1 - Introduction

From Great Games to imperial security

Late one night in northwest India, as a newspaperman was about to call it a day, two men arrived at his office and asked if they could speak with him briefly. The tall, red-haired one introduced himself as Daniel Dravot and the other as Peachy Carnahan. In explaining their visit, Dravot said that he and Carnahan were fed up with the governing class in India and had decided to go to Kafiristan to become kings. Neither of them knew very much about Kafiristan, however, other than that it had “two and thirty idols.” Nor were they certain where it was or how to get there. They had come to the newspaper office in the hopes of gaining information on the nature of the place and its geographic location. Thereupon, the newspaperman “uncased the big thirty-two-miles-to-the-inch map, and two smaller Frontier maps, hauled down volume INF-KAN of the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” brought out a file containing an address by Henry W. Bellew¹ on Kafiristan, and laid before them Wood’s Sources of the Oxus.² Dravot and Carnahan began their studies and soon discovered that they were familiar with at least part of the route to Kafiristan – they had campaigned with “Roberts’ Army” in the region.³

This critical scene near the beginning of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would be King”⁴ suggests a very intimate relationship between imperialism and certain kinds of knowledge. In this case, the knowledge in question involved what could be culled from precision maps like those produced by the Trigonometric Survey of India, from military reconnaissance, and from summaries of authoritative knowledge to be found in works like the Britannica, whose individual country entries were organized through nineteenth-century Europe-wide categories of the statistics of states. The technical materials the newspaperman thought essential for the two adventurers were, moreover, precisely the sort of sources that, by the 1880s when the story was written, had become crucial for planning military campaigns in little-known places like Kafiristan. More to the point, these works or ones like them could be found in the secret archive of the Intelligence Branch located at Simla, the unit responsible for providing the information required to plan the military campaigns of the Indian Army.

The Indian Army Intelligence Branch, and the forms of knowledge it produced, is the focus of this study. The records of the Branch, its library, archives and correspondence, make quite clear the scope and depth of the epistemological project at the core of British imperialism. Scholars of British colonialism in South Asia such as Bernard Cohn (1996) and Christopher Bayly (1996) have noted the close connection in the British Empire between the production of knowledge about human and natural resources and the maintenance of imperial control.⁵ At the same time, however, the works of Cohn and Bayly have tended to focus attention on the political reports of colonial administrators; army intelligence has seldom been an object of investigation in colonial studies.⁶ As a result, there has been little critical study of the forms military knowledge took. This may in part be because materials generated by British intelligence units in India are somewhat scattered through archival depositories such as the India Office and War Office records. But the fact that Indian Army records are not centralized in Britain does not wholly account for the dearth of studies on military knowledge practices. Instead, scholars who address epistemological issues of empire have, like Cohn and Bayly, tended to focus attention on the civil administration of British colonialism or on imaginative literature such as the works of Kipling.⁷

But perhaps of more interest is that even military historians seldom address intelligence, let alone its forms of knowledge. As Christopher Andrew has observed, if military intelligence is not completely ignored as a legitimate topic of historical investigation, it is relegated to a footnote (1992: 1). Andrew provides a number of explanations for this. First, he points out that even if intelligence was acknowledged as a “missing dimension” in diplomatic, military and institutional histories of the modern state, it is not always easy to gain access to the documentary record, partly because the declassification of sources remains a tricky business. The officials of former imperial states remain reluctant to give up secrets.⁸ A second difficulty has to do with the fact that intelligence is irreversibly linked to popular and sensational images of secret agents, spy-craft, espionage and counter-espionage and, of course, James Bond. As Andrew, in collaboration with David Dilks, put it on another occasion, “the treatment of intelligence by both mass media and publishers often seems ideally calculated to persuade the academic world that it is no subject for scholars” (1984: 3).

Nevertheless, some scholars do study intelligence. A substantial amount of attention has been given to code-breaking, signal intercepts, and the impact of the two on warfare. Much of this scholarship has focused on the twentieth century, its great wars and the Cold War.⁹ However, such research operates within a definition of intelligence that appears narrowly circumscribed. Andrew and Dilks, for example, define intelligence as information obtained by covert means. If this is the case, then the great mass of material collected in the late nineteenth century by British and continental armies would not qualify as intelligence because much of it was collected from published sources and collated into intelligence genres, some of which were printed openly as official government publications.

Moreover, often little attention is given in these studies to how novel it was for military intelligence units to be set up as discrete parts of armies.¹⁰ Most such units were a product of military reform and army reorganization, much of which occurred under the impact of technological change and rationalizing scientific thought. In the case of Great Britain, the intelligence units of the British and Indian armies were created after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Their emergence resulted from what Corrigan and Sayers referred to as a “cultural revolution” (1985) in Britain, one that through the collection of statistical data and the creation of new institutions by Parliamentary commissions radically altered the structure of the British state over the second half of the nineteenth century.¹¹

Two developments in particular are important for understanding what came to be called intelligence. One was the inauguration of a merit-oriented civil service system, the effect of which was to produce a cadre of professional, educated officers in the British Army by the end of the nineteenth century. These “new men” made British military intelligence. The second development had to do with the impact of empiricism and the natural sciences on modes of governance in Britain. The direct effect of the growth of the nineteenth-century applied sciences on military intelligence was to form it into a discipline believed to be governed by rational principles. Intelligence became an ordered set of practices for acquiring, classifying, managing, filing, storing and recovering military statistics. And while some of the material gathered as intelligence was acquired through military reconnaissance, vast amounts were “legible”¹² at a distance. That is, intelligence officers could draw on the great wealth of statistical information published on a regular basis by European states undergoing their own cultural revolutions.

Military statistics, a category shared by armies across the continent, made it possible for intelligence officers to compile (to use their terminology) and compare intelligence on foreign armies; to gauge as it were the relation of forces between armies. In the British and Indian armies, military statistics came to be “packaged” in standardized forms. These forms were route books, precision maps, handbooks and military reports, the central genres of intelligence well into the twentieth century. Works such as these made up a renewable and authoritative archive that was used to train intelligence officers, to inform civilian policymakers on military matters, and to provide vital information to commanders as they approached the battlefield. And when the battles were over, it was the intelligence officers, the commanders and controllers of military information, who wrote the official histories of campaigns.

Military intelligence involved something more as well. The information that accumulated in intelligence archives was employed both to evaluate the capacities of rivals, and to imagine what would happen if conflict arose. Intelligence became the site where planning for future wars was situated, where officers could practice for war and gain the necessary skills for going to war. In Great Britain, but also in European armies – at least from 1871 forward – there emerged permanent war-planning and training regimes. Intelligence provided the basic information, the raw material for such undertakings.

Thus, before code-breaking, spying and electronic surveillance came to dominate what was understood as military intelligence, these other forms of military knowledge informed the workings of imperial states. It is a central argument of this study that military intelligence was a product of the new mechanisms of state formation, the disciplinary and regulatory regimes, to use Michel Foucault’s terms, that transformed European states in the second half of the nineteenth century into militarized polities.¹³ It makes little sense, I believe, to separate intelligence, to say nothing of armies and militarization in Europe, from these processes. Foucault, it will be recalled, found more than a metaphor in the practices of eighteenth-century armies. Army discipline, particularly those aspects that involved making soldiers, was one site of the emergence of a disciplinary regime that re-formed “docile” bodies, whether in schools, prisons or on the parade ground (1979: 135–69).

While Foucault’s notion of the role of discipline in the transformation of European states in the nineteenth century is well known by way of Discipline and Punish, his theorization of regulatory regimes is less known, perhaps because he wrote no book on the subject. In lectures delivered in 1978 at the Collège de France, however, Foucault explored the notion that privileged the survival of the state (raison d’etat) over law and conventional notions of sovereignty. Raison d’etat emerged as a principle of political theorization with the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the realization that all states were now in fierce competition with one another. The state was to be preserved, Foucault observed, by means of a “regulatory idea of governmental reason” that posited the state as a “principle for reading reality” (a principle of “intelligibility”). The application of governmental reason, a set of applied techniques, produced statistics and put various forces and resources at the disposal of the state at any given moment. From this statistical knowledge of the state, officials could then formulate “tactics” that disposed or arranged “things so that this or that end may be achieved through a certain number of means.” Foucault called the application of tactics to arrange and achieve a desirable end the “arts of governance” or “governmentality,” whose significant historical effect was the governmentalization of the state (2007: 98–109).¹⁴

In the new European order of states, the objective was to arrest or modify any internal processes that might disrupt the smooth running of an individual state and externally to strengthen it against competitors. Rather than being based on classic notions of sovereignty such as divine right, the arts of governance focused attention on the preservation of the state as a sovereign entity, as opposed to the continuation of a monarchial line (2007: 262–89). It is this notion of preservation – the idea of sustaining the integrity of the state, especially against external threats, as an end in itself – that is of concern here.

With respect to other states, the officials of any one state had to be in a position to gauge the potential threat that a rival might pose. They did this by analyzing the statistics of other states. Then, rather than drawing on a “combination of legacies through dynastic alliances,” they sought to arrange a “composition of state forces” in “provisional alliances” (through diplomacy) to offset the power of one large state or the threat of a combination of smaller states. Such alliances were expected to preserve a relation of forces, a dynamic “rationalization of forces,” producing a provisional and contingent “balance of power” (2007: 293–96).

Those responsible for evaluating the strength of others and fashioning strategic alliances made up what Foucault referred to as an assemblage or a “mechanism of security” responsible for governing external relations.¹⁵ He called this assemblage the military-diplomatic apparatus. The key strategic term in this array, according to Giorgio Agamben, is apparatus, and it is worth briefly considering Agamben’s argument for its centrality in Foucault’s thought. Apparatus is the English translation of the French word dispositif. It is a network established between a heterogeneous set of elements such as discourses, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, buildings and institutions. Second, an apparatus always has a clear strategic purpose and is always part of a power relationship. Lastly, the apparatus appears at the “intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge” (2009: 2–3).¹⁶

Thus, the military-diplomatic apparatus was made up of a set of heterogeneous elements. This particular assemblage included theories of human behavior, rules of diplomacy, technical knowledge of ballistics and logistics, specialized forms of writing, army barracks and drill fields, protocols of behavior, maps and diagrams, and so on, all of which could be commanded to be disposed in provisional and contingent arrays. This security mechanism came to be situated at the intersection of the state’s capacity to defend itself in alliance with others and the knowledge possessed by state officials of their own strength and that of their “enemies” and “friends.”

Henceforth, warfare was no longer thought of as righting a wrong or as an expression of dynastic ambitions, but rather as interstate politics pursued by other means. War erupted, it was thought, at the point where the persuasive and rhetorical powers of the diplomat became insufficient to maintain a balance in the relations between European states. War persuaded others to alter their ways and perhaps even taught the lesson that there were consequences to disrupting an international equilibrium. But before warfare could become rhetorical or pedagogical, armies had to be prepared to go to war.

Foucault argues that preparation for war required the development of a “permanent, costly, large, scientific military apparatus within the system of peace.” What did this element of the apparatus look like? First, it was made up of professional soldiers who saw the army as their career. Second, it was made up of a permanently armed structure that in time of war could also operate to recruit more participants. Third, it comprised an infrastructure of depots, strongholds and transport networks; in other words, a supply and logistical capability. And lastly, it was made up of a form of knowledge concerning the strategy and tactics of warfare and “autonomous reflections on military matters and possible wars” (2007: 300–305). This formation produced a host of effects, the primary one of which was the condition, novel in the nineteenth century, of permanent preparation for war. The security mechanism produced, if not garrison states, then militarized states, states where there was (is) an unquestioned acceptance of the necessity for nourishing the apparatus, because only then could a balance of power be realized and the security of the state insured.

This study is about the military part of the security mechanism, especially the fourth part identified by Foucault, the part made up of the specifics of military matters and the forms of knowledge related to intelligence. As will be discussed in Chapter 3, this part of the apparatus took on new dimensions from around the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe by way of techno-scientific reflections on logistics – the calculus for mobilizing, concentrating, and preserving men and materiel in motion. To dispose armies and their supplies required planning. But to plan, to organize logistics rationally, required specialized kinds of information and methods for classifying, processing, storing and retrieving such knowledge. In European armies, these functions were initially organized in the Quartermaster General’s Department. Over the course of the nineteenth century they became increasingly located under centralized command structures (general staffs). In many cases, the agency within the apparatus deputed to organize the information necessary for planning was termed the intelligence department. In units of this sort, two kinds of information were centralized – the physical geography and the “military statistics” of states. These two forms of information, one about the terrain over which a potential adversary operated, the other about the war-making potential of other states, were the things that constituted peacetime military intelligence and supported the permanent establishment for the preparation and planning for war.

Reconceptualizing military intelligence in this way has several important consequences. First, and perhaps most obviously, it provides a new set of criteria for understanding what intelligence might have meant to intelligence officers at any moment in time, and it helps avoid the teleological trap of seeing nineteenth-century military intelligence as the inferior predecessor to the fully formed twentieth-century version. Second, it directs attention to the diverse techniques and technologies available at a particular moment and explores how their presence interacted with the broad task of intelligence. In the nineteenth century, for example, armies moved on their feet (as well as on their stomachs) and they relied on pack animals to transport their food and equipment. While telegraph was available in some instances, most communication was line of sight (heliography and signal flags) or by messengers who, if they were fortunate, might be mounted. More than anything else, terrain, often undeveloped,¹⁷ dictated the speed of armies on the march. This set of heterogeneous elements constitutes a grouping that intelligence units would have to account for if they were going to produce a rationally ordered plan of action.¹⁸

Third, exploring intelligence as part of a security mechanism essentially de-romanticizes it, and by so doing calls into question some of the most sacred tropes for discussing European activities in Asia (e.g., savage warfare, civilizing missions, development). The chief trope of concern here is the characterization of the Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia as a “Great Game.” Just why the game metaphor is questionable will become clearer in subsequent chapters, when the content of intelligence is discussed. Here it might be useful to rehearse this tale of adventure and competition, and note what it might obscure.

Recall the image of Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnahan in the office of a reporter much like the author of the piece, Rudyard Kipling. I began with this scene in order to make a point about the intersections of knowledge and imperial power. But another element is also at play, one involving fantasies of empire. In this case, the fantasy lies in the notion of white men going where none had gone before, commanding the natives by sheer charismatic presence, and becoming kings. Kipling’s stories are significant precisely because they formed Asia around such fantasies. Tales like this one fixed the continent as a space for unconventional men, where romantic adventure for the bold lay just around every corner or, as in this case, over the next range of mountains. In this emergent Asia, white men could fulfill themselves, assert their masculinity, and do so for noble purposes.

The Great Game to be found in Kim (1901) is perhaps one of the most enduring examples of fantasy and romantic adventure in empire. As Kipling presents it there, the game was made up of intrigue, clandestine operations, disguises, double-dealing, and a good deal of fun and pleasure. Although not discussed in quite these terms, in English Lessons I found the Great Game a useful shorthand for dealing with the Pan-Asian threat that the British, especially those in India, thought Russia posed to their empire. There are, however, a number of reasons to question Kipling’s and my versions of the game. First, although the British were known to use game metaphors to talk about international politics, the term is notably missing from the works of prominent public figures who wrote about the Russian threat to British imperial interests in Asia. These analysts include, for example, Henry Rawlinson (1875), Armin Vambery (1885) and Archibald Colquhon (1901). Nor was the term, as far as I have been able to ascertain, evident in the War Office or India Office records that deal with the Russian advance across Asia.

Second, as Gerald Morgan has argued, the game metaphor gives the impression that the Anglo-Russian rivalry was a “light-hearted affair,” when nothing could be further from the truth (1981: 16). To this might be added that it is unclear what sort of game the Great Game was supposed to be. Certainly, given Kipling’s characterization, chess comes to mind, but the one time George Curzon, the Viceroy of India from 1898 to 1905 and author of Russia in Central Asia (1889a), seems to have used the term, he was clearly referring to a card game with a series of hands (1889a: 297). In any case, Morgan may be right to insist that it is a misplaced metaphor masking the enormous amount of violence that actually transpired, including three British invasions of Afghanistan and repeated clashes on the Northwest Frontier of India that Charles Callwell euphemistically referred to as “small wars” (1906).

A third issue has to do with the origin of the term. Kipling, as many point out, did not invent the phrase, but he is usually given credit for popularizing it. Most who write on the Great Game ascribe the origin to Arthur Conolly, an adventurous young officer in the service of the East India Company, who died in captivity in Bokhara after a failed mission to the Amir of Kokand in the early 1840s. Conolly had previously come to popular notice when he traveled overland to India through Persia and Afghanistan in 1829–30. According to his biographer, John Kaye, upon arriving in India Conolly wrote reports on his travels and they were eventually published in Britain in 1834 under the title Journey to the North of India (Kaye, 1867: 74). Four years later, a second edition included a long section in which Conolly speculated on how the Russians might launch an invasion across Afghanistan, but he did not use the term there. In fact, it only appears once in the two-volume book, and that is when Conolly observes the “children of nature” in a small Central Asia town whose “great game” was to throw dirt at each other (1838, v. 1: 173). Conolly did use the term in another context, however. It appears in a letter to his friend Henry Rawlinson, a portion of which is quoted by John Kaye in his biography of Conolly.

If I ever cool my parched brow in the Jaxartes [Syr Darya], I’ll drink a goblet of its waters to the extension of your shadow in every direction. You’ve a great game, a noble game before you, and I have strong hope that you will be able to steer through all jealousy, and caprice, and sluggishness, till the Afghans unite with your countrymen in appreciating your labours for a fine nation’s regeneration and advancement. These are not big words, strung for the sound or period. I didn’t know that I could well express it more simply, certainly not when writing at a long canter to reach the post-bag ere it closes for the night.

(Kaye, 1867: 101)

This ought to give pause. Conolly was not, it would seem, imagining some geo-political/geo-strategic machinations across Central Asia when he used the term (which also includes the italicized noble), but something specific to Rawlinson’s labors. It was his way of expressing praise “simply” so as to make the mail pouch. What was this great and noble labor that occupied Rawlinson?

Rawlinson, an experienced political agent in Persia, had just been appointed to a similar position in the Afghan government under Shah Shujah, the “puppet” king the British had installed in Kabul after deposing Dost Muhammed in 1838. Rawlinson’s “great” and “noble” game was to govern everything from Kandahar in the southeast to Herat in the northwest. The details of the strife Rawlinson found himself caught in as he attempted to carry out his labors, especially the collection of taxes, and the disastrous end to the British efforts to remake Afghanistan as submissive protectorate, need not detain us here (see G. Rawlinson, 1898: 74–79). The important point is that Conolly’s reference was to the particular task Rawlinson had undertaken at that moment. How the Great Game got elevated from this instance to a battle of wits and clandestine operations across all of Central Asia remains, therefore, an open question.

One possible explanation has to do with how Kaye used the phrase in his biography of Conolly. Although he only quoted the single instance of Conolly’s use of the term, Kaye suggested more than once that Conolly thought of British and Russian rivalry in Central Asia as a great game (1867: 70, 90, 113). It would seem, therefore, reasonable to suggest that Kaye not only transmitted the notion, but framed it in such a way as to give the impression that there was meaning beyond what Conolly had actually said in his message to Rawlinson. I believe it is Kaye’s interpretation that Kipling picked up on, extending and expanding it even further in Kim, and thereby transforming Conolly’s locally specific great and noble game into a contest across all of Central Asia and India. Later writers, such as Peter Hopkirk (1994), have then taken the notion from Kipling, and in their popular histories, have read the Great Game back into the six decades prior to the publication of Kim and forward into the Soviet and post-Soviet era.¹⁹

If in fact the Great Game is a projection onto a host of events that were thought of in other terms by the historical actors involved, how does one approach British and Russian activities in Central Asia without producing either a romanticized or a distorted account? Would such an approach occlude the epistemological aspects of empire just for the sake of sustaining the metaphor? One way of proceeding is to recognize that the British Indian Empire of the 1830s, when the Great Game supposedly began, was not the same entity it became after 1857. Among other things, the army was reorganized, and it began to recruit newly invented categories of people, the “martial races” of India, to its ranks. Moreover, army intelligence as a coherent military discipline did not appear in British India until the late 1870s.

Nor did perceptions of imperial security remain static. The 1857 rebellion in India was a pivot point, one that resulted in the transformation of the security regime of the East India Company once the crown and parliament had assumed sovereignty over India. Perceptions of security also changed as a result of technological innovations that became available after 1860, including new forms of communication (e.g., telegraph and print technologies), transportation, information management and scientific measuring instruments. As they were extended spatially and temporally, these technical apparatuses and the forms of knowledge they produced altered imperial relations of power and fashioned new perceptions of strategic and political realities. Not everyone, however, welcomed such innovation. Kipling, in fact, provided one excellent example of ambivalence toward technological change in Kim when he had his youthful “spy” throw away the theodolite and prismatic compass, the tools of precision map-making stolen from the French and Russian agents. But he retained their notebooks. Thus, the novel could be read as nostalgia for a simpler time, when a less complicated relation existed between knowledge and power, one that required little or no scientific expertise; a time when Kipling might have imagined the Anglo-Russian rivalry as a game (1901: 402–3).

In addition to obscuring the relation between science and empire, the game metaphor also simplifies two quite different perceptions of empire in Asia that operated at least from around the middle of the nineteenth century forward. One of these saw the “East” in geo-political terms, that is, as a problematic involving a balance of power. The rubric under which the geo-political was organized and conceptualized was referred to as the “Eastern Question,” or more properly as a series of eastern questions, all ultimately referencing the balance of power in Europe! What would be the effect in Europe of the decay of the Ottoman Empire? How would a decline of Persia and the Central Asian khanates affect the Ottoman Empire and, hence, the balance of power in Europe? What were the ramifications for British and French commerce of the decline of the Qing Empire in the Far East? In what ways would the acquisition or expansion of European colonial possessions in Asia alter relations between European imperial states? For many, these were the questions of the day, and all of them concerned the foreign offices and diplomats of the military-diplomatic apparatus.

The other perception of empire in Asia conceived its challenges in geo-strategic terms. In the military arm of the apparatus, the geo-strategic question involved lines of communication within and to colonies. This was a security issue concerned first and foremost with the unencumbered flow of men and materiel along the routes connecting the imperial metropole to its peripheries, and maintaining the integrity of communications within the peripheries themselves. Second, the geo-strategic question also involved knowing possible paths of invasion that might be outside the immediate control of the imperial state. What was needed, especially in Asia, as Arthur Conolly recognized as early as 1838 (2: 324), was geographical and statistical knowledge of continental Asia. Without such information and the means for maintaining it, strategically important parts of Asia would remain outside the information system comprising maps, route reports and the statistical archives.

In South Asia, the local expression of these geo-strategic concerns was organized under the rubric “The Defense of India,” which also served as the title of journal articles and official memoranda that evaluated the threat posed by Russian expansion.²⁰ After 1878, the Intelligence Branch of the Indian Army was the unit responsible for producing the positive knowledge necessary for the protection of lines of communication to and from India and for planning the defense of India. The bulk of the officers who made up the unit were educated as engineers and artillery officers, and they came to define the security of India in broad geographic terms. They perceived lines of communication and, hence, a security belt stretching from Manchuria in northeast Asia all the way to Mesopotamia. From Egypt to the west, the Intelligence Department in London took responsibility for planning imperial defense. Across the grand span of Asia, intelligence officers imagined the continent as a site filled with factual information that could be recovered through scientifically informed “knowledge practices” (Poovey, 1998: 19). These practices included reconnaissance that would collect military statistics and information about land routes across Asia, the gathering of data from a network of correspondents located at legations, consulates and strategic outposts in various parts of Asia, trigonometric mapping, and the systematic organization and differentiation of relevant materials into libraries and archives.²¹ The information system the intelligence officers created was designed to command and control the space of Asia. Their efforts produced what Timothy Mitchell has termed a “rule of experts” (2002), a form of power/knowledge that has been either obscured or misunderstood by the Great Game emphasis to be found in most historical studies of Anglo-Russian relations in Central Asia.

To some extent, this imperial information system had its origins in and remained fraught with individual fantasies of romantic adventure. But it was also caught up in particular obsessions with imperial power. These desires for dominance also distorted or disturbed the smooth application of military and administrative reason. In previous work, I have noted that the compulsion to produce comprehensive knowledge in the domain of empire generated irrational fears and specters, elements that undermined the very certainties that the systematic production of instrumental knowledge was supposed to create (Hevia, 1998). As will be evident in the discussion presented in Chapters 7 and 8, such disruptions appear in sources from the intelligence project as well. But they do so in novel ways, sometimes dissolving the hard facts of terrain and logistics in rhetorical phantasmagoria, other times conjuring opponents whose very “primitiveness” gives them powers beyond reason.

To contextualize these dimensions of British colonialism, its forms of military knowledge and its fantasies of power, I begin with the observation that the changes that occurred in Britain in the nineteenth century were part of a European-wide phenomenon. In Germany, France, Russian and Austria, reform and professionalization of the army, with attendant reconceptualizations of military intelligence, were common (see Chapter 2). Some British military leaders incorporated elements from the continental armies into their reform programs, and ultimately reconceived intelligence as linked to knowledge production for the implementation of a training and planning regime. Chapter 3 explores how such men were fashioned through new institutional structures for recruiting and training army officers in the second half of the nineteenth century. The changes in question produced a new form of imperial masculinity, a professional elite with scientific and mathematical training. It was from this cadre of officers that the intelligence corps in Britain and India were formed. Chapter 4 addresses the creation of the intelligence units in Britain and India, explores their structure, and introduces the forms of knowledge they produced. These forms were made up of route books and military maps that disciplined the space of Asia, and of handbooks and military reports that regulated the facts of Asia.

The exploration of these intelligence genres is situated within specific historical events in order to better explain the relevant features of each. In the case of epistemological projects to discipline or command the space of Asia, the joint Anglo-Russian commission that demarcated the northern border of Afghanistan is addressed (Chapter 5). Military reports and handbooks, by contrast, can be understood as aspects of the “regulatory idea of governmental reason” in terms of which the facts of Asia were compiled (Chapter 6). To explore these genres, I focus on British Indian Army Intelligence operations in Afghanistan, the Northwest Frontier of India, and north China from 1901 to 1910. Having established how intelligence was made, I then direct attention to its uses. Chapter 7 takes up three instances: the debate between the Intelligence Department in London and the branch in India over the defense of India; the formation of the martial races of India as tribes with essential characteristics unique to each of them; and a planning and training regime in which the products of intelligence were used as the raw material for exercises and assessment. Chapter 8 addresses the effects of the intelligence-based security regime in Asia and Great Britain. I begin with military transformations in China and Japan and then consider the nature of warfare on the Northwest Frontier of India, debates in Britain over the form of the security regime, and popular images of empire as they appeared in media and were recirculated in romantic and sentimental tropes that serve to domesticate empire and normalize conflict.

There are certain elements that, although relevant, are not included in this study. Although I deal with the development of a general staff in Tsarist Russia, I do not address the activities of Russian “scientific” missions across Asia or the forms of knowledge production involved with them except insofar as they were appropriated by British intelligence.²² To deal with this aspect of Russian expansion would have also required an exploration of Russian activities on the borders of the Qing Empire, a topic I have dealt with to a degree in English Lessons. Qing leaders were, in fact, very concerned with Russian encroachment in Xinjiang, the vast area in the western part of the Qing Empire populated by Turkic-speaking Muslims. When these areas fell into the hands of Yakub Beg in the 1860s, the Qing launched a series of military campaigns, financed in part by loans from European banks and including the use of German-made field guns, to reconquer the region for fear that ultimately it might fall into Russian hands.²³ There were, in other words, those in the Qing leadership as concerned about Russian expansion across Asia as were their British counterparts.

Thus, there are connections between this book and English Lessons. One of the main arguments made in the earlier study concerned the necessity of understanding British activities in China in relation to strategic concerns about India. I would like to think that what appears in this book adds weight to that argument and extends it more deeply into the realm of the British Army than the previous work did. One thing that I hope will be clear in this study is the importance of the British Army, and especially its intelligence units, in the shaping of twentieth-century Asia as we know it. In both Great Britain and the United States, we tend to assume that the military is merely the instrument of civilian governors, all of whom are either elected democratically or appointed by elected officials. As a result, we are inclined to ignore the role of the military in initiating, influencing and implementing policy. I hope that this study will, at the very least, raise doubts about so simple an assumption. Further, however, it is the argument of this book that military intelligence not only framed imperial strategies vis-à-vis colonized areas to the east, but produced the very object of intervention: Asia itself.