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

This book brings to life the world of caravan trade--constituting not only merchants, but also pilgrims, pastoralists, and mercenaries; flows not only of goods, credit and money, but also of ideas, secret intelligence and fighting power. Contrary to the view that the ages of sail and steam rendered obsolete these more 'archaic' forms of overland connectivity, Jagjeet Lally demonstrates how the annual transhumance between North India and the Central Asian steppe was critical to the production and exercise of political power into the nineteenth century. Central to this narrative is the waning of the Mughal Empire and the emergence in the mid-eighteenth century of a new Afghan kingdom, whose leaders drew their power from the financial flows and force of arms moving through the networks of caravan trade, and who thus patronised the continued traffic between India and inland Eurasia. India and the Silk Roads is a global history of a continental interior, the first to comprehensively examine the textual and material traces of caravan trade in the 'age of empires'. Lally tells a story resonating with our own times, as China's Belt and Road Initiative once again transforms life across Eurasia.

The “Middle East” has long been an indispensable and ubiquitous term in discussing world affairs, yet its history remains curiously underexplored. Few question the origin of the term or the boundaries of the region, commonly understood to have emerged in the twentieth century after World War I. Guillemette Crouzet offers a new account in Inventing the Middle East. The book traces the idea of the Middle East to a century-long British imperial zenith in the Indian subcontinent and its violent overspill into the Persian Gulf and its hinterlands. Encroachment into the Gulf region began under the expansionist East India Company. It was catalyzed by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and heightened by gunboat attacks conducted in the name of pacifying Arab “pirates.” Throughout the 1800s the British secured this crucial geopolitical arena, transforming it into both a crossroads of land and sea and a borderland guarding British India’s western flank. Establishing this informal imperial system involved a triangle of actors in London, the subcontinent, and the Gulf region itself. By the nineteenth century’s end, amid renewed waves of inter-imperial competition, this nexus of British interests and narratives in the Gulf region would occasion the appearance of a new name: the Middle East. Charting the spatial, political, and cultural emergence of the Middle East, Inventing the Middle East reveals the deep roots of the twentieth century’s geographic upheavals.

A critical intellectual history of counterinsurgency, from early modernity to the present, analyzing military manuals, their authors, and their use.

How ordinary forms of writing—including manuals, petitions, almanacs, and magazines—shaped the way colonial subjects understood their place in empire In Required Reading, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial South Asia responded to texts ranging from licenses to manuals, how they made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. Taking these engagements seriously, she argues, is the first step to challenging conventional notions of what it means to read. Mukhopadhyay’s account is populated by a cast of characters that spans the ranks of colonial society, from bored soldiers to frustrated bureaucrats. These readers formed close, even intimate relationships with everyday texts. She presents four case studies: a soldier’s manual, a cache of bureaucratic documents, a collection of astrological almanacs, and a women’s literary magazine. Tracking moments in which readers refused to read, were unable to read, and read in part, she uncovers the dizzying array of material, textual, and aural practices these texts elicited. Even selectively read almanacs and impenetrable account books, she finds, were springboards for personal, world-shaping readerly relationships. Untethered from the constraints of conventional literacy, Required Reading reimagines how texts work in the world and how we understand the very idea of reading.

Western counterinsurgency doctrine proposes that cultural intelligence is an important requirement for those forces operating amidst the unfamiliar socio-political structures often found in distant conflict zones. Yet while the determination to understand the intricate nature of alien societies may appear a rational undertaking in such circumstances, Christian Tripodi argues that these endeavours rarely help deliver success. The frictions of war and the complex human, cultural and political 'terrain' of the operating environment render such efforts highly problematic. In their attempts to generate and instrumentalize local knowledge for the purpose of exerting influence and control, western military actors are drawn into the unwelcome realm of counterinsurgency as a form of political warfare. Their operating environment now becomes a space charged with phenomena that they rarely comprehend, rarely even see and which they struggle to exert any meaningful control over. All in pursuit of a victory that might literally mean nothing.

An innovative exploration of how colonial interventions in Afghanistan have been made possible through representations of the country as 'backward'.