Taming the Imperial Imagination

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

Martin J. Bayly

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781107118058
• eBook ISBN: 9781316668870
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Note on transliterations and archival references
• Introduction
• Part I Knowledge
• Part II Policy
• Part III Exception
• Conclusion
• 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
• Bibliography
• Index