Event: Taming the Imperial Imagination

Event recording from 19/10/2016: TAMING THE IMPERIAL IMAGINATION: COLONIAL KNOWLEDGE, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, AND THE ANGLO-AFGHAN ENCOUNTER, 1808-1878 Dr Bayly wrote his doctoral thesis in King's War Studies. He has recently written a book with the same title of the talk based on his doctoral thesis. Dr Bayly was the founder of King's Afghan Studies Group and is a postdoctoral fellow at LSE. He is returning to present his book to the Afghan Studies Group in conversation with Dr Avinash Paliwal. Dr Paliwal recently completed his doctorate at King's and took over the Afghan Studies Group from Dr Bayly. Taming the Imperial Imagination (Cambridge University Press) marks a novel intervention into the debate on empire and international relations, and offers a new perspective on nineteenth-century Anglo- Afghan relations. Martin J. Bayly shows how, throughout the nineteenth century, the British Empire in India sought to understand and control its peripheries through the use of colonial knowledge. Addressing the fundamental question of what Afghanistan itself meant to the British at the time, he draws on extensive archival research to show how knowledge of Afghanistan was built, refined and warped by an evolving colonial state. This knowledge informed policy choices and cast Afghanistan in a separate legal and normative universe. Beginning with the disorganized exploits of nineteenth-century explorers and ending with the cold strategic logic of the militarized ‘scientific frontier’, this book tracks the nineteenth-century origins of contemporary policy ‘expertise’ and the forms of knowledge that inform interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere today. Dr Martin J Bayly is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the International Relations Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He holds a PhD in International Relations from the Department of War Studies, King's College London, an MPhil in International Relations from Oxford University, and a BA with First Class Honours in Politics from the University of Newcastle Upon-Tyne. For more information, visit http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/warstudies/events/eventsrecords/bayly-asg.aspx