The second chapter draws on material from numerous colonial archives to examine the rationale behind initial British attempts to create a borderline through the northwestern Himalaya. These attempts, taking place as they did in a region where only border points had previously existed, were rooted in efforts to systematically read the landscape and transcribe it onto paper using generalized principles–principles that came to symbolize a growing sense that, for the empire, geography was destiny. The watershed, in particular, emerged as the ideal border-making object. In theory, these general border-making principles were meant to mitigate territorial disputes and to establish clear lines of sovereignty for the empire. But as this chapter shows, the determining and drawing of boundary lines was a task fraught with unexpected divisions and contradictions, both geographical and political. Despite surveys that revealed shifting limits of the Indus watershed, British administrators sought to apply the “water-parting principle” to their desired border through Ladakh and across most of the 1,500-mile long Himalayan range. Their ongoing failure to successfully “border” the Himalaya was primarily the result of ongoing tensions between ideas of natural frontiers and strategic ones–two frontiers ostensibly unified by the logic of the so-called scientific frontier.

The sixth chapter reexamines the work of boundary commissions in the context of the emergence of frontier experts such as Thomas Holdich. These experts, who became increasingly central to imperial policy, reflect the increasingly intimate relationship between geography and the state and reveal the networks through which geographical information fused with political and military policy. The chapter also examines the engagement of the frontier experts with the Royal Geographical Society and The Geographical Journal. The cohabitation of geographical studies and international political concerns, I argue, reflected a new geopolitical mode of seeing the region and the world that was in turn bequeathed to India at independence.