Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast · New Books Network

Florian Wagner, "Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

·57 min·5 clips

Colonial administrators were trained to respect native cultures while being prepared physically to resist the tropics.

The conversation begins with institutional genealogy. Instead of pinning imperial governance on one famous administrator, the host asks how the International Colonial Institute helped build a policy corpus. Frederick Lugert is the way in. The guest says he mattered to the ICI and the League of Nations mandates commission, but he was not the lone author of indirect rule. The sharper point is circulation. British concepts mattered, but French members of the ICI promoted the concept too, and Dutch actors were understood to use it as well. Comparison matters here because the Dutch empire could be cast as progressive partly through its link to indirect rule. Functional governance is where the episode settles. The guest describes it as governing without depending only on the state or nation-state, both inside empire and at the international level. That thread carries past empire into UN development institutions and other development agencies after 1945. The chronology also stretches back earlier than expected: functional and international governance, in this account, was already taking shape in the 1890s. The ICI comes across as an expert body trying to look independent while developing colonial governing methods outside European state infrastructure. The ending keeps the scholarly texture but does not stay narrow. Power and inequality are still in the room.

As heard by us

A careful look at how empire turned governance into technique.

This piece follows colonial power as a set of techniques: indirect rule, administrative pragmatism, and the institutions that helped carry those ideas forward.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want colonial power explained as a system of ideas, not just events.

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