islamic states 275 in Madras 266 in Malay States 163 in Nigeria 276 over protected subjects 15 in Tonga 246, 248 see also courts; judges; law codes; Supreme Court Ka‘ahumanu (wife of Kamehameha I) 185–9 kabaka (paramount in Buganda) 126, 128–34, 271 Kabbaka Yekka Party 133 Kaggwa, Sir Apollo (Katakiro of Buganda) 128, 131, 132 kahu (teacher) 189

Index 317 kainga (descent group) 240 Kaiulani (Hawaiian princess) 209, 211 Kakunguru, Semei (general and administrator) 129 Kalakaua, David (Hawaiian King 1874–91) 192, 194, 198, 200–7, 252 Kali‘anaole, Jonah Kuhio (Hawaiian Delegate to Congress) 214 Kamehameha I (King of the Hawaiian Islands 1795–1819) 185, 187, 188, 190 Kamehameha II 186 see also Liholiho Kamehameha III 188–90, 192, 196, 204 Kamehameha IV 192 Kamehameha, Lot (Kamehameha V) 197 Kampala, Uganda 132 Kana‘ina, Charles 190 Kandavu island 232 Kandy (Kingdom) 151 Kano, Nigeria 104, 110, 111, 113, 114, 124 Kapu (sacred) 187 Kapurthala 50 Karagwe state 128 Kashmir 50 Kasimbazar, market 19, 27 katakiro (chief minister of Buganda) 128, 132 Kathiawar 50, 61, 63 Kathiawar Agency 63 Katsina Emirate 113 Kaua‘i island 185 Kauikeaouli (Kamehameha III 1825–54) 186 kaukau ali‘i (service gentry) 186, 189, 190 Ke‘eaumoku (chief and governor) 188 Ke‘elikolani, Ruth (governor) 192 Kedah 161 Kekuanao‘a, Mataiao (Governor of O‘ahu) 189, 190, 192, 195, 197 Kelantan 161 Kenya 142, 264 Khama, Tshekedi (Botswana paramount) 138 Khandi Rao (Gaekwad) 59 Khedivate, in Egypt 79, 81–2, 84, 95, 268 Kimberley, John Wodehouse, Earl (Secretary of State for the Colonies) 154, 224 Kina‘u (Regent to Kauikeaouli) 188, 192 kingship: as constitutional monarchy 251 in East-Central Africa 126 in Morocco 95 and primogeniture 246 in Tonga 245, 246, 249 see also chieftaincy; Hawaiian Kingdom; paramountcy Kinney, William 205

Kitchener, Horatio Herbert, Earl (general) 85 Kono, Sierra Leone 141 konohiki (stewards, agents) 186, 198 Kordofan province, Sudan 88 Kotah 49 Kuakini (Governor of Maui) 187, 188 Kuala Kangsar 157 Kuala Lumpur 159, 166, 176 Kuala Lumpur–Klang railway 158 kuhina nui (senior minister) 188, 189, 191, 192, 197 Kumasi, Gold Coast 104 Kutch, India 50 labour 224, 226, 253 administration 131, 134, 145, 162, 190, 224, 275 in Buganda 131 and clientage 2, 130 coerced 116, 128, 151, 158, 186, 269, 271 competition for 138 contracted 202, 213, 222 immigrant 203, 253 as an imperial resource 113, 137, 264, 269 payment for 113 recruitment by chiefs 232 services avoided 198 services for chiefs 185, 186, 190, 194, 223, 230, 272 status of 114 Labour Party, Fiji 236, 239 Labuan 156 Lagos, Nigeria 14, 103, 117, 119, 122 Lagos Colony and Protectorate 103 Lahainaluna school 189 Lakeba (Lakemba) island 222 land 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, 272 and 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 of Commissioners landlord–stranger relations: in West Africa 101 Lango district 130 Lapaha, Tongatapu 242, 243

318 Index Larut, Malaya 154, 156 Lau islands, Fiji 180, 218, 221, 222, 232, 253 Laval, Father Honoré 247 law codes 246 adopted by chiefs 187, 188 in Hawaiian government 191, 252 in Tonga 245, 246 see also jurisdiction Lawry, Walter (missionary) 244 lawyers, African 117 Layard, E. L. 224 leaders, leadership: continuities in Africa 141 defined 7, 10 historiography 181 see also big men; chiefs,chieftaincy Lee Warner, Sir William (civil servant and author) 65, 276 Legislative Councils: in Botswana 138 in Egypt 84, 85 in Fiji 228, 233 Gold Coast 106, 108 in India 69 in Swaziland 139 in Uganda 132 legitimation 142, 261 Lesotho (Basutoland) 138, 145 Lethem, G. J. (administrator) 275 Liberal Party: in Hawaiian politics 206, 208 Light, Francis (trader and administrator) 149 Liholiho (Kamehameha II 1819–1824) 186, 187, 188 Lili‘uokalani (Hawaiian Queen 1891–93) 194, 206–8, 210, 211, 213, 252 Limba, people 101 Limbdi state 59 ‘line of power’ 230, 262, 236 in Fiji 229, 231, 253 in Indian states 55 in Tonga 250 lineages 6 and political offices 258 rivalries 240, 243 succession 116 local government 140 in British India 65 finances 227 in Fiji 228, 229, 233 Gold Coast (Ghana) 107 and imperial administration 120, 259, 260, 261, 277 Southern Nigeria 120 Lodge, Henry Cabot 212 Lomaiviti 230, 231

London Missionary Society 245 London, Jack (novelist) 282 Lot Kamehameha (Kamehameha V 1863–72) 192 Lotu Tonga 221 Low, Sir Hugh (Resident in Perak) 155–7, 257 Lucknow 35, 38, 39 Lugard, 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 the Hawaiian islands 1873–1874) 190, 194 Luo, people (Kenya) 125 Luyia, people (Kenya) 125 Lyautey, Louis Herbert (Resident-General in Morocco) 92 Lytton, Edward Robert Bulwer, Earl (Viceroy) 59 Ma‘afu (Tongan noble) 221–2, 225, 253 Ma‘aji (treasurers) 114 McCallum, Henry (Governor Lagos Colony and Protectorate) 103 Macartney, Sir George, Baron 149 McCook, General (US Minister to the Hawaiian Islands) 200 MacDonald, M. J. (Governor-General of Malaya) 169 MacGregor, Sir William (Governor, Lagos Colony and Protectorate) 103 McKinley Tariff, 1890 200, 211 Mackinnon, Sir William (businessman) 125 MacMichael, Sir Harold (Commissioner to Malaya) 168, 171 Madhava Rao, Sir T. (Dewan Baroda state) 64 Madras, India 5, 19–24, 27, 33–4, 40–8, 51–2, 56, 59, 62, 64, 72–4 Madras Council 42, 43 Maffey, Sir John (Governor-General of the Sudan) 88 Maghrib 90, 93, 94 Mahan, Captain Alfred Thayer 212 maharajas 49, 52 Jaipur 61 Mysore 51 Sindia 62, 63 Maharashtra 74 Mahdism, Mahdiyya 86, 88, 115 see also Sudan Mahele (land division) 194, 195, 198 Mahune, Boaz 189, 190 Mair, L. (anthropologist) 6, 126, 139, 141

Index 319 Maitland, Sir Thomas (general and administrator) 151 Maiturare (Sultan of Sokoto) 115 Makhosini Diamini (Swazi Prince) 139 Makhzen administration 91, 92, 93 Malabar Coast 42, 43 Malacca, see Straits Settlements Malacca sultanate 152 Malay Administrative Service 164, 176, 273 Malay Chinese Association 174 Malay College, Kuala Kangsar 164 Malay Congress 169 Malay nationalism 171 Malay Planning Unit 168 Malay rulers (sultans) 171 and constitutional change 176 Head of State 170 and political parties 172 Rulers’ Conference 170 status 159, 171, 172, 175 see also chieftaincy Malay Union 180 Malaya, Malay States 258 aristocracy 158 citizenship 170 constitution 169 finances 165 independence 171 investment in 158 and Japanese occupation 168, 171 jurisdiction in 169 treaty revision 168 Malayan Civil Service (MCS) 164, 170, 113, 279 Malayan Communist Party 170 Malayanisation in the civil service 170, 174, 176 Malaysia: government patronage in 174 Malcolm, Sir John (Governor of Bombay) 57 Malhar Rao Holkar 49 Malhar Rao, Gaekwad 59 Malo, David (historian) 189 Mamprussi, West Africa 104, 106 Mangareva, French Polynesia 247 Mantri of Perak 154, 155 Mara, Ratu Sir Kamisese (Prime Minister of Fiji) 233, 236, 237 Maratha, chiefdoms 21, 22, 24, 34, 35, 40–5, 48, 56–8, 74 and Bombay 45 political organization 40–1 treaty 41 and tributaries 44 see also peshwa March, E. (Consul) 224

Margai, Milton (Prime Minister of Sierra Leone) 142 Mariner, William 244 Marquesas islands 179 Marrakesh 9 matanitu, see confederations matapule (stewards, retainers) 240, 242, 243, 247 Maui island 185 Maxwell, W. E. (Resident in Selangor) 158 Maxwell, W. G. (Chief Secretary in Malaya) 166, 169 MCS see Malayan Civil Service Mende, people 102, 121 Mengo, Buganda 130 merchants: African 88, 102 European 7, 10, 19, 25, 102 Indian 9, 19, 20, 23, 25, 27, 45 see also chartered companies Merrill, George W. (US Minister to the Hawaiian Islands) 205 Mewar, India 61 Middleton, Nathaniel (Resident in Awadh) 36 Midnapur, India 29, 30, 33 military coups: in Fiji 254 see also armed forces; Indian Mutiny Mill, James 57 Mindon Min (King of Burma) 152 Minto, Gilbert John Murray Elliot, Earl (Viceroy) 66 Mir Jafar (Nawab of Bengal) 27 Mir Kasim 29 missionaries 125, 143, 180, 182, 220, 224, 253 and chiefs 187 co-option of 265 in Fiji 221 in the Hawaian Islands 183, 187 Pacific islanders as 220, 224, 225 in Tonga 244 Mitchell, Sir Charles (Governor of the Straits Settlements) 159 mo‘i (paramount, Hawaiian islands) 184, 190 Moala island (Fiji) 219, 222 Moeaki (chief) 245 Moloka‘i island 185 monarchy: in Egypt 105 in Buganda 132, 133 in Burundi 136 in Ceylon 151 Hawaiian 183–204, 296, 302 in Morocco 84

320 Index monarchy (cont.): in Rwanda 134 in Tonga 271–8, 296 see also Crown; ‘consitutional’ monarchy; kingship; Victoria Money, J. W. B. (author) 226 Mongkut, King of Siam 152 Montagu–Chelmsford Report (1918) 65 Morocco 79, 264, 265, 268, 270, 271, 275, 280 courts 91 and French over-rule 92–5, 96 kingship in 94–5 nationalist movement 93–4 as a patrimonial state 90–2, 96–7 protectorate treaty (1912) 90 sultanate 79, 90, 265 Moshoeshoe (Sotho paramount) 38 Mossi Kingdom, West Africa 106 Moulay Hafidh, Sultan of Morocco 91 Moulton, Rev. J. E. 248 Mountbatten, Louis, Earl (Viceroy) 68, 69 Mpande (Zulu paramount) 137 Mu‘a, Tongatapu 244 Mubarak, Nawab of Bengal 33 Mughal empire 21, 24, 27, 40, 42, 47, 74 and Europeans 10, 19, 20, 21, 30, 57, 72, 265 nobility 64 as a patrimonial system 22, 72 successor states 11, 22, 32, 40, 43, 55, 265, 278 see also Akbar; Alamgir II; Farrukhsiyar; Jahangir; Shah Alam Muhammad Ali Khan (Nawab of Arcot and the Carnatic) 24, 44 Muhammad Ali Walajah (Nawab of the Carnatic) 42 Muhammed ben Moulay ‘Arafa (Sultan of Morocco) 94 Muhammed ben Yussuf (Sultan of Morocco) 103, 106 mukama (paramount in Nyoro) 126 Mukhtar (Minister in Awadh) 37 muli (foreigners) 244 Munro, Sir Thomas (Governor of Madras) 56, 57 munshis (assistants) 54 Murshid Kuli Khan (Nawab of Bengal) 23 Murshidabad, Bengal 27, 29, 33, 73 Museveni (President of Uganda) 134 Musinga (Mwami of Rwanda) 134 Muslims, see Islam Mustafa Fahmy (Prime Minister of Egypt) 85 Muteba II (Kabaka of Buganda) 280

Mutesa II, Sir Edward (Kabaka of Buganda) 131, 132 mwami of Burundi 136 mwami (paramount in Rwanda) 135 Mwanga (Kabaka of Buganda) 128 Mysore state 42, 43, 45, 48–51, 53, 55–7, 59, 62–4, 68–9, 74, 270 control by Madras 44 maharaja restored 52, 60 Nagpur 41, 45, 49, 52 Nailatikau (son of Cakobau) 225 Najm-ud-Daula (Nawab of Bengal) 30 Nana Ofori Atta (Omanhene of Akyem Abuakwa) 107, 108 Natal 71, 264, 269 and Zulu chiefdoms 137 National Federation Party (Fiji) 233, 234, 236 National Liberation Movement (Gold Coast, Ghana) 109 National Reform Party (Hawaiian islands) 206 nationalist movements 59, 68, 69, 83, 94, 167, 169, 172, 176, 282 in Buganda 132 and chiefs 234, 236, 237, 251, 254, 260, 272, 279 in Egypt 96 in Malaya 169 in Morocco 93, 94 Nationalist Unionist Party (Sudan) 89 ‘Native Authorities’ 7, 107, 110, 117, 120, 129 see also local government Native Councils 102, 108, 117, 140 see also councils Naulivou, Savenaca (brother of Cakobau) 225 Nawab of Bengal 29, 33, 267 Nayacakalou, R. R. (anthropologist) 228, 230, 238 Negri Sembilan, Malaya 15, 161, 165 Neguib, Mohammed (Egyptian general) 86 Nehru, Jawaharlal (Indian politician and Prime Minister) 68 Nepal, Kingdom 50, 280 New Caledonia 179 New Zealand 3, 4, 71 and Western Samoa 273 Niger Delta 102 Niger Protectorate 103 Nigeria 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, 259 amalgamation 114, 117, 118

Index 321 chiefs in 103, 104, 118, 122, 140, 265, 271, 278 Civil Service 123 conquest and over-rule 110, 261 constitutions 27 corruption 256 Federation 123 joint hierarchy in 113, 116, 121, 131, 144, 256, 273, 274, 276 Northern Provinces 104, 110, 140, 144, 256, 261, 265 patrimonial elements in 109 political culture 15, 124, 142, 256 politicians and chiefs 119, 144, 260, 272, 280 revenue and over-rule 114, 271 Southern Provinces 119 see also Lagos Colony and Protectorate Nigerian Youth Movement 119 Nile Frontier Force 84 Nizam of Hyderabad 42, 43, 44, 68 Nkrumah, Kwame (Premier and President of Ghana) 108, 109 nobles, nobility: as administrators 164, 198, 204, 248, 250, 251 as a class 185 as clients of chiefs 64, 206 in conciliar government 162, 190, 191, 192, 204, 205, 207, 246 and European agents 27, 161, 272 and resources 22, 62, 164, 201, 246, 247, 250, 265 see also service gentry North West Provinces 48 North-Eastern Confederation (Fiji) 222 Northern Circars, India 42 Northern Peoples Congress (Nigeria) 123 Northern Territories (Gold Coast) 106, 107, 109 Nubar Pasha (Prime Minister of Egypt) 81 Nuer, people 89 Nupe Emirate 110 Nyoro state 126 O‘ahu island 183, 184, 185–7 Obas 103, 118, 119 see also Yoruba Obote, Milton (Prime Minister of Uganda) 133, 134 Ochterlony, David (Resident at Delhi) 54 Olubadan of Ibadan (Yoruba paramount) 118, 119 Omani Arabs 50, 125 Oni of Ife (Yoruba paramount) 103, 118 opium 52, 62, 65 in Malay States 157, 165

Opium War 150 ‘orientalism’ 54 Orissa, India 19, 21, 30, 32, 33, 35 Ottoman Empire 79, 80, 95 and Egypt 82, 84 over-rule 34, 118, 257 and chieftaincy 14, 16, 33, 47, 49, 157, 164, 168, 179, 230, 251, 272, 278 and custom 253 and decolonization 141, 145 denotation 16, 121, 151, 159, 171, 216, 258, 259 and diffusion of power 4, 185, 273 establishment of 72, 86, 89, 117, 138, 143, 151, 155, 157, 175, 218, 225, 260, 264, 273 expansion of 96 gradations of 3 and imperial hierarchy 3, 52, 54, 58, 76, 144, 176, 278 and institutional change 173, 254 methods of 268, 269, 274, 276 and patrimonial states 57, 71, 79, 92, 94, 95, 130, 140, 144, 255 and politics 256 and prescription 7, 13, 37, 39, 60, 65, 70, 109, 113, 121, 128, 139, 144, 155, 181 resistance to 5, 12, 33, 92, 94, 168, 171, 211, 249, 269, 272, 273 styles of 259 see also Belgian; British; Dutch; East India Company; French; German Pagan Min (King of Burma) 152 Pahang state, Malaya 158, 159, 162 Palmer, Sir Herbert Richmond (Resident, Lieutenant-Governor, Northern Nigeria) 113, 115, 116 Palmer, William (Resident in Awadh) 36, 39 Palu (chief) 244 Pangkor Engagement (1874) 154–6 Papua New Guinea 179 paramountcy, paramounts 1, 3, 6, 58 basis of power 184 by title accession 6, 254 in Anglo-Indian relations 57, 74, 270 in Rwanda 134 in the Hawaiian Islands 184 Northern Gold Coast 106 in Tonga 240 see 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-Pertuan Agong

322 Index parganas (districts) 30 Parker, Samuel (Hawaiian politician) 208 Parsis 64 Passfield, see Webb, Sydney James Patiala state 50, 59, 60, 68 Patna 23 patrimonial states 5, 91, 95, 136, 140, 144, 174, 185, 269, 270 compared 265, 292 deconstructed 152, 206, 258 political offices in 198, 283 used by foreign administrators 79 see also Buganda; chieftaincy; Egypt; Hawaiian Kingdom; hierarchy; Indian princes, princely states; Malaya; Morocco; Nigeria; patrimonialism patrimonialism 5 in Awadh 36, 37 and bureaucracy 126, 129, 131, 185 in East-Central Africa 126, 132 in Egypt 84, 280 and finance 269 in Ghanaian government 283 and patron–client relations 289 in High Commission Territories 138 in Indian states 22, 53, 56, 60, 62, 63, 69, 70 in Malaya 172, 156, 162, 175, 272 in Morocco 90, 92, 95, 97 in Nepal 280 in Northern Nigeria 109, 111, 141, 256 opposition to 196, 203, 205, 206, 213, 258 in 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, 75 by East India Company directors 34 see also preferment patrons 4, 6–13 see also patron–client relations patron–client relations: in African administration 13, 102, 111, 116, 126, 128, 135, 140, 272, 277 between Africans 276 in Ceylon 151 and colonial government 142, 256, 258, 261, 262, 263, 277, 283 defined 8, 9, 111, 262 in Egyptian government 80 as an exchange system 263 in Fiji 219, 226, 230, 233, 238, 254

in Hawaiian government 189, 196, 197, 202 in India 48, 60, 63, 69, 75, 279 in Lagos politics 277 in Malaya 157, 158, 162, 163, 165 and military rule 124 in Morocco 92 in Ontario 4 in Pacific states 180, 222, 245, 247, 250, 282 as personal bargains 12 in political science 5, 280 in post-colonial states 280, 281 second-level 27, 181, 249, 251, 277 in Siam 152 in South Africa 137, 141 in Sri Lankan politics 278 in Sudan administration 88, 96 in West African trade 101, 102 and under-development 283 Pauahi, Bernice 194, 210 Pea (Tongatapu) 245 Pearl Harbor 201, 202, 252 Peking 149 Penang 149 penghulu (village chief) 156, 157–8, 163–5 Perak state 154, 156, 159, 161, 163, 257, 272 Perlis 161 ‘Permanent Settlement’ (Bengal) 268 Peshawar 50 peshwa (Maratha paramount chief) 24, 40, 41, 44, 45, 50 Phillips, S. H. (Hawaiian attorney-general) 210 Pi‘ikoi, David 189, 195 Pickering, William (Protector of Chinese in Malaya) 165 pitso (assembly), Basutoland 138 Pitt, William, the Younger (Prime Minister) 34 plantations 194, 198 Plassey, battle of (1757) 23, 29, 45, 267 police 3, 52, 61, 95, 280 Fiji 223, 225, 229, 234 Hawaiian islands 196, 197, 206, 213 jurisdiction 50 Malaya 155, 157, 170 Northern Nigeria 112, 114, 124 Rwanda-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, 277 Malaya 163–4 Nigeria 110, 112, 271, 275

Index 323 ranking 112 records 15 see also commissioners; district officers; residents Political Department, see Indian Government political party patronage: in Fiji 235 in 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 252 and colonial administration 2, 16, 116, 131, 139, 256, 258, 261, 270 and decolonization 133, 136, 142, 234, 262, 280 and elites 15, 69, 72, 75, 120, 174 and ethnicity 171, 204, 234, 254 and 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’ 13 and representation 65, 69, 81, 84, 86, 93, 106–8, 124, 133, 138–9, 140, 228, 234, 236, 248, 249 Pondicherry 24 Poona 41, 44, 45 Port Loko, Sierra Leone 101 preferment in recruitment: in New South Wales 4 see 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 status princely states, see Indian princes, princely states Pritchard, George (missionary and consul) 189, 247 Pritchard, William T. (consul) 189, 221, 222 Privy Council (Hawaiian islands) 191, 192, 195

prosopography: of administrators 15, 16 Province Wellesley, Malaya 149 provincial commissioners, see commissioners Provincial Councils: Fiji 233 Gold Coast 108 Provincial Courts 276 Public Service Appeal Board (Fiji) 235 public services, see civil service Punjab 48, 49, 59, 60, 68, 74 Purling (Resident in Awadh) 38 Quebec 71 Rabat 92 Rabeh Zobeir (Islamic war lord in Bornu) 110 Rabi (Rambi) island 221 Rabone, Feez & Co. 224 Rabuka, Sitiveni (Prime Minister of Fiji) 239 Radunath Rao (Maratha chieftain) 41 Raffles, Sir Thomas Stamford (LieutenantGovernor of Java) 149 railway agreements: Indian states 62 Yoruba states 103 Raja Muda Abdullah, Perak 154 Raja Muda Yusuf 155, 157, 161, 162 Raja of Berar (Maratha chieftain) 44 Raja of Tanjore 44 rajas 10, 34, 49 as Malay officials 156, 164 Rajkot state 59 Rajput Agency 61 Rajput states 68 Rajputana (Rajasthan) 45, 47, 48, 49, 52, 62 Rajputs 11, 22, 49 Ramnarayan (finance minister in Bengal, deputy in Bihar) 29 ranching 194, 198 Rangoon 152 Ranjit Singh, Maharaja 50 Ratu Emosi 230 reciprocity: in political relations 8, 14, 142, 156, 157, 186, 232, 238, 275 in US–Hawaiian commerce 200, 212 Treaty (1876) 200, 201, 207 Reform Party (Hawaiian islands) 206 Regent of Kedah 167 Republic of Hawai‘i 211 see also Hawaiian islands residency ‘system’ 11, 54, 157, 159, 172

324 Index residents, agents: bribery of 54 client networks 75 as envoys 45, 48 functions of 267, 270 in Indian states 27, 29, 33, 36–40, 43–5, 47–54, 56–61, 64–5, 70, 73–5, 80 and Malay rulers 145, 156, 157, 159, 163, 272, in Nigeria 111–13, 115, 116, 118, 119 salaries 48 styles of administration 157 use of indigenous agents 35, 37, 38, 52, 54, 73, 75, 79 resources, see access; labour; land; tax revenue and expenditure 30, 34, 51, 113, 229, 234 in Gold Coast (Ghana) 109 in Hawaiian government 192, 198, 200, 202, 203 in Indian states 31, 53, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 67, 73, 74, 75 in Malay States 157, 160 in Northern Nigeria 112, 115 see also debt-servicing; East India Company; tax; tribute reversal of status 11 in imperial relations 259, 267, 268 in Egypt 268 in Indian states 267 in Malay States 156, 169 in Pacific societies 182, 183, 194, 247, 273 in Western Africa 143 revolution: in Hawaiian government 206 in Rwanda-Burundi 136 Rewa, chiefdom 220, 221 Riaz Pasha (Prime Minister of Egypt) 82, 85 Richards, A. I. (anthropologist) 6, 133, 139, 141 Ricord, John 190, 191 Rif, Rif chiefs 92, 94, 96 Robinson, R. E. (historian) 5 Robinson, Sir Hercules (administrator and governor) 225, 226 Robinson, Sir William Cleaver Francis, Baron Rosmead (Governor of the Straits Settlements) 156 Rohilkhand 40 Rohillas, India 22, 45 roko, roko tui (provincial chief) 219, 226–30, 231, 232 Roko Tui Ra 230 Roko Tui Ba 231 Roko Tui Lau 232 Roosevelt, Theodore 212

Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose, Earl (Foreign Secretary, Prime Minister) 85 Rotuma island 242 Rotuman chiefs 229 royalty, see kingship Royal Niger Company 103, 104, 110, 143, 268, 278 Royal Proclamation (1858) 58 see also Indian princes, princely states Rubber Growers Association (Malaya) 158 Rudahigwa (Mwami of Rwanda) 135 rulers, indigenous 2, 11–15, 256, 260, 281, 264, 265, 267, 270, 271, 272 African 110–12, 116, 118, 122, 128, 131, 141, 143, 144, 278 in Egypt 80 Indian 12, 21, 27, 34–5, 39, 47–9, 51–2, 54, 56–76, 267, 270 Malayan 152, 158–9, 161, 164, 165–176, 271, 280 Pacific islands 187, 192, 240 see also chiefs, chieftaincy; emirs; khedive; paramounts; sultans Russell, Sir Henry (Resident in Hyderabad) 57 Rwanda-Burundi 125, 141, 144, 279 see also Burundi Saad Zaghlul 86 Saadat Ali Khan (Nawab of Awadh) 39 Sadka, Emily (historian) 159, 161, 162 Sahlins, Marshall (anthropologist) 179 Saif (Nawab of Bengal) 33 St. Julian, Charles 246 Saketi (Tongan premier) 249 Salabat Jang 24 Salafism 93 Salar Jung (Dewan in Hyderabad state) 64 Salbai, Treaty (1782) 42, 43 Salbat Jang (Nizam of Hyderabad) 42 Salote, Queen (Tupou III) 249, 250, 255, 274 salt 29, 52, 62 Samoa 181 European mediation in 268 and German administration 273 and New Zealand administration 273 and Tonga 242 Sanads (decrees) 37, 49, 58 sandalwood trade 185, 188, 194 Sarawak 156 Sardauna of Sokoto 271 segmentary lineage systems 92, 258 in East-Central Africa 125, 130, 144 and political competition 6, 7, 92, 258 Southern Sudan 89 Selangor state, Malaya 154, 159, 163, 167

Index 325 Senegal 14, 142, 277, 280 Seringapatam Island 43, 44, 60 service departments: in Buganda 133 in Malay States 155–7, 159, 162, 163, 271, 273 Northern Nigeria 112 service gentry (elites) 70 and Hawaiian government 186, 189, 195, 198 and imperial administration 158, 167, 282 in India 11, 23, 27, 36 in Malay States 151, 157 in Nigeria 276 in Sudan 88 in Uganda 133 see also nobles, nobility settlers, settler society: access to resources 195, 221, 222 incorporation of 258 status in Hawaiian islands 185, 187 and taxes 200 Seyyid Bargash (Sultan of Zanzibar) 125 Shah Alam (Mughal Emperor) 11, 29, 30, 35, 40, 42, 44 Shaka (Zulu paramount) 137 Shanghai 150 Shar‘ia law 91 Shepstone, Sir Theophilus (Secretary for Native Affairs, Natal): as ‘Paramount Chief’ 137 Shore, Sir John, Lord Teignmouth 39 Shuja-ud-Daula 29, 35, 36 Siam (Thailand) 149, 150, 152, 161, 172, 175 Sierra Leone 122, 141, 143 chiefs and big men 101, 121 Sikander Jah (Nizam of Hyderabad) 44 Sikhs 22, 48, 50, 60, 68 Sind 47, 50 Sindia Marathas 41, 42, 44, 61–3 Sindia (Maharaja of Gwalior) 61 Singapore Island 150, 159, 161, 175 Siraj-ud-Daula (Nawab of Bengal) 27, 73 sirdar (commander-in-chief) 84 slave trade 102, 143, 260, 265, 268 slavery, domestic 88, 158, 261, 267 Sleeman, W. H. (Resident in Awadh) 57 Smith, M. G. (anthropologist) 6–8, 111, 139, 141, 258 Sobhuza II (paramount of Swaziland) 138 Society Islands (French Polynesia) 179, 242, 246, 258, 273 Soga people (Uganda) 265 Soga state 128 Sokoto 110, 111 Sokoto Caliphate 103, 115

Somosomo, Fiji 219 Soqosoqo ni Vakavulewa ni Taukei Party (Fiji) 238 South Africa (Republic) 138, 145 local patron leadership in 141 Southern Nigeria, see Nigeria Speedy, Captain (Resident in Malaya) 155 Spreckels, Claus (merchant-planter) 201, 203, 205, 209, 210 State Civil Service: in Unfederated Malay States 164 state councils 166, 167, 170 Gold Coast (Ghana) 107, 109 in Malaya 164, 166, 167, 170, 273 Southern Nigeria 119 State Rulers, see rulers Statutes, Acts: Charter Renewal Act (1813) 57 Currency Act (1876) 63 Foreign Jurisdiction Act (1890) 65, 168, 261, 274 Government of India Act (1935) 167 Hawaiian Organic Act (1900) 213 Protection Act (1922) 67 Regulating Act (1773) 33, 43 Tonga Lands Act (1882) 246 Stevens, John L (US Minister for the Hawaiian Islands) 208, 210 stipending of chiefs, see chiefs, chieftaincy Straits Settlements 149, 157, 175 links with China 150 links with India 150 subadar (imperial governor): East India Company as 33 succession disputes, see chiefs, chieftaincy Sudan 79, 84, 86, 88, 89, 95 Anglo-Egyptian 84–6, 96 factional politics 89 independence (1956) 89 Sudan Political Service 88 Suez Canal 86, 96 sugar 201, 202 sugar industry: and Hawaiian annexation 208, 210, 214 Sukuna, Ratu Sir Lala 237 Sultan Atahiru, Sokoto 110 Sultan of Johore 149, 167, 169 Sultan of Kedah 170 Sultan of Morocco 90, 95, 96, 271 Sultan of Perak 154 Sultan of Sokoto 104, 115, 280 Sultan of Zanzibar 271 sultans: and constitutional change in Malaya 169 status in Malaya 161, 163, 164, 168, 169 see 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 159 Supreme Court 276 at Calcutta 34 in Nigeria 110, 117, 118, 122, 274, 275 see also jurisdiction Surat 19, 20, 21, 40, 45, 50 Sutlej, River 48, 50 swadeshi (home rule) 69 Swanston, R. S. 222 Swazi National Council 138 Swaziland 138, 145 Swettenham, Sir Frank (Resident in Malaya) 156–8, 169, 172 Tahiti (French Polynesia) 242, 244, 247 see also Society Islands Tambari (Sultan of Sokoto) 115 Tanjore, kingdom 43, 44 Tanna (Vanuatu) 222 Taufa‘ahau (Tongan paramount title) 222, 242, 244, 245, 254 compared with Kamehameha I 254 conversion 245 see also Tupou, George Taufa‘ahau (Tupou II) 248 Tavanavanua, Timoci (son of Cakobau) 224 Taveuni 219 Tawfik, Khedive of Egypt 82, 83, 84, 95, 96 tax, taxation 118, 131, 203, 204 see also revenue and expenditure Temne, people 101, 121 Temple, Charles Lindsay (Resident, Lieutenant-Governor, Northern Nigeria) 112, 113, 256 Templer, General Sir Gerald (High Commissioner in Malaya) 170 Tenterden, Lord (Foreign Office official) 83 Teso people and district 129, 130 Thai dynasty, see Siam Thakore of Rajkot 69 Theo H. Davies & Co. 209 Thesiger, Wilfred 89 Thomas, Sir Shenton (Governor of the Straits Settlements and High Commissioner) 167 Thomas, John 245 Thomson, Basil H. 248 Thurston, Lorrin A. (politician and lawyer) 205, 206, 208, 209, 210 Thurston, Sir J. B. (administrator and governor) 224, 225, 226, 231, 248, 257, 273

tikina (districts) 226, 228, 232 Tipu Sultan 42, 43, 44 titles, hereditary 5, 57, 59 abolished 57, 58 chiefs and 104, 124, 242, 243, 245 confirmed 111, 270, 280 for nobles 198, 246, 251, 254 for residents 54 purchase of 102 restoration of 162 succession to 248 see also chiefs, chieftaincy; land Tonga, Tongan islands 179, 181, 240, 274 Assembly 246 and British over-rule 248, 273 constitution 246, 254 factionalism in 251 finances 247, 248 foreign contacts 243, 248 government 246, 248, 250, 276 political alliances 240 regional trade 242 resources and population 243 Treaty of Friendship (1970) 250 Treaty of Protection (1901) 248, 254 Tongan Kingdom 269 patrimonial basis 251 Tongan trading company 249 Tongans: in Fiji 218–21, 253 Tongatapu island 242, 243, 244, 245 Toro state 125, 128, 129, 132 Torrens system of land leasing 158 tradition: in Fiji 230 ‘re-invention’ 61, 67, 181, 279 Transvaal (South African Republic) 137, 138, 145 Travancore state 43, 53 treasuries: in Northern Nigeria 113, 144 treaties and agreements 5, 12, 34, 48, 261, 268, 270, 272, 274 in Africa 103, 106, 109, 110, 113, 114, 118, 122, 128, 129, 143, 274 in Egypt 86 and European states 19, 24, 30, 150, 175 in 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, 93 in the Pacific islands 188, 191, 200–2, 207, 210, 212, 245, 246, 248, 251, 255 in South-East Asia 150, 152, 154, 159, 161, 164, 167–9, 175 Treaty of Tientsin (1858) 150 Trengganu state 161

Index 327 tribute 24, 29, 33, 37, 49, 50, 52 in Hawaiian government 184 in Indian states 74, 75, 270 Tswana chiefs 138 Tucker, Alfred (Anglican Bishop of Uganda) 129 Tucker, Dr S. G. 205 Tui Ha‘apai (title) 244 Tui Ha‘atakalaua (title) 243 Tui Kanokupolu (title) 242–5, 254 Tui Lau, see Ma‘afu Tui Tonga (title) 240, 242–5, 247 Tui Vava‘u (title) 244 Tui Viti (title) 221, 224, 227 see also Cakobau Tunku Abdul Rahman 170 Tupou dynasty 241 Tupou I (George, King of Tonga) 246, 248, 251, 254 and Fiji 222 see also Taufa‘ahau Tupou II 248, 249, 254 Tuputoa (paramount chief) 243 turaga (turanga, headmen, chiefs) 180, 218 Turner, Nathaniel (missionary) 245 Tutsi, chiefs and people 134, 135, 145 Uganda 125, 132, 134 see also Buganda Uganda High Court 131 Uganda National Congress 132 Uganda People’s Congress 133 Umma Party, Sudan 89 UMNO, see United Malays National Organization umuhueto clientage 135 Unfederated 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, 252 Urabi, Ahmad Colonel (nationalist leader in Egypt) 82, 83 Uvea island 242 vakaviti (Fijian custom) 227, 273 Vancouver, Capt. George 187 vanua (land, chiefdom) 218, 219, 223, 226 Vanua Levu 220, 221, 223 Varigny, Charles de (Minister in Hawaiian government) 200, 201 Vason, George 244 vasu relations: in Fiji 218, 219, 220

Vava‘u island 242, 243, 244, 254 Victoria (Queen of Great Britain and Ireland): as imperial paramount 60, 161, 270, 271 given war club 225 Victoria Kamamalu Ka‘ahumanu 192 Viti Levu 219, 220, 222, 223, 225, 253 vizier: in Moroccan administration 93 see also waziri vulagi, outsiders 180 Vunivalu of Bau (paramount title) 220, 222, 231 see also Cakobau Wafd Party, Egypt 86, 94, 96 Waialua (Hawai‘i island) 186 Wailevu 221 wakils, envoys, assistants 45, 49 war lords 42, 44, 136 Watkin, Revd Jabez B. 249 Watts, William (Resident at Murshidabad) 27, 29 waziri, minister 116 Webb, Sidney James, Baron Passfield (Secretary of State for Colonies) 167 Weber, Max (sociologist) 5, 6, 7, 194, 282 Weld, Sir Frederick (Governor Straits Settlements) 158 Wellesley, Richard Colley, Marquis Lord Mornington (Governor-General of India) 40, 43, 44, 50 Wesleyan Methodist Church 220 Wesleyan Methodist missionaries 244, 245, 247, 254 Western Africa (West Africa) 4, 5, 16, 102–3, 112, 121, 138, 142, 259–61, 275 Western Pacific High Commission 273, 274 Western Region, see Nigeria Western States Agencies 49 whaling traffic: in the Hawaiian Islands 188 Wilcox, George N. (Hawaiian politician) 208 Wilcox, Robert 206, 214 Williams, J. B. 221 Wilson, Sir Rivers (Controller in Egypt) 81 Wilson-Gorman tariff 211 Wiltse, Capt. G. C. 208 Woods, G. A. 225 Woodward, Peter (historian and political scientist) 89 Wyllie, Lorrin C. (government minister) 189, 190, 192 Yang di-Pertuan Agong (Malayan paramount ruler) 171

328 Index Yang-di-Pertuan (Sultan of Perak) 161 yavusa (patrilineal descent group) 218 Yoruba people and states 103–4, 117–20, 123–4, 142–3 see also Nigeria Young, Alexander (Hawaiian politician) 209 Young, John (Keoni Ana, government minister) 189, 195, 197 Young, John (Olohana) 185

zamindars, landholders, landlords 22, 30, 33–4, 38, 55, 70 Zanzibar 79, 125 Zulu chiefdoms 137, 145 Zululand 137 Zungeru, Northern Nigeria 111