This Forum focuses on the many and diverse smaller polities in a region spanning lands from Bengal and Assam in the west to Yunnan in the east, and from the eastern Himalayas in the north to Thailand in the south. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, these polities underwent dramatic transformations when they faced the impact of Chinese and European encroachments. The ambition of this Forum is to reconnect academic research across the region. Even though this may be a new field of study for contemporary scholars, it is one that the smaller polities actively shaped long before the imperial onslaught. It is diverse, yet tied together by a multitude of interconnections, mobility, and integration through kinship, exchange, shared experiences, and warfare. Scholars of this region, who still work mostly from separate area-studies perspectives, face a challenge. The task ahead is to reconnect their conversations.

This text focuses on the early encounters, 1790-1840, between the officers in the British East India Company and landowners and rulers of the local polities. Estate holders, kingdoms and small polities were pressured to comply with British interests for minerals and control of communication routes. Large revenue settlements are discussed in view of the estate holders’ Mughal rights, and the impact of surveys for getting control of people and land shows the importance of modern science in imperial conquest. Finally, the British colonial government and private capital simultaneously intensified mineral extraction and commercial control of markets and routes, including attempts at securing the land routes to reach China’s markets.

Like a Pandora’s box, a recently found wooden-chest in the attic of an iron estate in south Sweden has opened a window to life and work at the levels of manual labourers and subcontractors. They worked on the large railway construction projects in nineteenth-century India. The documents hidden in the chest have also given rise to a revision of Scandinavian history and, especially, of the poverty-stricken region in which the estate lies as it ties Sweden into the colonial history of the British Empire. The chapter provides an overview and a context both to the key-places of these large transformations and to the historical trajectories of political and economic transformation in Denmark, Berar in western India, and south Sweden that also the Stephens’ family members experienced. It explains a global history that connects southern Scandinavia and western India via colonial processes of conquest, extraction and production, infrastructure projects, labour, capital, and entrepreneurship and, not least, the profound landscape change that followed. As an introduction to this volume, it shows how capital flows, mobility and migration characterised change. Joseph Stephens, the lead character of the volume due to the archive he produced, played a small but important part in these changes and his life was transformed by them. Via his and his family members’ lives, the chapters enter into histories of metropolitan and rural western India and Scandinavia at the time of intensive imperial infrastructure expansion and in the midst of the economic turn in south Sweden.

This volume presents a conversation between historians and anthropologists who work at the crosscurrents of Asian borderland studies and Trans-Himalayan studies. We focus on the evolving relationships of time, space, and place, while combining the ethnographically historical and the historically ethnographic. In line with many recent studies, this volume challenges the conventional foregrounding of nation-states (a short-lived phenomenon in the longer view) without, however, resorting to the fantasy of disembodied flows. Contemporary events require long-term perspectives since past mobilities underlie many of today’s complex conflicts. Anchored in the region’s stunning landscapes (but not determined by them), flows are negotiated in webs of human interaction (but not defined by them).

Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces traces movements and connections in a region known for its formidable obstacles to mobility. Eight original essays and a conceptual introduction engage with questions of networks and interconnection between people across a bordered landscape. Mobility among the extremely varied ecologies of south-western China, Myanmar and north-eastern India, with their rugged terrain, high mountains, monsoon-fed rivers and marshy lowlands, is certainly subject to friction. But today, harsh political realities have created hard borders and fractured this trans-Himalayan terrain. However, the closely researched chapters in this book demonstrate that these borders have not prevented an abundance of movements, connections and flows. Mobility has always coexisted with friction here, but this coexistence has been unsettled, giving this space its historical shape and its contemporary dynamism. Introducing the concept of the ‘corridor’ as an analytical framework, this collection investigates mobility and flows in this unique socio-political landscape.

The volume introduces a new analysis of interconnected labour and economic history of colonial India and Scandinavia. From a recently found archive of a railway contractor’s private and business papers, the studies revise both Indian labour history and Scandinavian modern history, and ties south Sweden into the British Empire. With deep insights into everyday work practices of Indian and European contractors and manual labourers, the book establishes a bridge across the globe, between two poor regions as sites of extraction and industrial transformation, resulting from global migration and capital flows. Drawing on rich archival sources such as the Joseph Stephens Archive, Maharashtra State Archives, the National Archives of India, and the British Library, the book offers deep insights into everyday business practices of European contractors in India, which were rarely documented and have remained largely inaccessible so far.

A unique look into the labour and entrepreneurship practices under British colonial rule in India, as well as its impact on the most transformative years of modern southern Scandinavia, the book will be of great interest to students, academics, and teachers of history, labour studies, subaltern studies, colonialism, imperialism, economic history, railways, economics, and Scandinavian and South Asian studies.

For many past centuries, the Shan-Dai territories have been crossed bycommunication routes allowing low- and high-tide flows of pilgrims,diplomats, and the most valuable goods to move. This chapter in detailstudies events in the late 19th century when British and Qing imperialforces sought to gain control of the movements and value of these flows.The efffects of the Panthay Revolt in Yunnan together with a diminishedBurmese kingdom resulted in unexpected opportunities for a Britishexpedition to make their fijirst journey ever between Bhamo in northernBurma and Momein (today: Tengchong) in Yunnan in 1868. By using thedocumentation generated by this expedition, this study traces a complexsocial web of relations that travellers on these routes had to negotiate.

Social relations in rural south India have often been studied from either a perspec­tive of labour and economic exploitation or one of dominance and subordination in terms of caste or exercise of political power. In Bonds Lost, the author argues that relations between landowners and agricultural labourers cannot be understood without taking account of both the economic and the social logic of the relationship. From a variety of government, mission and oral sources, the author analyses the transformation of rural social relations in the central parts of the highlands in today`s western Tamil Nadu between c. 1900 and 1970. Throughout the expansion of commercial crops in agriculture, in particular of the cultivation of cotton, the farming community of Goundar and the agricultural labourers of the Madhari leather-working community have been closely related to each other. There has been a mutual, however, uneven dependence between the two; the farmers being dependent on the skills of leather workers to manage the irrigation, the Madhari equally dependent on the farmers for their own survival. Until the 1930s, competition for labour scaled up in the region and agricultural labourers were increasingly tied by advance payments to work for a farmer. On account of this, economic expansion gained support and social control was upheld. However, even after preconditions had been made available to achieve a more profitable farming by replacing the permanent by casual labourers, a substantial, permanent labour force was still employed on the farms. In the late 1930s and 1940s, kinship-wise mobilisation among the Madhari labourers to convert to Christianity was met by strong and sometimes violent resistance. Every movement they made to break with Goundar authority was seen as a threat. Thus, during the decade, social rationality was given priority over economic rationality by the farmers. A severe six-year-long drought put an end to this situation