Abstract
By the turn of the nineteenth century, the Durrani Empire established by Ahmad Shah Abdali in 1747 had fallen into definitive disarray. The Afghans, who had long terrorized the north Indian plain as marauders and helped sack Delhi on more than one occasion, could no longer mount raids into this once rich reservoir of plunder. Their fall from political grace coincided with the rise of a new power whose growing influence over the Gangetic Plain was to be the story of the new century — the English East India Company (EIC). As the Company filled the vacuum of authority created by the decline, and in some cases defeat of South Asia’s post-Mughal successor states, it found itself coming into more regular contact with the political entities inhabiting the lands beyond the Sutlej and the Indus rivers. When these forces began to intrude into the Company’s conceptual universe, Company servants recognized the need to construct a framework within which these newly encountered entities could be understood and dealt with. This framework would transform the raw information the Company was beginning to accumulate about these powers into knowledge of the colonial state. Such colonial knowledge could then be deployed to relate with, if not directly influence, indigenous powers to the advantage of the Company state. Yet more profound than the exercise of power through the deployment of information, the colonial state was in the process of conceptualizing, and thus defining those with whom it dealt.
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Notes
For a discussion of colonial knowledge, see Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (2001)
Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (1996)
Eugene Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India 1796–1895 (1994).
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For a discussion of ‘colonial information order’, see C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information (2002).
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See, for instance, A. Burnes, Travels into Bokhara; Together with a Narrative of a Voyage on the Indus (2003; reprint, 1834).
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For a description of that universe, see George Stocking, Jr. Victorian Anthropology (1987), 8–45.
Martha McLaren, British India and British Scotland, 1780–1830: Career Building, Empire Building, and a Scottish School of Though on Indian Governance (2001), 30, 64.
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For a discussion of how the eighteenth-century values colouring Elphinstone’s writings affected other areas of Company policy, notably the Bengal Permanent Settlement, see Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (1963).
See George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (1987), 10–20. One must bear in mind Frederic Cooper’s admonition not to homogenize ‘Enlightenment values’ into a totalizing monolith, but rather to recognize the complexity of the Enlightenment past.
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He places this generational shift in the 1840s. David Washbrook, ‘India, 1818–1860: The Two Faces of Colonialism’, in Oxford History of the British Empire (1999), 417.
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On the issue of language, see Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (1996), 16–56.
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This image was especially prevalent in the late nineteenth century. See, for example, Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1989).
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See R.O. Christensen, ‘Tribesmen, Government and Political Economy on the North-West Frontier’, in Arrested Development in India: The Historical Dimension (1988).
See generally M.E. Yapp, ‘Tribes in the Khyber, 1838–1842’, in The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan (1983).
The Afghan experience was not unique. See, for example, Robert M. Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (1963)
Jean Comaroff, ‘The Empire’s Old Clothes: Fashioning the Colonial Subject’, in Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities (1996).
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Rob Hager, ‘State, Tribe and Empire in Afghan Inter-Polity Relations’, in The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan (1983), 94.
See generally Christine Noelle, State and Tribe in Nineteenth Century Afghanistan: The Reign of Amir Dost Muhammad Khan, 1826–1863 (1997).
See, for instance, Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society (1988)
Lawrence Rosen, The Culture of Islam: Changing Aspects of Contemporary Muslim Life (2002)
Sneath, The Headless State: Aristocratic Order, Kinship Society and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia (2007), especially Chapter 2.
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© 2008 B. D. Hopkins
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Hopkins, B.D. (2008). The Power of Colonial Knowledge. In: The Making of Modern Afghanistan. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230228764_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230228764_2
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