The Higher Research Seminar: Sarai-Anne Ikenze, Ted Svensson, Agustín Goenaga, Lund University – “Imperial Bureaucracies”

Imperial Capacity: Studying the Impacts of Colonial Bureaucracies on State Development

• How did historical empires govern the territories they conquered? 
• How did imperial governance strategies differ across colonial possessions and over time? 

These questions are not only central to understanding the particularities of empires as polities distinct from territorial states, but are crucial to debates about the drivers of imperial conquest and settlement and the long-term legacies of colonialism. 

In this project, we aim to provide a fine-grained and systematic account of British imperial governance and its legacies by:

1. Identifying what types of instruments the British deployed to govern territories across both time and space; and 
2. Measuring how variation in the deployment of those instruments has shaped post-colonial (political and economic) development. 

In this presentation, we introduce the British Colonial Institutions Dataset (BCID), a time-series cross-sectional dataset of over 200 territories that provides annual data on each territory’s political relationship with the British Empire, type of local colonial authorities, and administrative links with other colonial territories. 

We then present preliminary findings from three papers related to the project. 

• In a first paper, we use data from the BCID to map British colonial networks and governance patterns over time and across regions, engaging with IR debates about the nature and characteristics of the British Empire. 
• The second paper draws on the BCID to revisit classic hypotheses about the correlates of colonial institutions, examining how factors such as geography and pre-colonial political structures shaped British imperial rule.
• In the third paper, we explore the colonial origins and post-colonial legacies of federalism in the British Caribbean through a case study of the West Indies Federation.

The Higher Research Seminar is the Department’s main research seminar series. Researchers from the Department, alongside leading national and international scholars, present and discuss ongoing research and analysis on a wide range of timely and thought-provoking topics relevant to Political Science.

The seminar is held on Wednesdays 13.15 to 14.30 in Eden 367, unless otherwise indicated. PhD mid-term seminars 13:15 to 14:45

Convenors: Ian Manners and Anders Uhlin

The seminars are open to the public. Welcome to join us!

The Higher Research Seminar | Department of Political Science