This work primarily deals with the colonial period, that is, from the 1760s onwards, but in order to understand the nature of transition within a much established framework of ‘continuity and change’, it is important to delineate the trajectories of colonial practices and discourses as they emerged and interacted with the pre-colonial set-up. The changes taking place during the colonial period were both enabled and structured through these interactions. For instance, the colonial perception towards native criminality was not just a product of ‘colonial construction’ based on caste (and allegedly other enumerative features of colonial rule) but also a phenomenon related to the political decentralization in the early eighteenth century, to the rise of mercenary groups in state-formation and to the changed political conditions in the neighbouring region of Nepal. In the same vein, there existed a dialogue between the early colonial route surveys and map production on the one hand, and the late Mughal and Maratha practices on the other, which makes it clear that mapping, if seen in its essence as a ‘tool of empire’, was not innately ‘colonial’ in origin. Nonetheless, there definitely were moments in which colonial practices transcended, reconfigured and even altered the existing practices. Recognizing these moments requires engagement with pre-colonial times. In order to establish the coloniality of colonial spatial interventions, we need to examine some of the geographical and spatial politics and representations that existed before colonialism.