ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in this book. The book focuses on the intersection of penal power and colonial rule, and aims to understand how a colonial governmentality in British India fashioned an armature of power based upon three sovereign constitutive elements and, further, how the colonial state itself emerged as 'the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities'. It helps to develop an account of governmentality within the colonial sphere, or what we might term a genealogy of colonial governmentality. It examines the way particular forms of crime were perceived and met as problems of governance we may be able to develop more sophisticated and nuanced genealogy of colonial governmentality itself. The book argues that colonial governance sought to develop in its Indian subjects a particular kind of ethical subjectivity that was reflected in a discourse of character and virtue that lay behind discussions of race but also behind notions like addiction to crime.
