Description: When Britain abandoned its attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance as the definition and management of difference, lines of political identity were drawn between settler and native, and between natives according to tribe. Out of this colonial experience arose a language of pluralism.
Brief description: Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Professor of Anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He was Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala from 2010 to 2022. His books include Neither Settler nor Native, Citizen and Subject, When Victims Become Killers, and Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.
Review Quotes: In Define and Rule, Mahmood Mamdani considers the empire of so-called 'indirect rule' and argues that, far from being a weak state, as has long been assumed, indirect rule embodied a distinctly modern political rationality. This book is a much-needed historiographic and contemporary-political intervention. It is vintage Mamdani: erudite, pathbreaking, and a profound challenge to conventional wisdom.--Nasser Hussain, author of The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law