A Matter of Principle

In ‘On Governmentality’, Michel Foucault linked the emergence of the science of political economy to a new kind of power unique to the modern order. Departing from this observation, but integrating the wider imperial context of this historical shift by examining developments in the British Empire, the first part of this study analyses how the science of political economy was linked to the emergence of new identities, social practices as well as forms of political intervention and resistance in not only metropolises and colonies, but also the wider context of the Pax Britannica. The second part of the study analyses how these global entanglements shaped the conditions which made the emergence of anti- and postcolonial counter discourses and practices in India possible. By tracing how Indian imaginings of postcolonial modernity and concomitant practices of resistance emerged from engagements with globally circulating discourses on political economy, it shows the mutual entanglement between Western modernity and its postcolonial alternatives.