European University Institute Library

Taming the imperial imagination, colonial knowledge, international relations, and the Anglo-Afghan encounter, 1808-1878, Martin J. Bayly

eng

index present

non fiction

Taming the imperial imagination

electronic resource

dictionaries

972092277

Martin J. Bayly

Cambridge Social Sciences eBooks

colonial knowledge, international relations, and the Anglo-Afghan encounter, 1808-1878

Taming the Imperial Imagination marks a novel intervention into the debate on empire and international relations, and offers a new perspective on nineteenth-century Anglo-Afghan relations. Martin J. Bayly shows how, throughout the nineteenth century, the British Empire in India sought to understand and control its peripheries through the use of colonial knowledge. Addressing the fundamental question of what Afghanistan itself meant to the British at the time, he draws on extensive archival research to show how knowledge of Afghanistan was built, refined and warped by an evolving colonial state. This knowledge informed policy choices and cast Afghanistan in a separate legal and normative universe. Beginning with the disorganised exploits of nineteenth-century explorers and ending with the cold strategic logic of the militarised 'scientific frontier', this book tracks the nineteenth-century origins of contemporary policy 'expertise' and the forms of knowledge that inform interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere today.--, Provided by publisher

Part I. Knowledge -- 1. Early European explorers of Afghanistan -- 2. Knowledge entrepreneurs -- Part II. Policy -- 3. "Information... information" : Anglo-Afghan relations in the 1830s -- 4. Contestation and closure : rationalising the Afghan polity -- Part III. Exception -- 5. The emergence of a violent geography, 1842-1853 -- 6. Overcoming exception, 1853-1857 -- 7. "Science" and sentiment : the era of frontier management, 1857-1878 -- Appendix 1: Afghanistan's Ethnic Groups -- Appendix 2: Tribes of the Pashtun Ethnic Group -- Appendix 3: European Explorers of Afghanistan in Chronological Order, 1793-1839 -- Appendix 4: European Explorers of Afghanistan 1843-1878 -- Appendix 5: The Elphinstone Map -- Glossary