ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on how the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) tried to establish a political infrastructure that would fundamentally and permanently change the terrain on which politics was to operate and to be recognised as such. It explores administrative government, which is a type of rule centred on devising and implementing regulations governing how to live and how to conduct ourselves economically and politically, and sometimes culturally. The book examines the administrative rule that is complexly articulated across different scales, institutions and networks of authority. The implementation of laws and policies of administrative rule is the social process. For example, colonial employment law that sought to commodify Chinese labourers in nineteenth-century Kuala Lumpur coexisted with laws that securitised Chinese labourers, and informal practices and discourses that emphasised the criminality and even sub-humanness of Chinese labourers.
