Affective knowledge stayed central to colonial governance into the late period

Evidence

Historian Christopher Bayly, in a thoughtful analysis of the information order of British India, has argued that the mastery of “affective knowledge” was an early concern of the British colonial state that diminished during the nineteenth century as that state became more hierarchical and governing became a matter of routine. I have argued here that affective knowledge was at the core of political rationality in its latecolonial form. Colonial modernity hinged on a disciplining of one’s agents, on a policing of the family, on Orwellian visions of interventions in the cultivation of compassion, contempt, and disdain. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 594

Categorization

• XREF: Directly counters Bayly’s Indian case — a useful comparative pivot for a colonial-studies knowledge base.