indirect rule - Cases

A form of colonial rule especially characteristic of British rule in Africa during the inter-war years. In general terms it involved the use of existing political structures, leaders, and local organs of authority. Thus local political elites enjoyed considerable autonomy, although they still had to keep in accord with the interests of the colonial power. It was adopted on grounds of its cheapness and to allow for independent cultural development, but was increasingly criticized for its failure to introduce a modernizing role into colonial administration, and was gradually given up after 1945.

Indirect rule is a type of European colonial policy as practiced in large parts of British India (see Princely states) and elsewhere in the British Empire (including Malaya), in which the traditional local power structure, or at least part of it, is incorporated into the colonial administrative structure. (Note: Not all British colonies were under indirect rule, e.g. Therefore, tapping in to the ruling class that ruled the countries before they became colonial property is a very attractive and pragmatic move.

Another motive is a matter of political tactics: the conquerors want the cooperation of the former ruling class (for personal profit and safeguarding much of the dynastic heritage) of the country in order to prevent the risk of a rebellion led by these former rulers.

Cases

British Empire

Its main application was in British Asia, in hundreds of princely states, first under the HEIC (mainly the Indian subcontinent and Burma, but also in strategic regions on the route thereto, mainly coastal Persian Gulf states), later in the succeeding Crown Colonies and protectorates.

Typically a British Governor and council of advisors made laws for each colony, but local rulers loyal to the Governor kept some of their traditional authority. Even Belgium found its only colony, the Belgian Congo (started as king Leopold II's 'personal' Congo Free State), later de facto extended, under League of Nations mandate and subsequent UN Trust, with the formerly German Rwanda and (B)Urundi, far to large to govern without indirect rule through the native chefs = (stam)hoofden (the French and Dutch words for Chiefs) Spain didn't feel much for indirect rule through usually heathen native aristocracy, which seemed anathemate to its rigid Inquisition-type of Catholicism and absolute moanarchy, and therefore chose rather to eliminate most of the ruling classes (even whole tribes of Indians, partially accidental as by contagious infections), but ended up the first great power to lose most of its colonies, in Latin America - mainly to the Creoles, and after having great chunks taken from its internally to weak empire by European rivals, mainly the British. Although its goes against their 'jacobine' tradition of meddling omnipresence of the republican authorities, even more then under royal absolutism, the French too found their colonial empire too vast to be ruled without recourse to some indirect rule. This was least the case in the 'popular colonies' many metropolitan French families migrated to, as in the Maghreb country of Algeria (these pied noir were the main reason that colony was so late to attain independence, and only after an extremely bloody war). The German (originally Prussian) Reich, proverbially even stricter in its organisation, was too late to carve out an empire worthy of its weight in Europe, but in its haste to move in quickly didn't shrink either from some indirect rule, as in Tanganyika (now the continental part of Tanzania).