Reflections

Bibliographic Data

ID23720717
AuthorsJon Wilson (0000-0002-0398-8259, corresponding author), Jon E Wilson
Year2008
Pages182-194
Publication date2008-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueDomination of Strangers (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230584396_8
OpenAlexW4237754851
ISBN9780230584396
LanguageEN
References cited9

In the nineteenth-century Anglophone world, the phrase ‘the domination of strangers’ referred to rule by one people of another. The word stranger meant foreigner. The domination of strangers was associated with conquest, usurpation and interference. It was a phrase used to criticise subjects as varied as ‘Popish’ dominance and the inability of a municipal corporation to manage its own waterworks. The domination of strangers was an unnatural state, not something any people was supposed to be able to ‘brook’ or ‘submit to’ for long. 1 Describing colonial rule in India as ‘the domination’ was intended to suggest that abnormal measures were needed to retain British power in a country where the majority of the population were potentially hostile. Charles Metcalf justified the size of Britain’s military force in India by noting that the ‘domination of strangers, in every respect strangers, in country, in colour, in dress, in manners, in habits, in religion, must be odious’ to the country’s inhabitants. It was impossible to retain foreign rule by consent and ‘opinion’. 2 Thomas Munro believed that the ‘domination of strangers’ meant that the regulation of the press was necessary to suppress the otherwise inevitable voice of dissent. These officers thought its domination of strangers prevented the colonial government from operating according to the flexible connections of opinion and sentiment supposed to bind people to the polity in Britain. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Colonialism · Corporation · Dissent · Political science · Politics · Polity · Population · Power (physics) · Sociology · State (computer science) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Australian History and Society · Demography · European Political History Analysis · Law

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