Policing Society: the ‘Rational’ Practice of British Colonial Land Administration in the New Territories of Hong Kong c. 1900

Abstract This paper examines the formulation and practice of British colonial land policy in the New Territories of Hong Kong shortly after the signing of the lease. Far from having put into operation a set of legal codes and administrative practices which mirrored indigenous custom hence rationally preserving the nature of traditional social organization, as has been put forth repeatedly in the scholarly literature, the machinery of rational administration introduced subtle changes into the system and petrified the social order in a way which came to be confused for native tradition. These events reflect the intrusion of a larger normalizing process and the hegemony of a new kind of moral regulation foreign to the existing order.