This chapter surveys the histories behind differentiation in colonial governance, rooted in the politics of colonial conquest from the middle of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century. It begins with an explanation of the East India Company as a mercantile enterprise with few commitments in the governance of India. Challenges to the Company’s trading prerogatives led to the conquest of eastern and northern India, yet the illegibility of indigenous society and fears of peasant rebellion fashioned governance arrangements which empowered proprietary elites, who served as key intermediares between the colonial state and society. In much of southern, central and western India, however, threats to the colonial enterprise from indigenous state-building projects, like Mysore and the Maratha confederacy, led to significant conflict and a variety of different arrangements: significant state intervention into rural society and relations with cultivators, as well as the affirmation of different types of princely states. The chapter concludes with the extremes of state presence and absence: in metropolizes and in political agencies on the frontier of state authority.

In Majerteenia in the nineteenth century, violence – once the exception in inter-state relations in the region – evolved into a diplomatic strategy that could be instrumentalised for political and financial gain. Chapter 2 reconstructs a series of confrontations between British colonial officials and the rulers of north-eastern Somalia over Somali attacks on seaborne and wrecked ships. The Majerteen coastal elites engaged in a cycle of attacking shipwrecks and signing treaties with the British colonial rulers in Aden to increase regional recognition for their rights as coastal rulers. As the nineteenth century wore on, the British reneged on their promises, relied on duress in negotiations, and engaged in double-dealing with Sultan Uthman’s political rivals, especially a regional governor named Yusuf ‘Ali. Their treaty relations with the British echoed but modified existing agreements with other port-rulers in the region, including the Hadhramis, the Omanis and the Ottomans. By the end of the century, the Majerteen Sultanate would be split in two, carved into mutually antagonistic northern and southern spheres which continue to this day to be rivals, as can be witnessed in the tensions over the extent of Puntland and Galmudug federal states jurisdictions.