ABSTRACT
Governance is hard to write about. Colonial writing about it was perfunctory and formulaic. Texts about colonial governance were produced in such vast quantities they are almost impossible for the historian to handle successfully; historians find narratives about conquest or academic accounts of the non-European world far more interesting to read. As a consequence, the history of governance often gets submerged under more exciting stories about either elite politics or – more recently – narratives about the academic knowledge produced in Europe about the non-European world. In either case, there is a danger of reducing the complex and uncertain practices of colonial administration to the history of the rather more stable categories, concepts and stereotypes that metropolitan Europeans used to describe the non-European world.
