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Mapping the Great Game is a somewhat scattered but still fascinating account of geography and spycraft in 19th century Asia. India was the crown gem in the British Empire, but its frontiers were poorly understood and even less well defined, and it took a dedicated effort to map them. The consistent fear was one of Russian attack from the north, a rivalry that prefigured the Cold War, and was in many was a mirrored provocation by the imperial powers at the expense of the locals.
The story is bookended by military history, the First Anglo-Afghan War and the 1904 British Expedition to Tibet, two of the more pointless and brutal imperial exercises of the period. The heart of the book is an account of the Pundit expeditions. While Europeans were conspicuous and vulnerable beyond the frontier, Indian natives could pass as traders and pilgrims, and specially trained locals, most notably Nain Singh, carried out long distance route surveys to fix the location of ancient Silk Road oasis cities and the courses of mighty rivers. Their methods were crude: trained paces, latitude observations with sextants and altitude observations with boiling thermometers, and they always operated under risk of exposure and execution as spies, but they were surprisingly accurate in their measurements and gained significant accolades.
A second theme is the Grand Trigonometric Survey. As people who have read James Scott or Foucault know, accurate maps and census are a key part of governmentality, and the British Empire launched an ambitious plan to map India using the most modern trigonometric methods, starting with a painstakingly measured baseline and then extrapolated by large triangles, until every key point was fixed. This was a physical and mathematical odyssey, requiring precise measurements with heavy instruments in the worst of conditions, and then painstaking calculations to compensate for everything from atmospheric refraction to gravitational anomalies pulling plumb bobs out of true. It took hundreds of men decades to complete, and broke new ground in precisely measuring the Earth.
The story is bookended by military history, the First Anglo-Afghan War and the 1904 British Expedition to Tibet, two of the more pointless and brutal imperial exercises of the period. The heart of the book is an account of the Pundit expeditions. While Europeans were conspicuous and vulnerable beyond the frontier, Indian natives could pass as traders and pilgrims, and specially trained locals, most notably Nain Singh, carried out long distance route surveys to fix the location of ancient Silk Road oasis cities and the courses of mighty rivers. Their methods were crude: trained paces, latitude observations with sextants and altitude observations with boiling thermometers, and they always operated under risk of exposure and execution as spies, but they were surprisingly accurate in their measurements and gained significant accolades.
A second theme is the Grand Trigonometric Survey. As people who have read James Scott or Foucault know, accurate maps and census are a key part of governmentality, and the British Empire launched an ambitious plan to map India using the most modern trigonometric methods, starting with a painstakingly measured baseline and then extrapolated by large triangles, until every key point was fixed. This was a physical and mathematical odyssey, requiring precise measurements with heavy instruments in the worst of conditions, and then painstaking calculations to compensate for everything from atmospheric refraction to gravitational anomalies pulling plumb bobs out of true. It took hundreds of men decades to complete, and broke new ground in precisely measuring the Earth.