Liberal-utilitarian projects in colonial India were not based solely on the optimistic assumption that modern metropolitan strategies of intervention in the societies, bodies, minds and habits of undisciplined populations would produce modifications that were desirable to the colonizer. In the case of the child-correction project, we find that the optimism was accompanied from the outset by serious doubts about whether modifications could be induced in even the ‘softest’ of all native populations. As experiments with reformatories for juvenile delinquents and boarding schools for savage princelings continued into the twentieth century, these doubts accumulated into a pervasive sense of failure. This, in itself, is not surprising. It is overwhelmingly established in the post-Foucauldian historiography that disciplinary strategies rarely worked as expected, either in the peripheral space of the colony, or in the enclaves of juridical power within the metropole. Much of the time in India, reformatories and boarding schools, like prisons and hospitals, did not produce a discernible modification; they were, therefore, ‘failures’. Colonial disciplinary institutions, from this familiar perspective, were defeated by the resistance of inmates, the autonomy of their native staff, the apathy or hostility of the wider society of natives, and the British need to negotiate constantly with inmates, staff and outsiders.

The appearance of a defeated discipline is, however, misleading; there are One is to use the ‘rock / water’ analogy that Sudipta Kaviraj has used to describe the interplay between strategy and tactics in the politics of marginal urban populations.

As far as the history of the family in Europe is concerned, it can be told in a number of different ways and there are considerable variations in family patterns across the continent. One dimension concerns the family's size, another dimension what sorts of people and how many generations the family has included. Both dimensions are quantifiable and the changes taking place over time are easily summarized. Over the last 500 years the size of the family has constantly gone down, and there is a particularly sharp dip in the twentieth century. In England, for example, the average family size was 4.75 members between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, but it was 4.49 members in 1901 and only 2.4 in 1996. As far as the kinds of people the family has included, the nuclear family – the parent-and-children group – seems to have been firmly established at least since the twelfth century, and few important changes have taken place since then.

However, an understanding of the family as a protective arrangement requires more than an analysis of numerical data. What matters is not the size and composition of the family as much as its nature. The question is how it is regarded by its members and what relationships obtain between the family and the rest of society. What is important above all is the way in which the family provides individuals with a place they can call ‘home’.

But perhaps everything we have said up to this point is of little but historical interest. Today, developments are afoot which have the potential of radically recasting the entire analysis we have presented. Today, old-fashioned laissez-faire, in the guise of a ‘new economy’, is once again turning things upside-down and melting that which is solid into air. The globalization of markets is intensifying competition and putting pressure on social models to conform to a standardized norm. As a result, many of the arrangements we have previously relied on for protection have come under severe pressure. It is possible to exaggerate these changes, to be sure, but it is also possible to extrapolate from current trends. Doing this, the results are nothing short of alarming. Today, families, associations and states are all changing, weakening and eroding. But if such trends persist, what is going to happen to us? Who or what will protect us in the future?

A first task is to assess the damage done, and a second task is to figure out what, if anything, we can do about the situation. Even if the damage is substantial, there would be no emergency as long as substitutes are readily available. The question is what these substitutes would look like and whether they are likely to do their job. Who knows, maybe we will even be better off in the future than we were in the past?

While the second RS Act allowed for girls to be included in the category of the ‘juvenile offender’, neither of the RS Acts provided for the incarceration of female children in reformatories. The 1897 legislation might be seen as a tentative half-measure, but the extension of the infrastructure of juvenile punishment to girls was explicitly discouraged by both laws, and it was not until the 1920s that systematic efforts were made to import native girls into the penal archipelago. Nevertheless, like the child of the Criminal Tribe, the girl child was a persistent shadow within the reformatory, rendered marginal but all the more interesting by the ideological and political dimensions of her exclusion. There was, in fact, a substantial body of opinion in colonial child-correction circles that held female children to be especially delinquent and endangered in the native context. That girls were not ‘reformed’ on a larger scale reflects the peculiar place of females and families in an evolving vision of Indian society. The delinquency of native girls was perceived by experts as too great a problem for the reformatory to manage. Furthermore, administrators overwhelmingly believed that locking up girls would destabilize the native family, and thus create more disorder than order. In the process, they aligned themselves with Indian men who, in Partha Chatterjee's well-known phrase, sought to implement a ‘nationalist resolution’ of the problem of women and the colonial state.

During the last ten years or so there has been a lot of talk about the coming of a ‘new economy’. Different authors define this amorphous entity in slightly different ways; some focus on new technologies, others on new styles of corporate management and ways of working; or perhaps it is rather a product of a scaling-back of the state or perhaps a consequence of an ever more globalized world. Although the items on this list, or on some longer list like it, may appear quite disparate, what they have in common is an emphasis on the logic of the marketplace, on the interplay between supply and demand. What is new about the new economy, in short, is an emphasis on market forces. Economic markets, we are today constantly told, must be given freer reign – we must ‘get prices right’ and stop pampering and mollycoddling the inefficient, the unproductive and the merely lazy. Only in this way will we survive in the new and vastly more competitive world in which we live; only in this way can we achieve economic growth and lasting happiness.

We are in this way invited to participate in a gigantic social experiment. According to the engineers who have drawn up the plans, our societies are to be reorganized ever more closely in the image of a market.

The state is potentially our best ally when it comes to dealing with the problems that capitalism causes. The state is, at least in theory, tremendously powerful; nothing and no one can match the width and depth of its reach. According to a well-worn theory first enunciated in the Renaissance, the state is ‘sovereign,’ meaning that there is no authority above it – no emperors or popes – and no authority below it – no feudal lords or independent peasant communities – that can challenge its position. The state is, in Max Weber's famous definition, ‘a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’. The state can imprison people, expropriate their assets, send them to war to kill or to die, and it can do so legitimately. The question is whether there is a way to use this formidable entity to protect us against the impact of markets.

The state, in the European tradition, is not only tremendously powerful but also highly robust. It is made up not of individuals but of institutions, standardized procedures and regulatory frameworks. As such it always outlasts the people who happen to occupy its positions, and it is also highly resistant to attempts at reform. The state is somehow too large and too complex for anyone to properly control or manipulate. Moreover, the European state is sometime given what perhaps best is described as a transcendental status.