Vol. 30 No. 19 · 9 October 2008
pages 29-30 | 2802 words
Try It on the Natives
James C. Scott
- BuyEmpires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 by Martin Thomas
California, 428 pp, £29.95, October 2007, ISBN 978 0 520 25117 5
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the American Communist Party was a pale shadow of what it had been two decades earlier. Thanks to the FBI, the McCarthy hearings in the Senate and the Un-American Activities Committee in the House of Representatives, blacklists, firings and generalised fear, the Party’s ranks had been radically thinned. And still it lived. That it survived was in no small measure due to the membership of FBI informers who, creatures of bureaucratic routine, continued to attend Party meetings and pay their dues: it was, after all, their job. Without the FBI’s backing the Party might have vanished altogether.
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[*] Routledge, 238 pp., £70, October 2007, 978 0 415 37280 0.
Letters
Vol. 30 No. 21 · 6 November 2008
From J.A. Bosworth
‘The first systematic inventory of population, livestock, crops and landholdings’ in the British Isles was carried out not by Cromwell’s agents in Ireland, as James Scott has it, but by those of King William I in England in 1069 (LRB, 9 October). The details of this survey are recorded in the Domesday Book.
J.A. Bosworth
Cugy, Switzerland
From Bill Cooke
James Scott is right to conclude that the torments inflicted by Europeans on one another were first tested in the colonies, or in the US as a consequence of the colonial encounter. But there is more to this than Scott suggests. Much of the more mundane, everyday coercion we experience as ‘being managed’ has the same colonial origins. The elements of Fordism (division of labour, rules, measurement etc) were first set out in antebellum guides to the ‘management’ of slaves, and implemented by their 38,000 salaried managers (as counted in the 1860 US Census). And those still tempted, post-meltdown, to accept Boltanski and Chiapello’s notion, cited by Hal Foster in the same issue, that the contemporary worker is a creative, autonomous individual, might remember that the other side of surveillance and coercion is co-optation. Today’s managerialist notions of co-optational ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’ have their roots in practices designed to enable the early 20th-century mode of colonial administration called Indirect Rule, whereby limited amounts of autonomy were granted to co-opt otherwise resistant populations. This autonomy was always controlled and delimited; and ‘sovereign power’ was always ‘reserved’.
Bill Cooke
Lancaster University
Vol. 30 No. 22 · 20 November 2008
From Tony Scull
A little correction in turn for J.A. Bosworth (Letters, 6 November). The Domesday survey dates not from 1069 but from 1085/86.
Tony Scull
Ilkley, West Yorkshire
