Introduction

While territories are socially produced spaces, the role of the environment in their constitution cannot be overlooked. In recent decades an environmentalist paradigm has captured the historical imagination to reveal the mutual transformations that characterize the relationship between the environment and human beings. The varied literature that has developed on this theme of environmental history has restored the environment to the center stage of history. Within the South Asian context, recent studies of the environment have examined the role of climate, health and disease and forests in the social, political and economic history of the subcontinent. This chapter builds on these insights in order to gain a better understanding of the connections between the environment and the socio-political forces acting on them that ultimately mediated the production of territory. In order to better understand the spatial dimensions of processes of state formation on the Anglo–Gorkha frontier, the relationships between the environment, land and labor in the production of territory needs to be emphasized. Interactions between human beings and their environment shaped the cultures of governance on this frontier in important ways, producing fluctuating histories of land control.