@article{ref1,
title="Colonialism's Civilizing Mission: The Case of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission",
journal="Law and social inquiry",
year="2001",
author="Shamir, Ronen and Hacker, Daphna",
volume="26",
number="2",
pages="435-461",
abstract="This paper examines a particular episode in the history of British imperialism in India: the appointment of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission in 1893. We analyze the way a quasi-judicial investigation into the consumption of drugs was differently conceived and executed as a civilizing mission by, on the one hand, British colonizers, and, on the other hand, an aspiring colonized elite. By bringing together the ideological dimensions of a civilizing mission (e.g., the reliance on scientific knowledge, groper procedures, legal techniques) with its social ones (e.g., collaboration between colonizers and a local elite), we show how the very notion of a civilizing mission became a site of struggle over meaning, identity, and desirable forms of governance. The analysis reveals a local elite struggling to position itself at once on a par with British criteria of scientific competence and yet not as a mere proxy for British interests; at once able to articulate itself in terms of enlightenment concepts such as reason and modernity and yet celebrating its own distinct cultural authenticity.<p />",
language="",
issn="0897-6546",
doi="10.1111/j.1747-4469.2001.tb00184.x",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-4469.2001.tb00184.x"
}