Mary Louise Pratt introduced the concept of ‘contact zone’, as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other”. This concept has become an influential tool in postcolonial studies to examine the socio-cultural relationships, often in highly asymmetrical contexts, as Pratt asserts. This paper explores the Indian Mail Route as a contact zone. This was a postal route between England and India, which received greater attention with the introduction of steamships in the 19th century. It got a further boost with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which reduced the distance between England and India significantly and eventually became popular for tourism as well. This research undertakes an interdisciplinary approach, examining visual sources, such as maps, posters and photographs, in order to study the multiple networks of infrastructure on this route. Using Brian Larkin’s theory of infrastructure, it looks at the physical networks as well as the cultural politics and meaning-making that this route engendered. It investigates the actors and their role within the colonial-imperial contexts as well as the dynamic power hierarchies and notions of centre and periphery induced and subverted. Thereby, the paper goes beyond mere divides, highlighting transculturation on the route, resulting from the circulation and exchange of people, resources, and ideas. This approach can bring a novel perspective for investigating global history, hitherto underexplored.

In describing the 19th-century border between British Malaya and Dutch Sumatra, Eric Tagliacozzo used the term 'porous' to highlight the permeability of the Anglo-Dutch frontier along the Strait of Malacca. Before European intervention, the region functioned as a commercial microcosm within the broader system of exchanges between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, where systems of allegiance and client-patron relations extended to both sides of the Strait. Penang, the oldest British settlement in the region, had long relied on trade with Sumatra as its primary trading partner, particularly the Deli and Aceh regions considered the "El Dorado" for Penang merchants. However, when the Netherlands Indies began annexing Sumatra into Dutch control, Penang’s merchant community was the most commercially affected. The paper will delve into how and in what terms the advancement of the Dutch frontier impacted the trade and prosperity of Penang, and how, despite the imposition of this frontier, pre-colonization trade routes persisted into the 19th century. The paper will seek to illustrate the relationships between the two coasts, primarily expressed through the commercial experience of the Chinese community in Penang. The attempt is to demonstrate how a micro-region between British Malaya and Dutch Sumatra survived and transformed over the years and in the wake of Western powers' advancements, highlighting a concrete example of subaltern history within the imperialist framework of the late 1800s.

This paper examines the ‘intermediary’ as a discursive label in British colonial records, specifically focusing on its role as an expansive and fluid category that accompanied narratives of rule in the borderlands spanning present day India and Bhutan. Global history primarily focuses on the importance of interconnections and a stance away from methodological nationalism that informed many nationalist historiographies in the past. This paper offers opportunities to understand how the global is almost always shaped by the local i.e. many locals constitute the global. Thus, it makes the methodological intervention that the operations of the British Empire in the northeastern part of the subcontinent were marked by a particular form of ‘frontier governance’ that relied on multiple social and political actors. This fragmented territoriality was often embodied in the figure of the intermediary – a title ascribed by various British officials to individuals and communities alike who sometimes helped them navigate relationships across a multilingual and diverse landscape. Since these regions were also the sites for the expansion of capital owing to the abundance of various resources – tea, timber, oil and coal among other, control was necessary and urgent. Empirically grounding itself in the archive, the paper thus argues for a rethinking of conceptual categories such as borderlands and intermediaries in the light of developments in global history and if this can contribute to a different understanding of the ‘colonial state’ and thereby to histories of empire that reside in regions constructed as ‘peripheries’.