Information at the Peripheries of Empire: Space in Bayly's Empire and Information

In my most recent conversation with Heidi Scott, my intrepid advisor for this whirlwind, comparative tour of empire, we talked about space in Richard White's The Middle Ground. White explicitly positions hist study (and here, we're talking about geographical place, not the theoretical positionality of a scholar relative to his sources) at the edge of the French empire in North America. White demonstrates in The Middle Ground that imperialism can function – or fail to function – in surprising ways at the periphery of empire. Heidi suggested that by pairing White's analysis with the work of Anthony Pagden, who I read earlier this semester, we get an interesting perspective on how imperialism changes over space, not just over time.

Information – not space – is the theoretical tool at the center of Christopher Allen Bayly's Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. But attention to the way empire functions differently in different spaces is also an important part of Bayly's argument. Empire and Information lays out the argument that co-opting an extensive, indigenous communication network and using information obtained through that network for colonial purposes, were critical to the success of British colonization of the Indian sub-continent. But while the information order was critical to the success of the British, it had real limits, particularly when colonial administrators failed to consult with knowledgeable Indians.

Bayly also argues that when the information order changed outside the boundaries of the Indian states – specifically in Nepal and Burma – British conquest became difficult or impossible. Even though Bayly focuses on information, and the impenetrability of the information orders in Burma and Nepal, there is a substantial geographic component to the argument. As Bayly notes: “on the fringes of the sub-continent, such networks eventually thinned out and vanished.” Information orders, as Bayly painstakingly demonstrates in Empire and Information, are created by the practices of people and institutions in particular places. As places change, so do people and institutions, and in turn information orders.

In later chapters, Bayly argues that the information order in colonial India changed substantially around the beginning of the nineteenth century, as colonial administrations put into place “new, knowledgeable institutions” such as the army, and public education (143). The power of these information gathering institutions, however, was, like earlier information orders that relied on pre-colonial networks, also limited by geography. “In the peripheries too,” Bayly writes, “British innovations [in information gathering] had little purchase on the debates and forms of communication of the older Indian 'public' which centered on the mosque, temple, and bazaar” (143). For the nineteenth century information order, as well as its earlier predecessors, the distance from the metropole impacted the efficacy of information gathering by the British.

Other, more detailed examples from Empire and Information suggest other connections between space and information orders. The “information famine” the British faced in Nepal had particularly geographical consequences: “the detailed material [the British] managed to assemble on routes and roads did not reveal the difficulties which would face an army moving in such terrain” (108). The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India was a “conduit for colonial knowledge” whereby information gathered during the survey was used by colonial officers in other contexts. And although much of the information generated by the survey was, in the short term, of limited practical value, Bayly notes that “the perception of India as measurable and represented space had a profound longer term effect on Indian society itself” (161).  

A quick side note on Bayly's engagement with Said: Empire and Information includes numerous references to Orientalism, and a number of striking instances where Bayly demonstrates that British conceptions of Indian society were so misguided they resulted in military or political mishaps and failure. The relationship between Bayly and Said's work might be parallel to that of White and Pagden: Said traced the intellectual history of the Orient in the metropole; Bayly examines how those ideas worked - or failed to work, in the colony. Part of that project includes laying out the limits of Oreintalism. As Bayly writes of the creation of a new British information order, and the response to that order within the Indian ecumene, "Orientalism, in Edward Said's sense, was only one among a variety of localised engagements between power and knowledge" (143). Bayly certainly does not demonstrate the existence of a middle ground in imperial India, but the tension between knowledge at the center and at the edge does parallel White and Pagden's respective treatments of French imperialism in North America. 

These explicit references to Orientalism may, though, belie the greater debt that Bayly's work owes to Orientalism.  Said laid out a way of thinking about knowledge and power in the colonial world, and the relationship between knowledge (or information) and colonial power is at center of Bayly's field of inquiry.