Statemaking and Territory in South Asia: Lessons from the Anglo-Gorkha War (1814-1816) (Anthem Modern South Asian History) - Hardcover

Michael, Bernardo A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 085728519X ISBN 13: 9780857285195

Verlag: Anthem Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

This volume seeks to understand how European colonization transformed the organization of territory in South Asia through an examination of the territorial disputes that underlay the Anglo-Gorkha War of 1814–1816 and subsequent efforts of the colonial state to reorder its territories.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bernardo A. Michael

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Statemaking and Territory in South Asia

Lessons from the Anglo-Gorkha War (1814-1816)

By Bernardo A. Michael

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2012 Bernardo A. Michael
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-85728-519-5

Contents

List of Maps, Plates and Tables, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xiii, 
Abbreviations, xvii, 
Chapter 1 Statemaking, Cultures of Governance and the Anglo–Gorkha War of 1814–1816, 1, 
Chapter 2 The Agrarian Environment and the Production of Space on the Anglon–Gorkha Frontier, 17, 
Chapter 3 The Champarann–Tarriaini Frontier, 31, 
Chapter 4 The Gorakhpurn–Butwal Frontier, 49, 
Chapter 5 The Disjointed Spaces of Precolonial Territorial Divisions, 67, 
Chapter 6 Making States Legible: Maps, Surveys and Boundaries, 87, 
Chapter 7 Conclusion, 123, 
Glossary, 129, 
Notes, 137, 
Archival Sources, 197, 
Bibliography, 201, 
Index, 221, 

CHAPTER 1

STATEMAKING, CULTURES OF GOVERNANCE AND THE ANGLO–GORKHA WAR OF 1814–1816

The word [state] commonly denotes no class of objects that can be identified exactly, and for the same reason it signifies no list of attributes which bears the sanction of common usage.

— George Sabine

[...] we recognise space as the product of interrelations; as constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny.

— Doreen Massey

1. Approaching States and Statemaking

It was the start of a warm day in the month of Jeyt in 2046 BS (May/June 1989 CE) when I awoke at 4.00am to undertake the six-hour trek to the Indian border. I had been living in a small town, in Far Western Nepal, teaching in a public school and now had to travel to Delhi to repair school equipment and purchase textbooks. I trudged along under the weight of a backpack full with nearly thirty mismatched pounds of damaged machine parts, punctured soccer balls and books in need of binding. As the day headed purposefully towards its consummation in a scorching finale of 110 degree Fahrenheit, I broke for a cup of tea along the Mohana River which marked the Indo – Nepal boundary. Always a porous zone of flows, this section of the Indo – Nepal boundary had been a mobile space attracting traders, migrant labor, smugglers and tourists alike. That day, however, the Nepali guards were out, armed, vigilant as they gazed across the river at the outpost of their Indian counterparts. I unpacked my bags for the guards to rummage through. When they discovered I was a teacher, they quickly waved me on. I received the same treatment on the other side of the river where there was an unusual buzz of activity on what should have been a quiet and uneventful day. All of a sudden the border had come alive and the boundary that had been irreverently crossed all these days was now being carefully monitored, especially by the Indian side. This was a tense time in the relations between the two neighbors. The Indo – Nepal Trade and Transit treaties had expired and the Indian government had imposed an economic blockade on Nepal by sealing the borders. At such times a tighter regime of discipline and control ensued with new protocols of crossing, examination, and scrutiny. It felt as if the boundary which had always seemed like an imaginary line on the ground had suddenly been reincarnated into a real wall of separation. Out of all the innumerable boundary crossings I made during my nearly eight year stay in Nepal, these remain most vividly ingrained in my imagination – signifying the boundary as both porous and impermeable.

This book is a historical account of the emergence of the Anglo–Gorkha boundary set against a wider backdrop of colonial territorial formation. It bridges two distinct but dispersed historical junctures where the idea of the modern state as a geographically discernible and territorially circumscribed entity emerged in colonial South Asia. Firstly, it examines the territorial disputes that emerged along the common frontiers of Gorkha (present-day Nepal) and the English East India Company that eventually led to the outbreak of the Anglo–Gorkha War in 1814. I suggest that at the heart of these disputes were questions pertaining to the geographical construction of the state, more specifically the precise location and layout of territorial divisions along the shared frontier of the two states. These disputes coalesced around older tribute, taxation and tenurial claims that left their territories perpetually intermixed with ill-defined boundaries. Following the defeat of the Gorkhalis in 1816, the Company's officials surveyed the frontier to establish a linear boundary that would clearly demarcate their respective territories. Secondly, this book also argues that such exercises in colonial boundary formation formed part of a long-drawn process whereby the colonial state, through various cartographic projects and changes in administrative routines, rearranged its internal administrative divisions in an attempt to create the geographical template of the modern state – occupying a definite portion of the earth's surface and divided into non-overlapping divisions and sub-divisions. The Gorkhali state would initiate similar proceedings only in the twentieth century.

The observation of the historical sociologist Michael Mann, that "societies are much messier than our theories of them," could very easily be applied to the study of the state and the messy middle ground that marks state–society relations. It is at this middle ground, where abstractions such as "state" and "society" break down to reveal their form in terms of process rather than some fixed unyielding structure, that the study of statemaking can be located. Consequently, statemaking calls for the study of the complex embroidery of social forces that make up the middle ground between the state and society and the negotiated and contingent manner in which these forces are produced, sustained and transformed through time. Furthermore, and from the standpoint of this study, the role of culture, power, space and history in shaping processes of statemaking is clearly acknowledged. Such an approach to statemaking reveals the finest local details in all their complexity, while balancing them with broad generalizations of dominant trends and patterns.

Within the specific context of South Asian history the state has been an object of scholarly scrutiny. Many studies traversing the length and breadth of the subcontinent's history have generated a rich palette of histories and interpretations of states and statemaking. Here, states and statemaking have been defined and interpreted in terms of an intersecting array of political, economic, ideological, environmental and cultural forces. This has led to the study of military and bureaucratic institutions, agrarian systems, long-distance trade, nationalism, the environment, colonial constructions of knowledge and subaltern life. Given this context, studies on statemaking emerging from South Asia continue to evolve in new and innovative directions – questioning received wisdom on the subject and pursuing interdisciplinary agendas that are sensitive to the socio-cultural complexity expressed through the nuances, vagaries and varieties of human agency. On this point, the state of history writing in modern Nepal deserves special comment. Over the last fifty years or so, scholars have mined archival repositories to produce historical works on the Nepali state that are...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Anthem Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 085728519X
• ISBN 13: 9780857285195
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 252
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland