Since the publication of Michel Foucault's 1978 lectures on governmentality, it has become increasingly commonplace to understand the circulation of power as a decentered process.1 Instead of identifying government with the centralized locus of state rule, a burgeoning governmentality literature has argued that governmental power operates through the production of discursive normalizations, political rationalities, and techniques of regulation that ultimately produce subjects that behave as they ought. In Social Text 43 (1995), David Scott's article "Colonial Governmentality" developed this line of thinking to move toward a better understanding of the operation of colonial power. His influential piece set forth ways of understanding the political terrains that colonial power made possible: what new forms of subjectivity, society, and normalcy Europe's insertion into the lives of the colonized organized and produced. He did so by working through one particular historical instance: the formation of Sri Lanka's modernity, which he traced back to British Ceylon's Colebrooke-Cameron constitutional reforms of the early 1830s. These institutional changes, Scott skillfully shows, constituted a crucial break with the past, ushering in Sri Lanka's modernity by way of "the introduction of a new game of politics that the colonized would (eventually) be obliged to play if 

they were to be counted as political" (emphasis in original).