In a series of books starting with his 1996 Citizen and Subject, Mahmood Mamdani has turned repeatedly to colonial history to denaturalize what are often taken to be primordial political identities in the postcolonial world, revealing them to be legacies of empire. In so doing, he has made major contributions to a number of fields, from comparative politics to anthropology, African studies, and history. At the same time, he has established himself as a public intellectual, a rare scholar whose work regularly finds an extra-academic audience, and this in two very different contexts, in the “South” as well as the “North.” While Mamdani’s work is rich in lessons for political scientists and political theorists in particular, it has generally been assessed under other (sub)disciplinary headings, making the present task particularly welcome.

To be sure, Define and Rule, which originated as the 2008 Du Bois lectures at Harvard, fits the rubric of theory better than his previous offerings in at least two respects. On the one hand, it is shorter and more general, forgoing detailed historical exposition and drawing conclusions that apply mutatis mutandis to the whole postcolonial world—which is to say, nearly everywhere. On the other hand, it places more weight on political ideas. In broad outline, it performs in narrow compass what Mamdani has been doing at greater length for decades: It shows how categories that structure postcolonial politics—in this case, “native” and “settler”—were created by high imperialism. As he tells it, around the midpoint of the nineteenth century, British and, more broadly, European imperialism underwent a crisis. The 1857 Indian rebellion, echoed in Jamaica, Sudan, and elsewhere, exposed the failure of the Utilitarian/evangelical mission to “civilize” the natives. Into the breach stepped a new theory of colonial governance developed, above all, by the English jurist Sir Henry Maine. According to Maine, the East India Company had misjudged in applying English-style civil law to Indians, who were used to being governed instead by custom—for him, the key difference between modern, progressive peoples and backward, stagnant ones. His solution, soon adopted, was a shift to “indirect rule”: Each cultural or religious group should be governed by its own traditional codes, administered where feasible by community elders (overseen, naturally, by the colonial power). In this way, Mamdani explains, “the colonial mission shifted from civilization to preservation and from assimilation to protection” (p. 28).

To this point, Mamdani’s tale overlaps with that told in greater detail by Karuna Mantena in Alibis of Empire (2010), published after he gave the Du Bois lectures and now the authoritative account of Maine’s contribution to the political theory of empire. Mamdani tips his hat to Mantena, but explains that his aims differ from hers in two ways. The first is methodological, and corresponds roughly to the difference between intellectual history and genealogy, or between the history of arguments and that of power-knowledge regimes—crudely, between Quentin Skinner and Michel Foucault. Where Mantena focuses on justifications for empire, Mamdani is principally interested in how Maine’s paradigm introduced a “new and modern technology of rule” (p. 43), which he elaborates in the book’s second part. Colonial populations around the world were assigned to reified groups defined by the imperial power, then subjected to traditionalistic rules interpreted by the most authoritarian members of their communities. From this perspective, Mamdani argues, the transition to indirect rule actually amounted to a massive intensification of imperial government: “[I]f direct rule aimed to assimilate elite groups through a civilizing mission, the ambition of indirect rule was to remake the subjectivities of entire populations” (p. 45). “Define and rule” can thus be understood as Roman-style “divide and rule,” plus governmentality, the techniques and apparatuses of the modern state. Moreover, in Africa, indirect rule went along with a division between “natives,” organized into “tribes,” and non-native “races,” ruled by civil law administered by colonial authorities. This durably shaped institutions and identities, laying the basis for the ethnic conflicts that have plagued so many postcolonial countries since independence.

The second way Mamdani’s project differs from Mantena’s is in extending to remedies, which he pursues in the book’s third and final part by turning to two figures from the independence period: Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman and Tanzanian statesman Mwalimu Julius Nyerere. Both men appear in a heroic light (even if Mamdami does not especially conceal Nyerere’s shortcomings); both saw overcoming the divisive categories of European rule as the first task of postindependence politics, and fashioned intellectual and political strategies to accomplish it. To this extent, Mamdani’s criticism of the political logic of colonial categories leads to a prescription parallel to that of Marx and much of the radical tradition: “The only emancipation possible for settler and native is for both to cease to exist as political identities” (p. 4). Usman, whose work circulated little around Africa, let alone beyond, emerges as Mamdani’s direct intellectual forebear, a tireless critic of colonial categories like “race” and “tribe” who developed a reflexive, critical historiographical practice to undo them. This tribute is also a corrective to theoretical Eurocentrism, insofar as referring to the familiar Western theorist (Foucault), as I have done and Mamdani does only once, would belie the fact that Usman’s work is more immediately relevant in its substance and its concerns. Nyerere, meanwhile, usually associated with a failed attempt to build African socialism, is reclaimed as the author of a successful strategy for subverting colonial identity politics. His triumph was to have created in Tanzania a more or less united nation-state with a single, equal citizenship, notably by abolishing communal privileges—what Mamdani praises as the “most successful attempt to dismantle the structures of indirect rule through sustained but peaceful reform” (p. 107).

While comparativists, Africanists, and students of political development will make their own assessments, I can best speak to Mamdani’s contribution to political theory, which remains underappreciated. His first and most obvious lesson is critical. Define and Rule, like much of his work over the last two decades, profoundly troubles categories that political theorists, probably more than empirical political scientists, too often take at face value. Theories of multiculturalism and recognition, for example, commonly treat identities and traditions as facts. Mamdani corrects this by showing how the ostensible recognition, accommodation, or protection of “difference” often amounts to its naturalization, manipulation, and even creation by the state for its own purposes. More generally, from his perspective, the apparently natural or neutral phenomena and frameworks that structure thinking about politics and society—here, ethno-cultural or religious groups, but also states, nations, families, and so on—can and should be submitted to historical scrutiny. This cannot be a merely ancillary concern, a post hoc check on theoretical models, since it affects the very heart of the matter: Who or what is to be recognized (accommodated, protected) by whom.

There is a widespread tendency to separate ideas and arguments from power relations and institutions, and to consider normative reflection, empirical analysis, historical investigation, and political prescription as distinct tasks. If we could learn from Mamdani how these activities might better inform one another, he would have done us all a great service.