The second chapter draws on material from numerous colonial archives to examine the rationale behind initial British attempts to create a borderline through the northwestern Himalaya. These attempts, taking place as they did in a region where only border points had previously existed, were rooted in efforts to systematically read the landscape and transcribe it onto paper using generalized principles–principles that came to symbolize a growing sense that, for the empire, geography was destiny. The watershed, in particular, emerged as the ideal border-making object. In theory, these general border-making principles were meant to mitigate territorial disputes and to establish clear lines of sovereignty for the empire. But as this chapter shows, the determining and drawing of boundary lines was a task fraught with unexpected divisions and contradictions, both geographical and political. Despite surveys that revealed shifting limits of the Indus watershed, British administrators sought to apply the “water-parting principle” to their desired border through Ladakh and across most of the 1,500-mile long Himalayan range. Their ongoing failure to successfully “border” the Himalaya was primarily the result of ongoing tensions between ideas of natural frontiers and strategic ones–two frontiers ostensibly unified by the logic of the so-called scientific frontier.

By the time of independence in 1947, the Himalayan region had been a vast laboratory for border making for nearly a century. But the experiments often yielded unexpected and unsatisfactory results. Instead of generating solutions to transform a vague frontier into a clear and legible border, the complex of border-making practices and ideas developed by colonial administrators and experts frequently failed to account for the dynamism of the Himalayas themselves and the people who moved through this vast complex of mountains. Their geological complexity challenged geographers’ assumptions that watersheds neatly aligned with mountain ranges, and their scale challenged surveyors’ ability to comprehensively record them. Like the complex perpendicular spurs running off the central Himalayan range, political space failed to follow neatly mapped borderlines. And the historical movement of peoples, animals, and goods challenged the colonial state’s ability to regulate movement at its territorial edges. Although the precolonial modes of seeing space outlined in the first chapter did not disappear, they became detached from and subordinated to the political view of Ladakh as a single, solid, bounded territory – a territory now appended to the periphery of a massive state, not a historical entrepôt connecting vast swathes of people.

The fifth chapter reexamines boundaries, roads, and changing geographical epistemes in the context of the multiple categories of “trans-frontier men” that emerged in the late nineteenth century. These multiple categories–groups threatening the security of empire or those protecting it–reveal the anxieties and aspirations tied to the frontier and to the imperial policy surrounding it. Growing security concerns pushed imperial administrators to better define and “close” the frontier, in large part by restricting access to information about it.

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

The first chapter draws on Ladakhi and trans-Himalayan sources to examine precolonial understandings of space, boundaries, and frontiers in Ladakh and the broader northwestern Himalayan region. Sources surveyed range from the earliest available records of the tenth and eleventh centuries to the beginning of British rule in 1846. This chapter provides both a historical background to the region and an exploration of four major facets of indigenous Himalayan space: cosmology, politics, language, and matter. In illustrating multiple historical modes of seeing by indigenous historical actors, I suggest that the single, bounded entity called Ladakh was primarily a product of imperial possession in the nineteenth century. I am not arguing that there was not an earlier political entity known as Ladakh but rather that indigenous conceptions of its space were more pluralistic than the subsequent territory envisioned by its imperial rulers. The commingling of cosmological, political, linguistic, and material ways of seeing, I argue, produced identities that failed to map neatly. This chapter draws not only on the limited extant precolonial Ladakhi sources but also on an array of anthropological, linguistic, and archeological sources.

The final chapter evaluates the state of the region before the Sino-Indian War of 1962 and illustrates how colonial practices produced a disputed postcolonial borderland in independent India. It reexamines local perspectives and the political rearticulation of Ladakh as a crucial frontier of India against threats from China and Pakistan. Finally, it highlights the enduring legacy of imperial border making: the inherited complex of practices and ideas about territory, borders, and security, magnified by the significance of a nation-state for which its citizens were willing to die.

Whether or not we acknowledge them, the territorial borders of our modern world still shape the narratives historians write. These ubiquitous lines of political control have become “global uniformities,” emerging with what C. A. Bayly termed the “birth of the modern world.” Many of today’s borders embody linear legacies of empire, reflecting the territorialization of the globe in the nineteenth century as European empires reached the zeniths of their power. And while many historians have recently attempted to transcend the national borders of the present by turning (or returning) to global scales of analysis, persistent questions of state formation at the core of even the most global histories resist the boundary-dissolving tendencies of transnational history – though the history of modern border making is itself a decidedly transnational one.

The fourth chapter focuses on two different ways of “reading” the landscape of the northwestern Himalaya. The first evolved from the surveying and road-building practices discussed in Chapters 2 and 3: practices which resulted in an increasingly standardized body of environmental knowledge that was widely circulated through gazetteers, route books, and intelligence reports. But there is also a second way of reading the Himalayan landscape: one that emerged from earlier precolonial modes of seeing, discussed in Chapter 1. Jurisdictional problems between the imperial state and its Himalayan frontier–including disputes over taxation, water rights, territory, and grazing rights–produced deep uncertainty about the limits of frontier locales. In fact, the main challenge to the imperial vision of the would-be border came from an unlikely source: pashmina goats. By illustrating the emergence of a geographical episteme illustrated in gazetteers and other official publications, I show how information about borders, terrain, and geographical features became a necessary prerequisite for understanding political territory. This episteme, I argue, reveals the slow emergence of geopolitical thinking. But the utility of this form of thinking was consistently undermined by the multiple modes through which indigenous groups conceived of the space around them.