Colonial bureaucracies did not extend European absolutist career rationality overseas

Evidence

In principle, the extra-European expansion of the great kingdoms of early modern Europe should have simply extended the above model in the development of grand, transcontinental bureaucracies. But, in fact, this did not happen. The instrumental rationality of the absolutist apparatus – above all its tendency to recruit and promote on the basis of talent rather than of birth – operated only fitfully beyond the eastern shores of the Atlantic. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 226

Categorization

• XREF: Directly scaffolds the racialized exclusion themes central to the Islamophobia field — merit rationality blocked at the colonial boundary. — connects to: Bureaucratic colonial rule favored informal secrecy over defined policy.; Colonial bureaucracies massively employed indigenes but maintained hierarchy — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 490; Colonial bureaucracies collected information largely irrelevant to actual decisions (+5 more)

Related

• Colonial bureaucracies massively employed indigenes but maintained hierarchy (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial exclusion sustained empire by dividing colonizers against themselves (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial administrative overviews signaled assumed mastery rather than real knowledge #corroborates (0.85) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 143
• Colonial bureaucracies collected information largely irrelevant to actual decisions #expands (0.82)
• The colonial state was equipped to police natives but not wayward Europeans #expands (0.80)
• Colonial powers impose a double moral standard demanding restraint only from the colonized #qualifies (0.80)
• Scholars have treated colonial sentiment as ornament rather than substance of rule #expands (0.80)
• Colonial settlers’ attention was selective, not panoptic, and oriented to Europe #complicates (0.78)