Define and Rule

“Mamdani’s book raises critical queries of colonial intervention in the lives of the colonized and how they are articulated in their theories to look upon themselves, and to take on their political and historical nativist subjectivities. Couched in the simple idiom of an astute political analyst, the academic-cum-theoretician has produced a thesis of nativism and counter theory that is bound to lead on to new intellectual grounds and initiate newer debates.”—Murali Sivaramakrishnan, The Hindu

“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