Søren Rud is Associate Professor in History at the Saxo-Institute, University of Copenhagen. He has worked and published within the field of Postcolonial Studies specifically on the topic of Danish Colonialism in Greenland .Søren Ivarsson is Associate Professor at the Saxo-Institute, University of Copenhagen. He has worked and published within the field of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies. His geographic area of expertise is Thailand and Laos.

Contributed by scholars from Europe and the US and based on papers given at a conference and workshop held at the U. of Copenhagen, Denmark, the nine essays in this collection consider the colonial state in the context of governmental practices, violence, and agency. They discuss different configurations of power in two colonies of the US (Puerto Rico and the Philippines), mechanisms of power in Denmark and the Danish colony of Tranquebar at the end of the 18th century, and governmental power in the slave society of the Danish West Indies in the late 18th century; violence in the 1950s in the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, the police force Landespolizei in the German colony of Southwest Africa, and violence in the relational processes of territorialization in Morocco and Libya; and the role of local agency in relation to reforms of the British colonial state that increased state capacity in Trinidad and Tobago and colonial governance in Samoa at the end of the 19th century under the shared control of German, British, and American officials.

• Rethinking the Colonial State: Configurations of Power, Violence, and Agency  Colonial Governmentality in Puerto Rico and the Philippines: Sovereign Force, Governmental Rationality, and Disciplinary Institutions under US Rule Comparing the Colonial State – Governing ‘the Social’ and Policing the Population in Late 18th Century India and Denmark Governing the Risks of Slavery: State-Practice, Slave Law, and the Problem of Public Order in 18th Century Danish West Indies Ordering Resistance: The Late Colonial State in the Portuguese Empire (1940-1975)   Violence as Usual: Everyday Police Work and the Colonial State in German Southwest Africa Colonial War and the Production of Territorialized State Space in North Africa  Resistance and Reforms: The Role of Subaltern Agency in Colonial State Development Colonialism by Deferral: Samoa Under the Tridominium, 1889-1899