The Long Conquest

Territorialisation, Rebellion and the 'Tribe' in Eastern India, circa 1760 to 1900

Sanghamitra Misra

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032514611
• eBook ISBN: 9781040024720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book is an enquiry into the elision of the figure of the sovereign, cotton-producing Garo in the colonial archive and its savage transformation into imperialism's quintessential 'primitive' in the period between 1760 CE and 1900 CE.

The precolonial political economy of hill cotton produced by the Garos, its unhinging from the exercise of Garo sovereignty and its eventual commodification twined with the deterritorialization of the community as it made way for elephant mehals and reserved forests form the kernel of the book. This history is seen as participating in and mirroring analogous processes of colonization across vast contiguous swathes of India, including Mymensingh, Chittagong, Bhagalpur, the Khasi hills and the Cachar valley. A central theme explored is the long history of Garo rebellions and their rationality, examined in conjunction with contiguous polities such as that of the Khasis; even as the book follows the growing arc of colonial power in eastern and northeastern India as it converted territory and revenue appropriated through conquest, into dominium.

The book makes an original contribution to the historiography of the colonial state, the 'tribe' and primitivism by making a case for the welded histories of war, ethnogenesis, revenue extraction and anthropological knowledge otherwise often studied as disparate fields of scholarship. It therefore also offers a new interpretation of the history of the colonization of eastern and northeastern India. The book will be of interest to academics and researchers of these regions and of empire and political economy, law and 'primitivism', and anthropology and colonial revenue.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Abbreviations
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1 At the Cusp of Conquest: Cotton and Sovereignty
• 2 Insurgent Hills: The Garo Peasant Rebellions
• 3 Customs of Conquest: Legal Primitivism and British Paramountcy
• 4 The Apportionment of Sovereignty: The Duars and Gird Garo
• 5 Becoming ‘Primitive’ under Colonial Modernity
• Epilogue: Perceiving Absence
• Works Cited Bibliography
• Index