At a moment when India and China are clashing over their borders once again, this book is a timely examination of the “scientific” practices deployed by the British colonial state in India through the course of the long nineteenth century to bring those borders into existence. In particular, it details the mapping of the region of the northwestern Himalayas, with Ladakh at its center, that led to its transformation from a crossroads of economic, political, and cultural exchange to an imperial frontier to be policed and enforced. The book argues that imperial attempts at mapping the region and demarcating borderlines within it were only partially successful, leaving behind a colonial legacy that the postcolonial states inherited and continue to wrestle with. Not only has this legacy embittered relations between the two neighbors, but perhaps most poignantly, it has rendered the once-prosperous entrepôt of Ladakh into “a fractured and disputed borderland”...
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