The Colonial State and Resource Frontiers

Abstract

The article, through an investigation of a plethora of colonial reports, correspondences and petitions, attempts to build a history of frontier spaces invested in resource appropriation. Discovered in the forests of the northeastern tracts of British India in the early nineteenth century, rubber entailed the culmination of a resource frontier whose effects simultaneously produced the disruptive as well as the dialogical in a multiplicity of extractive as well as non-extractive activities. As the material intricacies of appropriating rubber located beyond the assumed political boundary of the colonial state littered the frontier geography with strange institutions and legal apparatus, there circulated at the same time certain ideas and perceptions that wove the region and its people within an ideological geography that increasingly rationalised the operative intentionality of the resource frontier. The effects noted, sometimes through the violent outbursts of military combat and sometimes through the discursive politics of petition writing, bring forth the complexities that the project of rubber appropriation unfolded for the region.