Colonial states ruled colonized populations chiefly through Western law and race

Evidence

Law is perhaps the single most important apparatus by way of which, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colonial state ruled over its populations. … Within this legal system, the state deploys “repressive and productive mechanisms” that participate in formulating “the new as that which has always been.” One of these mechanisms, and the basis for distinguishing and indeed discriminating between colonizer and colonized, was race. Such discrimination, however, was not enough, and further distinctions were introduced, sometimes even prior to the official establishment of Western law, prior to the full institution of colonial rule. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 38

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject and the general Islamophobia/colonial-legal cluster already in this batch.