The colonial state was an imperial apparatus across multiple sites, not a concealed fiction

Evidence

17 Philip Abrams held that “the state is … a triumph of concealment. It conceals the real history and relations of subjection behind an a-historical mask of legitimating illusion; contrives to deny the existence of connections and conflicts which would if recognized be incompatible with claimed autonomy and integration of the state. The real official secret … is the secret of the non-existence of the state.” Abrams, I think, gets it right and wrong. There is no “a-historical mask” but rather an elaborate apparatus geared to the task of historical reproduction. Nor was the colonial state nonexistent if we understand it rather as an imperial one that stretched across multiple locations—in the Indies and the Netherlands— and multiple sites and technologies of command. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 160

Categorization

• XREF: Stoler’s corrective to Abrams dovetails with how imperial historians like Alan Lester caution against reifying the metropolitan-colonial state.