ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some key forms of British colonial ethnography on the Frontier, then turn to their organizational settings between the incorporation of the Panjab into British India beginning in 1849 and routinizations that were in place by 1901 when the Frontier was made a separate province from the Panjab. One of these is the colonial ethnography that emerged on the North-West Frontier of British India over a century and a half of efforts to grasp, often literally, the society and culture of its Pakhtun people. The endeavor became institutionalized around what T. Ainslie Embree characterized as separate boundaries of administration, sovereignty, and influence over the Pakhtun tribes. With Pakhtun tribes astride both the administrative borders of empire and its claimed international frontier with Afghanistan, the Great Game became a matter of limits on power to influence Afghanistan, to control ceded tribal areas, and to enforce imperial law and order in directly administered ones.
