/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2863953
You're looking at things in a Black and White moralistic perspective. The Brits were on the team that beat the Nazis, that doesn't make them good. Your peoples were on the side that lost to the British, that doesn't make them good.

>>2863953
>I'm curious have socialist historians or theorists argued against the simplified "divide and conquer" narrative or offered a more nuanced explanation of how colonialism relied on alliances with local elites, existing class structures, and pre-existing political conflicts?

Even mainstream historians do that tbh, it's kind of the shtick of the discipline, or it's supposed to be anyway. You just need to find the people who are at the top of their fields, I liked studying François-Xavier Fauvelle regarding the history of Africa for example.

>These groups were not passive victims manipulated into conflict, they saw cooperation with the British as the best way to advance their own ambitions and often they achieved many of their goals through those alliances.
That's exactly what divide and conquer means though. If you're some random Indian prince in the early 19th century locked in a decades old struggle with a neighbouring kingdom, and the British offer to crush your rival in exchange for the right to export spices and tea from your ports, then obviously you're going to take that deal. Fast forward 50 years and that rival kingdom is now a under direct British rule, they have a permanent military presence in your kingdom, those trade concessions have grown into a total monopoly over your industries, direct taxation of your population, etc. Meanwhile you don't give a fuck because the Brits are making sure you and your cronies get a piece of the colonial plunder.

>>2863955
What do you think I'm talking about?

One aspect that was at least somewhat unique to India was that the ruling dynasties of many of these kingdoms were Turko-Persian elites governing a population that was overwhelmingly Hindu, along with a large number of Indian Muslims. The royals generally showed only slightly more tolerance toward the latter, but overall they cared little for either group beyond maintaining their rule.

>>2869847
That's just an excellent example of how colonized societies have their own reactionary ideological complexes that function just as effectively to suppress revolution as any first world treats.

>>2869891
Your comment is literally what I was saying. Western leftists can't connect with conservative peasantry whose views are rooted in religious principles and values. You simply can't approach them using that kind of language or those terms. They need a leader who won't offend their religious or national values, but who also projects an image of strength that they can rally behind.

It's just standard third world seething. Ethnic fracturing killed Austria Hungary and Yugoslavia, but those countries are doing okay nowadays (well Croatia and Slovenia at least)

>>2869961
Like I said, I think it's basically after the fact justification for your Frankenstein state's existence, no matter how arbitrary your borders are or how little the people have in common, you just point to some empire that peaked 400 years ago and fixate on the handful of years when it reached its maximum extent, pretend that somehow validates your modern state, ignore the far longer history of independent kingdoms and states and then declare that every division is somehow the fault of colonialism.
Like in South Asia you see this with the Mughal Empire in both India and Pakistan. People always bring up a map of the Empire at its greatest extent under Aurangzeb and Aurangzeb did march his armies into those regions and claimed them, but they ignore the fact that these regions were tributaries rather than fully integrated parts of the state. They weren't incorporated into the same tax system, bureaucracy or even the same currency. Almost immediately after Aurangzeb's death, the whole thing began to collapse and for most of their history the Mughals effectively ruled little more than Delhi and its surrounding regions.

>>2863961
>Meanwhile you don't give a fuck because the Brits are making sure you and your cronies get a piece of the colonial plunder.
see >>2863964

>>2863953
The trend in South Asian Studies and History is to see colonialism as an evolving process in which there was a constant give and take between the British (we can't forget the French and Portuguese) and various local actors, many of whom had ulterior motives and ambitions or aligned opportunistically with British power. The British also established networks of patronage, communities they had deep connections with and rely on for support. British colonialism was built on a strategy of indirect rule: hijacking and reengineering native institutions to better control the native population. The nationalist narrative is extremely simple: there was always an Indian nation, it was subjugated by outsiders, and it yearns to be free. Its inaccurate and too simplistic and most academics would agree on that. So for the most part current research has already moved in that direction.

What the nationalist account overlooks is how British colonizers used ethnographic and orientalist knowledge to manage the Raj. They invented and enshrined caste, class, and gender differences into codified law and created inequality between different social groups e.g. passing discriminatory laws against Mappillas and Pathans, anti-Muslim policies, discrimination against so called "tribal" communities, the scheduled castes, anti-Hijra policies etc. So yeah, in a round about way they did 'divide and rule' by leveraging social differences to their advantage. However, Indian/Pak/Bengali nationalists create a mythology of a unified nation where differences don't exist or get subsumed into a majority identity in ways that transform whole groups into minorities and outsiders who have to put up and shut up in the name of national unity. In many ways, the kind of social divisions the British created in the Raj persist in South Asia today e.g. caste and tribe discrimination, Muslims as a security threat, etc.

>I'm curious have socialist historians or theorists argued against the simplified "divide and conquer" narrative or offered a more nuanced explanation of how colonialism relied on alliances with local elites, existing class structures, and pre-existing political conflicts?
Marxist approaches in South Asian history have been on the decline for many years now, partially because Orthodox Marxism simply isn't good at explaining stuff in the Indian context. Nowadays the trend is more Foucault than Marx and pulling from anthropology instead of sociology.

>>2882202
>What the nationalist account overlooks is how British colonizers used ethnographic and orientalist knowledge to manage the Raj. They invented and enshrined caste, class, and gender differences into codified law and created inequality between different social groups e.g. passing discriminatory laws against Mappillas and Pathans, anti-Muslim policies, discrimination against so called "tribal" communities, the scheduled castes, anti-Hijra policies etc. So yeah, in a round about way they did 'divide and rule' by leveraging social differences to their advantage.
Haha, dude 99.99999% of the people in my country would beat the living shit out of you if you so much as uttered one of those words. hell I’d bet that British orientalist probably understood South Asia better than every single post-colonial dorks who believe this shit.

India is united in their quest to do backflips and post them on instagram

Indian flippers of the world, unite!

>>2870013
You seemed to be taking the nation state as if it were a natural given and not an invention, as though people naturally organize into bordered states where the population must have something in common. This is really a modern construct and an aberration from how political systems have worked across the world before European colonization.

>for most of their history the Mughals effectively ruled little more than Delhi and its surrounding regions.
This isn't true and Mughal documents (e.g. Ain-i Akbari, Tabaqat-i Akbari, Tarikh-i Ferishta bureaucratic correspondence) proves that. The Mughal Empire was not a centralized modern state but neither were the Qing or any other state outside of modern Europe. Direct centrally organized rule, absolute sovereignty, a centralized universal tax system, single currency etc. these are European inventions and the Mughals had a different way of running their territories.

>>2882209
See Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Nicholas Dirks, Princeton University Press (2001)
Note: Dirks isn't a postcolonialist.

>>2863953
Colonialists will attempt to divide and conquer a subject population based on pre-existing divisions as well as newly formed and sometimes deliberately contrived divisions. This will cause civil strife in the subject population who are forced to unite into a national liberation movement, causing a national identity to form. The national identity is then retconned as this eternal thing that has always existed, and the colonial period is re-written as a period of unusual internal division caused by external conquerors.

>>2863953
>While I'm thinking primarily about South Asia, the exact same narratives appear is most third world societies.
It's an interesting thing and probably goes to how history is often reinterpreted by people later in a way to serve present-day political purposes. In this case it's modern state building and part of that is creating a flag for a nation and defining who "we" are through some kind of story we tell ourselves (and enforced quasi-covertly with weapons) about our ancestral origins or an unfolding and beautiful fulfillment of providence and realization of freedom. That's probably just some shit people made up to produce a patriotic or loyal population, although the governments are real. That's the state.