Studies of colonialism and empire have increasingly drawn attention to the problem of conceptualizing the political logic of colonial projects and the circumstances of state formation in colonial contexts. Concepts such as ‘colonial governmentality’ (Prakash, Thomas, Scott, Legg), ‘state effect’ and ‘enframing’ (Mitchell), ‘rule of difference’ (Chatterjee), ‘ethnographic state’ (Dirks), ‘the colonial state as a social field’ (Steinmetz), ‘affective state’ (Stoler) have contributed immensely to the analytical framing of the peculiarities of colonial rule. Still, the nature and workings of the colonial state remains undertheorized and underanalysed. With this workshop we wish to bring together a small group of scholars working on less studied colonial states. Hereby we wish to open up for a fruitful exchange on what such cases can tell us about the generic nature of the colonial state and hereby stimulate a retheorizing of the colonial state.