Empire’s Backyard

In Empire’s Backyard: Colonial Modernity and Northeast India, 1st Edition, author Kailash Baral provides an academic examination of how British imperial expansion reordered regional social structures. The text offers students of postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and South Asian studies a grounded analysis of historical governance and identity.

The primary thematic coverage traces the specific historical processes that converted the Northeast frontier beyond Sylhet into a governed boundary zone. The narrative explains how the ideological rhetoric of progress concealed underlying motives of resource extraction and severe cultural disruption. Across these imperial interventions, the volume highlights local agency and power dynamics, showing how indigenous populations exercised active resistance and cultural adaptation.

Issued as part of the Critical Humanities Across Cultures series, this monograph provides reliable reference material for upper-level university instruction. It supports academic researchers and advanced students who require grounded historical perspectives on imperial frontiers.