Trans-Himalayan Flows, Governance and Spaces of Encounter

The project studies the formation of imperial rule under exceptional conditions in northeast India, Burma and Yunnan 1850-1920. It focuses on the consequences for small polities of imperial competition between the Qing and British empires.

It targets the practice of governance in frontier tracts from the perspective of people, polities and long distance mobility.

How did imperial forms of governance take shape during encounters with small polities?From written and oral evidence, inscriptions, maps and family genealogies, the project uses an inductive method for identifying encounters between small polities, travelling missions, people with itinerant livelihoods, and colonial officers.

During 2022-24, a research team of four historians in Sweden, China and South Africa will make empirically detailed studies of six locations.

Results are compared in an analysis of an imperial mode of operation that was pragmatic and provisional, and depended on circumstance and precedent rather than on universal imperial principles of rule.The project makes a significant contribution to a better understanding of the roots to the violent 20th century in northeast India, Burma/Myanmar and Yunnan.

It makes a spatially integrated analysis of a region, which has been fragmented by Area Studies demarcations.

The team members’ joint expertise and language competence for work in Chinese, Indian and European archives and local collections across the region is a precondition for achieving the goals.