Ramparts of Empire British Imperialism and India's Afghan Frontier, 1918-1948 [Paperback]

This cultural and political study examines British perceptions and policies on India's Afghan Frontier between 1918 and 1948 and the impact of these on the local Pashtun population, India as a whole, and the decline of British imperialism in South Asia.Introduction 1. The North-West Frontier: Policies, Perceptions, and the Conservative Impulse in the British Raj 2. The North-West Frontier and the Crisis of Empire, 1919-1923 3. A Cigarette in a Powder Magazine: The Frontier, Nationalism, and Reform, 1919-1930 4. 'A Considerable Degree of Supineness': Nationalism and The British Administration, 1928-1930 5. 'These Infernal Khudai Khidmatgaran': Defining and Repressing Frontier Nationalism, 1930-1932 6. 'The Forbidden Land': The British, Frontier Nationalism, and Congress, 1931-1934 7. 'If the Ramparts Fall, the City must Fall also': The Frontier and Indian Constitutional Reform, 1930-1939 8. Tribal Policy and its Discontents, 1930-1939 9. The North-West Frontier and the Second World War, 1939-1946 Conclusion: The End of British Rule and the Frontier Legacy

'At the dawn of the twentieth century, British grand strategists believed that 'in all the British Empire there is but one land frontier on which war-like preparations must ever be ready. It is the north-west frontier of India'. In Ramparts of Empire, Brandon Marsh examines the subsequent push-and-pull between such seemingly immutable assumptions on the one hand, and new thinking born of new times on the other. This cogent and timely study demonstrates that events on British India's Afghan frontier developed, and must be understood, in the frame of 'all-India' politics, however much colonial officials imagined the region to be a place apart from the rest of South Asia. Policy-minded readers will find an instructive precedent to twenty-first century debates over autonomy versus integration, and over containment versus counter-insurgency, in the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan.'

-Petel3´