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Sanghamitra Misra, Thomas Simpson. The Frontier in British India: Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth Century., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1237–1239, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae202
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Thomas Simpson’s The Frontier in British India inaugurates fresh directions in research on “frontier governmentality,” both in the similitude that it uncovers between the particular colonial histories of nineteenth-century northeastern and northwestern India, and in the fine analyses that it brings to our understanding of the varied practices of colonial sovereignty. As each chapter introduces the reader to a specific imperial strategy for extending legal and political authority in these regions—border making, surveys and maps, administration, ethnography, and violence—the book’s central thesis about patterns of exceptional forms of governance that produce hazy legal codes, taxation regimes, and ideas of subjecthood assembles itself together. In conversation with recent scholarship in legal history, the book interrogates the idea of a seamless unfolding of an even imperial sovereignty in colonial borders in India, discerning in its place a politics of instability that emanates organically from the confusion and deliberate subversion on the part of colonial officials. For projecting its sovereignty onto conquered and yet unconquered spaces, the state, it is argued, relied on a rule of exception that emanated primarily from the careers of its individual officers. Thus individuated, British imperial sovereignty and territoriality finds itself underpinned in the discretionary authority of individual administrators.
