Colonial rule justified intelligence-gathering as replacing absent communal bonds

Evidence

Modelled on the processes of schooling, the new politics was to acquire an individual hold upon both the body and the mind. The need for a hold upon the mind was explained by Lord Cromer in terms of the very process of constructing a colonial authority. The problem for the British colonial regime in Egypt, he explained, was that the traditional communal bonds between a ruler and those who were ruled – the ‘community of race, religion, language and habits of thought’ – did not exist. It was therefore necessary for the government to forge what he called ‘artificial bonds’ in their place. These artificial bonds were to consist above all in the government’s information about and understanding of those whom they ruled, a kind of understanding that Cromer called ‘reasonable and disciplined sympathy’. He insisted on ‘the exhibition of reasonable and disciplined sympathy for the Egyptians, not merely by the British Government, but by every individual Englishman engaged in Egyptian administration’. How was this artificial bond of understanding to be forged, in a manner that would keep it something ‘reasonable and disciplined’? It was to be ‘based on accurate information and on a careful study of Egyptian facts and the Egyptian character’. The Egyptian character – a notion later to be replaced with terms such as culture – was to be carefully examined, for a disciplinary politics was predicated upon this object. Such examination was itself part of the disciplinary mechanism of power – the mechanism that places under surveillance and continuously watches. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 342

Categorization

• DEFINE: Cromer’s ‘reasonable and disciplined sympathy’ is the colonial euphemism for surveillance of the governed as ‘artificial bonds’ where traditional bonds are absent.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s panopticon/discipline themes and to analyses of what later became ‘culture’ as a colonial knowledge object; also to contemporary ‘data-driven governance’ framing of knowing populations.