3 - Communication

Summary

The third chapter examines the sharp rise of security concerns in the late nineteenth century and the changing role of roads: from conduits of trade to instruments of imperial security. In particular, it focuses on the two central examples of road building in the northwestern Himalaya: the Hindustan-Tibet Road and the Leh-Yarkand Treaty Road. Roads, I show, were conduits that became synonymous with communication. By examining the vast and detailed journals kept by the British Joint Commissioners stationed in Ladakh, beginning in 1870, I reveal how commercial potential beyond the frontier eventually led to the paradoxical desire to “close” the frontier in order to better secure it. As the commissioners were responsible for supervising the Indo-Yarkand and Indo-Tibetan trade routes, their primary tasks were to regulate the movement of people on these routes and to ensure the roads were in good working order. But they were also concerned with gathering intelligence from Central Asia and Tibet. Here we see the interplay of technology, commercial expansion, and security and the limits placed on each by the Himalayan environment. Road building, I show, became a central piece of the larger complex of border making.