Trade, treaty and territoriality: British empire on the high roads of Central Asia

This article discusses the impact of British commercial policies on the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. It argues that British imperialist policies should be seen as a continued expansion of the empire by integrating South Asian markets into the larger economies of the empire. It takes the example of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir and hints at the changes in the magnitude of trade, which largely changed the region’s economic output towards British India. For instance, when the region came into political contact with the British after the 1850s, it hardly dealt with trade by or through the empire, but by the early 1870s, cotton piece goods from both British India and Europe constituted more than 40% of trade into or through the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. Second, the article discusses the empire’s need for constant expansion and exploring unknown regions for information and control. At the expense of the princely state, the British asserted their dominance through treaties, creating spaces of access to control and monitor territories. Third, through employing trade as their motive, and expanding territorial limits with the treaties as justification, the British were able to create a rationale for intervention in the region. Thus, the article also contributes to the historiography of princely states in colonial India, which have been characterised as instances of divisible sovereignties, and instead argues that British paramountcy was the political norm and regional sovereignties meant little in the face of British imperialist expansion.