Imperialism’s hybrid unnameable government became normalized within a few decades.

Evidence

Lord Cromer’s career is fascinating because it embodies the very turning point from the older colonial to imperialist services. His first reaction to his duties in Egypt was a marked uneasiness and concern about a state of affairs which was not “annexation” but a “hybrid form of government to which no name can be given and for which there is no precedent.” In 1885, after two years of service, he still harbored serious doubts about a system in which he was the nominal British Consul General and the actual ruler of Egypt and wrote that a “highly delicate mechanism [whose] efficient working depends very greatly on the judgment and ability of a few individuals …can …be justified [only] if we are able to keep before our eyes the possibility of evacuation…If that possibility becomes so remote as to be of no practical account …it would be better for us …to arrange …with the other Powers that we should take over the government of the country, guarantee its debt, etc.” No doubt Cromer was right, and either, occupation or evacuation, would have normalized matters. But that “hybrid form of government” without precedent was to become characteristic of all imperialist enterprise, with the result that a few decades afterwards everybody had lost Cromer’s early sound judgment about possible and impossible forms of government, just as there was lost Lord Selbourne’s early insight that a race society as a way of life was unprecedented. Nothing could better characterize the initial stage of imperialism than the combination of these two judgments on conditions in Africa: a way of life without precedent in the south, a government without precedent in the north. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 549

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘construction of the Other’ and to how illegible institutions get naturalized — parallels Gramsci’s common sense as internalized contingency forgotten.
• QUESTION: Arendt suggests the formative moment of imperialism is precisely this hybrid, unnameable government — worth checking how Orientalism’s account of Cromer aligns.