We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
The Significance of the Frontier in British India
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 January 2021
This chapter recapitulates the book’s core themes and arguments, opening with George Curzon 1907 lecture on ‘Frontiers’. Drawing on the famous American ‘frontier thesis’ of Frederick Jackson Turner, Curzon positioned imperial frontiers as spaces of excess and threat that held out the promise of national and racial salvation for Britain. By the age of high empire, agents of empire in India widely conceived of frontiers as spaces of productive tension between closure—in the form of clearly delineated borders, normalised and bureaucratised administration, and authoritative knowledge of people and space—and openness—in the form of spatial, epistemic, and administrative indeterminacy. They laboured to render the outskirts of empire ‘other spaces’, requiring distinctive types of knowledge and government under the unfettered guidance of ‘men on the spot’.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
