Fringes of Empire: Peoples, Places, and Spaces in Colonial India ed. by Sameetah Agha and Elizabeth Kolsky (review)

Fringes of Empire: Peoples, Places, and Spaces in Colonial India is an excellent volume of essays that explores the ways in which the “fringes of empire”—as theoretical and geographical sites and as social locations—were spaces of new possibilities, reinventions, and innovative negotiations. Edited by Sameetah Agha and Elizabeth Kolsky, the detailed case studies presented by the various authors showcase the response of the colonial state to challenges to its authority. Along with a thoughtful foreword by Nicholas B. Dirks, the essays in this volume make important contributions to the history of imperialism. In particular, they show that a focus on the “fringes of empire” can give us a nuanced understanding of the limits of colonial rule and the abilities of individuals (both the colonizers and the colonized) and populations to effectively use colonial institutions and expansionary goals to further their own ambitions and agendas. The view of empire that results reveals that historical outcomes were contradictory and hardly predictable.

Most of the authors are historians or social scientists. Dirks’s foreword effectively lays out the interventions in historiography underlying this collection of essays, while Kolsky’s introduction highlights the theoretical implications of the “fringe.” Dirks reminds us that both imperial and nationalist history are still reckoning with the imperial past. As early as 1870, J. R. Seeley scolded historians of England for ignoring the role of empire in English history, and Dirks cautions us that this neglect is, for the most part, ongoing. On the other hand, historians of the South Asian subcontinent can also be faulted for their own nationalist blinkers and a reluctance to engage with the complexities and contradictions of empire. Fringes of Empire is thus an important intervention and a corrective to these historiographical trajectories. Kolsky’s introduction provides the theoretical underpinnings of this collection. The work of cultural critic Elaine Freedgood on Victorian fashion and the use of fringe decoration, and the publications of scholars such as Ronald Robinson and Jack Gallagher on the relationship between metropolitan centers and colonial peripheries are particularly pertinent. Many of the essays show extensive use of archival sources (also unfortunately revealed by an overreliance on quotation) but they do not always maintain enough distance for the idea of the fringe to be a productive framework for analysis. The density of detail in the essays assumes some knowledge of South Asia and it is unlikely that the volume as a whole will be read by scholars who are not familiar with this region. Given the emphasis on fringes, margins, and borders, the absence of maps is surprising.

The book is divided into two parts, dealing respectively with “Borders and Boundaries” and “Outsiders and Insiders.” Chronologically the essays range from the sixteenth century to the 1940s, though most are set in the nineteenth century. Geographically, although the focus is on the South Asian subcontinent, the essays also extend to include Britain, the Indian Ocean context, the Andaman Islands, and the frontier zones of the Indo-Tibetan region, the Northwest, and Kashmir.

Philip J. Stern’s essay importantly highlights that, rather than a trading company that reluctantly took up the task of a sovereign power, as it has commonly been portrayed, the English East India Company was, from the time of its first charter in 1600, not only a trading company but also a political organization with the responsibility to govern itself and those under its rule. With the abolition of the Company and the imposition of direct Crown rule in 1858 after the uprising of 1857, a new order came into being that was further clarified in 1877 with the declaration of Victoria as Empress of India. A unitary sovereignty replaced the earlier complex, joint, and layered sovereignty.

The borderlands were a source of anxiety for the colonial regime but were also locations where individuals could exercise greater independence and initiative, sometimes at...