Simpson, Thomas (2024) Find the river : discovering the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra in the age of empire. Modern Asian Studies, 58 (1). pp. 127-162. doi:10.1017/S0026749X23000288 ISSN 0026-749X.
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Abstract
Despite the enormous size and economic and scientific significance of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River, questions of where and what it was generated successive waves of dispute from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Geographical discovery in the eastern Himalayan borderlands neither entailed the application of fixed theories and techniques, nor resulted from consistent flows of information along established channels. Europeans instead understood the region’s rivers in many different ways, influenced by sporadic deluges of data, competing forms of expertise, shifting imperatives of colonial political economy, unsettling encounters with various bodies of water, and heterogeneous Asian knowledge structures. Informants, infrastructures, and cosmologies of often-overlooked communities at imperial margins fundamentally reshaped European knowledge. Under these conditions, practitioners of spatial sciences came to thrive on the proliferation of models and objects of discovery rather than seeking definitive closure.
| Item Type: | Journal Article |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | D History General and Old World > DS Asia |
| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History |
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Tsangpo Gorges (China), Brahmaputra River, Irrawaddy River (Burma), Asia -- Discovery and exploration |
| Journal or Publication Title: | Modern Asian Studies |
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| ISSN: | 0026-749X |
| Official Date: | January 2024 |
| Dates: | Date Event January 2024 Published 25 October 2023 Available 5 August 2023 Accepted |
| Volume: | 58 |
| Number: | 1 |
| Page Range: | pp. 127-162 |
| DOI: | 10.1017/S0026749X23000288 |
| Status: | Peer Reviewed |
| Publication Status: | Published |
| Re-use Statement: | This article has been published in a revised form in [Modern Asian Studies http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X23000288. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution or re-use. © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press. |
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
| Date of first compliant deposit: | 17 November 2023 |
| Date of first compliant Open Access: | 20 November 2023 |
| URI: | https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/181049/ |
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