The Imperial Security State: British colonial knowledge and empire-building in Asia by James Hevia (review)

The Imperial Security State, a volume in the Critical Perspectives on Empire series, is an elegant, thoughtful and often provocative analysis of how security imperatives dictated the collection, analysis, and dissemination of military information, which in turn would profoundly shape the actions and ideologies of colonial power in South Asia. Its sophisticated study of military intelligence, particularly in the period after 1880, is a signal contribution to our understanding of the power-knowledge nexus which underpinned colonial rule and exemplifies many of the core strengths of both the new imperial history as well as the new military history. It is also a valuable reminder of our need to move away from a purely instrumentalist view of the military and military intelligence and instead pursue a more nuanced appreciation of the interplay between military intelligence and governmentality. As the author aptly notes in his introduction, “there has been little critical study of the forms military knowledge took” (2). Hevia persuasively argues that the failure to appreciate the creation and application of military knowledge in the past has its parallels with recent developments in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the US, Britain and their military allies are once again trying to render the region militarily legible through the deployment of ethnographical and anthropological tools.

It is surprising just how little has been done on the contributions made by the military to the formation of colonial knowledge. Armies not only marked the blunt edge of imperial power; they also constituted a reservoir of ideas, impressions and anxieties that powerfully shaped the ideologies and institutions of colonial rule. Moreover, Hevia brings to this study his extensive experience as a scholar of Western imperialism in China. In so doing he further enriches our appreciation of the connection between military intelligence and imperial rule by positioning developments in South Asia within wider global currents, particularly the so-called “Great Game,” which was a consequence of increasing European penetration into Asia from the mid nineteenth century onwards. The key players were the British and Russian Empires, and the British quickly came to realize that if they were to play the game at all well, they would first have “to regulate the facts of Asia” (111).

The Imperial Security State largely focuses on the period after the Indian Rebellion of 1857–58, and more particularly the years following the formation of the Indian Army Intelligence Branch at Simla in 1878. Not only did the emergence of this office signal an increasingly professionalized military practice, one which dovetailed neatly with emerging forms of colonial governmentality; it fused together critical elements of the two wherein “new forms of imperial masculinity [were manifested in] a professional elite with scientific and mathematical training” (15). This cadre of military professionals was largely responsible for the proliferation of route books, caste handbooks, campaign studies (such as the six volume Frontier and Overseas Expeditions from India, an underappreciated window into military readings of India which appeared between 1907 and 1911), histories of communities and lineages and other reports that informed policy-making within the military and without. Hevia offers fascinating insights into the histories and genealogies of such important imperial artefacts as the sixteen-volume compilation of routes in Afghanistan published in 1907, and he also provides one of the best critical readings of C.E. Callwell’s Small Wars (1906) I have seen to date. The resulting military archive exemplifies what Hevia aptly and trenchantly has termed “epistemophilia” (103), or the imperial fetishization of knowledge acquisition and classification. His careful scrutiny of the various reports demonstrates that many of them were organized and formatted along remarkably similar lines, a telling indication of just how systematic these efforts had become.

I would, however, take issue with the argument made by the author that this convergence of strategic imperatives, military intelligence and emerging forms of colonial governmentality was a late nineteenth-century phenomenon. The author emphasizes this periodization, arguing that “army intelligence as a coherent military discipline...