The authenticity game: order, recognition, and customary rule for empire to the international system

This thesis attempts to diversify International Relations’ understanding of the patterns of ordering that governed European empire in the 19th and early 20th–centuries, and in doing so to identify an overlooked but crucial precursor to the contemporary international order. IR research has overwhelmingly focused on liberal universalism and civilizing missions in Empire’s politics of recognition, its ideas of difference, and its strategies of rule. This thesis argues that our focus has been too narrow, and draws from work in colonial history, political thought and anthropology, as well as original archival research, to illustrate the ideas and practices of customary rule that predominated in the British Empire after the 1857 Indian Rebellion. I argue that this form of rule was not simply a set of ideas, or a top–down imposed regime, but a ‘game’ of jurisdictional jockeying. In this game, life in colonized societies was increasingly bifurcated into ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ spheres as local elites and colonial officials worked to define increasing swaths of governance as belonging to one or another, while avoiding violent responses to overreach on either side. From 1857 through the scramble for Africa and the League of Nations mandates system, I use records of official knowledge work to study the ways that colonized and colonizer alike vied to craft new language of legitimacy: language through which new subjects in international politics could be recognized and heard. Studying knowledge work as strategic interaction, I find that non–European intermediaries exercised crucial agency in crafting these new customary forms of governance, leveraging revolts and violence to narrate crisis to power in ways that shaped colonial and eventually international rule. Beyond its historical value, this work has implications for the ways IR understands the emergence of order from interaction, and for present debates on the questionably liberal nature of international order