Colonialism, Neopatrimonialism, and Hybrid State Formation in Malaysia and the Philippines

In Weberian scholarship, conventional wisdom views the corruption of the modern rational-legal bureaucratic state by local patrimonialisms as an endemic feature in non-Western postcolonial state formation. The resultant neopatrimonial state is often blamed for the social, political, and economic ills plaguing these societies. This essay challenges conventional wisdom and argues that neopatrimonialism is a process of hybrid state formation that has its origins in the cultural politics of colonial state building. This is achieved by drawing on a comparative study of British Malaya and the American Philippines, which offers contrastive trajectories of colonialism and state formation in Southeast Asia.

Because of the precariousness of state power due to local resistance and class conflicts, colonial state building involved the deepening of patron–client relations for political control and of rational-legal bureaucracy for social development. In the process, local political relations were marked and displaced as traditional patrimonialisms distinguished from the new modern center. Through native elite collaborators and paternal-populist discourses, new patron–client relations were institutionalized to connect the colonial state to the native periphery. However, colonial officials with different political beliefs and ethnographic world views in the center competed over native policy and generated cyclical crises between patron-clientelist excess and bureaucratic entrepreneurship.

Instead of the prevailing view that postcolonial states are condemned to their colonial design, and that authoritarian rule favors economic development, my study shows that non-Western state formation is non-linear and follows a cyclical pattern between predation and developmentalism, the excesses of which could be moderated.