Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Preface
- Glossary
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Prologue: surveillance and communication in early modern India
- 2 Political intelligence and indigenous informants during the conquest of India, c. 1785–1815
- 3 Misinformation and failure on the fringes of empire
- 4 Between human intelligence and colonial knowledge
- 5 The Indian ecumene: an indigenous public sphere
- 6 Useful knowledge and godly society, c. 1830–50
- 7 Colonial controversies: astronomers and physicians
- 8 Colonial controversies: language and land
- 9 The information order, the Rebellion of 1857–9 and pacification
- 10 Epilogue: information, surveillance and the public arena after the Rebellion
- Conclusion: ‘Knowing the country’
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Political intelligence and indigenous informants during the conquest of India, c. 1785–1815
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Preface
- Glossary
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Prologue: surveillance and communication in early modern India
- 2 Political intelligence and indigenous informants during the conquest of India, c. 1785–1815
- 3 Misinformation and failure on the fringes of empire
- 4 Between human intelligence and colonial knowledge
- 5 The Indian ecumene: an indigenous public sphere
- 6 Useful knowledge and godly society, c. 1830–50
- 7 Colonial controversies: astronomers and physicians
- 8 Colonial controversies: language and land
- 9 The information order, the Rebellion of 1857–9 and pacification
- 10 Epilogue: information, surveillance and the public arena after the Rebellion
- Conclusion: ‘Knowing the country’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As late as 1785 the British were poorly informed about India outside Bengal and Banaras, Madras and its immediate hinterland, Bombay Island and a few other centres. During wars with the Marathas and Mysore between 1778 and 1783, the Company's effort nearly came to grief when the fast cavalry of its enemies caught its armies badly off balance. Knowledge of the interior of the country, its manufactures, population and agricultural statistics, remained similarly patchy, confined to Bengal and the Madras hinterland. Within a generation all this had changed. In 1808 the Maratha ruler and general of ‘predatory cavalry’, Jaswant Rao Holkar, remarked on the invaders' ‘practice and favourite object’ of receiving ‘intelligence of all occurrences and transactions in every quarter’. Well-informed residents and Company newswriters reported from all the major Indian courts. The army had created specialist posts and intelligence units. Surveyors and amateur ethnographers had traversed much of central India. The Company's intelligentsia had moved on from the study of classical texts and was now constructing statistical accounts of Indian agriculture, commerce and castes. The results of this surveillance were disseminated in officially-approved journals to a more expert body of civil and military officers.
The expansion of knowledge was not so much a by-product of empire as a condition for it. Recent studies have shown that historians have exaggerated the military superiority of the British in India. Indian armies were rapidly narrowing the gap in technology in the later eighteenth century.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Empire and InformationIntelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, pp. 56 - 96Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997