Empire rules through sustained pressure and produced loyalties, not just violence

Evidence

Knowledge-acquisition is only a piece of what makes empires work. It may abet allegiance or wither it. Blatantly coercive inculcation is not always the name of the imperial game. The force of rule lies in producing affiliations, loyalties, and allegiances among empire’s own agents as much as the colonized. Rule by sustained pressure as much as overt violence makes “choices” and commitments—ones that subordinate family attachments to state mandates—difficult but ennobling ones. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1369

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s purpose on colonial epistemic anxieties — imperial dispositions are politicized cognitions. Also connects to Stoler’s concept of ‘rule by affect and disposition.’
• SEED: The claim that empire produces allegiance among its OWN agents (staff, officials) before the colonized is an angle for a piece on imperial bureaucracy as emotional labor.