Leaving only question-marks: Geographies of Rule in modern Yemen

Abstract

The juxtaposition of these seemingly unrelated moments in Britain’s colonial history, the trial of Warren Hastings and a conversation with Imam Ahmad concerning the borders of Britain’s Aden Protectorate, is meant to suggest the importance of geography in the constitution of the state and its object of rule. As Burke realized even then, colonial rule was predicated on a geographical imagination that marked off spaces as modern and pre-modern and, therefore, justified particular forms of government. In South Yemen, the British quite consciously placed Aden and its hinterland under separate forms of rule based on a distinction between city and tribe. But as Imam Ahmad’s statement indicates, the Zaydi Imamate of the Yemeni highlands was no less obsessed with space, albeit of a very different kind.