Class Struggle, Ethnographic Ideology and Bonapartist State Formation in Colonial Malaya and Philippines.

In the 1930s, the colonies of British Malaya and US Philippines were beset by labor uprisings. In both cases, political administration lurched toward bonapartism, when the deadlock between imperial capital and native labor was resolved in the dictatorship of the colonial state. The formation of colonial bonapartisms however diverged. In Malaya the British governor embodied a dictatorship softened by institutional-racial compacts, while the US delegated the dictatorship to an autonomous Commonwealth state. This paper explains the divergence in terms of class formation and ethnographic ideology. British capitalist ownership made it difficult to conciliate the demands of the Chinese proletariat, while lack of US capitalist investment allowed it to withdraw from direct rule and support a client state against land-starved peasants. Ethnographic ideology determined the British policy of support the traditional Malay elites against the economically preponderant Chinese and the US policy of supporting Filipino mestizo elites as civilized guardians of a client state. This comparative analysis suggests that colonial bonapartism influenced the variable constitution of post-colonial states. Strong bonapartism (Philippines) leads to a weakly institutionalized state dependent on patron-supported coercion, while weak bonapartism (Malaya) leads to a strongly institutionalized state dependent on racial consensus to maintain the class status quo. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]