6 - The Birth of Geopolitics

Summary

The sixth chapter reexamines the work of boundary commissions in the context of the emergence of frontier experts such as Thomas Holdich. These experts, who became increasingly central to imperial policy, reflect the increasingly intimate relationship between geography and the state and reveal the networks through which geographical information fused with political and military policy. The chapter also examines the engagement of the frontier experts with the Royal Geographical Society and The Geographical Journal. The cohabitation of geographical studies and international political concerns, I argue, reflected a new geopolitical mode of seeing the region and the world that was in turn bequeathed to India at independence.