Paper short abstract:

The paper attempts to understand how environmental histories of resource politics in this region can move away from conventional histories of ecological change by a focus on how different spatial entities moulded and re-ordered landscapes.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to examine how imperatives for the expansion of colonial capital led to the quest for and contestations over natural resources in the Northeast frontier of India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It attempts to understand how environmental histories of resource politics in this region can move away from conventional histories of ecological change by a focus on how different spatial entities moulded and re-ordered landscapes. These include moving beyond the colonial archive to visual and textual material produced by anthropologists. Locating the dynamics of colonial trading encounters and resource politics within the intersection of historical studies, critical geographical studies and more-than-human anthropology enables conversations around how the flows of commodities and people shaped the social geography of the region. These include British political officers, migrant traders, indigenous communities, anthropologists who navigated these spaces. The paper attempts to move beyond the confines of empire to understand how the region that encompasses present day Bhutan-Assam-Arunachal Pradesh borders were framed as resource frontiers. These include competition and control over resources such as rubber, timber and of course tea. The project thus tries to demonstrate how mediations among these different actors has been understood and framed in various sources and sees these processes as fluid and being continuously renegotiated rather than static instances of conflict and resistance that conventional histories offer us. In doing so, it seeks to chart the trajectories of resource politics on the fringes of empire, and its consequences thereof.