Taming the Imperial Imagination Bayly Paperback Cambridge University Press

Taming the Imperial ImaginationColonial Knowledge, International Relations, and the Anglo-Afghan Encounter, 18081878\nAuthor(s): Martin J. Bayly\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9781107542679, 978-1107542679\nSynopsis\nTaming the Imperial Imagination marks a novel intervention into the debate on empire and international relations, and offers a new perspective on nineteenth-century Anglo-Afghan relations. Martin J. Bayly shows how, throughout the nineteenth century, the British Empire in India sought to understand and control its peripheries through the use of colonial knowledge. Addressing the fundamental question of what Afghanistan itself meant to the British at the time, he draws on extensive archival research to show how knowledge of Afghanistan was built, refined and warped by an evolving colonial state. This knowledge informed policy choices and cast Afghanistan in a separate legal and norma.