Ramparts of Empire

This cultural and political study examines British perceptions and policies on India's Afghan Frontier between 1918 and 1948 and the impact of these on the local Pashtun population, India as a whole, and the decline of British imperialism in South Asia.

'At the dawn of the twentieth century, British grand strategists believed that 'in all the British Empire there is but one land frontier on which war-like preparations must ever be ready. It is the north-west frontier of India'. In Ramparts of Empire, Brandon Marsh examines the subsequent push-and-pull between such seemingly immutable assumptions on the one hand, and new thinking born of new times on the other. This cogent and timely study demonstrates that events on British India's Afghan frontier developed, and must be understood, in the frame of 'all-India' politics, however much colonial officials imagined the region to be a place apart from the rest of South Asia. Policy-minded readers will find an instructive precedent to twenty-first century debates over autonomy versus integration, and over containment versus counter-insurgency, in the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan.' -Peter John Brobst, Associate Professor of History, Ohio University "Ramparts of Empire provides an important corrective to our understanding of India's Afghan frontier by pulling together the political, cultural, and military dimensions of the frontier's history in an impressive way, and by placing the frontier in the context of all-India politics and nationalism. It is based on new and extensive archival research in India, the UK, and US that goes well beyond the old familiar sources. It is also beautifully written.' James Onley, Editor of the Journal of Arabian Studies, author of The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj and Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of Exeter, UK. 'British and Russian players of the Great Game in Asia competed for the Northwest Frontier of India. In Ramparts of Empire, Brandon Marsh effectively deals with the area itself, its Pathan tribes, its British rulers, and the end of the game, when Mountbatten brought the British side of it to a close. This work demonstrates the continued importance of the Northwest Frontier in the final decades of the British Raj. This is a compelling account of both the mystique and the realities of the Northwest Frontier.' - Wm. Roger Louis, University of Texas, USA

Brandon Marsh is Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater College in Bridgewater, Virginia, USA.