Empire building in British India was inseparably tied to the processes of frontier-making and the creation of boundaries. This book examines how the dynamics of frontier and boundary creation were shaped by a variety of agents.
Empire building in British India was inseparably tied to the processes of frontier-making and the creation of boundaries. Through a range of complex practices and developments, the constitution of these spaces took shape at various historical conjunctures. The making of these spaces was also shaped by a variety of imperial concerns, including local and global processes, connections, and entanglements. Focusing on the period between the 19th and the early 20th century, this book looks at how the dynamics of frontier and boundary creation were shaped by a variety of agents, institutions, infrastructure and technologies, events, economy, travel, forms of representation, and imperial rivalries. The role of capital, war and violence were also intrinsic to the creation of such spaces. Further, societies in these spaces responded to these processes in various ways. The book examines how they negotiated and mediated these complex developments of modern space-making in multiple ways at the margins of empire.
Part of the Empire and Frontiers series, this book will be of interest to researchers and readers of history, anthropology, cultural studies, social and cultural history, frontiers, boundaries and borderland studies, Himalayan studies, and studies of commodities and circulations.
Introduction: At the Imperial Edges: Producing Frontiers, Making
Boundaries Part I: Economy, People, Frontier Geographies
Chapter 1: The
Hanging of Siddhoo Koli: Tracing Subaltern Lives in the Early Colonial
Himalaya, c. 1815-45
Chapter 2: Dynamic Trades, Shifting Geographies:
Commerce in the North East frontier of British India Part II: War, Travel,
Representation
Chapter 3: The River Sutlej as Frontier at the First
Anglo-Sikh War (1845-46) in the Personal Chronicle of Prussian Prince
Waldemar
Chapter 4: The Great Indian Desert in Colonial and Nomadic
Narratives of Travel Part III: Imperial Politics, Peripheries, Frontier
Governance
Chapter 5: Assam, Tibet and the Great Game: Imperial Geo-Politics
in the Himalayas in the Long Nineteenth Century
Chapter 6: Policymaking and
the Political-military Interface on the Periphery of Empire: The Battle for
Waziristan in the Early 1920s Part IV: Infrastructure, Connectivity, Frontier
Making
Chapter 7: Infrastructural Contingencies and Contingent Sovereignties
on the IndoAfghan Frontier
Chapter 8: The Making of a Defence Frontier:
World War Two and British India's North East
Lipokmar Dzüvichü is Assistant Professor at Special Centre for the Study of North East India, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. His research work covers themes on history of frontiers and borderlands, transport history, history of goods and circulation, labour history, history of modern infrastructure, and visual history.
Manjeet Baruah is Assistant Professor at Special Centre for the Study of North East India, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. His research work covers themes on literary and cultural history; study of space and text; colonialism; and the study of frontiers and borderlands. His most recent published book is Hunter, Peasant, Rebel: Colonialism and the British Assam Frontier (2024). He has also published a work of translation, Remains of Spring: A Naga Village in the No Mans Land (2016).
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