Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia

EMPIRES OF VICE

HISTORIES OF ECONOMIC LIFE

Jeremy Adelman, Sunil Amrith, and Emma Rothschild, Series Editors

Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia by Diana S. Kim

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Empires of Vice

THE RISE OF OPIUM PROHIBITION ACROSS SOUTHEAST ASIA

DIANA S. KIM

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kim, Diana S., 1982– author.

Title: Empires of vice : the rise of opium prohibition across Southeast Asia / Diana S. Kim.

Description: Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2020] | Series: Histories of economic life | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019029698 (print) | LCCN 2019029699 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691172408 (hardback) | ISBN 9780691199702 (paperback) | ISBN 9780691199696 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Opium trade—Southeast Asia—History. | Opium trade—Political aspects—Southeast Asia. | Opium trade—Malaysia—Malaya—History. | Opium trade—Indochina—History. | Opium trade—Burma—History. | France—Colonies—Asia—Administration. | Great Britain—Colonies—Asia—Administration.

Classification: LCC HV5840.S643 K57 2020 (print) | LCC HV5840.S643 (ebook) | DDC 364.1/77095909034—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029698

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029699

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Eric Crahan and Thalia Leaf

Production Editorial: Mark Bellis

Jacket Design: Leslie Flis

Production: Merli Guerra

Publicity: Alyssa Sanford and Kate Farquhar-Thomson

Copyeditor: Theresa Kornak

Jacket Credits: poppy from the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis; ledger courtesy of Archives nationales d’outre mer, France, INDO/NF/88/880

Dedicated to my parents and Julia

CONTENTS

List of Figuresix

List of Tablesxi

Acknowledgmentsxiii

Note on Terms Usedxvii

PART I

1 Introduction3

2 A Shared Turn: Opium and the Rise of Prohibition28

3 The Different Lives of Southeast Asia’s Opium Monopolies54

PART II

4 Morally Wrecked in British Burma, 1870s–1890s91

5 Fiscal Dependency in British Malaya, 1890s–1920s121

6 Disastrous Abundance in French Indochina, 1920s–1940s153

PART III

7 Colonial Legacies185

8 Conclusion216

Appendix225

Abbreviations235

Notes237

Sources and Bibliography277

Index303

FIGURES

0.1. Map of Southeast Asia under European colonial rule

1.1. Map of colonial Southeast Asia in Europe’s Far East, c. 1929

3.1. French popular depiction of Second Opium War, c. 1859

3.2. British popular depiction of Second Opium War, c. 1858

3.3. Quantity of Indian opium exports to key destinations, 1870–1930 (in chests)

3.4. Quantity of imported opium from India, Persia, and China to key destinations in Southeast Asia, 1912–1930 (in kg)

3.5. Comparing reported shares of net opium revenue for colonial Southeast Asia, 1890s–1930s (%)

4.1. Statistical table of opium consumption, Arakan Division, Lower Burma, c. 1893

5.1. Straits Settlements’ opium revenue replacement reserve fund’s investments, 1934–1935

7.1. Map of world opium traffic, c. 1946

7.2. Malaya. View inside opium den in Singapore, c. 1950

7.3. Malaya. Man walking out of building of opium seller in Singapore, c. 1941

7.4. Malaya. Photograph of St. John’s Island opium addict rehabilitation center, c. 1957

7.5. Malaya. Governor of Singapore Sir Robert Black visits opium addict rehabilitation center on St. John’s Island, c. 1956

7.6. Burma. View of opium shop and dwellings on the Irrawaddy River, 1880s

7.7. Burma. Government opium retail shop in Rangoon, with two Indian opium consumers, 1920s

7.8. Indochina. Opium smugglers and their disguises: Man wearing a vest with multiple pockets, c. 1924

7.9. Indochina. Opium smugglers and their disguises: Man wearing a raincoat, c. 1924

7.10. Indochina. Photograph of Thông Sin Phu, a Chinese man arrested in Tonkin for opium smuggling, c. 1928

7.11. Indochina. Men smoking opium in an opium den in Saigon, c. 1972

7.12. Indochina. Man smoking opium in a Meo (Hmong) village in Laos, c. 1975

A.1. Ekstrand Commission’s maps of opium sale zones: French Indochina, c. 1929

A.2. Ekstrand Commission’s maps of opium sale zones: British Burma, c. 1929

A.3. Ekstrand Commission’s maps of opium sale zones: Dutch East Indies I, c. 1929

A.4. Changing volume of India–China opium trade, 1790s–1930s (number of chests exported from India)

A.5. Comparing shares of reported net opium revenue across Southeast Asia, 1890s–1940s (% of total colonial tax revenue)

TABLES

3.1. Ekstrand Commission of Enquiry’s comparison of opium monopolies, c. 1929

4.1. Prison population and estimated opium consumers in Lower Burma’s prisons, c. 1881

6.1. The financial controller’s calculation of fictitious opium sales by the opium monopoly of French Indochina, 1930–1934

A.1. Volume and shares of Indian opium exports to China and Southeast Asia, 1870s–1920s

A.2. Comparing shares of Chinese population and number of opium shops in Burma, Straits Settlements, Indochina, 1890s and 1920s

A.3. Timeline of key colonial, metropolitan, and international opium-related reforms

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WRITING THIS BOOK has been a much longer, harder, yet always more rewarding process than I had originally envisioned. I am first and foremost grateful for the support of my dissertation advisors, Bernard Harcourt, Dan Slater, and Andrew Abbott. Through their exemplary scholarship and warm encouragement, each has durably shaped the way I see and puzzle about the political world. I am also grateful to the wonderful colleagues, teachers, and friends whom I met at the University at Chicago, including Kathy Anderson, Mark Bradley, Michael Dango, Sofia Fenner, Joe Fischel, Minnie Go, Bob Gooding-Williams, Daragh Grant, Chris Haid, Gary Herrigel, Eric Hundsman, Iza Hussin, Juan Fernando Ibarra del Cueto, Sarah Johnson, Samip Mallick, J. J. McFadden, Claire McKinney, Jeremy Menchik, Sankar Muthu, Jim Nye, Jonathan Obert, Willow Osgood, Josh Pacewicz, Jong-hee Park, Jennifer Pitts, Jon Rogowski, Bill Sewell, Erica Simmons, Nick Smith, Matthias Staisch, Paul Staniland, Tekeisha Yelton-Hunter, and Lisa Wedeen. My particular gratitude goes to Matthias for always being there for me, with every imaginable form of caffeine, alcohol, wit, and patience.

Over the past years, I have been very fortunate in finding welcoming interdisciplinary homes among historians, economists, and political scientists. As a postdoctoral prize fellow with the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University, I had the pleasure of meeting and sharing ideas with Sunil Amrith, Abhijit Bannerjee, Allan Brandt, Ian Brown, Claire Edington, Catherine Evans, David Doupé, Allegra Giovine, Ben Golub, Johannes Haushofer, Kalyani Ramnath, Emma Rothschild, James Rush, Paul Sager, Padraic Scanlan, Amartya Sen, Brandon Terry, Alicia Turner, and Kirsty Walker. Since joining the faculty at Georgetown University and living in Washington D.C., I have also benefited from discussions with and the friendship of Peter Andreas, Celeste Arrington, Carol Benedict, John Buchanan, Marc Busch, Victor Cha, Katharine Donato, Mike Green, Kristen Looney, Kimberly Morgan, Kate McNamara, Marko Klasnja, Abe Newman, Irfan Nooruddin, Charles King, Christine Kim, Melissa Lee, Zachariah Mampilly, John McNeill, James Milward, Puja Rudra, Nita Rudra, Diya Rudra Sundaram, Jordan Sand, Joseph Sassoon, Joel Simmons, Ravi and Kitcha Sundaram, Yuhki Tajima, Dennis Quinn, Jim Vreeland, and Erik Voeten. The formative ideas for this book are also inextricably linked to a cotaught seminar with Kirsty Walker, my brilliant friend and partner in crime for all matters relating to the history of vice in colonial Southeast Asia, as well as the insights of thoughtful students including Nathaniel Bernstein, Daye Lee Cho, Max Paterson, Catherine Killough, David Showalter, Wonik Son, Hannah Rosenfeld, Kim Mai Tran, and Bohesa Won.

I would like to express appreciation to several organizations for their support in developing this book: the Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG), a remarkable collective of political scientists committed to marrying positive social science with deep area studies, especially feedback from Allen Hicken, Amy Liu, Eddy Malesky, Quynh Nguyen, Alexandre Pelletier, Tom Pepinsky, Sarah Shair-Rosenfeld, Jessica Soedirgo, Dan Slater, Risa Toha, and Meredith Weiss. I also acknowledge financial support from the American Philosophical Society, Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the Nicholson Center for British Studies at the University of Chicago, the Mortara Center for International Studies and the Carnegie Foundation’s Bridging the Gap grant, as well as the staff at the following institutions for their assistance and expertise: the British Library, the Center for Khmer Studies, Center for Research Libraries, National Archives of Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and the United Kingdom as well as France’s National Archives for Overseas Territories. It has been a pleasure working with Princeton University Press with the steadfast support of the editors for the Histories of Economic Life Series, Jeremy Adelman, Sunil Amrith, and Emma Rothschild. I am also grateful for the acumen and patience of my editors Eric Crahan and Thalia Leaf, as well as Amanda Peery for her help during earlier stages of the manuscript’s development, to Mark Bellis for bringing it to production, and to Theresa Kornak for copyediting. I have also benefited immensely from the constructive criticism and suggestions of three anonymous reviewers.

The pleasure in writing this book has come from people who have been with me constantly. I am happy to acknowledge the friendship of Yoonsun Hur and Mia Jeong, as well as Jean Lachapelle, who has been both my most astute critic and caring audience. My younger sister and best friend, Julia Sue Kim, is an unfailing source of energy and laughter. Without her, I would not have been able to complete this book. My greatest debts are to my parents, Mi Sun Kim and Sun Chang Kim. I am the daughter of two scientists, who love history and politics. They were my first teachers and remain my warmest mentors today. And there are few aspects of my professional and personal life that are not inspired by the creativity, passion, and discipline they have demonstrated throughout their own careers. With much love, this book is dedicated to them.

NOTE ON TERMS USED

THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, I use the generic terms opium and consumption when actually referring to a much wider range of the drug’s forms and sumptuary practices. Chandu is a sweeping term for opium processed for the purpose of smoking. Madak is a mixed form of smokable opium, prepared by first dissolving raw opium in water, straining it through cloth, and boiling it down to a syrup, and mixing it with charred leaves of acacia, betel, or guava. Dross is the residue left in an opium pipe after it is smoked. Kunbon refers to betel leaves fried and smoked in opium. Opium consumption encompasses a diverse range of modes of ingestion that include smoking, eating or chewing, and swallowing.¹

For most of the time period I examine, neither the word Southeast Asia nor its reference to what we understand today as a bounded regional unit existed.² I have nonetheless chosen to use the ahistorical term because it is the clearest way to convey the geographical scope this book covers to different audiences that include non-specialists of this part of the world. For similar reasons, I use terms like Vietnamese and the Hmong in Laos even though a polity called Vietnam or Laos did not yet exist. My decision to reproduce labels that may have uncomfortably pejorative connotations such as native, indigenous, as well as the Burman, Annamite, or Chinaman reflects an aim of conveying British and French administrative language during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I hope to avoid any hint of condoning the colonial logics that produced these terms. Unless noted, all translations are my own.

FIGURE 0.1. Map of Southeast Asia under European colonial rule, 1870s–1940s.

Part I

1

Introduction

UNTIL THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, European powers defended opium as integral to managing an empire. Opium was one of those things, declared one imperial politician in 1875, which enabled us to serve God and Mammon at the same time.¹ Colonial states in Southeast Asia taxed opium consumption as a vice, at once collecting revenue and claiming just reasons for doing so. During peak years, the British and French collected more than 50 percent of colonial taxes from opium sales to local inhabitants, while other European rulers across the region reported smaller yet still significant shares sustaining the public coffers.² It was possible, an administrator stationed in Burma wrote, that this drug could raise for the public benefit, the greatest amount of revenue with the smallest possible consumption.³

Into the first half of the twentieth century, however, the same powers were disavowing opium as a proper source of revenue and reconfiguring rationales that had once aligned the fiscal might and moral right of imperial rule. Before Parliament, John Morley referred to the British Empire’s anti-opium resolve as that civilizing mission of the regeneration of the East, while the French senator Édouard Néron wrote approvingly that [o]ur commitment to ending the consumption of opium in Indochina has been made unambiguously clear at an international conference in Geneva organized to combat dangerous drugs.⁴ By the 1940s, all major beneficiaries of colonial opium were restricting once permissible habits of opium consumption, closing down opium shops and punishing violators of these new interdictions.

The prohibition of opium altered the foundations of colonial government and justifications for European rule across Southeast Asia. It involved reconfiguring old fiscal arrangements and fashioning new claims to authority, as opium went from being a significant source of public revenue to an official danger that states condemned. This remarkable transformation is the subject of this book.

Specifically, Empires of Vice puzzles over this historical process in two respects. First, prohibiting opium entailed abandoning a key source of revenue for colonial states. Thus, it sits uneasily against influential theories that view modern states as guided by efforts to maximize revenue.⁵ Second, a shared turn against opium unfolded unevenly across Southeast Asia under European rule. There were diverse experiences, with the timing and tenor of opium-related reforms differing not only between empires but also among colonies of the same empire. Such variations complicate conventional understandings of colonial opium policies as following metropolitan regimes that medicalized drug control or as a response to religious actors and transnational activists who altered the moral conscience of the world.⁶

How did colonial states come to prohibit opium in such different ways? This book addresses the question, focusing on the British and French Empires—two powers that relied especially heavily on opium revenue collected from vice taxes—and tracing how they restricted opium sales and consumption in Burma, Malaya, and Indochina from the 1890s to 1940s. I argue that local administrators stationed in each colony are key to understanding when and how such reforms were possible. Prohibition involved unraveling a state’s deep-seated opium entanglements, a process enabled by a loss of confidence deep within the bureaucracy about the drug’s contributions to colonial government. Local administrators played a pivotal role in constructing official problems, which internally eroded the legitimacy of opium’s commercial life for European colonial states across Southeast Asia.

Local administrators were minor agents of imperial rule, far removed from greater intellectual debates of their times and seldom directly involved in the high decision-making of empires. Yet, these actors exercised surprisingly strong powers, as they produced official knowledge about opium in overseas colonies that provided evidentiary bases for major legal administrative reforms. They were poor theorists but rich empiricists of colonial reality. By way of doing what lowly administrators do on a day-to-day basis—implementing policies and keeping records—they developed commonplace philosophies about opium consumption as a colonial vice and forceful opinions about profits gained from the ills of others, while generating copious records that described and explained what challenges, what dangers, what wickedness seemed to mar local order. Seemingly radical reversals to Empire’s approach to opium in each colony were the sum of accumulated tensions arising from longstanding efforts to manage opium markets. Anti-opium reforms occurred at different times for different reasons, depending on the ways in which local administrators defined opium problems and affirmed them as politically actionable causes. But commonly, prohibiting opium was made possible through the work of anxious overseas bureaucracies.

The power of a state is felt intimately when it declares new interdictions. In the case of Southeast Asia, opium had long been a part of both the public and private lives of people. When nineteenth-century colonial rule began, opium was sold openly in the busy ports of Singapore under British rule and French Saigon to sailors and dockhands, in tin mines of Malaya where Chinese and Indian migrant workers toiled, as well as at opium shops in bustling bazaars throughout the region. The ones in Rangoon are like gin shops in London with conspicuous signboards and often attractive in appearance particularly at night, described one British official living in Burma in the 1880s.⁷ A French doctor named Angélo Hesnard remembered the Saigon opium manufacturing factory where busy Chinese, half naked, covered in sweat, labored in a vast hall … filled with the infamous odor of ‘boiled chocolate.’ ⁸ As a sumptuary practice, consuming opium touched the lives of both the rich and the poor, the pious and the profane, as a habit associated with the highest of pleasures and the lowest of pains. For those who smoked, ate, or otherwise ingested it, opium was a drug at once bountiful and all devouring, merciful and destructive, sustaining and vengeful, in the words of the novelist Amitav Ghosh.⁹

This everyday world changed under prohibition. Vendors faced restrictions on who they could sell opium to, at what price, and at what times of the day, while some saw their businesses taken over altogether by the same authorities who had issued sales licenses. In turn, people changed how they acquired and consumed a good that disappeared from respectable markets, from well-off merchants in Saigon to impoverished rickshaw pullers in Singapore who smoked opium excessively in pursuit of brief reprieves from the physical hardship, disease, and profound loneliness that came with working as a migrant away from home.¹⁰ Some individuals were summoned before authorities to register as opium addicts and avow the state’s way of defining their experiences. Others did not and became labeled as illicit, illegal, and indeed criminal actors. By demonstrating how this shift was made possible through the nitty-gritty work of local administrators, this book tells a larger story about how states transform themselves.

The Underbelly of Bureaucracies

The bureaucracy holds a privileged place for understanding modern states. It enforces laws, oversees taxation, provides public services, and allocates resources to people. Such administrative activities can introduce and naturalize fundamental categories through which individuals understand their place in groups, society, and a nation, while inculcating a sense of the inevitable presence or self-evident utility of the state. Bureaucracies have and continue to assume a powerful role organizing the exercise of physical and symbolic forms of state power.

While many scholars now agree that the state is not a monolithic entity with a unified purpose, we have been slower to acknowledge the bureaucracy in a similar way.¹¹ In the shadow of Max Weber’s ideal type of the professional bureaucracy—an organization ordered by hierarchy, routinized tasks and rules, internal meritocracy, and the triumph of rational-legal authority—many conceive of administrative activity as first and foremost a rule-bound process of executing top-down directives.¹² Public choice theorists also favor a minimalist view of bureaucracies comprising principal–agent relationships, hampered by frictions that arise from misaligned interests between implementing administrators and the ministers, regulators, and technocrats who formulate policies.¹³ Both perspectives posit a general logic to bureaucracies as pursuing goals set by upper echelons of the organization, seeking to efficiently implement policies formed from above.

This conventional wisdom tends to pathologize the discretion of low-level officials. From a high vantage point at the center, low-ranking administrators who act by their own volition are sources of bureaucratic inefficiency. From a Weberian perspective, these actors defy the rules of an organization and thwart its ability to realize goals. Everyday administrators who implement policies imperfectly and produce imprecise paperwork, vague records, as well as gaps between professed objectives and achieved results are suspect agents who exploit their principal’s relative lack of information and difficulty monitoring in order to implement alternative polices or pursue private ends. Discretionary power within bureaucracies often has a negative connotation, from misleading superiors and shirking responsibilities to rent-seeking behaviors and outright corruption¹⁴: The desk officer who sidesteps procedure. The tax collector who reports ambiguous numbers. The financial officer who misreports funds and blurs entries in the budget. The wayward official who alters, contradicts, or even challenges given directives. Typically, all are familiar as willful figures who distort the rational workings of a bureaucracy.

But when we actually look within a bureaucracy, these administrators are no longer so familiar. This book argues that the discretion they exercise represents commonsense acts in the contexts in which they work, as solutions to problems with perceived urgency. They acquire felt imperatives to act, which vary widely depending on the history and inherited precedents for their particular realm of administrative activity. More than mere disobedience or corruption, the ways that low-ranking administrators behave differently from the bidding of superiors reflect their own reasons for easing tensions, making accommodations, and exercising authority on a day-to-day level of work.¹⁵ Thus, to understand discretionary power within bureaucracies, it is necessary to understand what problems fueled the everyday work of minor officials. From the perspective of these insiders, the bureaucracy was not a coherent organization but a messy structure defined by multiple logics of operation, shifting objectives, as well as contradictory reasons for action. Political scientists have long stressed that bureaucracies are mired in politics, arising from external ties to elected politicians and legislators, business interests, professional communities, intellectuals, and activists, as well as through interactions with everyday citizens. I tell the lesser known story of micropolitics within bureaucracies. This requires exploring the concrete and granular workings of administrative governance, focusing on what actors deep within the underbelly of a bureaucracy actually did and wrote.

Contributions

This book’s approach to bureaucracies and opium in colonial Southeast Asia offers several interpretive and theoretical contributions. First, for scholarship in political science and sociology on the modern state, it places the everyday bureaucracy and power of ideas at the center of how we think about states and their claims to govern. A growing literature on symbolic dimensions of state capacity recognizes the ways that seemingly banal administrative categories, labels, classifications, and regulatory rubrics can profoundly order and organize socioeconomic life.¹⁶ When explaining how bureaucrats develop and implement such administrative schemes, most studies focus on external interactions with political actors and social forces. But less sustained attention has been paid to the interpretive work that actors within bureaucracies do: how they choose and puzzle over objects of regulation, how they define the meaning of their own work, and how they develop narratives about the necessity and viability of official action. This inner world of bureaucratic activity is important for understanding how states govern concretely and claim authority to rule.

For comparative historical studies of colonialism and state building, this book’s focus on opium illuminates an often overlooked realm of fiscal capacity and authority for European colonial states: the vices of subject populations. Taxing colonial vices enabled rulers to exercise social control, collect revenue, and assert moral claims to govern. It simultaneously gave institutional expression to imperial logics of domination based on difference, while instantiating Empire’s ambivalence about the terms on which to articulate reasons for differentiating among and dominating presumed others. Yet, few studies have treated colonial vice taxes as a central subject of inquiry or been curious about how exactly this system operated.¹⁷ Empires of Vice does both. It situates the regulation of vice at the heart of European colonial state building, focusing on policies and arguments for regulating opium consumption as a peculiar vice among non-European subjects through excise taxation.

Finally, for histories of opium and empire, this book gives reason to be more puzzled about how opium prohibition happened across Southeast Asia under European rule since the late nineteenth century. The anti-opium turn of empires has been best understood from global perspectives that center on the political economy of China and India, transnational forces behind international norm changes, as well as the role of the United States and League of Nations. Seen as a region, however, Southeast Asia merits special consideration, not least due to the distinctive regulatory conundrums that taxing opium consumption posed for colonial states. Using a diverse range of administrative sources, I give access to the inner lives of bureaucracies on colonial ground and elucidate the variety of administrative challenges that different colonial states faced by identifying the authors of official facts about opium problems invoked in major anti-opium reforms, the architects behind administrative categories, the creators of revenue numbers and government statistics on crime and diseases relating to opium, as well as the narrators of public transcripts of the state with their descriptive, causal, and normative assessments of colonial reality. In doing so, this book aspires to tell a history that compares, in the words of Frederick Cooper, without sweeping the particular under the global.¹⁸ It also underscores the imperfect and incomplete nature of this process of change, in ways that demonstrate how Southeast Asia today bears the lasting legacies of colonial opium prohibition.

Symbolic State Power and Everyday Bureaucracies

States are powerful, with a capacity to name, to identify, to categorize, to state what is what and who is who.¹⁹ They can impose categorical distinctions on society by officially defining, declaring, and sometimes naturalizing the basic terms on which people understand the world they live in. While the modern state is most famously the wielder of physical coercion par excellence, it is also an entity that exercises a more subtle yet equally forceful presence by generating formal categories, shared vocabularies, and frameworks of reference that guide human interactions. If a claim to monopolize the legitimate use of violence distinguishes the state from other entities capable of coercing, disciplining, and ordering society, then the state is also distinct in its claim to centralize control over symbolic realms of social and economic activity, constituting as given what people experience as meaningful.²⁰

In recent decades, studies acknowledging the importance of symbolic state capacity for understanding historical dynamics of state formation and contemporary governance have gained much currency. They provide valuable correctives to canonical theories of the modern state focusing predominantly on the military, police, and bureaucracy in establishing and defending territorial jurisdictions, waging war, and extracting revenue, by shifting attention to the many other composite institutions of the state and its additional pedagogical, corrective, and ideological roles.²¹ In this revisionist vein, studies on symbolic power generally give sustained attention to cultural and ideational dimensions of state capacity; recognize the importance of legitimate authority for exercising power; challenge blunt separations of material versus immaterial, hard versus soft forms of influence; and stress the ways by which coercive and extractive acts occur alongside, or indeed require, nonmaterial capacities that shape an individual’s ideas, beliefs, values, as well as his or her social, linguistic, and practical relationships with others.²²

The pervasive presence of bureaucracies in people’s lives has proven a fruitful vantage point for understanding how administrative capacities emerge and evolve to reconfigure social hierarchies, construct the taken-for-granted, and mask the intrusive presence of the state. The census; registries for birth, marriage, death, disease, and criminal behavior; cadastral maps; tax lists; land surveys; and passports mark but a few of the many sites where seemingly mundane bureaucratic arrangements can become powerful instruments of state rule, as they help constitute what they appear merely to represent.²³ For instance, the census classifies, quantifies, and serializes people in ways that at once enabled the rise of imagined political communities, grammars of resistance against it, as well as the remaking of ethnic and racial identities and struggles for political recognition.²⁴ Even the most microlevel administrative practices such as creating surnames and standardizing units of measurement can render society legible—generating knowledge about local practices into standardized forms—in ways that facilitate efficient fiscal extraction and social control.²⁵ In the international realm, everyday patterns of action that perform competency can shape war, diplomatic cooperation, and conflict, as well as the efficacy of international organizations through reiterative interactions that embody, act out, and possibly reify background knowledge and discourse in and on the material world.²⁶ Banal, yet clearly existing forms of political authority may prevail through administrative practices that produce official statistics, conduct surveys, and employ technologies to map, label, and narrate supranational entities as a social fact.²⁷

This book advances the current literature by taking the lens of everyday practices further inside the bureaucracy. Many studies on symbolic power have focused on state–society interactions: between bureaucrats and citizens, elites and nonelites, technocrats and laypersons, official and unofficial actors, those who govern and those who are governed.²⁸ This reflects a predominant approach to studying the power of administrative categories in light of what people recognize as legitimate, of how society regards the state. But if we pause to ask where a state’s vocabularies, narratives, and professed ways of knowing come from, then the existing literature tells a partial story. There is a prior step of fashioning labels, attaching referents in the empirical world, transforming words into official names, and entering them into the formal lexicon of the bureaucracy. State actors enact public transcripts that are produced through very prosaic acts of paperwork, recordkeeping, sorting, and scripting that tame unwieldy and abundant information into seemingly coherent narratives. Low-level bureaucrats also express their own convictions about what is or should be treated as real about objects of administration. Such convictions are formed cumulatively, by way of dwelling on regulatory precedents, internal archives, and shared commonsense about the possibilities and limits of administrative action. Put simply, in addition to looking outwardly, everyday bureaucrats look inwardly and backwards at their own pasts and construct official realities that they themselves find persuasive.

The inner workings of bureaucracies are messy, murky, and often hidden from sight. Understanding them requires a critical stance that steps back from established ways of asking how states wield symbolic state power through administrative categories. Who does the actual work of producing official knowledge and what does the process look like? What fidelity do bureaucrats have to the languages they use and when do the state’s own agents recognize formally sanctioned ways of categorizing and classifying the world as legitimate, appropriate, or absurd? Why do some constellations of ideas, interests, and sentiments shared among administrators become official narratives while others do not; and through what mechanisms does a bureaucratic realm of imagination guide state action? I address these prior questions that concern how administrative actors come to act, speak before, and interact with society in the ways that they do.

A sustained focus on administrative narratives about rule and revenue laden with symbolic power runs counter to how social scientists typically study policies relating to economic, fiscal, and financial matters. The words that official actors use are often treated as either secondary to hard material interests or as smokescreens for unspoken alternative goals. There is also a tendency to discount what bureaucrats say, assuming that efforts to explain, record, or hide their activities are guided by insidious intents such as misleading superiors, pleasing external audiences, or performing otherwise absent competency.

This book pushes against such preconceptions. I insist on the importance of language for bureaucratic activity and approach the self-regarding ways that administrators articulate reasons for action (or lack thereof) as interpretive acts. Even the lowliest of officials can justify their decisions, without necessarily seeking to perform competency before, or conceal corruption from, superiors, but because it is an everyday practice that makes sense in their narrow worlds. They can fashion and weld together labels and idioms, conceptual frameworks, presuppositions and biases, standards of necessity, causal and descriptive explanations, as well as worldviews that may appear odd and even hypocritical to outsiders but still make sense internally. An absurd quality may color a repetitive and almost comically self-referential process that nonetheless has a method to its madness, conjur[ing] up … visions that are at once accepted and understood by the whole of a social group.²⁹ The narratives that administrators use may enact and express ideas to accord with these visions. And desires to find meaning in actions taken in their official role may give these agents of the state reason to actually believe in the categories they construct.

This prior layer of interpretation within bureaucracies has political consequences. It sets the boundaries of a state’s officially acceptable speech by generating guidelines for what information and truth claims can be made publicly and what must remain unspoken. It defines formally actionable causes by establishing criteria for the necessity and feasibility of state action among those most intimately involved in actual administrative work. It decides (or negates) reasons for policy change and produces narratives that explain why certain initiatives succeed (or fail). It invents political facts by abstracting information and generalizing knowledge that bureaucrats produce. It induces state actors to believe in, defend, or at least justify their own ideas publicly and behave accordingly. It constructs realities that become taken for granted as obvious objects of state action.

In sum, this book approaches bureaucracies from the inside out. It takes seriously the importance of language and knowledge in administrative work and locates what political scientists might call endogenous sources of policy change in struggles within the bureaucracy. Even the most minor officials and their seemingly petty ideas can have major influence over how states wield symbolic power, by constructing official realities. Throughout this book, I refer to the surprising strength of weak actors to capture this link between micro- and macrolevel dynamics of change and trace the processes through which everyday bureaucratic practices and ideas have real, observable political consequences.

Taxing Colonial Vices

The vices of others formed a hidden pillar on which colonial states were built. Empires were obsessed with deviant sexualities, illicit addictions, and perverse moralities, developing regulatory regimes that collected revenue and policed unfamiliar societies, while also defining what constituted abnormal behavior among subject populations. An interdisciplinary literature on colonial history recognizes the regulation of vice as simultaneously manifesting logics of colonial domination, while also serving purposes of social control and managing boundaries.³⁰ State interventions that presupposed the difference of colonized subjects involved in prostitution, gambling, drinking, and use of narcotics—to name just a few of the most studied vices—are understood as both constitutive of the fundamental nature of colonialism and instrumental to its maintenance. Many scholars have focused on the paternalistic regard of European rulers toward