Understanding Colonial Border Making: British India and China

Prior to the arrival of British colonial power in the subcontinent, India’s northern neighbours were generally considered to comprise Tibet on the one hand and the assorted post-Timurid Khanates of Central Asia on the other. Like India, these regions also experienced the influx of colonial rule. Though Tibet rose as an empire in the seventh century, by the mid-seventeenth century, its political fortunes had depended on the state of its relations with the Zhungars, Mongolia and China. The Manchu emperors’ territorial expansion into Inner Asia was without precedent in Chinese history, and ‘the Qing pacification of independent territories to the north, west and south of China proper was, in magnitude, one of the largest territorial expansions in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century world history’ (Di Cosmo 1988, The International History Review 20, no. 2: 288). Though in matters of religion, Tibet looked south to India, in political terms, notwithstanding the occasional forays by Kashmiri and Gurkhas forces into Tibet in the eighteenth century, Lhasa’s main attention was always directed eastwards to the Mongols and towards China.