Sömürgeci Aklın Mimarisi: İngiliz Doğu Hindistan Şirketi’nin Hegemonya Mekanizmaları Üzerine Post-Kolonyal Bir Analiz (1757–1857)

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Yürük E.

Vakanüvis - Uluslararası Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi, cilt.11, sa.2, ss.2269-2303, 2026 (TRDizin)

Özet

This study analyzes the construction of British dominance in the Indian subcontinent between 1757 and 1857, moving beyond a focus on military conquest to examine a complex architecture of indirect power that permeated the realms of law, administration, economy, and knowledge production. By centering on the institutional specificity of the British East India Company (EIC), the article provides a holistic analysis of the building of British hegemony through six core policies: the Subsidiary Alliance System, Political Residency, Permanent Settlement, the Doctrine of Lapse, the Divide and Rule strategy, and the Paramountcy Principle. Seeking to transcend the fragmented approach prevalent in current literature, this study argues that these policies constituted a mutually reinforcing “ecosystem of sovereignty.” The analysis synthesizes the historical material with the theoretical frameworks of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Frantz Fanon. The original contribution of this work lies in its classification of colonial interventions into three distinct types of epistemic violence—taxonomic, juridical, and structural—based on the specific knowledge regimes they targeted. The article demonstrates that while the Subsidiary Alliance and Residency systems liquidated the political subjectivity of local elites, the Permanent Settlement transformed the social fabric by altering the ontological definition of property, and the Divide and Rule strategy constructed a colonial “politics of difference” by freezing fluid identities. Ultimately, the study contends that British rule in India was a post-colonial model of sovereignty established through mechanisms of consent, surveillance, and legal normalization, reaching its breaking point with the Great Resistance of 1857.

Keywords: India, British East India Company, Post-Colonial Theory, Epistemic Violence, South Asia.