Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Maps, Plates and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Statemaking, Cultures of Governance and the Anglo–Gorkha War of 1814–1816
- Chapter 2 The Agrarian Environment and the Production of Space on the Anglo–Gorkha Frontier
- Chapter 3 The Champaran–Tarriaini Frontier
- Chapter 4 The Gorakhpur–Butwal Frontier
- Chapter 5 The Disjointed Spaces of Precolonial Territorial Divisions
- Chapter 6 Making States Legible: Maps, Surveys and Boundaries
- Chapter 7 Conclusion
- Glossary
- Notes
- Archival Sources
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 6 - Making States Legible: Maps, Surveys and Boundaries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Maps, Plates and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Statemaking, Cultures of Governance and the Anglo–Gorkha War of 1814–1816
- Chapter 2 The Agrarian Environment and the Production of Space on the Anglo–Gorkha Frontier
- Chapter 3 The Champaran–Tarriaini Frontier
- Chapter 4 The Gorakhpur–Butwal Frontier
- Chapter 5 The Disjointed Spaces of Precolonial Territorial Divisions
- Chapter 6 Making States Legible: Maps, Surveys and Boundaries
- Chapter 7 Conclusion
- Glossary
- Notes
- Archival Sources
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
But it is the case, I believe, that we would not have had empire itself, as well as many forms of historiography, anthropology, sociology, and modern legal structures, without important philosophical and imaginative processes at work in the production as well as the acquisition, subordination, and settlement of space.
—Edward W. SaidEuropean states made their power visible not only through ritual performance and dramatic display, but through the gradual extension of “officializing” procedures and routines, through the capacity to bound and mark space, to record transactions such as the sale of property, to count and classify their populations, to gradually replace religious institutions as the registrar of the life-cycle facts of birth, marriage, and death, and finally to become the natural embodiment of history, territory, and society.
—Bernard S. Cohn and Nicholas B. DirksIntroduction: Indigenous Maps and Representations of Territory
This book has tried to spin a shared spatial thread to join two dispersed narratives. The first examines the spatial substance of the Anglo–Gorkha disputes in order to better understand the organization of territory along that frontier. The defeat of the Gorkhalis by the East India Company meant the gradual insertion of the second narrative, whereby a specific colonial vision of territory gradually overshadowed older ways of organizing state territories in South Asia. This vision found its material expression in modern surveying and mapmaking exercises undertaken initially by the colonial state and then by succeeding postcolonial regimes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Statemaking and Territory in South AsiaLessons from the Anglo–Gorkha War (1814–1816), pp. 87 - 122Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2012