In Nicholas B. Dirks's words, Colonial conquest was not just the result of the power of superior arms, military organisation, political power or economic wealth as important as these things were. Colonialism was made possible and then sustained and strengthened as much by cultural technologies of rule as it was by the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest that first established power on foreign shores (Dirks 1928: ix). Similarly, Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism begins from the premise that the institutional, political and economic operations of imperialism are nothing without the power of the culture that maintains them....