Colonial administrative practices threatened to migrate back to England.

Evidence

The Indian system of government by reports was …suspect [in England]. There was no trial by jury in India and the judges were all paid servants of the Crown, many of them removable at pleasure… Some of the men of formal law felt rather uneasy as to the success of the Indian experiment. ‘If,’ they said, ‘despotism and bureaucracy work so well in India, may not that be perhaps at some time used as an argument for introducing something of the same system here?’ — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2373

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The boomerang effect of colonial bureaucracy into the metropole is a mechanism Arendt develops elsewhere and that later postcolonial theory formalizes as ‘the empire strikes back.’