This dissertation explores formations of the ‘colonial’ in Sudan through the vantage point of transformations in debt and temporality. Situating Sudan in an Ottoman-Egyptian context, it offers an account of how debt and land came to be reorganised so as to be separated from the realm of ethical relations. It does so by exploring legal-juridical changes brought about under Ottoman-Egyptian rule, which gradually altered notions of selfhood and time. In light of this, forms of resistance—especially during the Mahdist uprising—are shown to be a reformulation of disciplinary and ethical regimes and a (re)fashioning of subjects. Concluding with the early decades of British colonial rule, it considers the temporal regimes used to neutralise Mahdist subjectivities, which involved producing a rational, sedentary, and calculative peasantry oriented toward—not an afterlife but—a prosperous future.

This dissertation examines symbolic representations of British imperial power through the appropriation and display of Indian “things.” The objects and spectacles examined here—the Koh-i-Noor diamond, tigers and tiger hunting, and turbaned men on display—are all invested with a range of social and symbolic meanings within both their indigenous and imperial contexts. The things appropriated into the British Empire’s styling of itself that are discussed in this study were each traditionally associated with masculinity and kingship in their native Indian context and subsequently displayed on and around the bodies of British women. This study advances a relationship between the theatrics of British imperial power, and the emasculation and objectification of Indian men. A list of images has been submitted as a supplemental digital file with this dissertation.

This project focusses on the historic border region of the Himalayas as a central space for negotiations of power and identity in British South Asia. It particularly focusses on the standardization of mapping and surveying practices as socio-technological discourses through the 1840s to the 1920s that lead to the transformation of trans-Himalayan and Tibetan land into British territory that could be invaded, settled, and controlled. With a unique focus on subaltern agents moving through and past the Himalayas, this project writes a history of the transformation of the imaginary of the mountains, from a spatial feature that connected vibrant pre-colonial geographies to a natural resource object and a political border that delineated the limits of imperial territory. While previous scholarship has tended to examine the history of the Tibeto-Himalayan borderlands in the context of its importance to the British Indian, Indian, or Chinese nation-building practices, this project foregrounds the importance of trans-Himalayan connections and exchanges in examining the structural transformation of a region where historical forces simultaneously undermined the power of the British Indian state while reflecting the hegemony of its imperial project. Additionally, this project explores the tensions between the construction of “universal” discourses of empirical scientific practice in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which claimed to orient the practices of geography, cartography and ethnography, and the constraints of the British imperial system predicated on the same coercive technologies to identify territory. The epistemic regime governing the production of geo-knowledge about Tibet and the Himalayas rose out of a series of contestations between the appropriation and rejection of local and indigenous knowledge, networks, and actors. Tracing a near hundred-year arc, I locate geography as a unique facet of colonial modernity that dictated imperial logics of developmentalism at the frontiers of the British empire, thereby demonstrating the birth of modern geography as mired in haphazard expeditions, rather than proceeding from well-defined scientific theory and protocols. This dissertation concentrates on three main aspects to revisit the history of construction of the geo-knowledge of the Tibeto-Himalayan borderlands by focusing on situated actors and connections: the epistemological contributions of native Indian, Tibetan, and Chinese surveyors in the employ of the Survey of India, the mobilization of labor for trans-Himalayan military and surveying expeditions, and the interactions between imperial knowledge productions and “indigenous” modes of spatial thinking as related in Tibetan revelatory guidebooks detailing the space of the Himalayas. Each of these aspects was critical in the re-constitution of the Himalayan mountains as a spatial unit that divided rather than connected political communities on either side.

Drawing on archival materials, family stories, and student artwork, “Schooling the Master: Caste Supremacy and American Education in British Ceylon, 1795–1855” examines how nineteenth-century American missionary education in South Asia facilitated dominant-caste supremacy while distributing negotiated sensibilities of colonial modernity. The work’s first section explores the arrangement of an educational nexus of mutual benefit between the Jaffna Peninsula’s dominant Veḷḷāḷar caste, the British Ceylonese government, and American Protestant missionaries. I track this nexus from its origins in the veranda school of Tamil Śaiva poet Kūḻaṅkai Tampirāṉ (1699–1795) to its apogee in the American Ceylon Mission boarding schools of the late 1840s. The dissertation’s second part examines two pedagogies of colonial modernity: the embroidery of needlework samplers that taught an American form of gendered domesticity, and map drawing that imparted a geographically specific and American-style national identity. By describing three moments in its development and two pedagogical facets of its career, the dissertation argues that an educational nexus crafted for some Veḷḷāḷars a distinct Jaffna Tamil identity that is geographically bound, gendered, and pervaded by a sense of superiority. This dissertation makes two significant contributions to South Asian studies, first by demonstrating an unexamined arrangement of power in the context of colonialism—the educational nexus—and second, by exploring the way colonial teaching methods in the first half of the nineteenth century transformed South Asian ways of being.

This dissertation studies conflict in a hierarchical international system, the British Empire. How did the British Empire respond to violent and nonviolent resistance within its colonies? I develop a theory explaining how and why an imperial metropole becomes involved in and grant concessions to its colonies. Unlike federal nation-states and looser relationship like in an international organization, modern European empires were characterized by selective engagement of the metropole with its peripheral colonies. This has important implications for understanding metropolitan response to peripheral resistance. In contrast to more recent work, I find that violence was more effective at coercing metropolitan concessions to the colonies in the British Empire than nonviolence. I argue that this occurred because violence overwhelmed the capabilities of local colonial governments, and violence commanded metropolitan attention and involvement. This theory is supported with a wide range of data, including yearly measures of anticolonial resistance, every colonial concession made by the British Empire after 1918, daily measures of metropolitan discussions of colonial issues from cabinet archives, and web-scraped casualty data from British death records. In addition, I present in-depth case studies of British responses to resistance in Cyprus and the Gold Coast, along with a conceptual schema of different types of resistance to understand strikes, riots, terrorism, and civil disobedience in a number of other British colonies. My findings show that the effectiveness of resistance is conditional on the political structure that it is embedded in and that hierarchy matters for understanding state responses to resistance.