Taming the Imperial Imagination
Colonial Knowledge, International Relations, and the Anglo-Afghan Encounter, 1808–1878

A new perspective on empire, international relations and foreign policy through attention to British colonial knowledge on Afghanistan from 1808 to 1878.

Martin J. Bayly (Author)

9781107118058, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 May 2016

352 pages, 2 b/w illus. 1 map 2 tables
23.1 x 15.7 x 2.5 cm, 0.61 kg

'This is no ordinary book about British colonial-era engagement with Afghanistan. In fact, it is as far removed from orthodox military histories of the Anglo-Afghan experience as it is possible to be. More than anything it chooses to intellectualise the subject in an uncommon fashion and in the process delivers an entirely refreshing approach to what is in danger of becoming a tired and unimaginative field of study. … It is as much a book about the present as it is about the past, and for that reason is a must-read for anyone interested in the formulation of foreign policy and military strategy with respect to those dark corners of our world that stoke the fears of Western imagination.' Christian Tripodi, International Journal of Military and Historiography

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.

Introduction
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, 1842–53
6. Overcoming exception, 1853–7
7. 'Science' and sentiment: the era of frontier management, 1857–78
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS], Society & social sciences [J], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ]