Collectively and severally, the essays gathered together in this book explore the roles of the men and women who administered the British Empire in Australasia and India. The essays had their genesis in an interdisciplinary conference held at Osmania University, Hyderabad, in 2007, which was jointly convened by the University of Tasmania's Centre for Colonialism and Its Aftermath and School of English, Journalism, and European Languages, and the Department of English at Osmania University.

“Administering,” as the essays in this volume amply reveal, involves many forms of activity – managing and organising; financing and accounting; monitoring and measuring; ordering and supplying; writing and implementing policy – across diverse domains of practice (the Civil Service, schools and universities, missions, domestic realms, justice systems, and so on). Administrative arrangements, as the various essays show, involve complex cross-cultural relationships in colonial spaces, often through radically unequal and racially based power relations. In the two parts of this book the authors, from India, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain, look at the way colonial administrations in Australia, New Zealand, Pitcairn Island, and India – and with inevitable reference back to Britain and other parts of the British Empire – call into being the spaces under their control, and how they do so through the accumulation and management of information and knowledge.