Gating India

The Great Hedge of India turned taxation into landscape. Built by the East India Company to trap salt and police movement, the hedge became a vast colonial instrument of coercion that tied ecology, labor, and administration into one system. It shows how imperial rule could grow thorn by thorn across ordinary life. Through administrative records, customs reports, and colonial maps, the book follows the mechanics of extraction: fixed revenue demands, frontier-making by bureaucratic force, and the conversion of a basic necessity into a taxable commodity. The hedge was not only a barrier but a statement of power, designed to make smuggling costly and compliance unavoidable. In that design, geography itself became policy. Its history reaches beyond India. The hedge reveals how empire reorganized space to control people, how fiscal pressure produced new forms of surveillance, and how colonial markets turned hunger and salt into instruments of order. The result is a study of British power at its most methodical and most intimate.