ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I interrogate the entanglements between objects and imperial knowledge to re-examine frontier state-society relationships during global war. I view objects like guns and weapons as sites of historical encounters where competing claims of wartime frontier state-making, along with the tenuousness and contingent nature of these processes can be revealed. Guns were tangible objects of conducting violence, but they also simultaneously functioned as allegories for articulating a variety of symbolic and cultural relationships that went beyond exchange relations. Often, guns, through ‘gifting,’ contained metaphors for negotiating masked anxieties. The chapter seeks to go beyond prevalent forms of technological determinism that consider weapons as powerful objects. Instead, I view their embroilment to the epistemic, cultural, material, performative, and temporal worlds that they occupied. This included material exchanges as well as cultural production during global war. Control over firearms was considered central to both processes of frontier governance as well as the defence of a war front, and yet they were invested with other ceremonial and performative political functions. The fully loaded histories of guns in frontier politics, global war, and localised state-making provide insights to better anticipate the pervasive legacies and political economies of armed conflicts and violence in the making of these borderlands today.
