Nomads, empire, and colonial modernity

This chapter explores the nomad figure encountered in contexts of colonial modernity. It examines three texts that address the nomad’s relationship with empire: namely, the explorer Jospeh Thomson’s Ulu: An African Romance (1888) that addresses the British Empire’s encounter with Maasai resistance to the building of railways in East Africa; Flora Annie Steel’s short story “Habitual Criminals” (1894) that explores the inadequacies of enforced sedentarization of nomads who were deemed habitual criminals under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871; and finally, Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Bridge Builders” (1893) that examines the casteless Indian lascar or sailor as a global nomad and a product of colonial modernity, who may envision the end of rigid categories of situated identities that are the product of sedentary civilization, so that with the collapse of distinctions between colonizer and colonized through syncretism, intuitions of the end of empire emerge.