Over thirty years ago, Benedict Anderson asked students of Southeast Asia: Why did French Indochina eventually splinter into three political units, while the Dutch East Indies emerged as a single national polity? This chapter takes up Anderson's challenge to evaluate the central claim of this book: That variation in the institutions governing colonial-era bureaucratic selection proved influential in either forging or undermining the horizontal camaraderie constitutive of multi-ethnic nations. This chapter shows that where colonial rulers introduced the meritocratic selection of local civil servants – as the French did in Indochina – privileged groups tended to outstrip marginalized groups in the competition for coveted government jobs. Meanwhile, where colonial regimes relied on indigenous elites to select local staff – as the Dutch did in the East Indies – there was little inter-group competition for government jobs, as elites tended to dole out jobs to members of their ethnic in-group, with the consequence of siloing grievances.

What is the definition of both the state and the nation? How did these two concepts emerge – and what explains their comparative advantage in supplanting alternative forms of political organization and identity? This chapter critically reviews the scholarly literature on these questions, placing a particular emphasis on how the state and the nation are “built,” and arguing that questions of bureaucratic selection constitute the key element of state-building. The chapter concludes by developing a theory about the relationship between rulers’ efforts at state-building and nation-building.

The first chapter explores the background to the 1600 Charter setting out the conditions for the establishment of the East India Company. Here I am interested in the rights of acquisition inherited from the exploratory age of the Tudor state rather than the more familiar story of its formal constitution. The language of charters granted to trading companies revealed something of the discursive complexity shaped by European powers striving to legitimize claims to overseas territory. England had few jurists of note and so the state drew partially and selectively on Roman and common law to foreground the precept of possession, not least because it conveniently rendered obsolete all challenges to the means of acquisition. The chartered companies of unprecedented size, capital and ambition which rose to power in the second half of the sixteenth century inherited this repertoire of legal pluralism but found in practice that the quest for conquest of overseas territory was compromised by geography and the existence of rival European powers with similar ambitions.

Worldwide, more than 125 countries have enacted legal provisions against disability-based discrimination; such legislation was also a core demand of Japanese and Korean disability rights activism. Despite the rapid diffusion of non discrimination norms, we know less about why their forms vary and how they have affected rights-claiming options. Through a paired comparison of activism surrounding statutes enacted in Korea and Japan in 2007 and 2013, respectively, Chapter 5 shows how advocacy for such legislation and related litigation transformed governance and created legal opportunities. To a greater extent in Korea than in Japan, people with disabilities gained non discrimination rights, mechanisms for redressing discrimination, support from NGOs and state agencies, and the legal tools with which to solidify and expand anti discrimination protections in court and through statutory revisions.

In this chapter, I take the theoretical predictions developed earlier to a near-global dataset using techniques of statistical inference. The analyses relate variation in country-year bureaucratic selection to two genres of outcomes: (1) a measure of representational inequality and (2) the incidence of internal conflict. I establish two core findings in this chapter. First, I show that countries in which civil servants are recruited more meritocratically are also those with higher measures of bureaucratic between-group inequality. Second, looking at the incidence of internal conflict in a given country-year observation, in a sample of post-colonial countries over the period 1941–2021, I find that internal conflict is more likely in countries that recruit civil servants meritocratically.

Bombay did not progress steadily from its uncertain beginning for it was beset by an uncompromising topography, a Portuguese landed class which refused to forfeit its valuable estates, hostile rival powers and a malarial climate which regularly took its toll on English lives. For decades, its very survival was in doubt. Even the governorship of Gerald Aungier, long celebrated for its achievements in setting Bombay on the path to modernization and legal and municipal reform, actually did little to guarantee its survival. Fortifications were neglected and the administration of justice was left in abeyance, particularly at the time of Keigwin’s rebellion of 1683 and the aftermath of the siege of 1689 which brought Bombay close to total collapse. But progress there was. Faltering it may have been but for the Company there was sufficient evidence to encourage a transition of power from Surat. And by the third decade of the eighteenth century, a Mayor’s Court was established as a decisive new phase in the administration of justice. By then, the Company could claim a certain sovereign authority over a defensible Bombay, essential conditions for the explosive growth of the eighteenth century.

The introduction outlines the book’s two main puzzles: First, why is legalistic governance emerging in South Korea and Japan, which were long known for their non legalistic regulatory styles? Second, what accounts for the varieties of legalism observed in Korea and Japan? Legalism describes a style of regulation that relies on more formal, detailed, and enforceable laws and regulations, as well as more participatory policy design and implementation processes. This book argues that activists and lawyers are often-overlooked societal drivers behind the emergence of legalism and the broader judicialization of politics in Korea and Japan.

Like Bombay and Calcutta later, Madras had an improbable start. Unprepossessing the site may have been, but by the time Francis Day resolved this was to be the first permanent settlement of the Company, he found receptive audiences in London and Bantam. Despite costs which troubled the court, work began immediately to fortify the town, and when population levels soared through the migration and settlement of native artisans and their families, it was surveyed, ordered, segregated and taxed. Importantly also, the experience of Madras threw into sharp relief the urgent need for a legitimacy grounded in jurisdictional power. Madras thus provided the means of addressing the manifold complexities associated with imposing a foreign administration of justice on a population which for the most part inhabited indigenous systems. The process was messy, pragmatic and incomplete, but by the early years of the eighteenth century, a court system was installed. Although based exclusively on an English model of municipal and legal reform, this was a system that helped to assert the sovereign authority of the Company and shaped the experiences of Bombay and Calcutta.

This chapter reflects on the contribution of this book to the new generation of literature on both the state and the nation. It reviews the arguments and evidence presented in earlier chapters from a critical perspective, however, engaging the main vulnerabilities and critiques of the argument. The chapter then turns to speculate about a broader statement of the theoretical tension between state-building and nation-building – beyond the context of bureaucratic selection. Finally, it concludes with some reflections on the normative implications of the argument.

This chapter shows that the simple fact of failure on the civil service examination in Indonesia decreased applicants’ belief in the legitimacy of the process and levels of national identification while increasing support for in-group preferentialism. Next, I find that applicants who were offered – and accepted – employment in the civil service reported higher satisfaction with the process, greater amity toward out-groups, and higher national identification. I also present results from a series of survey experiments that suggest that Indonesian citizens respond negatively to information about representational imbalances in their local bureaucracies.