Conclusion: ‘Knowing the country’

Summary

This book has been intended, firstly, as a contribution to imperial history. It argues that successful intelligence-gathering was a critical feature of the British domination of India. It shows how the British took over and manipulated the sophisticated systems of internal espionage and political reporting which had long been deployed by the kingdoms of the Indian subcontinent. One overriding reason why the East India Company was able to conquer India and dominate it for more than a century was that the British had learnt the art of listening in, as it were, on the internal communications of Indian polity and society. The gap in resources and military technique between Indians and the British has been exaggerated, but, after the 1780s, the superior coherence and effectiveness of British political surveillance and military intelligence were striking. Where indigenous lines of communication did not exist, or where the British were shut out of them by enemies who could control the flow of information more effectively, conquest proved difficult and costly. The wars against Burma and Nepal dramatically demonstrated this.

Even in India itself, however, the British ‘empire of information’ rested on shaky foundations. Prejudice or ignorance excluded the Europeans from many areas of Indian life. Despite new institutions designed to hoard and preserve information – the science of statistics, trigonometrical surveys, revenue records and oriental societies – much of the deeper social knowledge the European conquerors had once possessed withered away as expatriate society became more hierarchical and government more a matter of routine. Despite the accumulation of records of rights and agricultural statistics after 1830, networks of information beneath the level of the district office remained tenuous.