Trade, Empire and Frontier: The Trans-Himalayan Wool Trade Through the Chumbi Valley 1870–1960

This article examines the trajectory of Tibet’s economic relations with India from the 1870s to the 1960s, a period during which wool became the most important commodity that Tibet traded with British India and overseas markets. While the existing literature tends to focus mainly on the geo-military and strategic aspects of Indo-Tibetan history, this article examines the imperial infrastructure that gave rise to a distinct economic space along the frontier between India and Tibet. This article argues that the creation by the British colonial administration of the infrastructural networks (roads, railways and telegraphs) that sustained the wool trade in the rugged landscape of the trans-Himalayan region was not only a physical embodiment of empire along its frontiers but also the creation of political legibility: consolidating once-remote territories into the politico-economic folds of colonial enterprise but without necessarily carving out a sovereign political or economic space across the Himalayan frontier. This article aims to show that objects and commodities do not make places or geographies on their own. The notion of ‘mobility’ that underlies the work of many studies on frontiers and borderlands needs to look more closely at the infrastructural foundations and the underlying geopolitical imperatives through which certain objects and people move, or cease to move, in such transnational spaces. This article examines how the wool trade brought Tibet into direct economic and political relations with British India (and later with independent India) and how this shaped the frontier along the eastern Himalayas. It underlines the spatiality of imperial infrastructures and the geopolitics of trade, territoriality, and sovereignty along the Himalayan frontiers during this period.