A central purpose of this book is to examine British political intelligence in north India between the 1780s and the 1860s. It describes the networks of Indian running-spies, news writers and knowledgeable secretaries whom officials of the East India Company recruited and deployed in their efforts to secure military, political and social information. It considers how the colonial authorities interpreted and misinterpreted the material derived from these sources. It draws attention to the gaps, distortions and ‘panics’ about malign ‘native’ plots which afflicted the system of imperial surveillance within north India and, for comparison's sake, outside its borders, in Nepal, Burma and beyond the north-western frontier. Finally, the book examines the extent to which intelligence failures and successes contributed to the course of the Rebellion of 1857–9, the collapse of the East India Company's government and the form of the following pacification.

The quality of military and political intelligence available to European colonial powers was evidently a critical determinant of their success in conquest and profitable governance. Equally, this information provided the raw material on which Europeans drew when they tried to understand the politics, economic activities and culture of their indigenous subjects. The book, therefore, addresses some of the most traditional as well as some of the most recent and controversial issues in imperial and south Asian historiography.

The study also concerns communication and the movement of knowledge within Indian society, examining the role of communities of writers in the bazaars and the culture of political debate. It is a study of social communication in the sense used in Karl Deutsch's pioneering work.