Without good political and military intelligence the British could never have established their rule in India or consolidated the dominant international position of the United Kingdom. During the years of conquest, British knowledge of the country was drawn largely from Indian sources and supplied by Indian agents. This introductory chapter analyses the indigenous systems of political surveillance which the British sought to capture and manipulate in the years after 1760.

Indian statesmen had long been concerned with good intelligence gathering, regarding surveillance as a vital dimension of the science of kingship. Their aim was not to create a police state which monitored the political attitudes of subjects, so much as to detect moral transgressions among their officers and the oppression of the weak by the powerful. Their systems were flexible and adaptable, but in Indian kingdoms the agencies of the state were generally not as densely clustered in the localities as they were in most European and some other Asian societies. For this reason royal intelligence was heavily dependent on informal networks of knowledgeable people. The chapter goes on, therefore, to consider the context of popular communication and literacy in which the royal agents worked, enabling us to conceive of the evolution of the pre-colonial information order in broad terms. It ends by describing the slow and piecemeal process by which the East India Company began to ‘know’ the country which it ultimately conquered.

Royal wisdom and intelligence: the tradition

In theory, Indian statesmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw kingdoms as treasure-houses of knowledge as well as accumulations of wealth and power.