Abstract
The least-garrisoned, least-mapped and formally least-administered ‘tribal frontier’ in the northeast was also the most capitalised one in the British Indian empire. In trying to make sense of this seeming paradox, this article examines the complex, and largely neglected, culture of contracts involving several communities, joint-stock companies and the frontier administration. Through a connected history of the contractual and the customary in the region, it points at the critical and inconstant conjunctions between the styles of political control, the logics of capital accumulation and the discursive infrastructure of identity and difference.
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