ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a cultural reading of colonial campaigning on India’s northwest frontier. It argues that combat on the frontier was shaped, in important ways, by colonial culture: the strategic, tactical and logistical calculations made by colonial officers reflected ideas and assumptions about the frontier, its population and their relationship to colonial authority. By tracing the development of specific rationalities for fighting the tribes of the North-West Frontier, the chapter reveals how military practice was shaped by – and in turn helped to shape – Orientalist ideas about the tribal populations of the frontier region. The codification of doctrine for ‘savage warfare’ rested on these forms of cultural knowledge as much as on the lessons of past engagements, a point which many military historians have been slow to recognize. Charting the intersection of colonial culture and imperial military power, the chapter calls for a wider synthesis between culture and military histories and historiographies of empire.
