Salt, Sovereignty and Law in Colonial India: The Case of Rajputana Salt in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article explores salt as a substance that lay at the heart of discussions around sovereignty, jurisdiction, criminality and control. Tracing salt administration in late nineteenth-century Rajputana, it argues that the colonial state significantly altered existing local contexts of power and control in the princely states where the salt sources lay. It explores how the colonial state, while maintaining a façade of ‘indirect rule’, created jurisdictional spaces for itself within the princely states. In the process, local and regional salt production and the trade circuits of Rajputana were subsumed in the making of an expansive colonial enterprise.