In Empire and Tribe in the Afghan Frontier Region, Hugh Beattie offers a new exploration of British colonial policy towards Waziristan, a border region at the intersection between Afghanistan and Pakistan that has retained a large degree of autonomy despite the shift from a world of empires to a world of nation-states. Empire and Tribe contributes to a recent wave of scholarship that rethinks British approaches to and conceptualizations of this region, and the text's strengths lie in its careful detail on British military encounters in Waziristan and deep research into local British colonial frontier policy.
Beattie takes a largely chronological approach in his text, narrating developments in British policy towards Waziristan and its population from the mid-1800s until 1947, with a brief coda exploring the region's history under independent Pakistan. As such, the text builds on his earlier work, Imperial Frontier: Tribe and State in Waziristan (London: Routledge, 2002), moving his exploration of British policy into the 20th century. By taking this longer historical approach, Beattie highlights the inconsistencies of British colonial policy towards this region while reinforcing conceptions of Waziristan as a highly militarized space, due in large part to the nature of British engagement, which was often armed and brutal. Beattie links these inconsistencies not only to developments within Waziristan but also to the British relationship with Afghanistan and concerns regarding Russian encroachment. Beattie thus reveals the extent to which Waziristan remained a point of contestation between British and Afghan officials and an area where both governments tried to assert their influence even after the demarcation of the Durand Line in 1893.
Without question, the greatest strength of Beattie's text is its level of historical detail. Beattie explores and unpicks the minutiae of British policy towards Waziristan and particularly its Mehsud Pashtun population. He reveals with great care how British policy seesawed back and forth between efforts to actively subdue this region and, at other times, efforts to mold this area as a buffer to the British colonial project, a space not entirely incorporated. He pays particular attention to the various iterations of the “forward” and “closed border” policy debates that repeated themselves time and again up until the British withdrawal from South Asia. Beattie explores at length various instances where locals resisted British encroachment only for the Government of India to retaliate with widescale violence.
Beattie's text reinforces the primacy of armed force and violence in shaping relations between the Raj and Waziristan. It thus complements, and in many ways parallels, arguments presented recently by Benjamin Hopkins in Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). Where Hopkins explores how British imperialists used the rule of law to institutionalize violent practices, Beattie explores how the colonial armed forces were the main tool for carrying out this writ. Taken collectively, these recent works demonstrate how violence and the threat of violence informed and often dictated frontier governance, particularly in Waziristan.
Empire and Tribe is at its strongest in detailing British approaches to Waziristan and the local colonial decision-making that underpinned the frequently punitive expeditions into the region. Beattie is perhaps less successful in his attempts to “read against the grain” (p. 4) in relation to local Waziristanis. Beattie usefully provides an introductory chapter that provides background on the political and social modes that organized Pashtuns inhabiting Waziristan into “tribes” (less is said about the increasingly pejorative way that British officials used the idea of the “tribe”). However, tribal agency is generally notable in this text for its absence, which raises two key questions.
Firstly, while the reader gets a sense of change over time in terms of British policy towards Waziristan, locals’ responses read rather statically. Beattie makes clear throughout that “anti-British” sentiment drove many instances of local attacks on British encampments or responses to imperial encroachment. But what were other potential motivating forces, and how might local reactions and impetuses have evolved? While Waziristanis might have been stateless in the 19th century, as Beattie argues, surely their conceptions of statehood and governance shifted as their encounters with both British and Afghan state representatives increased. Beattie introduces one tantalizing vignette where, in 1922, an Afghan envoy claimed to lead a “tribal Government” in Waziristan, drawing links between Waziristan and the Muslim world and criticizing the British government's ready turn to punitive violence (p. 109). This instance demonstrates how locals could reframe their own politics and sense of political belonging by using the language of rights, international law, and governance, but it is not explored in the book in these terms. Further reflection on Waziristani agency as more than just “anti-British” might have provided additional explanations for the failures of British policy, as well as highlighting the evolution of the region's own population and its ability to evade colonial rule.
Secondly, an expanded sense of tribal agency and motivations might have clarified a central issue running throughout the book—the issue of control. British policies towards Waziristan, whether in terms of the forward or closed border policy or the “peaceful penetration” pursued during the interwar years, were all intended to assert British influence over this region. But what did “control” actually look like? Was it merely a matter of pacifying local populations and maintaining a buffer zone between Afghanistan and colonial India? Or did British officials hope to incorporate the region and its population? While the book documents the decision-making taking place among British civilian and military officials on the ground, what is not always clear is how choices to send in troops or conduct aerial bombardments fit into broader imperial strategy or aspirations. How the British ultimately envisioned Waziristan fitting into colonial India, the greater British Empire, or, in the era of decolonization, a world increasingly dominated by nation-states remains vague. Perhaps this reflects the nature of British policy towards the region or the Raj's ambivalent relationship with Waziristan's population, but this point would have benefited from further explanation in the text. Likewise, contextualizing British policy towards Waziristan in terms of colonial approaches to other areas along the Indo-Afghan frontier would have helped emphasize the region's significance and potential uniqueness.
Empire and Tribe does not particularly break new ground in terms of its analytical findings regarding British policy towards Waziristan. Instead its value lies in the painstaking detail Beattie offers in describing how British policy evolved over a century as well as in its chronological approach, which allows the reader to easily follow the shifts in British relations with Waziristan. It will be of particular use to students and scholars newly arriving to the study of the colonial Indo-Afghan frontier and serves to reemphasize how violence became an institutionalized part of state rule towards this border region.
