Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India

A detailed analysis of the way communication became an integral part of colonial governance in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India.

This volume offers a detailed analysis of colonial policies in respect to communication in India – via roads, ferries, steamships and railways – and reveals how communication became an integral part of colonial governance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Through a regional focus on Bihar between the 1760s and 1880s, ‘Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India’ reveals the shifting and contradictory nature of the colonial state’s policies and discourses on communication. The volume explores the changing relationship between trade, transport and mobility in India, as evident in the trading and mercantile networks operating at various scales of the economy. Of crucial importance to this study are the ways in which knowledge about roads and routes was collected through practices of travel, tours, surveys, and map-making, all of which benefited the state in its attempts to structure a regime that would regulate ‘undesirable’ forms of mobility.