Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Preface
- 1 The contraction of England: an inaugural lecture 1984
- 2 The twentieth-century revolutions in Monsoon Asia
- 3 India and Britain: the climactic years 1917–1947
- 4 The forgotten Bania: merchant communities and the Indian National Congress
- 5 Counterpart experiences: India/Indonesia 1920s–1950s
- 6 Emergencies and elections in India
- 7 East Africa: towards the new order 1945–1963 (with John Lonsdale)
- 8 Africa Year 1960
- 9 The end of the British Empire in Africa
- 10 History and independent Africa's political trauma
- 11 Political superstructures in post-colonial states
- 12 Little Britain and large Commonwealth
- 13 Australia in the eastern hemisphere
- Index
11 - Political superstructures in post-colonial states
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Preface
- 1 The contraction of England: an inaugural lecture 1984
- 2 The twentieth-century revolutions in Monsoon Asia
- 3 India and Britain: the climactic years 1917–1947
- 4 The forgotten Bania: merchant communities and the Indian National Congress
- 5 Counterpart experiences: India/Indonesia 1920s–1950s
- 6 Emergencies and elections in India
- 7 East Africa: towards the new order 1945–1963 (with John Lonsdale)
- 8 Africa Year 1960
- 9 The end of the British Empire in Africa
- 10 History and independent Africa's political trauma
- 11 Political superstructures in post-colonial states
- 12 Little Britain and large Commonwealth
- 13 Australia in the eastern hemisphere
- Index
Summary
a register of constructs
We are beginning to know something of the political structure of what have been called the new states, many of them post-colonial ones. It is of major importance to understanding the great majority of them to draw a distinction from other, principally western states, whose populations are overwhelmingly urban. In new post-colonial states the population is principally, sometimes overwhelmingly, rural. That has major implications for their polities, since it is a characteristic of rural societies, not just that they are quintessentially committed to agriculture, but that their human settlements are dispersed and not congregated – and therein are often nucleated. As a consequence they have community lives of their own that are ordinarily clearly demarcated from those of surrounding and otherwise like communities; and despite the fact that the political structure superimposed on them may appear, and seek to play, a pervasive role, there are many respects in which so much of rural existence continues entirely, or almost entirely, without any reference to it. That means that at most the political superstructure can only partially, and sometimes no more than marginally, determine the manner in which rural entities actually operate.
It is of some importance that, as in the western world, large landlordism-say of the Egyptian pasha type – has for the most part gone from the new states (it remains more especially in those areas where the Spanish hacienda model held sway, very strikingly, for example, in the Philippines).
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- Chapter
- Information
- Eclipse of Empire , pp. 297 - 325Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991