Paper short abstract:

Through the prism of postal standardization in British India, this paper will seek to study the networks of exchange that came to define the imperial state and its administrative structure in nineteenth-century India.

Paper long abstract:

It has been argued that domination of the Indian subcontinent in the early modern period was predicated on the control of networks of social communication, information exchange and intelligence gathering. Imperial conquest was based not only on the import of scientifically developed systems of colonial domination, but also on the appropriation and/ or subordination of local knowledge communities and their networks. I would like to show how one such means of information exchange, the postal system of India, was standardized by the colonial state to serve the interests of a British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The expansion of the British Indian postal network was often the product of piecemeal localized interventions, competing with pre-existing mediums of communication and linking up with modern, often transnational channels of exchange. The significance of this development can be studied in multiple spheres. Geographical conquest was facilitated by expanding postal networks, enabling the development of a new body of knowledge of the unknown interiors of the Indian subcontinent. This knowledge in turn would assist in military expansion and civil administration of the conquered regions. Tensions between the military and administrative spheres of the imperial state in India led to the standardization of bureaucratic structures within the subcontinent, which in turn set precedents in governing transnational exchange.

The proposed paper attempts to contextualize some of these developments against the background of geo-political, socio-economic, physiographical, scientific as well as ideological factors at work in this period.