CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE
Jawaharlal Nehru University
ANNUAL LECTURE 2017
By
ATUL KOHLI
David K.E. Bruce Professor of International Affairs, Princeton University
Chair : NIRAJA GOPAL JAYAL, Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU
11.00 AM, Friday, 10 November 2017
Auditorium-I, Convention Centre, JNU
Britain's Informal Empire in the Nineteenth Century
(with India in the Background)
The presentation will be based on a chapter of the author’s new book (in the making), Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and United States Shaped the Global Periphery. In this chapter Professor Kohli provides an interpretation of the motives, mechanisms, and impact of Britain’s informal empire in the nineteenth century in Argentina, Egypt and China. The main motive that drove Britain to establish influence over these far flung places was search for profits and power, especially when private profits were of national significance. EIC’s main mechanism for establishing an informal empire was to create stable but subservient governments on the periphery; such ruling arrangements were often created under duress but then sustained by “cooperative” clients. As to impact, Britain benefitted handsomely from trade, investment, and financial relationships with client states. The peripheral economies by contrast experienced lopsided development, with some short-term growth but also long term distortions. The impact of Britain’s informal empire was not as pernicious as that of British colonialism, say, in India. However, there were to be no Meiji transformations within the informal empire. Limits on sovereignty were the key variables that help us understand development breakthroughs, lop-sided development, and near stagnation in the nineteenth century global periphery.
ATUL KOHLI is the David K.E. Bruce Professor of International Affairs at Princeton University. His principal research interests are in the areas of comparative political economy with a focus on the developing countries. He is the author of Poverty amid Plenty in the New India (2012) (a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2012 on Asia and the Pacific); State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery (2004) (winner of the Charles Levine Award (2005) of the International Political Science Association); Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability (1991); and The State and Poverty in India (1987). He has also edited or coedited nine volumes (most recently, States in the Developing World, 2017) and published some sixty articles. His current research focuses on the topic of "imperialism and the developing world." Through much of his scholarship he has emphasized the role of states in the promotion of prosperity and equity in the developing world. He is Editor of the journal, World Politics. During 2009-10 he served as the Vice President of the American Political Science Association. He has received grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, Ford Foundation and Russell Sage Foundation. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
NIRAJA GOPAL JAYAL is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU. Her most recent book is a history of citizenship in India titled, Citizenship and its Discontents: An Indian History.
PLEASE JOIN US FOR TEA AT 10:30 AM
ALL ARE WELCOME
