Research Seminar: '‘Naturally Anxious’ and ‘Utterly Worthless’: Cultivated Ignorance and Manufactured Certainty in Company Bengal'

In 1825, the directors of the East India Company asked the Governor-General of Bengal a seemingly simple question: when, and on what basis, had they acquired sovereignty over the small island of Shapuree on the contested frontier with Burma? What emerged in response was less an answer than an exposure of imperial uncertainty and cultivated ignorance. The island had been omitted from maps, inconsistently recorded in administrative practice, and, when surveyed, appeared to expand and contract dramatically in size. Yet in 1823 the killing of a boatman on its shores was elevated to Parliament as the murder of a British subject and an affront to imperial sovereignty, and by 1825 it was deemed worth going to war over.

This paper intervenes in historiographical debates on imperial knowledge by arguing for the centrality of ignorance as a recursive condition of colonial governance. Building on, but departing from, accounts associated with Christopher Bayly, Ann Laura Stoler, and Lauren Benton, it shows that ignorance was not simply reduced, anxiously managed, or contained within fragmented jurisdictions. Instead, it could be stabilised through routine administrative practice and only became visible when political necessity demanded that it be reworked into claims of sovereign certainty.

Focusing on Shapuree and the Naf frontier, the paper traces how this condition was produced through inherited territorial assumptions, the classification of land as ‘waste’, and legal practices that privileged documentary sufficiency over empirical verification. Shapuree thus functions as an ‘exceptional normal’: a case that reveals how imperial rule operated not despite ignorance, but through it.

Thomas Kingston is currently a visiting doctoral researcher in the Department of History at Durham University, a Berkeley Fellow, and a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. His doctoral research examines how colonial governance and imperial regimes of knowledge were shaped through legal, economic, and environmental dynamics in South & Southeast Asia and the wider Indian Ocean world.  Prior to graduate study, he trained in law and was the inaugural mentee of H.M. Solicitor General, before working on human rights law in Cambodia in cooperation with the UNHRC and ILO. He holds an MA (Distinction) in Pacific Asian Studies from SOAS and an MPhil in Philosophy from Renmin University and was named the Malini Chowdhury Fellow for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley in 2023.