Visit https://ebookfinal.

com to download the full version and

explore more ebooks

Ruling the savage periphery frontier governance

and the making of the modern state 1st Edition
B. D. Hopkins.

_____ Click the link below to download _____

https://ebookfinal.com/download/ruling-the-savage-
periphery-frontier-governance-and-the-making-of-the-
modern-state-1st-edition-b-d-hopkins/

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookfinal.com

Here are some suggested products you might be interested in.
Click the link to download

Making the EMU The Politics of Budgetary Surveillance and

the Enforcement of Maastricht James D. Savage

https://ebookfinal.com/download/making-the-emu-the-politics-of-
budgetary-surveillance-and-the-enforcement-of-maastricht-james-d-
savage/

Understanding Statebuilding Traditional Governance and the

Modern State in Somaliland Rebecca Richards

https://ebookfinal.com/download/understanding-statebuilding-
traditional-governance-and-the-modern-state-in-somaliland-rebecca-
richards/

Ruling the World Constitutionalism International Law and

Global Governance 1st Edition Jeffrey L. Dunoff

https://ebookfinal.com/download/ruling-the-world-constitutionalism-
international-law-and-global-governance-1st-edition-jeffrey-l-dunoff/

Colonial Crucible Empire in the Making of the Modern

American State 1st Edition Alfred W. Mccoy

https://ebookfinal.com/download/colonial-crucible-empire-in-the-
making-of-the-modern-american-state-1st-edition-alfred-w-mccoy/
Power Lines Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest
Andrew Needham

https://ebookfinal.com/download/power-lines-phoenix-and-the-making-of-
the-modern-southwest-andrew-needham/

The Making of the Modern Admiralty British Naval Policy

Making 1805 1927 1st Edition C. I. Hamilton

https://ebookfinal.com/download/the-making-of-the-modern-admiralty-
british-naval-policy-making-1805-1927-1st-edition-c-i-hamilton/

The Sexual State Sexuality and Scottish Governance 1950 80

1st Edition Roger Davidson

https://ebookfinal.com/download/the-sexual-state-sexuality-and-
scottish-governance-1950-80-1st-edition-roger-davidson/

The Modern State 3rd Edition Christopher Pierson

https://ebookfinal.com/download/the-modern-state-3rd-edition-
christopher-pierson/

The Insecurity State Punjab and the Making of Colonial

Power in British India Mark Condos

https://ebookfinal.com/download/the-insecurity-state-punjab-and-the-
making-of-colonial-power-in-british-india-mark-condos/
Ruling the savage periphery frontier governance and the
making of the modern state 1st Edition B. D. Hopkins.
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): B. D. Hopkins.
ISBN(s): 9780674246157, 0674246152
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 6.18 MB
Year: 2020
Language: english
ruling the savage periphery
RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

Frontier Governance and the Making of

the Modern State

 be n ja m i n d. hopk i ns 

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2020
 Copyright © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer­ic­ a

First printing

Jacket design: Jill Breitbarth

Jacket art: Duncan1890/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images

9780674246140 (EPUB)
9780674246157 (MOBI)
9780674246164 (PDF)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Hopkins, B. D., 1978–
Title: Ruling the savage periphery : frontier governance and the making of
the modern state / Benjamin D. Hopkins.
Description: Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts : Harvard University Press, 2020. |
Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019041799 | ISBN 9780674980709 (cloth) |
ISBN 9780674246140 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Borderlands—­Political aspects. | Imperialism. |
Indigenous ­peoples—­Government relations. | Frontier and pioneer life.
Classification: LCC JC323 .H65 2020 | DDC 323.11—­dc23
LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2019041799
 To Eliana, Tobias, and Olivia
You are the suns of my day, the moons of my night,
the loves of my life.
—Papi
 Contents

Introduction: The Edges of Authority 1

1. Frontier Governmentality 13
2. Governing British India’s Unruly Frontier 27
3. The Imperial Life of the Frontier Crimes Regulation 61
4. The Colonial Specter of “Savagery” 91
5. Ruling the Chiricahua Apache in Amer­ic­ a’s
Desert Southwest 112
6. Argentina’s Conquest of the Desert and the Limits
of Frontier Governmentality 153
Conclusion: A Long History of Vio­lence 192

Notes 209
Archives Consulted 265
Acknowl­edgments 267
Index 271
 Introduction
The Edges of Authority

T he edges of ­today’s global po­liti­cal and economic order—­the world’s

modern-­day frontiers—­are seen as dangerous and often bloody places.
­These peripheral spaces are characterized as contact zones between order
and anarchy, peace and vio­lence, “civilization” and “savagery.” They pro-
vide portals between the modern world and an indefinite, atemporal past
where aberrant ideas of tribe, tradition, and fanatical religious bigotry pre-
dominate. They are, in short, the land that time forgot, and that the
world has done its best to ignore. The toxic combination of premodern
identities, penchant for irrational and unpredictable vio­lence, and the
ability to access modern weaponry make such places of special concern
­today. They require constant vigilance and policing. ­These spaces, and
the ­people who inhabit them, need to be contained and confined, lest the
ever-­present, though abeyant danger they hold ever manifests itself.
Yet sometimes it does, and spectacularly so. In April 2015, Al-­Shabaab
militants stormed the grounds of Garissa University in the North Eastern
Province of ­Kenya, killing 147 ­people in the attack. Five months ­earlier,
in December 2014, gunmen of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan took over
the Army Public School in Peshawar, in northwest Pakistan, and mur-
dered 145 ­people, including over 130 ­children. ­Earlier that same year,
Boko Haram fighters abducted 276 schoolgirls from Chibok in Borno
state in northeastern Nigeria.1 All three incidents involved self-­described
terrorist networks advocating violent jihad to establish an Islamic po­liti­cal
order akin to the Caliphate.

1
 RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

The latent vio­lence of the world’s limits exploded in dramatic fashion,

and sadly not for the first, nor likely the last time. But ­these attacks are
bound by more than the so-­called War on Terror. The geography of vio­
lence they pre­sent is neither accidental nor coincidental. Rather, it is con-
nected by deep historical roots. All three episodes occurred on what w ­ ere
previously the frontiers of imperial systems and ­today are the peripheries
of states and the modern global order. It is the liminal character of ­these
spaces, and, more importantly, the p ­ eople inhabiting them, that has made
them systemically vulnerable to the bloodletting so gruesomely put on
display.
­Kenya, Pakistan, and Nigeria w ­ ere all impor­tant linkages in Britain’s
global empire. But not all the spaces within ­those linkages ­were of equal
importance to that empire. The spaces subject to t­ hese recent atrocities sat
astride the imperial limits. Indeed, it was the advent of the British Empire
in the latter half of the nineteenth c­ entury that rendered t­hese spaces
frontiers. It was ­here, along ­these edges, that Britain’s colonial enterprise,
and the successor states it gave rise to, defined themselves—­not only spa-
tially, but also conceptually. For the way the empire and its constituent
colonial parts conceived and wielded power along t­hese frontiers had a
profound effect on how they did so elsewhere.
The practices of frontier rule that the British imperial juggernaut au-
thored, maintained, and replicated w ­ ere part of a global paradigm at-
tending the rise of the modern state-­based international order in the
closing de­cades of the nineteenth ­century. British imperial practices ­were
decidedly more imperial than British. Their administrative doppelgangers
could be found in other con­temporary Eu­ro­pean empires, as well as the
neo-­European states of the Amer­i­cas, such as the United States and Ar-
gentina, which ­were at the same time constructing the foundations of their
rule and authority along their expanding limits. Though not formally em-
pires, at least in their own estimations, the actions of t­hese states ­were
substantively imperial. In structuring their own systems of frontier rule,
­these neo-­European, neo-­imperial states evinced a decidedly colonial face,
at least to ­those subject to such systems.
This book tells a story, one likely familiar in its contours if not its con-
tents, about the way states defined and governed their frontiers and the
indigenous ­people inhabiting them in the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries. In many ways, it is a history of the global periphery—­both
place and ­peoples. As the modern state system filled in the map through
conquest and colonization, its constituent parts time and again encoun-

2
 Introduction

tered seemingly stateless ­peoples inhabiting “wild” lands along their limits.
The ­peoples ­were invariably “savage,” in contrast to the “civilized” states
that encountered and, in many instances, exterminated them. They w ­ ere
“tribal”—­non-­sedentary and bound by ties of kinship and timeless pre-
cepts of “custom” and “tradition,” which governed them collectively. Fur-
ther, they w ­ ere inherently violent. But their vio­lence lacked e­ ither method
or meaning, making it seem dangerously irrational. To state officials they
presented an undifferentiated mass marked by cruelty, barbarity, and ig-
norance. As such, they ­were seen as a threat to the civilized order of the
expanding state-­based socie­ties of the day.
The lands such p ­ eople inhabited ­were equally characterized as dan-
gerous and “savage.” In nearly all the cases examined in the following
pages, the p ­ eoples subject to the regime of rule along the frontiers of the
global order shared the distinction of occupying lands marginal in the eyes
of the imperial exchequer or national trea­sury. That marginality lay rooted
in the fact that ­these lands ­were relatively unproductive of settled agri-
culture. Officials viewed them as ecologically barren. They failed to pro-
duce tax receipts sufficient to support regular administration. ­These lands
­were too poor to pay for themselves, or more precisely for their own gov-
ernance. They ­ were thus nothing more than fiscal sinks—­ bottomless
money pits draining the state’s ­limited resources. It was not worth the
state’s investment to erect the normal architecture of administration on
such parsimonious lands. Nor was the extermination of the inhabitants
of such lands—­violent and “savage” as they supposedly ­were—­worth the
costs ­either in terms of blood or trea­sure. Why waste resources to con-
quer resourceless wastelands and eradicate recalcitrant “barbarians”?
How, then, ­were states to deal with t­hese “savage” ­people inhabiting
“savage” lands? How ­were the limits to be governed? Or, more precisely,
what strategies and tactics did states develop and deploy over time to
govern ­these spaces and their unruly inhabitants? This is the central ques-
tion animating this work. What is arresting is that despite the geographic
distance and cultural difference between sites of governance and subjects
of rule, the states of the late nineteenth c­ entury turned to a nearly iden-
tical model of governance. ­Whether they were Apaches or Afghans, Zulus,
Somalis, or Mapuche, the p ­ eoples of the periphery w
­ ere ruled in substan-
tively the same way. While details differed from place to place, a striking
continuity of power, both in its structure and deployment, clearly reveals
itself. This book documents this seemingly universal phenomenon of fron-
tier rule.

3
 RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

The increasingly power­ful states of the time could conceivably deal

with such nuisances and potential threats in any number of ways. But
three administrative options quickly ­rose to the top of the procedural pile.
First, following the logic of liberalism, the “savage” inhabitants of t­hese
spaces could be remade, civilized and assimilated into the expanding body
politics of the day. The land could be tamed through cultivation, turning
the barren desert into a blooming garden by the now-­pacified ­peoples of
the periphery. Second, the inhabitants could be eliminated—­a potential
strategy that their relatively small numbers, combined with expanding
state power and capabilities of the time, made more and more realistically
pos­si­ble. The lands could then be turned over to ­people—­almost invari-
ably colonial settlers—­who would make productive use of them, and
thus sported a superior moral claim. Third, the p ­ eople as well as the land
could be contained—­both physically and culturally. The frontier dwellers
could be encapsulated in their own “customs” and “traditions” and exiled
to impoverished lands of ­little interest to the states and their land-­hungry
populaces. Such encapsulation of the p ­ eople and enclosure of the land
proved the most eco­nom­ical as well as, in many ways, the easiest option.
It had the advantage of separating the “savage” ­peoples and their waste-
land from the surrounding state sphere, which both physically and cul-
turally enveloped them. Such a strategy quarantined the chaos, and in so
­doing it promised to inoculate the modern, civilized socie­ties from the
premodern anarchy infecting the indigenous “barbarians.”
While all three strategies w­ ere tested weapons of the arsenal of expan-
sion employed by the states of the late nineteenth c­ entury, the third is the
focus h ­ ere. The policy of encapsulation and enclosure proved one of signifi-
cant con­temporary popularity, with modern, as well as modernizing, poli-
ties around the globe pursuing it. Yet it was not only widespread. It also
relied on deep historical antecedents whose temporal reach forward in time
extend to t­oday, giving the policy continuing valence in the twenty-­first-­
century world.2 Within the Western canon at least, this was a strategy pur-
sued by the Roman Empire against the Germanic tribes in the first ­century
bce.3 As such it provided a time-­tested strategy of subjugation for dealing
with the “barbarian” hordes of beyond. The prominence of this policy
transformed it into nothing less than a standard administrative practice for
how modern states dealt with the premodern p ­ eoples of the periphery. It
became an administrative archetype, widely replicated the world over.
That archetype produced par­tic­u­lar types of spaces to contain the
­people subject to this administrative regime. The spaces assumed many

4
 Introduction

dif­fer­ent names that are still in use ­today—­reservations, native reserves,

tribal areas, and indigenous agencies. Yet an altogether dif­fer­ent moniker
is more appropriate for them both individually and collectively—­frontiers.
­These spaces ­were not frontiers ­because of their locations. Some, if not
all of them, ­were eventually enveloped by the expanding states they lay
along the limits of. Rather, they ­were frontiers ­because of their char-
acter, a character constituted by the state practices that defined and de-
limited them. They w ­ ere not frontiers ­ because of place, but rather
­because of practice—­the practice of administration that states used to
govern them. That practice constituted a singular regime of rule I call
frontier governmentality.
While frontier governmentality assumed many guises, all its forms
manifested the same basic skeletal structure. ­There was invariably a l­egal
component—­most often a code or regulation. This reflects the fact that
the powers that deployed frontier governmentality nearly all justified their
expansion, conquest, and authority—to themselves as well as o ­ thers—in
terms of the “rule of law.” ­These states w ­ ere bringing the light of order
into the darkness of anarchy, and the torch that shone the light was the
law. But laws are inanimate abstractions which must be affected by p ­ eople.
In the case of frontier governmentality, the laws themselves did not struc-
ture a highly bureaucratic form of governance, but rather a highly per-
sonalized one that empowered the “man on the spot.”4 This was a system
of personal administration, justified and stiffened by the objective in­de­
pen­dence of the law, but nonetheless reliant on its subjective interpreta-
tion and application by men. In nearly all the instances detailed h ­ ere, in-
dividual frontier administrators left their imprimatur on the regime of rule,
bestowing their monikers in lasting popu­lar memory on the system. But
imperial administrators ­were not the only players on the stage. The ruled
also played a central role in their subjugation to the system of frontier
governmentality as they ­were entailed in its structures of power and stric-
tures of exploitation. Local tribesmen provided the first line of colonial
muscle to enforce the precepts of the regime’s l­egal code and personal ad-
ministration within frontier socie­ties. As tribal police and militia, they
became the coercive arm of the state complicit in their own suppression
and in that of their fellow tribesmen.
To both explain and illustrate the meaning and content of frontier gov-
ernmentality, the following pages consider a series of episodes in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to analyze this globally ubiqui-
tous form of governance constructed along the expanding bounds of state

5
 RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

authority.5 From the North-­West Frontier of British India, to the Northern

Frontier Province of colonial ­Kenya, to the San Carlos Apache reserva-
tion in southern Arizona, to the “Pais de las Manzanas” at the edge of the
Argentine Pampas, one finds the near simultaneous construction of a
system of frontier administration on a cosmopolitan canvas. While some
instances stand as clear reproductions of administrative practices honed
elsewhere and brought to bear by the mobile c­ areers of imperial servants,
­others evince a seemingly autochthonous origin in both conception and
execution. Yet in all, the frontier governmentality that emerged and em-
bedded itself along states’ limits—­through administrative transmission or
original authorship—­retained and shared the same four centrally defining
ele­ments: indirect rule, sovereign pluralism, imperial objecthood, and eco-
nomic dependence.
Expanding empires and nation-­states constructed and entrenched a
regime of rule along their frontiers that was both strikingly similar and
remarkably consistent across divides of distance and culture. The inhab-
itants of ­these spaces ­were at the edges, or rather beyond the edges of
“civilization” with which empires and con­temporary states justified them-
selves. The states neither had the appetite nor made the pretense of ruling
the ­peoples of the periphery directly. Instead, employing colonially sanc-
tioned “customs” and “traditions,” the states exerted their authority indi-
rectly. As a consequence, the tribesmen ­were portrayed as “sovereign” if
not “in­de­pen­dent” by colonial officials, though they ­were in fact neither.
This rhetorical exercise excluded them from the colonial sphere. Not sub-
jects of the Queen’s law, nor ­those of the republic, they ­were nonetheless
objects of imperial action. ­These frontier dwellers lay beyond the sover-
eign purview of the colonial state, though they nonetheless remained
trapped within the suzerain one of the imperial sphere. And although ju-
dicially excluded from the colonial regime, the tribesmen ­were rendered
eco­nom­ically dependent on it.
Invariably, t­ hese forms of frontier rule ­were considered exceptional and
temporary administrative expedients necessary to deal with less advanced
­peoples not yet suited to the l­egal complexities of regular administration.
They ­were often thought of, then and since, as passing aberrations—­
glitches in the triumphal pro­ cession of state formation. But nothing
could be more removed from the truth. Rather than the unintended de-
tritus of modern po­liti­cal development—­a step in the progressive advance-
ment of ­peoples—­these systems ­were the consciously intended outcome.
They ­were a central part of the blueprint, a foundational ele­ment to the

6
 Introduction

state-­centric order constructed at the time. And they continue to have

lasting impacts ­today. The imperial pasts of ­Kenya, Pakistan, and Nigeria
have an ensanguined and pressing legacy on the postcolonial pre­sents of
the ­people populating their peripheries. While in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries the stateless p ­ eoples of the periphery, at the edges of
governmental power, ­were discussed in terms of “savagery” and “barba-
rism,” the updated lexicography of the early twenty-­first ­century is that
of “failing” or “fragile” states.6
Viewing the periphery through the lens of frontier governmentality of-
fers a markedly dif­fer­ent vantage than the ways t­hese spaces are gener-
ally characterized. ­Others have depicted the frontier as ­either “states of
exception” or as places to practice “the art of not being governed.”7 As a
subject of inquiry, frontiers are thought to constitute a liminal case on the
margins of normalcy, in­ter­est­ing ­either for their aberrance or for what they
do not tell us about the state order. But precisely the opposite holds. Fron-
tier governmentality argues that the frontier is far from exceptional.
Rather, it constitutes an integral, and in truth pedestrian, part of state de-
sign. The frontier underlines the fragmented and varied character of the
state-­based order. Likewise, frontier governmentality contests the notion
that the ­people of the periphery practice some art of not being governed.
Instead, it demonstrates yet another way that states govern t­ hose they ab-
jure from their direct gaze and administration. The p ­ eople subject to
forms of frontier governmentality are the ­people of the proverbial hills—­
those who by choice or circumstance are removed from the confines of
normal state administration. While some romanticize the hills, by the late
nineteenth ­century they ­were not retreats and redoubts of freedom, but
prisons and sites of enforced exile.8 Expanding states transformed t­hese
hills not through conquest and assimilation, but rather through contain-
ment and encapsulation. Far from not being governed, the p ­ eoples of
the hills and peripheries ­were very much ruled, through state sanctioned
“customs” and “traditions.” This was another form of subjugation and
governance rather than the absence of it.
Though states may have governed the p ­ eoples of the periphery through
their own “customs” and “traditions,” such regimes of authority ­were a
consequence of state weakness rather than strength. States ­were neither om-
nipresent nor omniscient along their peripheries—in ambition or in real­ity.
Their presence was both geo­graph­i­cally and temporally episodic at best.
Frontier governmentality is what states did when they could muster neither
the ­will nor the resources to affect their presence in a more penetrative or

7
 RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

permanent manner. This, then, was not a case of dominance without he-
gemony, but rather of the ephemerality of authority.9 Recognizing such,
although this regime of rule may have minimized po­liti­cal and fiscal ex-
penditure, it was by no means without costs. Frontier governmentality,
like much of the colonial regime, was a regime of rule predicated on dif-
ference. Such rule of difference necessitated the particularization of both
colonial and frontier populations. They w ­ ere to be divided and governed
by their distinct social identities, which ­were bounded by their communal
customs and traditions. For states to effect a rule of difference along their
limits, they needed to be able to erect, maintain, and police that differ-
ence. Not all states of the nineteenth-­century world, or indeed t­oday,
could convincingly do so. Thus while frontier governmentality may reflect
state weakness where the state abjures its sovereign authority, that weak-
ness is relative.
The story of frontier governmentality is first and foremost a history of
the state, and in par­tic­u­lar the state of colonial regimes. Though indige-
nous ­people play a central role, it is a history of what states did to ­those
indigenous ­peoples rather than how ­those ­people escaped, resisted, or
ultimately succumbed to the state. In a way, this history arguably repli-
cates epistemically the vio­lence perpetrated by the state on t­hese ­people
physically—­a vio­lence of domination that silences their historical voice.
That is certainly not the intention ­here. Rather, this work is offered as a
critical consideration of the ways states composed and constructed
themselves through the practices of governance they employed. And as a
reflection on the lasting effects of such systems and practices. By looking
at what the state did to the p ­ eoples of the periphery, we are in fact exam-
ining what the state did to itself. The story that emerges, while one of
dominance, subjugation, and vio­lence, is also one of complexity. For
what it reveals is a history of state construction and governance predicated
not on the erection of a universal order—­a flat po­liti­cal topography—­but
rather on the intentional structuring of a layered po­liti­cal real­ity that in-
cluded some and excluded ­others by design.
To effect that design, frontier governmentality had to be enacted and
performed by the apparatuses and personnel of the imperial state. The
everyday practice of frontier governmentality was played on a global stage
by a cast of characters who enter and exit, some with dazzling cupidity
and avarice, ­others with a deeply held conviction about the righ­teousness
of Eu­ro­pean imperialism. While many of the places and ­people may seem
wholly disconnected from one another, they are deeply bound together

8
 Iceland
FINLAND
NORWAY
Alaska
SWEDEN
ESTONIA
DENMARK LATVIA S O V I E T
GREAT LITUANIA
BRITAIN EAST PRUSSIA R U S S I A
DOMINION OF NETH. POLAND BELORUSSIA
GERMANY
CANADA BELGIUM
Newfoundland CZECHOSLOVAKIA
AUSTRIA UKRAINE
FRANCE HUNGARY
SWITZ.

Y
MONGOLIA

U
G
ROMANIA

O
ITALY

SL
A
BULGARIA

V
Georgia

IA
SPAIN ALBANIA Azerbaijan
PORTUGAL TURKEY Armenia
UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA GREECE
KOREA
Spanish TUNISIA Syria
Morocco Lebanon JAPAN
ATLANTIC PERSIA AFGHANISTAN REPUBLIC
French Palestine Iraq OF CHINA
TIBET
OCEAN Morocco Algeria Trans-
Jordan Kuwait
Nepal
Libya Bhutan
Bahrain

HIJ
Rio De Oro Egypt Qatar INDIAN

AZ
MEXICO EMPIRE
CUBA
DOMINICAN NEJD Oman Burma PACIFIC
REP. French West
HAITI OCEAN
British Jamaica Puerto Rico Africa
Honduras
HONDURAS Anglo- Eritrea Yemen Goa SIAM
GUATEMALA Aden
Egyptian

a
EL SALVADOR NICARAGUA Gambia French French Philippine
Sudan Somaliland Indo-china Islands
Portuguese Guinea
COSTA RICA Nigeria British

l Afric
VENEZUELA Sierra Leone Gold ABYSSINIA Somaliland
PANAMA British French Coast
Guiana LIBERA

atoria
Guiana Cameroon
COLOMBIA Italian Malay States
Dutch Somaliland
Rio Muni Uganda

h Equ
Guiana
Singapore

nc
ECUADOR Belgian
Fre Kenya
Congo
Tanganyika Dutch East Indies
Territory
Portuguese
BRAZIL
Timor
PERU Angola
Northern Nyasaland
PA C I F I C Rhodesia
BOLIVIA INDIAN
OCEAN Southern Madagascar
South-west Rhodesia OCEAN
ATLANTIC Africa
PARAGUAY Bechuana- Portuguese
OCEAN Land East Africa AUSTRALIA

Swaziland
Basutoland
SOUTH
AFRICA
CHILI URUGUAY

ARGENTINA

NEW
ZEALAND

Map 1. ​The world, c. 1920. Circles indicate frontiers discussed.

 RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

by sinews into a discernable if not unitary ­whole, highlighting global cir­

cuits of ideas, administrative practices, and personnel. At the core of the
story of frontier governmentality sit two central characters—­one a law
and the other a man. The former is the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR),
the l­egal code used by the British to govern their Afghan frontier. The latter
is Sir Robert Groves Sandeman, the first head of the Baluchistan Agency
of British India. Together, t­hese two personify, as well as arguably docu-
ment, the origins and rise of frontier governmentality globally during the
last three de­cades of the nineteenth c­ entury and into the opening years of
the twentieth ­century.
The book begins in the borderlands between British India and what
would ­later become Af­ghan­is­ tan. The issues of territorial demarcation,
practical governance, and economic penetration w ­ ere particularly pressing
­here. By the 1870s, the British had over twenty years of direct adminis-
trative experience and an even longer history of encounter h ­ ere, begin-
ning with the First Afghan War (1839–1843). It was along this frontier,
which was not demarcated in theory u ­ ntil the Durand Agreement of 1893
and in practice u ­ ntil much ­later, that the British developed and deployed
their system of frontier governmentality in full. This system was embodied
by a draconian ­legal regime known as the Frontier Crimes Regulation,
initially promulgated in 1872. The Regulation created a system of gover-
nance relying on indirect rule and encapsulating frontier tribesmen in what
­were, in effect, native reserves, though it neither used that language nor
explic­itly proclaimed that vision. The outworking of the Regulation over
time made the inherent suppositions of the law clear in their po­liti­cal and
administrative implications.
The FCR proved an imperial template subsequently exported around
Britain’s burgeoning global empire. It was first duplicated within British
India, where it was quickly copied and enforced along the Raj’s northeast
frontier in the highlands bordering Burma during the 1890s. Its last in-
stance of imperial reproduction was in ­Kenya’s Northern Frontier Prov-
ince in 1934. In the interval between, the law, as well as the substance of
its administrative structure, was constructed time and again along a widely
dispersed array of frontiers globally. In South Africa in the late 1870s and
the early 1880s, Sir Bartle Frere, the Governor of the Cape Colony, ap-
plied the lessons learned from his days as Commissioner of Sindh along
the Afghan frontier in British India to his dealings with the Zulus, with
disastrous results. He was preceded in ­these efforts by Theo­philus Shep-
stone in Natal, who eventually produced the Natal Code. Twenty years

10
 Introduction

l­ater, at the turn of the twentieth ­century, Frederick Lugard, the alleged
architect of indirect rule in Africa in the eyes of subsequent generations
of imperial administrators, cribbed his notes from his days in Peshawar
in the 1870s and 1880s to construct a system of frontier governmentality
in northern Nigeria. The British Indian Empire’s involvement in the First
World War on behalf of the King Emperor brought the FCR, originally
designed for the par­tic­u­lar prob­lem of the Pathan tribesmen in the Hindu
Kush, to the marshlands of the Basra vilayet taken from the disintegrating
Ottoman Empire. From ­there, it traveled the deserts of the ­Middle East,
settling, in modified form, in the Negev of mandatory Palestine and Tran-
sJordan. Through the ­careers of vari­ous imperial officials, the FCR had
an imperial ­career of its own.
Yet the ideas of indirect rule, and, more importantly, the practices of
frontier governmentality, ­were not the singular purview of the British
­Empire. Nor w ­ ere the under­lying norms and values that provided the
intellectual foundation on which ­these governing practices rested. A
number of con­temporary thinkers—­scholars, administrators, and scholar
administrators—­held a common view of the “savagery” of the p ­ eoples of
the periphery and how their “savage” state not only justified but also ne-
cessitated their subjugation and rule. Men like Sir Bartle Frere in Britain,
Frederick Jackson Turner in the United States, and Domingo Sarmiento
in Argentina collectively authored and maintained an intellectual edifice
on which the rule of frontier governmentality was built. Their transna-
tional intellectual milieu points to the fact that the rationale for and prac-
tice of frontier governmentality proved a regime of rule with global
reach. In Argentina, the republic’s expansion into the Pampas and Pata-
gonia at the end of the 1870s and through the mid-1880s—­known as the
conquista del desierto (conquest of the desert)—­was precipitated by the
same impulses concurrently driving the British into Af­ ghan­ i­
stan.10
With the former’s success, they tried to put in place forms of rule strikingly
similar to ­those embodied by the FCR. At the same moment, the United
States—in one of its many wars of expansion along its rolling continental
frontier—­created a reservation system for the Apache in the Arizona
­territory that embodied the ele­ments of frontier governmentality. This
was clearly a global phenomenon linking geo­graph­i­cally far-­removed
corners of the world inhabited by p ­ eoples who, though individually quite
distinct, collectively constituted an archetype of frontier dwellers who
had to be dealt with in a similar fashion by the expanding state order of
the nineteenth ­century.

11
 RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

Frontier governmentality facilitates a deeper understanding of the

modern world we live in—­both past and pre­sent. Through an examina-
tion of the “peripheries” of the global order, it throws a revealing light on
the “centers.” For the construction of both was not a dichotomous proj­ect
where the interior defined its limits, but rather a wholly entangled enter-
prise in which the two mutually constituted one another. Frontiers defined
the centers as much as centers defined the frontiers. Yet this is no ­simple
collapse of categories, for ­those definitions ­were differential. Indeed the
story of frontier governmentality is r­ eally about how the state system, so
often characterized as driven by the universalizing, and flattening impetus
of modern po­liti­cal power, intentionally constructed and included an un-
dulating, uneven po­liti­cal terrain of difference, which remains central to
our world ­today.
That system affected, and continues to affect, p ­ eoples’ lives in a direct
and malicious manner. The inhabitants of the frontier—­the objects of this
story as well as the actions of the imperial states—­are the forgotten ­peoples
of the periphery who only seem to explode into popu­lar consciousness
when they perpetrate or are more often the victims of spectacular and os-
tensibly unintelligible acts of vio­lence. The world looks with horror as
the bodies of massacred c­ hildren are removed from the Army Public School
in Pakistan, as the bloodied remains of young students are put into body
bags in ­Kenya, or as the hooded heads of pubescent girls are shown in
the propaganda videos disseminated by Boko Haram. As such vio­lence is
so alien to the daily lives of so many, we strug­gle to make sense of such
bloodletting, reaching for the interpretive lens of terrorism and thus un-
derstanding t­ hese ­people and places as “fanatical”—­and thus deviant and
dangerous. Yet ­there is a deep structural logic at the heart of ­these inci-
dents along the global periphery, embedded in the very construction of
­these spaces as peripheries from the late nineteenth ­century onward. ­These
are not spaces of exception, aberrations in our modern global system of
nation-­states. Rather, t­hese are central parts of the system’s design—­
intended outcomes, not unexpected accidents. As such, they sit as
damning indictments of the po­liti­cal, economic, and social order con-
structed over the last ­century and a half.

12
 N1n
Frontier Governmentality

T he nineteenth-­century world was a new world marked by rapid pro­

gress in technology, communications, and transport. It was also marked
by po­liti­cal upheaval, the likes of which the world had never seen before.
But what distinguished this c­ entury from ­those that came before, or in-
deed a­ fter, was that it was the first truly global ­century.1 While linkages
between the world’s distant lands had been forged previously, only ­after
1800 did ­those linkages serve to tightly bind far-­removed corners into a
loosely united, if not unitary global arena. In that arena, the changes that
­shaped one locale rippled out across the world to affect, often in unfore-
seen ways, faraway lands inhabited by vastly dif­fer­ent ­peoples. Yet the
impulse of the nineteenth ­century was one of both sameness and differ-
ence. Whereas the eigh­teenth c­ entury, for Eu­ro­pe­ans at least, was about
knowing the places and p ­ eoples of the world (the Enlightenment world)
the nineteenth c­ entury proved to be about ruling them (the imperial
world). But such rule was expensive. To economize and expedite it, stan-
dard practices of administration, which lasted beyond the often short
­careers of colonial servants, ­were increasingly put in place and embedded
in the foundations of the colonial enterprise. The story of frontier gov-
ernmentality is a story about the authoring, propagation, and reproduc-
tion of just such a practice, or rather regime of rule.
Before one considers how the frontier was ruled, however, one must
consider what was ruled. What did “frontier” mean in the nineteenth-­
century imperial world? Frontiers appear as a self-­definitional category re-
quiring no formal elucidation. Rather, like obscenity, one knows a frontier

13
 RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

when one sees it. Yet such reasoning is in many ways teleological. Fron-
tiers are not objective realities, but rather social constructs. As such, the
very act of observation is in fact an act of definition—­a kind of social
version of Heisenberg’s uncertainty princi­ple. To most, frontiers are at the
limits of polities—­markers of authorities and bounds of belonging that
have existed since the dawn of history itself. ­There have always been “ins”
and “outs,” with frontiers delimiting the line between the two. Yet in the
nineteenth ­century, they assumed a distinct, if not altogether dif­fer­ent
meaning commensurate with the altogether dif­fer­ent polities they demar-
cated.2 They w ­ ere an outward expression of the state-­based empires
­Eu­ro­pe­ans constructed the world over.
Much ink, as well as blood, has been spilled trying to define the “ideal”
frontier.3 Though often thought of as a discrete place, most frequently on
the extremity of the relevant po­liti­cal or administrative entity, frontiers
are a par­tic­u­lar type of space. The frontier is an ideational space marked
by specific manifestations of state power and po­liti­cal authority. In this
space, the state defines the limit of both its claims to, as well as actualiza-
tion of authority over, ­people and territory. Just as ­those claims, and states’
abilities to assert and realize them, entail a wide spectrum of possibilities,
so too do frontiers assume a wide array of expressions. Some frontiers
manifest themselves as hard lines, drawn on a map and theoretically en-
forced on the ground. ­These are thought of as borders, or more precisely
modern borders.4 Other frontiers articulate themselves as zones, where
state claims and power recede through space. ­These are thought of as
borderlands.5
Frontiers are not only spatial and territorial artifacts, but temporal
ones as well. They are not static, but rather dynamic, changing location
and meaning, as well as character over time. For example, the frontier of
the American West through the nineteenth ­century was marked by its con-
stant movement, while the frontier between British India and Af­ghan­i­
stan evinced a remarkable geo­graph­i­cal fixity ­after the British assumption
of power at mid-­century. The significance of both, in the con­temporary
and historical imagination, changed with the changing nature of the states
claiming and enforcing t­hese respective frontiers. The conquest of the
American West, along with the narrative of the American national proj­ect,
led to the “closing” of the American frontier by the end of the nineteenth
­century.6 In contrast, the arrival of British imperial power along the Af-
ghan frontier in 1849 simply served to codify this space as dif­fer­ent and
apart. The American frontier and its closure represented the supposedly

14
 Frontier Governmentality

universalizing face of the nation-­state while the British Indian frontier epit-
omized the particularizing one of the imperial state. Such renderings of
­these frontiers—of regimes of sameness and difference—­are distorted
by time. How they are remembered t­oday is not how they w ­ ere ­either
conceived or experienced at the time.7 That dissonance—­between then
and now—­has impor­tant and lasting implications not only for frontiers
themselves, but also for the states that enforced them and for the p ­ eoples
enclosed by them. The time-­bound character of frontiers is thus as impor­
tant to recognize as their spatial locations.
The mobility and variety of the frontier as place makes it an unstable
and unreliable category of space.8 It is more productive to think of fron-
tiers as conceptual rather than physical spaces, a move that allows for their
location to be at one and the same time multiple as well as mobile.9 Con-
sequently, rather than identifying specific places as “frontiers,” it is more
useful to identify the par­tic­u­lar practices constituting frontiers. Thinking
of the frontier as practice has radical implications as it moves the inter-
rogative gaze away from the external bounds of the state to the internal
body as a realm of frontier possibility. If the frontier marks the limits of
both the claims and actualizations of state authority, the absence (inten-
tional or other­wise) of such authority within the state itself—­native Amer-
ican reservations, Indian princely states, African tribal reserves—­creates
frontiers. Indeed, for many states of the modern world, the most impor­
tant and extensive frontiers demarcate their interior, rather than their
exterior.
The relationship between the frontier and the state is a mutually af-
fective one. The state may claim and enforce the frontier, but the act of
­doing so irrevocably alters the state itself. The frontier does not have an
in­de­pen­dent, self-­evident, or “objective” real­ity, but rather has to be en-
acted in both space and time by governing agents. The frontier has to be
made and maintained through constant, repeated, and publicly vis­i­ble acts.
It must be both inscribed and performed. Such per­for­mances are acts of
sovereignty—­the assertion by the state of its ultimate authority.10 Some
of ­these acts can have the fiction of permanence, such as a boundary
marker or border wall. Some of them can personify the frontier, such as
the surveillance of a border guard or customs officer. It is through ­these
acts, ­these practices, that the frontier is performed and thus realized. While
one may say this is true of government in general, the frontier is con-
structed through a par­tic­u­lar constellation of practices best understood
as frontier governmentality.

15
 RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

Frontier governmentality is composed of two distinct phenomena that

when combined give rise to a unique spatialized and time-­bound prac-
tice. Whereas “frontier” denotes a sense of the place, “governmentality”
locates it in time. One of the necessary conditions for the advent of gov-
ernmentality was the emergence of po­liti­cal economy as a central arena
for governments’ aspirations to control.11 The development of capitalism
and the modern state system not only took place concurrently, but also
sprang from the same root. The rise of po­liti­cal economy as both a prac-
tice of governance and discourse during the nineteenth c­ entury, a func-
tion of the global expansion of capitalism, was intimately tied to the pro­
cesses of state formation. As the economy became an arena for action by
the state, it opened a new realm of regulation by which the state could
control its subjects-­cum-­citizens, through regimes of taxation, regulation,
and work.12 The state could intervene directly into the individual lives of
its subjects by policing economic intercourse between them, something
previously outside both its abilities and ambitions. The rise of statistical
sciences and development of economics as an academic field during the
nineteenth ­century changed all that. Smith’s ideas of comparative advan-
tage and Ricardo’s theory of rent combined with the enumerative capabili-
ties of bureaucratizing administrations to make it imperative for the state
to intervene directly in the spheres of commerce, finance, and economics,
even if only to ensure the market’s unhindered functioning. Another arena
for state action was born, along with another field of social-­cum-­political
life upon which it could place its administrative imprimatur.
The expansion of capitalism and state power ­were thus intimately
linked. Yet the logic of global capitalism created specific opportunities
and forms for its expression, which varied by time and place. Along the
frontier, they facilitated the expansion of capitalism into the spaces of
“savagery” through a distinctive regime of state administration. In the
main that regime was one of negative action—­namely what the state did
not do in the economic realm of the frontier, as opposed to what it con-
structively did do. As such, the story of frontier governmentality—of the
rule of the periphery—is in part a story about the expansion of global
capitalism in the late nineteenth ­century and its integration, or abnega-
tion, of the limits of the state-­based international order.
Governmentality then, as opposed to governance, is a temporal signi-
fier, an aspect of the modern state whose ambitions and abilities to inter-
vene, regulate, and control the lives of the populations over which it rules
are both qualitatively and quantitatively dif­fer­ent than the state forms

16
 Frontier Governmentality

­ receding it. The term speaks to the invasive architecture of order as-
p
sembled by states to regiment everyday life. The technological changes of
the nineteenth ­century, in par­tic­u­lar the rise of statistics and quantifica-
tion of government, radically expanded the state’s intrusion into indi-
viduals’ lives.13 Arguably, the most impor­tant and famous practice of
governmentality, at least in the colonial world, was the census. The emer-
gence of the individual, as opposed to collectivities as the target of gover-
nance, required a fundamental rewriting of the compact on which po­liti­cal
order rested. Successful state control of individuals rather than groups
was predicated on the ability of the state to deploy technologies of rule
over individuated subjects. This marked a significant expansion of state
abilities and ambitions. The idea of governmentality captures ­these devel-
opments, firmly placing its subject m ­ atter in the modern world wrought
by the changes of the nineteenth ­century.
But empires ­were not simply about bringing new technologies to bear
on foreign lands. Rather, imperial enterprises integrated local practice with
classical learning to develop a regime along the frontier akin to, yet fun-
damentally dif­fer­ent than, past praxis. For the British administrators along
the Afghan frontier, this meant combining the lessons of their classical
education with Mughal and even Sikh methods.14 Mountstuart Elphin-
stone, the first British ambassador to the kingdom of Kabul and author
of modern understandings of Af­ghan­i­stan and its frontiers, read Tacitus’s
Germania on his pro­gress to the court in Peshawar.15 Though in many
ways Elphinstone’s An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (1815) resem-
bled the writings of his Roman precursor, both in descriptive and pre-
scriptive manner regarding frontier ­peoples, they served fundamentally
dif­fer­ent state forms in fundamentally dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal epochs.16 Though
the systems of frontier rule developed in and deployed by the Roman and
British empires, respectively, may have been intellectual kin, they w ­ ere at
best far-­removed relations. The frontier governance of any number of pre-
modern or even early modern empires—­from the Romans to the Mughals,
from the Tang dynasty to the Ottomans—­resembled that of nineteenth-­
century Eu­ro­pean global empires. But it was nonetheless distinct from
the frontier governmentality ushered in by the nineteenth-­century global
po­liti­cal and economic order.
Frontier governmentality entailed a common set of governing norms,
administrative practices, and l­egal regimes that together constituted a dis-
crete form of rule unique to frontier spaces. What made it unique to ­these
spaces was a combination of the fleeting reach of state authority as well

17
 RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

as the circumscribed assertion of that authority, often based on an assess-

ment of its fragility as well as strategic concerns.17 The ele­ments consti-
tuting frontier governmentality ­were pre­sent—­singly and in combination—­
elsewhere in the colonial realm. But nowhere e­ lse did its discrete parts
combine to articulate a systematized order as they did along frontiers.
­Those constituent ele­ments—­indirect rule, sovereign pluralism, imperial
objecthood, and economic dependency—­were intimately linked to one an-
other and mutually reinforcing. They represented, respectively, the state’s
cultural, po­liti­cal, juridical, and economic calculations.
Indirect rule, a phrase made famous by Lord Frederick Lugard, gov-
ernor of Nigeria and a key player in this story, was the practice of gov-
erning native ­peoples by their own “customs and traditions” through
ostensibly indigenous institutions of rule.18 While the specific mechanisms
­were supposedly culturally conditioned and dependent on the par­tic­u­lar
­people being governed, the practice invariably relied on some sort of na-
tive authority, often a “chief” of some sort, serving as the central medi-
ator with and conduit of colonial authority. In some instances, such as
the tribes along the Afghan frontier, ­these authorities could be corporate
in nature. However constituted, indirect rule aimed to substitute state-­
sanctioned indigenous forms of governance for the “regular” administra-
tive structure of the colonial regime. Strikingly, t­hose indigenous forms,
though supposedly specific to their context, assumed a standard appear-
ance in state administration around the world. In colonial constructions
of them, the Somali tribesmen of ­Kenya’s Northern Frontier Province in-
dulged the same excesses of the “blood feud,” which likewise marked the
Bedouin of the Negev and the Pashtuns of the North-­West Frontier Prov-
ince as “savages.” Ironically, despite their presumed particularity, each of
­these ­peoples of the periphery presented a universal archetype. The
spaces subject to such forms of rule ­were invariably ­those where the cost
of direct rule outweighed the potential returns. ­Those costs could be, and
often ­were, exponentially increased by the re­sis­tance of local inhabitants.
More importantly, however, the lands they occupied ­were marginal to the
imperial economy, and thus not worth the effort of forcibly integrating.
One of the most impor­tant aspects of indirect rule was suzerainty,
which constituted a claim to po­liti­cal power that was neither exclusive
nor exclusionary, in marked contrast to modern ideas of sovereignty. A
suzerain acted as primus inter pares, allowing often-­overlapping alle-
giances to vari­ous overlords. This plasticity of power did not require loy-
alties to be absolute, a recognition of the ­limited abilities of suzerains to

18
 Frontier Governmentality

enforce inimitability. The Eu­ro­pean imperial formations that sprouted in

the eigh­teenth ­century and matured through the nineteenth inherited and
integrated local po­liti­cal cultures marked by suzerain po­liti­cal relations.
Instead of replicating modern, metropolitan norms of sovereignty, the co-
lonial states of the imperial heyday ­were mishmashes of local and impe-
rial po­liti­cal norms, forms, and practices often cobbled together through
an unending series of temporary compromises made permanent by the
weight of time and accretion.19 It was precisely this that allowed the East
India Com­pany to be both a vassal of the ­great Mughal in Delhi and the
sovereign representative of the British Crown in South Asia u ­ ntil its dis-
solution in 1858.
Yet the po­liti­cal order erected by colonial states, though resembling
their local suzerain pre­de­ces­sors, was fundamentally dif­fer­ent. By the latter
half of the nineteenth c­ entury the issues of communication, transporta-
tion, and finance that previously ­limited the ability of early modern su-
zerains to assert claims of exclusive authority had largely been overcome,
though by no means totally eradicated. Nonetheless, the colonial state ab-
jured uninhibited claims of sovereignty. Instead, it created a universe of
sovereign pluralism, where the exclusivity associated with the idea of sov-
ereignty was pre­sent, as paradoxically was the space for multiple po­
liti­cal allegiances.20 Unlike the personal and relational aspects of a suzerain
po­liti­cal universe, a world of sovereign pluralism was an institutionally
framed one based on the rule of law, or rather the manifold codes of law
coexisting within most colonial realms. Multiple sovereignties could co-
exist and interact, and even be nested within one another. Unlike modern
absolutist understandings of sovereignty, a realm of sovereign pluralism
lacked the formal demarcation of a hierarchy of authority. It did, how-
ever, maintain and police a clear informal understanding of the relative
place of ones’ power and its limits. In such a realm, colonial authorities
could indulge in the fiction of native sovereignty and in­de­pen­dence—be
it in the form of princely state or frontier tribes—­without fundamentally
contradicting their own all-­encompassing pretentions to power.
Such an understanding of sovereignty runs starkly at odds with ­today’s
sensibilities. It abjures the ele­ments commonly associated with ideas of
sovereignty in the modern world—­the exclusive control over a specific
and identifiable territory and population; a mono­poly over all forms
of legitimate vio­lence; some form of regularized bureaucratic structure
or apparatus; and recognition by other analogous states.21 ­These ele­
ments necessarily imbue the sovereign with singular and superior po­liti­cal

19
 RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

authority, legible to its equals who themselves are similarly constituted.

Further, such states are marked by the universality of the rule of law—­all
stand equal before blind justice. While this vision of the state remains
central to understandings of the state-­centric po­liti­cal order that emerged
through the nineteenth c­ entury, ­there has been an increasing recognition
that it represents at best an ideal type, rather than a fully actualized
real­ity.22 The nineteenth-­century imperial world, which serves as the foun-
dation of t­ oday’s state-­based international system, was one of sovereign
pluralism. At their inception, many of the states populating t­oday’s sov-
ereign world had very dif­fer­ent ideas of po­liti­cal authority than t­hose
usually ascribed to them. They comfortably inhabited a world marked by
the undulating exercise of power central to sovereign pluralism.
Perhaps nowhere was that po­liti­cal terrain more variegated than in the
­legal realm. Imperial entities and colonial states, though justified by the
“rule of law,” nonetheless sliced the law into innumerable discrete portions
that did not necessarily overlap. Though realized in the form of communal
civil codes, it was most pronounced in the recognition of subsidiary sover-
eignties, such as the princely states of colonial India.23 Yet not all such
sovereignties w ­ ere that subsidiary. Maintaining the sovereignty, or even
in­de­pen­dence, of vari­ous native authorities placed at least some of them
beyond the ­legal reach of the colonial state. The inhabitants of such ad-
ministrative spaces w ­ ere not subjects of the state’s justice.24 Indeed, in
many instances, they w ­ ere barred access to ave­nues and arenas of colonial
justice, most especially the courts. This was accomplished e­ ither through
outright l­egal injunction, or through the rendering of ­these ­people as non-
justiciable in the eyes of the court, such as American Indians who w ­ ere not
recognized as “persons within the meaning of the law” u ­ ntil 1879.25 Juridi-
cally illegible, such p ­ eople could be acted upon without any ­legal con-
straints theoretically offering colonial subjects a modicum of judicial pro-
tection from executive overreach. While such l­egal protection was more
honored in its breach than its observance, for many colonial states the
rhe­toric of bringing the rule of law to a “barbarous” and “savage” world
was a foundational pillar of self-­justification.26 So the fact ­these “in­de­pen­
dent” p ­ eople ­were not covered by this blanket protection, however thread-
bare its real­ity may have been, was an impor­tant and telling omission.
They could be objects of state action without being subjects of its justice.
­These p ­ eople ­were thus not colonial subjects, but rather imperial objects.
Imperial objecthood had impor­tant implications for both the p ­ eoples
of the periphery as well as the colonial state itself. Whereas within the

20
 Frontier Governmentality

colonial juridical sphere, the state exercised a rule of difference through

discrete, individuated forms of rule deployed over dif­fer­ent subject popu-
lations, ­these ­were by and large l­imited to the civil l­egal sphere, most
especially in ­matters of personal law. Communities ­were ruled by their
individual civil codes, such as the Muslim personal law statutes of British
India or the Hindu Code of postcolonial India.27 Criminal law, such as
the Indian Penal Code, was universal. The subjection of the colonial pop-
ulation to that universal law was both a marker of the colonial state’s
sovereign aspirations, as well as justification of its rule—­namely equality
before the law.28 Colonial governmentality thus worked on a register of
civil difference and criminal sameness.29 Frontier governmentality, in con-
trast, excluded frontier inhabitants from the colonial ­legal sphere alto-
gether, save in certain l­imited cases, and in so ­doing abjured the colonial
state’s sovereign claims.30 The law, which provided the rhetorical justifi-
cation for imperial rule, met its limits along the frontier, t­here disaggre-
gating between judicial subjects and po­liti­cal objects.31
While frontier dwellers w­ ere legally disenfranchised by and at least rhe-
torically in­de­pen­dent of the colonial state, they nonetheless remained
po­liti­cally and eco­nom­ically beholden to the imperial one. Dependence,
in par­tic­ul­ar economic dependence, marked the final foundational fea-
ture of frontier governmentality. In terms of their po­liti­cal relationship
with the imperial state, this meant the in­de­pen­dence of ­these ­people was
highly circumscribed and contingent. Eco­nom­ically, they ­were rendered
dependent on the imperial economy, the tentacles of which reached well
beyond the physical confines of the colonial state. Their economic subju-
gation facilitated the disciplining of frontier inhabitants. This dependence
was accomplished through administrative practices such as policing, the
expansion of economic intercourse tied to burgeoning patterns of global
trade, and the recruitment of bodies into ­labor practices and migratory
cir­cuits. ­These practices ensured the relationship between the imperial
economy and the “in­de­pen­dent” ­peoples of the frontier was heavi­ly
weighted in the former’s f­ avor. Drawn into an economic order wrought
by imperialism, they w ­ ere nonetheless denied the ­limited po­liti­cal enfran-
chisement of colonialism.
The economic dependence of frontier p ­ eoples was most con­spic­u­ous
in a distinctive and exploitive l­abor regime. ­There ­were two central ele­
ments to this regime: first, a military ­labor market closely tied to policing
frontier ­peoples; and second, migratory ­labor flows that cycled frontier
bodies into productive ends. The military ­labor market operated by directly

21
 RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

recruiting the men of the frontier into the military forces of the colonial
state—as regular troops, as scouts, and as paramilitary units. George
Crook’s Apache scouts, the Bedouins of John Glubb’s Desert Patrol, and
the Pashtuns of the Punjab Field Force all played central roles in colonial
force along its extremities. Relatedly, men ­were recruited into “tribal
militias,” which w ­ ere deployed to police the indigenous communities of
the frontier from which they ­were recruited. In ­either capacity—­the mili-
tary or policing one—­these men had their l­abor of vio­lence turned into
wage work. The colonial state paid them, and that pay made its way back
to the frontier through remittances within kinship networks. Such injec-
tions of cash along the frontier monetized the local economy, in turn more
closely integrating it with the enveloping imperial one. It had the secondary
effect of monitoring the tribesmen while si­mul­ta­neously monetizing
them.32 They ­were thus subjected to surveillance at the same time they
­were subjugated to the imperial economy.
The second major ele­ment of the frontier ­labor regime, and remit-
tances, was migration. As the frontier economy monetized, it was also
impoverished. Frontier dwellers w ­ ere thus forced to pursue strategies to
­counter that impoverishment. With the economy of plunder—­“raiding”—
no longer an option, wage l­abor stood as the colonially conditioned al-
ternative.33 Such ­labor would obviously be preferable in the military
­labor market discussed above, but only a small percentage of men could
avail themselves of it. ­Others ­were forced to enter cir­cuits of ­labor migra-
tion within the colonial or even broader imperial sphere. Consequently,
the newly transformed economic man of the frontier could be found at
work far away from home. His dependence, and that of his f­ amily, on the
imperial economic sphere was thus complete, while at the same time his
integration into the colonial po­liti­cal and judicial sphere remained barred.
This is not to say the spaces subject to frontier governmentality ­were
transformed into ­labor reserves. While this may have been true in indi-
vidual cases over time, such as the so-­called Bantustans of South Africa,
as a general rule the p­ eoples of the periphery inhabiting ­these spaces did
not make a docile ­labor force. Indeed, in many of the areas where such
spaces existed, cheap l­abor was imported from elsewhere. In South Af-
rica, Indian coolie ­labor was brought in as they w ­ ere easier to control; in
the Desert Southwest of the United States, Mexicans proved more reli-
able, pliable, and numerous as a workforce than the recalcitrant Apache
and other reservation Indians. Nonetheless, the ­peoples of the periphery
­were forced into migratory ­labor cir­cuits in a dependent position on the

22
 Frontier Governmentality

imperial economy. Pashtun railway workers in northwest India and far-

ther afield joined Apache thespians who ­were part of traveling Indian
shows in the global cir­cuits of migratory ­labor.34 So while the spaces ­were
not l­abor reserves as such, the bodies occupying ­those spaces provided
­labor reserved solely for exploitation by the surrounding imperial economy.
The dependence of such peripheral places and p ­ eoples on that economy,
along with the state’s cash requirements in the form of taxes, had an ad-
ditional, lasting ramification. It created pathways for the development of
“illicit” economies, which included trade, smuggling, and the production
of prohibited goods, which at one and the same time sought to create cash
revenue while denying it to state coffers.35 Often, ­these illicit economies
centered around commodities ­either banned by or highly regulated by the
state, most importantly arms, as well as bodies.36 ­Today, ­these have ex-
panded to include drugs, criminal extortion, and even capital flows.37
Many of the frontiers discussed ­here—­like the Afghan frontier, the Somali
frontier, and the Burmese frontier—­have become nodes in the global drug
and arms trades, making them places of par­tic­u­lar peril. The peripheral-
ization of such spaces, while forcing the inhabitants into positions of de­
pen­dency, also created opportunities for them to circumvent the stric-
tures of the state and profit off the differential margins of regulation,
opportunities for what may be thought of as “illicit” agency.
The constituent ele­ments of frontier governmentality—­indirect rule,
sovereign pluralism, imperial objecthood, and economic dependence—­
provided the substance of the system. However, that substance had to be
exercised and transferred in a bureaucratic and personnel form. Frontier
governmentality assumed the character of a l­egal regime—be it a single
ordinance or regulation or a collection of laws. Such ­legal regimes ­were
paradoxical as they w­ ere designed to provide clarity, coherence, and stan-
dardization. Yet they codified a system of highly personalized rule, which
maximized deference to the “man on the spot.” Frontier governmentality
relied on the steady hand of an experienced local officer who became val-
orized in the imperial imaginary. Men like Robert Sandeman, John
Glubb, Frederick Lugard, and John Clum dispensed rough-­and-­ready jus-
tice to the “savage” hordes of the frontier and w ­ ere lionized in print and
even film for ­doing so. ­These men played a capacious part in frontier ad-
ministration, and purposely so as the ­peoples of the periphery needed a
firm and familiar hand to govern them. Such administrators ruled the fron-
tier as virtual kings, jealously protecting their freedom of action from
their bureaucratic overlords. Yet the laws they enforced circumscribed

23
 RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

their in­de­pen­dence and authority through bureaucratic surveillance in the

guise of reporting. They w ­ ere the vessels administering frontier govern-
mentality in the flesh, and as such they play an outsized role in its story.
Frontier administrators are not the only p ­ eople in this story. More nu-
merous and impor­tant ­were the frontier dwellers themselves, the ­peoples
of the periphery who w ­ ere the objects of frontier governmentality. This
system of rule was both predicated on, and culminated in, a characteriza-
tion of ­these ­people as “savage.” Indeed, it was their “savagery”—­their
predilection for vio­lence, recalcitrance to rule, and general lack of defer-
ence to po­liti­cal hierarchy—­that placed them beyond the pale of regular
administration in the eyes of colonial administrators.38 The Pashtuns of
the Afghan borderland ­were no more ready for the marks of civilization
than the Apaches or Somalis. Yet while t­here is a long history of ideas
­dividing barbarians from the civilized realms, the idea of civilization itself
was a rather late invention dating to the Enlightenment in the latter half of
the eigh­teenth c­ entury.39 Further, the idea of the “savage” has a par­tic­u­lar
intellectual genealogy closely tied with the conquest and colonization of
the Amer­i­cas, as opposed to “barbarian,” a term of much greater antiq-
uity.40 While recognizing t­ hese linguistic nuances, my aim h ­ ere is not to be
sidetracked by them. Nineteenth-­century writers interchangeably used the
terms “savage / barbarian” and “savagery / barbarism / uncivilized” to mean
substantively the same t­hing.41 Denoting and degrading frontier dwellers
as “savage,” “barbarous,” and “uncivilized” was a shorthand justification
for colonial rule generally and frontier governmentality specifically. It is
centrally impor­tant to recognize the language of “savagery” as a colonial
one of delegitimation, for its use, even in historical texts, can be controver-
sial. Thus when I refer to the p ­ eoples of the periphery as “savages” in the
text, it is not to make a normative statement about their cultural disposi-
tion, but rather to document part of the po­liti­cal proj­ect of conquest
­undertaken by colonial (and in some instances postcolonial) states.
While, in significant ways, frontier governmentality overlapped with
other forms of governance practiced by the colonial, and postcolonial,
state, the spaces in which it was enacted ­were both a key constitutive and
distinguishing feature.42 Indeed, the exercise of frontier governmentality
along the physical limits of colonial authority constituted one of the cen-
tral practices of bordering in the late nineteenth c­ entury.43 By demarcating
the inhabitants of ­these spaces as outside the colonial sphere, the colonial
state marked the edges of its power. However, the liminal space—­physical,
po­liti­
cal, juridical, and economic—­ occupied by ­ these ­ people clearly

24
 Frontier Governmentality

r­evealed ­those edges to be blurred. State authority receded rather than

­stopped along the “border,” which in many instances did not even notion-
ally exist. The pro­cesses of bordering ­were, at their core, negotiations of
that recession and diminution.44
The frontiers inhabited by t­hese in­de­pen­dent tribesmen did not abut
other colonial or sovereign states. Rather, beyond the limits of the colo-
nial state lay a world of indigenous polities subtly but, nonetheless, wholly
remade by the globalization wrought by Eu­ro­pean imperialism. More
often than not, colonial policymakers did not know what exactly to make
of such polities. Clearly their moment had passed, eclipsed by the rise of
the juggernauts of nineteenth-­century Eu­ro­pean empires. As a conse-
quence, administrators often tried to fashion t­hese indigenous polities
into po­liti­cal o­ rders more familiar, and thus more intellectually recogniz-
able, to the colonial one. The classic example was the rise in the nineteenth
­century of “buffer states,” places like Af­ghan­i­stan, intervening between
expanding Eu­ro­pean empires.45 The po­liti­cal o ­ rders of t­ hese interstices
­were absorbed within imperial strategies to make them legible to Eu­ro­
pean powers and tamed within the imperial imagination.46 D ­ oing so, how-
ever, ­either essentially subjugated or fundamentally subverted any sort of
indigenous agency, often to the ultimate detriment of imperial as well as
indigenous authorities.
Such borderland spaces ­were created by the expansion of Eu­ro­pean
colonial empires throughout the world in the nineteenth ­century. As ­those
empires expanded into the “unknown,” they disrupted existing regional
po­liti­cal and economic ­orders, often causing “chaos” in the eyes of the
imperial authorities as a result. ­Those Eu­ro­pean powers used the threat
of such chaos along their limits to e­ ither annex the areas subject to it, or
encapsulate and seemingly quarantine it, applying the medicine of fron-
tier governmentality.47 With the expansion of Eu­ro­pean empires and the
creation of colonial frontiers, the birth of frontier governmentality and
its global reach became multicausal as well as multivalent. Rather than a
singular point of origin from which this administrative practice spread
outward to the world, the story is one of both a spread of practice from
par­tic­u­lar points of origin and the near simultaneous, seemingly sponta-
neous birth of multiple points of origin. Frontier governmentality appeared
in­de­pen­dently in similarly situated spaces around the late nineteenth-­
century world. And from some of ­those spaces, most importantly British
India’s Afghan frontier, it spread through imperial c­ areer cir­cuits, admin-
istrative exchanges, and a common intellectual milieu.

25
 RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

The practices developed and employed along the Afghan frontier in

the late nineteenth c­ entury, in the Desert Southwest of the Arizona terri-
tory, on the Pampas of the Argentine interior, along the desert rim of north-
east ­Kenya—­all ­these peripheries ­were touched by, if not themselves,
sources of frontier governmentality. In some instances, the manifestation
of t­ hose practices almost identically mirrored one another, collapsing geo-
graphic and temporal distance as well as cultural and social difference. In
other instances, ­these practices expressed themselves quite differently—­
perhaps incompletely, or perhaps not even at all. Taken in their totality
with stories of both sameness and difference, what emerges is a compel-
ling history of the construction, maintenance, and reproduction of a glob-
ally ubiquitous regime of rule—­a frontier governmentality—­along the
limits of the expanding international order. That history illuminates not
only how power and polity ­were embedded and manifest along the pe-
riphery of that order, but also, and, as importantly, how that periphery
was definitional of the order it delineated.48 By examining how that order
entailed, and conversely excluded, certain places and p ­ eoples, the story
of frontier governmentality provides a lens onto the emergence of the
modern state and cap­i­tal­ist systems.
Understanding the frontier as practice, and of the practices collectively
defining spaces as frontiers ­under the rubric of frontier governmentality,
opens new interpretive vistas not only onto the colonial states that put
­these forms and practices in place, but also on the postcolonial states that
inherited and in many cases continued with them. This then is not simply
a story about the forgotten peripheries and ­peoples whose main ambit of
action is nihilistic in character, erupting into the popu­lar consciousness
with stunning vio­lence. Rather, it is the story of the construction of our
modern po­liti­cal and economic global order. Part of the blueprint of that
order included the creation of forgotten peripheries—­the edges of empire
that ­today are characterized as spaces of “state fragility” if not “state
failure.” But ­these are not spaces that have somehow failed. If anything,
they—­and the ­peoples inhabiting them—­have succeeded only too well in
assuming their consciously designed and carefully constructed place in the
modern international order. By looking at such peripheral spaces and
­peoples, we can better understand not only the vio­lence emanating from
them, but also, more importantly, the centers defining them.

26
 N2n
Governing British India’s
Unruly Frontier

N aqeebullah Mehsud’s body was handed over to his f­amily on Jan-

uary 17, 2018. He had been murdered four days e­ arlier by Karachi
police in an encounter killing by one of the force’s more notorious en-
counter specialists, Rao Anwar. Anwar claimed that Mehsud was a ter-
rorist killed in a shootout with police. But the story quickly fell apart and
Mehsud, the f­ ather of three c­ hildren and an aspiring model, appeared the
victim of police extortion. ­After torturing Mehsud and extracting Rs. 9
million, he was reportedly so badly beaten that Anwar de­cided it too dan-
gerous to let him go and instead staged the killing. While this incident
could have simply become yet another statistic in the gruesome history of
vio­lence in Karachi, and another example of extra-­judicial killing by the
Pakistani security ser­vices, Mehsud’s death instead became a rallying point
for the emerging Pashtun Tahafuz (Protection) Movement. The movement
transformed Mehsud’s death into an indictment of the systematic mistreat-
ment of and discrimination against the Pashtun by the Pakistani state.1
Such mistreatment and discrimination has a long pedigree in South
Asia, predating the birth of Pakistan as an in­de­pen­dent state in the late
summer of 1947. British colonial officials, for the c­entury they ruled
over the frontier areas abutting what became Af­ghan­i­stan in the late
nineteenth ­century, long saw the “Pathan” (the colonial nomenclature
for Pashtun) population of this space as a prob­lem.2 This was particu-
larly true of ­those inhabiting the recently dissolved Federally Adminis-
tered Tribal Areas (FATA).3 Naqeebullah Mehsud, a member of the
Mehsud tribe, was one such Pashtun. Forced from his home in South

27
 RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

Waziristan in 2009, Naqeebullah joined the uncounted exodus of frontier

tribesmen and ­women rendered “internally displaced persons” since 2004
by a series of military offensives in the FATA. ­These tribesmen, excluded
from the Pakistani body politic while residing in the FATA through the
draconian Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), found themselves subject
to continued exclusion, mistreatment, and discrimination once out of
­those areas. This deleterious triumvirate forms the core complaint of the
Tahafuz Movement, which demands not the special treatment of Pashtun
like Naqeebullah, but rather their treatment as normal Pakistani citizens.
In par­tic­u­lar, the movement wants an end to the collective punishment of
Pashtuns in the tribal areas, a pernicious mainstay in the governing ar-
senal of the FATA. In demanding the application of the constitutional pro-
tections available to all Pakistanis, and by implication the abrogation of
the “special” treatment Pashtuns have been the object of, the Tahafuz
Movement is forwarding an innocuously radical agenda that has the po-
tential to threaten the foundations of the Pakistani state. For that postco-
lonial state, like its colonial pre­de­ces­sor, has never been predicated on the
uniform rule of law but rather on the particularized rule of difference.
Historically, no place was more dif­fer­ent than the frontier, and no ­people
more par­tic­u­lar than the Pashtun.
To govern that difference, the British created a special l­egal code known
as the Frontier Crimes Regulation, which applied to all Pashtuns as well
as the inhabitants of the frontier districts included in the notification pub-
lished in the government gazette.4 The FCR encapsulated the tribesmen
of the frontier in their own colonially sanctioned customs and traditions.
It cut them off from the regular administrative apparatus of the colonial
regime, forcing ­those subject to it into a ­legal eddy from which ­there was
no recourse or escape. The FCR was the l­egal manifestation of frontier
governmentality along the limits of British India. The British character-
ized the FCR as a culturally conditioned administrative solution to the
prob­lem of the Pashtun. That prob­lem, in the eyes of frontier authorities,
was that the Pashtuns ­were “savage” tribesmen constitutionally unsuited
to civilization inherent in the complex intricacies of colonial law. As post-
colonial Pakistan inherited that prob­lem, it kept faith with the colonial
solution ­until the constitutional abrogation of the regime in 2018.5
That solution rendered the Pashtun as neither colonial subjects nor
postcolonial citizens. Rather, they ­were constructed and maintained as
imperial objects who could be acted upon by the colonial and then post-
colonial state—­often violently—­with no meaningful judicial relief. The

28
 Governing British India’s Unruly Frontier

0 50 miles

0 100 km

Malakand
Agency

N O RT H - W E ST
Kabul
A F G H A N I S TA N

Khyber
Peshawar
Agency
Kurram
Agency

FRONTIER

BRITISH
North Waziristan
Agency
INDIA
PROVINCE
South Waziristan
Agency
s R.
u
Ind

BALUCHISTAN
.
iR
Ra v

Map 2. ​North-­West Frontier Province, British India, c. 1909.

29
 RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

promise of colonial justice, however ephemeral, was intentionally fore-

closed to the Pashtun who instead ­were characterized as “in­de­pen­dent
tribes” inhabiting the liminal lands of the tribal agencies. ­These agencies
lay beyond the edge of civilization in the settled districts of British India
and before the international boundary with Af­ghan­i­stan that was consti-
tuted by the Durand Line. It is precisely this legacy—­the legacy of frontier
governmentality—­more than the traditions of police vio­lence in Karachi
since the 1980s, which is responsible for Naqeebullah Mehsud’s death.

nNnNnN
The liminal lands of British India’s North-­West Frontier, more specifi-
cally ­those which t­ oday mark the border between Pakistan and Af­ghan­i­
stan, ­were considered by colonial authorities as a “savage,” violent, and
chaotic space since well before the arrival of British administration in
1849. Many still consider it such ­today, repeating colonial tropes and ce-
menting them in the popu­lar imagination.6 Delimiting an ecologically and
ethnographically diverse region ­running nearly 1,200 miles, the frontier
ranges from the high Pamirs and Hindu Kush along its far northern reaches
to the dry desert ridges in the southern marches of Baluchistan. The moun-
tainous topography impoverished the p ­ eoples of this periphery, forcing
them to develop multiple coping strategies, including transhumance, no-
madism, and settled agriculture on the valley floors. The hills had the dual
effect of dividing the p­ eoples of the region both from one another, as well
as from the lowland rulers who claimed authority over them. This in turn
made frontier inhabitants po­ liti­
cally recalcitrant to rule by plainsmen.
When combined with the land’s relative poverty, the frontier proved an
administrative money pit—­a fiscal sink in terms of governing costs.
The highland realm included diverse congeries of socie­ties composing
equally diverse constellations of po­liti­cal communities, ranging from feu-
datory princely states to “in­de­pen­dent” tribal groups.7 Most prominent
among the frontier’s inhabitants w ­ ere the Pashtuns who populated its
northern reaches. They proved obstinate for the governing authorities of
the north Indian plains. The prob­lem of the Pashtuns was a long-­standing
one first for Mughal, then Sikh, and ultimately British colonial authori-
ties. So prominent ­were the Pashtuns in the British colonial imagination
that in constructing their conceptual understandings of the frontier they
largely “Pathanized” this space, demonstrating l­ittle recognition of the
complexity of the frontier’s ethnic patchwork.8 That complexity included
the Baluch, who inhabited the southern reaches of the frontier. As colo-

30
 Governing British India’s Unruly Frontier

nial authority seeped into their realms in the latter half of the nineteenth
­century, the Raj acknowledged the difference between the Pashtuns and
Baluch, often constructing the image of each in opposition to the other.
The Pashtuns w ­ ere supposedly republican in spirit and anarchical in so-
cial solidarity, making them difficult to control. In contrast, the Baluch
embraced a social hierarchy that made it pos­si­ble to rule them through
their khans, maliks, and chiefs.9 ­Today, both the Pashtun and the Baluch
are subject to continued discrimination by the Pakistani state.10
British administration of India’s North-­West Frontier was predicated
not only on a par­ tic­
u­lar understanding of its inhabitants—­ there ­
were
other “tribal” and “savage” ­peoples within the bounds of British India—­but
also on an inimitable conception of this space. Rather than a clear line—­a
border—­dividing in­de­pen­dent and sovereign states, the frontier presented
a zone. In this zone, imperial pretensions to power, not to mention the
daily exercise on which they rested, unevenly manifested themselves. ­There
was a certain point, somewhere along the ridges surrounding the vari­ous
passes into the Afghan kingdom, where the administrative power of the
Raj definitively ended.11 Conversely, its full might was exercised in the
plains populated by settled agricultural populations who ­were easily
taxed. As one administrator put it, “The fact is, that the territory in pos-
session of the British Government runs up to the very foot of the hills
which have, for obvious reasons of con­ve­nience, been called the fron-
tier.”12 Between t­hese settled districts and the ridgeline, which in 1893
became the border between Af­ghan­is­ tan and British India, lay the “tribal
areas.” ­These w­ ere inhabited by “in­de­pen­dent” tribes whom the British
at times claimed authority over, but not control. The British thus created
a bifurcated frontier, with an administrative one marking the end of co-
lonial control, and a po­liti­cal one marking the end of imperial rule. The
space between ­these bound­aries was an imperial space, and its inhabit-
ants ­were imperial objects rather than colonial subjects like the Indians
of the South Asian plains.13
The dynamic and often convoluted relationship between imperial and
colonial was put in stark relief along the frontier. The colonial state was
one embedded within the imperial proj­ect. Nonetheless, the two ­were dis-
tinct. The former both represented and was embodied by the administra-
tive structure of rule. The latter entailed the po­liti­cal pretensions to power.
The imperial realm included the colonial one in its totality, yet extended
beyond it to include areas of informal control as well as influence. The
frontier between British India and the Afghan lands was one space where

31
 RULING THE SAVAGE PERIPHERY

the relationship, or rather distinction between the two, became clear. The
colonial state ended with its regular administrative structure at the foot
of the hills. From ­there the imperial realm assumed its full form, with
claims of po­liti­cal paramountcy, which lacked the bureaucratic l­ egal scaf-
folding marking the lowland colonial realm. Formal colonial practice
gave way h ­ ere to informal imperial custom; control found itself supplanted
by influence. ­These ­were the tribal areas.
What distinguished the tribal areas from other anomalies within the
British Indian po­liti­cal topography was their location. Beyond the edge
of colonial authority, they sat uncomfortably between British India on the
one hand and the lands becoming Af­ghan­i­stan on the other. The former,
though entailing a diverse range of po­liti­cal possibilities, was ultimately
a colonial state subject to the paramount authority of the British govern-
ment. The latter was rather less defined. It was neither a protectorate nor
a de­pen­dency of British India, but nor was it a fully formed, in­de­pen­dent
state in the Eu­ro­pean understanding of the term.14 Rather, it was an in­de­
pen­dent indigenous polity at times subject to, and at ­others resistant of,
the influence of neighboring British India. What this meant for the tribal
areas was that in many ways they ­were neither fish nor fowl. They ­were
not a buffer between two European-­like states, nor between two indige-
nous polities. Rather they ­were a liminal space that sat astride the colo-
nial and the not-­colonial world. It was this liminality—at the edges of
authority—­which distinguished them from other seemingly similarly con-
stituted spaces in British India. And in that liminality lay both opportu-
nity and peril for the colonial state and the inhabitants of this realm.
The language of liminality employed by the Raj was the rhetorical
pretense of the tribemen’s “in­de­pen­dence,” one colonial officials ­were su-
perficially at pains to honor. At the same time, however, it insisted on
the bounds of that in­de­pen­dence. Addressing the issue in Parliament, Lord
Lansdowne, then Secretary of State for War and himself previously Viceroy
of India (1888–1894), insisted that

To talk of tribal in­de­pen­dence is, I cannot help thinking, a ­little mis-

leading. ­There can be no complete in­de­pen­dence in the case of a
­people that has not the power of transferring its allegiance in any
direction it pleases. We know that that power is not given to ­these
Frontier tribes, and I think, therefore, it is better, perhaps, not to
speak of them as in­de­pen­dent. That condition of qualified in­de­pen­
dence [italics mine] is a very common one all through the borders

32
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 stalks to be propagated, 662–64–66.
varieties of sweet, 662–64.

Prayer chants, for Halemano’s restoration, 244.

of Aiohikupua for victory over Ihuanu, 408.
of Kekuhaupio to his god Lono, 456.
to deities of husbandry, 662–64–66, 680–82–84.

Prichardia gaudichaudii (loulu lelo), and Prichardia martii (loulu hiwa), Hawaiian
palms, 656.

Priests, 458, 612.

canoe building, 612, 630.

Prophet of Kauai, 516, 518.

Prophets, 660, 662.

Providence (ship), 474.

Puaahuku, cliff overlooking Waipio, 290, 292.

Puaawela, Kohala, Halemano set out from, 258.

Puaena, the eastern point of Waialua harbor, 616.

Puaiki, the shark guardian of Puupehe, 558.

Puako, chase of Iwa ended at, 292.

Hamau and Hooleia lived at, 564.

Pualii, husband of Pokai and father of Namakaokapaoo, 274, 276, 278.

Pua-ne, sugar-cane arrow of Hiku, 182.

Pueokahi east of Kauiki, the harbor of Hana, 548.

Pueonuiokona, owl deity, 554.

Puhali, noted for strength, 174.

Puhikanilolou, an eel named, 534.

Puhola, to cook in ti leaves, 50.

Puikikaulehua, chief steward of Kawelo, 20, 26.

Pukui (assembly of gods), 328.

Pula-i, ti-leaf whistle, 668.

Pulee, sister of Halemano, 228.

Pumaia, chief of district, 550, 652.

and Wakaina, 552.

Puna, awa of, 258.

“big sea of,” “hala trees of,” 248.
coast of, submerged, 248.
Halemano chants of, 248.
Kamalalawalu’s birthplace, 230.
Kamehameha’s birthplace, 230.
Kamehameha sets out to conquer, 468.
kapas, 230.
king of, 228, 240, 248.
references to, 340, 342, 410, 416, 468.

Punaluu, Kaliuwaa falls near, 314.

Olopana lands at, 314.

Punia, legend of, 294–300.

Puniakaia, legend of, 154–162.

Puowaina, Punchbowl Hill, Honolulu, 474.

Makaioulu and companion encounter ten soldiers at, 488.

Pupuilima, legend of, 552, 554.

Pupukea, high chief, legend of, 436–450.

and Kamalalawalu, 448.
and Lono, 436, 440.
and Makakui, 438–440, 448, 450.

Pupulima, Waimea, Kauai, birthplace of Kawelo, 694.

Puuepa hill, 290, 292.

Puuhele a goddess, 546, 548.
a hill on Maui, 506, 514, 516, 546, 548.
a lizard, father of Molokini, 514, 516.

Puuhue hill, Kohala, 494.

Puukapele, Kauwila wood of, 40.

Puukapolei, Opelemoemoe fell asleep at, 168.

Hiiaka sojourned at, 318.
Makaioulu encountered a robber at, 488.

Puukohola, temple in Kawaihae, 472;

Keoua and others offered at sacrifices at, 472.

Puukolea, a dual body, 550–52.

Puukuakahi, hill climbed by Hiku, 182.

Puula-i, present name of Puulaina hill, 668.

Puulaina, Molokai, 534, 536, 668.

heiau on, 536.

Puulena, the cold wind of Kilauea, 580.

Puuloa, Pearl Harbor, 8.

Awahua is carried by ocean current to, 602;
breadfruit plant brought from Kanehunamoku by two men of, 678.
king of Oahu at; Kawelo sends messengers to, 28.

Puuoinaina, lizard daughter of Puuokali, 514, 516, 518.

and Lohiau, husband of Pele, 518.
and Pele, 518.

Puuokali (mother of Molokini), gave birth to a lizard daughter, 514.

Puuolai at Makena, the tail of lizard Puuoinaina, 518.

Puuomaiai and Puuhele, mythical persons in story of Kaniki, 546.

Puuonale, Hawaii, 246.

Puupaukaamai, a great warrior, 150, 374.

Puupehe, child of Kapokoholua and Kapoiliili, 554, 556,558, 560.

name of a rock off eastern point of Lanai, 556.

Puuwaiohina, a beautiful woman from Kauaula, 534.

Red-mouthed gun (pu-waha-ulaula), name given the sea-fight off Kohala, 472.

Restoration to life of Halemano, 230, 244;

of Kahalaopuna, 192;
of Pumano, 312.
legendary evidence of Hawaiians’ belief in, 188.

Riddle and guessing contests, 418, 706.

Robber attacks Makaioulu, 488–490.

Rooster, color and shape told by its crow, 494.

Rooster, Laenihi transforms herself from fish to, 234.

Rubus Hawaiiensis (akala), 642.

Runner, or runners of note: Maniniholokuaua, of Molokai, 164;

Keliimalolo, of Oahu, 164.
Kamaakamikioi and Kamaakauluohia from Niihau, 164.

Rhus semialata (Neneleau), sumach, 500, 640.

Sacred rank observances, 142–44.

temple, Palili promises to be first to enter the, 144.

Sacrifice, body carried to the temple altar as a, 212.

Sacrifices on the altar of Lolomauna temple, 168.

Santolum freycinetianum (iliahi), sandalwood, 478.

School papers of Lahainaluna, 506.

Season, Kau the sunny, 664.

“Sea! O the sea!”, chant of Pele’s brothers, 524.

Seriola sp. (kahala), 100, 270.

Shark fishing, 202, 366.

stories, numerous, 294.
teeth, 376.

Shells (cowries), incidents relating to, 248, 288.

Signs, 192, 194, 198.

Sleeping, customs regarding, 648.

Sleeping opele, “Opelemoemoe,” 168.

Sling, Kemamo’s use of the, 222, 224.

Mahoe’s use of, 468.
plaything for boys, 222.
stone, Oulu’s use of, 452, 454, 456. [xvi]

Smoke, the traditionary tell-tale result of conflicts, 326.

indicates the course of Luahoomoe’s sons, 516.
darkened the sky for six days, 516.
Kauai prophet sailed towards the, with offerings, 516.

Sophora chrysophylla (Mamane), 150, 638.

Soul (the) after death, 544, 572, 574–76.

Soul’s leap (leina a ka uhane) localities, 574.

Spear throwing, 18, 20, 206, 216, 218, 220, 224, 386, 392, 450, 474, 488, 564.

Spirits, ideas regarding, 88, 196, 552, 554.

Squid (Octopus) fishing, 284, 288.

Sticks, use of to produce fire, 296, 342.

Stomach, considered the seat of thought by Hawaiians, 442.

Story of bambu, 588;

fire, 560;
lauhala, 656;
 Kamehameha, 688;
Kauiki, 544;
Kawelo, 694;
Makahi, 564;
Ohelo, 576;
Palila, 372;
Peapea, 458;
Poo, 528;
Pumaia, 550;
Piimaiwaa, 376;
Puupehe, 554;
Ulukaa, 532.
See also legends.

Strong man of Kakuhihewa, 4, 6.

Sugar-cane (Saccharum officinarum) found indigenous in Hawaii by Cooke on his

arrival, 582.

Sugar-canes in olden time, 582;

planting, 586.

Summits of Haleakala, Maunaloa and Maunakea, 524.

Superhuman power, 700.

Supernatural being, 314.

bodies, 324, 330, 342.
body, 140.
power, 330, 332, 412, 414.

Surf of Maliu, famous, 240–242.

of Makaiwa, 242.
of Kauhola, 242.
of Kalehuawehe, Waikiki, most noted, 396.

Surf riding, 4, 6, 232, 242, 247, 302, 436, 706.

Taro, culture of, 222, 682, 684, 686.

implements used in culture of, 680.
introduced into Hawaii, 592.
 preparation for planting; selecting seed (hulis); tops (huli), chosen for seed, 680.
used as firewood, 222.
varieties of, 680–82–84.

Temple, of Alanapo, inland of Humuula, 136.

of Hauola in Waiawa valley, built by King Ola, 208.
of Humuula, home of Hina, 136.
of Kanelaauli (at Kahehuna), Palila carried in haste into the, 144.
of Kawelo built at Waianae, 28.
of Lolomauna, at Pokii, Kauai, 168.
(heiau) of Puukohola, in Kawaihae, 472.

Temple sacrifices, 206, 212, 322, 324.

Temples built by Kamehameha on the island of Hawaii, 464.

Teuthis sandwichensis (Manini) surgeon-fish, 98.

Thief, (smart), tried to steal shells from Umi, 284.

catching a, understood in Hawaii, 284.
lying, 286.
Iwa termed a smart, 290, 292.

Thieves, six expert, in service of Umi, 292.

expert in service of Kamehameha, 292.

Thunder referred to as rolling stones, 340.

Ti-leaf, origin unknown, 668.

uses, 668–70.

Token of identity or recognition, 170.

Touchardia latifolia (olona), Hawaiian hemp, 202, 606.

Tradition of Kamapuaa, 314.

Turtles lift the hill, 518.

Ualakaa, a legendary potato, story of, 532.

hill in Manoa (Round Top) named for, 458, 692.
Kamehameha began cultivation of, 692.
Ua’u, or Uwau birds (Æstrelata phaeopygia sandwichensis), 514, 660.

Uhu (parrot-fish), 8, 10, 154, 298, 698, 700.

(Calotomus sandwichensis), 76, 78, 356.
fishing, 76, 538.
(Callyodon lineatus), 298, 300.

Uhumakaikai (fish), 8, 12, 14, 154, 160, 162, 696.

See legend of Puniakaia.

Ukoa at Waialua, Kamalalawalu landed at, 236.

Ukumehame, valley near Lahaina, 202.

Uleohiu, an indigenous cane, used in sorcery, 584.

Uli, grandmother of Kana, 518.

Ulili, the Wandering Tattler, one of Aikeehiale’s messengers, having power to

change to bird form, 414.

Ulu, a game, see maika stones.

Ulus, the ten warriors of Kawela, 700, 702, 704, 706, 708.

Ulua, fish (Carangus sp.), 266, 274.

Uluhe fern used by Hina, 136.

Ulukou, Waikiki, Kapakohana landed at, 210.

Aikanaka king of Oahu living at, 238.

Uluomalama in Waiakea, 240, 250.

Uma (a midget, skillful in bone-breaking), story of, 498, 500.

Umi, king of Hawaii, 176, 178, 200, 284, 286, 288, 290, 292, 378, 380, 382.

Umi and Hakau, 660.

Iwa, 286, 288, 290.
Keaau’s shells, 284, 288.
Kihapiilani, 180.
Lonoapii, 180;
 Piikea (wife), 176, 178.
Piimaiwaa, 178.

Umi’s axe, 290, 292.

Umu, or imu, an underground oven, 2, 160, 162, 398, 472, 510, 516.

Unihipili, familiar spirit, 574.

spirit of one deceased, 576.

Unulau, wind, 252.

Upolu Point, 390.

Uweuwelekehau, son of Ku and Hina, legend of, 192, 198.

king of Kauai, 198.

Valley of Iao, battle at, 470.

Volcanic eruption, Kamapuaa chants of Pele’s, 340.

Volcano, souls of chiefs and farmers go to the, 544.

Waahila (rain), 252.

Waawaaikinaaupo, snarer of birds, 422.

Wager, of bones, 128, 132, 160.

of fish, 126.
on Kilu game, 246.

Wahahee, deceitful or conceited, 406.

Wahahee, masseur of Kamehameha, 478.

Wahiawa, father of Halemano, 228.

district, 250.
Kaeleha meets Aikanaka at, 62.

Wahieekaeka, war club of Kalonaikahailaau, 26.

Wahieloa (war-club stroke), 20.

(husband of Pele), 524.
Wahilani, canoes at, 80.
district chief of Kohala, 80, 82.
king of Kohala, 246.

Waiahole (chief of Kualoa), 260.

Waiahole (district on Oahu), slaughter at, 262;

taro of, 222.

Waiakalua, Napuelua, hides at, 502.

Waialae, 6, 10.

Waialani, a daughter of Kaohelo and Heeia, 578–580.

Waialeale (wife of Kemamo), 222.

(Kauai’s loftiest mountain), 222, 704;
awa grew at, 606.

Waialua, calm of, 252;

Halemano proceeded to, 238;
harbor, 616;
Laenihi returned to, 234;
Ihukoko met Kawailoa at, 270–72;
referred to as “Ehukai of Puaena,” 616.

Waianae (range of mountains), 228;

Kaena, a chief of, 270;
Kawelo at, 8, 10, 12, 18, 26, 30.
Kalaumeki the pride of, 54;
Lihue in, 228;
Palila lands at, 142;
Pokai a section of, 252;
Waialua people, 234.

Waianapanapa pool in Honokolani, Hana, 206. [xvii]

Wai auau (bath water), spear thrusts termed, 18, 452, 484.
javelin exercise, 700.

Waiawa, Oahu, Kawelo and wife reside at, 700.

Waihauakala, body of, 514.

Waihee, Lonopii at, 176, 180.

Waihohonu, the land of, 140.

Waikaee, lehua blossoms of, 54.

Waikapu, Maui, battle at, 452.

Waikele, Palila at, 142, 372.

Waikiki, Oahu, Kahekili lands at, 458;

Kawelo at, 4, 6, 14, 16, 18, 28, 30, 34;
Makalea joins in surf sport at, 396;
residence of Amau, king of Oahu, 276.

Waikoekoe, Hamakua, 486.

Waikoloa, “false, cold uncovered at,” 250.

wind, of Lihue, 310.

Wailau, kapa from Molokai, 112.

Wailinuu, head fisherman of Kahikiula and Hina, 356, 362.

Wailua, Kauai, 2, 4, 32–40, 162, 192, 242.

Wailukini, 656.

Wailuku, the waters of, 250.

Hua lived at, 516.

Waimea, Kauai, Opelemoemoe settles at, 168.

fort at, 502.
Kalaimoku and men march to, 480.
Kamalalawalu at, 448.
Kanaihalau and Malaihi chiefs over, 486.
Kepakailiula reaches, 396.
Kohala, Hokuula hill in, 446.

Wainaia gulch, 218.

Waioahukini in Kau, Kalaiopuu dies at, 464, 466.

Waiohonu, ditch dug by Awahua, 604.

land division south of Hamoa, 600.
famine at, 600.

Waiolama, arched sands at, 256.

Waiopua, uplands of, 310.

Waipa, shipwright of Kamehameha, 478.

Waipahu, Kamaikaahui comes to, 142.

Waipio, Hakau chief of, 660.

Kalapanakuioiomoa at, 264.
temple in; Iwa starts to, 290;
Kainapuu resides at, 480–82.

Waipouli cave at Honouliuli, 276, 278.

Waipu and Kaluaokapuhi, springs, 514.

Waipu, name of mythical axe in Pakaalana temple, 290.

brother of Kanaio, 302.
Kahili asks, etc., 306;
Pumano fears, 306.

Waipu and Koolau, 312.

Waka, grandmother of Laiekawai; of supernatural powers, 412.

Wakaina, a ghost, noted for deceit and cunning, 418, 550, 552.

Wakea, 540.

Wakiu kills Namakaeha, 510.

Walaheeikio, chief warrior of Aikanaka, 702.

Walaheeikio and Moomooikio, warriors of Aikanaka, 46, 48.

Walewale, Palila the offspring of, 150.

Wandering Tattler, name given to Ulili, 414.

Wanua, chief of Hamakua, 84.

king of Hamakua, 150, 152, 374.

Waoakua, dwelling place of the gods, 496.

Waokanaka. See Waoakua.

Waolani, valley in Nuuanu, 188, 460, 476.

main army of Kahahana at, 460.
Kalaikupule and warriors encamped at, 476.

War canoes, 64, 142, 146, 148, 150, 180, 278, 488.

War-club strokes, 28, 30, 50.

Warriors, 178, 452, 460, 472, 474, 476, 480, 482, 718.

Wauke, plant used in making tapa, 270, 636.

Weather, 116.

Well digging unusual among Hawaiians, 200.

at Kahoolawe Kalaepuni directed to dig, 202.

Whaling days of Maui, 542.

“When the canoe is pushed ahead,” chant of Kuapakaa, 84–86.

White man Jim (Jas. Robinson), 486.

Wikstroemia foetida (akia), shrub producing kapa-bark, 636.

Wiliwili tree (Erythrina monosperma), 216, 618.

wood, 56.

Winds of Hawaii, 92–94.

Halawa, 102.
Kauai and Niihua, 94–96.
Kaula, 98.
Maui and Molokai, 100, 102.
pleasant called “kaao,” 122.
Wizard in form of a rat, 370.

Wreath, 230, 234.

Young (John) and Davis (Isaac), 426.

 Colophon
Availability

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-
use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with
this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org ↗️.

This eBook is produced by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

at www.pgdp.net ↗️.

This is volume II of a three-volume set. Volume I is also available

from Project Gutenberg as ebook number 72686 📘. Volume III is in
preparation.

Metadata

Fornander collection
of Hawaiian
Title:
antiquities and folk-
lore (volume 2 of 3)
Abraham Fornander Info
Author:
(1812–1887) https://viaf.org/viaf/19759187/
Thomas George Info
Editor:
Thrum (1843–1932) https://viaf.org/viaf/56788585/
File
2024-03-14 08:25:19
generation
UTC
date:
Language: English
Original
publication 1918–1919
date:
Keywords: Folklore -- Hawaii
Hawaiian language --
Texts

Revision History

2024-01-24 Started.

Corrections

The following 292 corrections have been applied to the text:

Edit
Page Source Correction
distance
iii Keawenuiumi Keawenuiaumi 1
v, iv,
Olomano Olomana 1
372
v, iv Kewalakii Kawalakii 1
v, iv Aohikupua Aiohikupua 1
v, iv Kaluhumoku Kalahumoku 1
v, iv Wainaka Wakaina 4
16 [Not in source] the 4
26 Kalonaikahilaau Kalonaikahailaau 1
28,
[Not in source] : 1
352
34, [Not in source] ” 1
146,
171,
173,
238,
308,
386,
516,
509,
582,
676,
708,
707
48,
146,
290,
427, ” [Deleted] 1
609,
706,
706
7,
57,
316,
350,
370,
586,
604,
651, . , 1
vii,
vii,
vii,
vii,
xii,
xii,
xv
19 Kauluaaiole Kauluaiole 1
47 alaila Alaila 1
49 e-a e—a 1
59,
74,
212, , [Deleted] 1
290,
366
59, [Not in source] . 1
128,
151,
206,
233,
400,
428,
427,
563,
686
74,
Kaewenuiaumi Keawenuiaumi 2
201
86,
140,
246,
290,
374,
566,
i, ii, [Not in source] , 1
ii, v,
viii,
x, x,
xii,
xii,
xiv
100 Makaha Nakaha 1
100 paikaika pakaikai 2
102 point points 1
124,
128,
216,
240,
240,
staid stayed 2
260,
260,
260,
260,
320
126 ? . 1
97 Kuapaka Kuapakaa 1
123 .. . 1
150, Moananuikalehua Moanonuikalehua 1
350,
351,
x
150 Kohalalele Koholalele 1
158 [Not in source] ‘ 1
166 Kamaamikioi Kamaakamikioi 2
171 Opelemooemoe Opelemoemoe 1
171 Kalilikookalauae Kalikookalauae 2
173 ke’lii ke ’lii 1
178 Laumama Laaumama 1
178,
eat ate 2
576
177 Kaenae Keanae 2
187,
187,
223,
356,
353,
[Not in source] “ 1
439,
556,
559,
584,
718
191 : “ .” 3
196 Wialua Wailua 2
196 Kohoaea Kahoaea 1
197 Luukai Luukia 2
200 Keawenuiamui Keawenuiaumi 2
202 Kaleapuni Kalaepuni 2
201 Haulalai Hualalai 2
214 kind hearted kind-hearted 1
216 Upola Upolu 1
223 Kemano Kemamo 1
236 you your 1
252 follow following 3
233, . [Deleted] 1
590
264 your’s yours 1
274 enciente enceinte 2
279,
521, lii ’lii 1
691
285 keaau Keaau 1
295 Kaialelale Kaialeale 1
299 Keau-kaha Keaukaha 1
303 Keakea Keaka 1
303 ’lii ’Lii 1
309,
451,
483,
, . 1
491,
vii,
xiii
330 controling controlling 1
340 Kuiliaikekaua Kuliaikekaua 1
325,
. : 1
439
333 Kamapua Kamapuaa 1
345 Laimaloa Limaloa 1
353 Kukeaomihamihaikalani Kukeaonuimihamihaikalani 3
355 , no : “No 3
372 Namakokalani Namakaokalani 1
374 Kamuonuiaiake Kumuonuiaiake 1
382 Manoni Mauoni 1
394,
Kapakailiula Kepakailiula 1
395
393 kepakailiula Kepakailiula 1
395 Kepakaliiula Kepakailiula 2
414 rerturned returned 1
411 Aioikupua Aiohikupua 1
426 pronounciation pronunciation 1
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookfinal.com