In the 1840s, as British Indian colonial authorities displaced the Sikh government in the Punjab and districts bordering Afghanistan, they attempted to replicate a pattern of rule evolved from previous military occupations of north Indian regions. Certain ‘structures of power’ and an ‘ideology of authority’ shaped a hierarchical relationship between the colonial state and regional societies. A crucial concern was to establish a law and order regime that minimized conflict and legitimated British authority.

Across British India, through the implementation of police, judicial, and ideological structures, authorities asserted claims of colonial preeminence and a monopoly over coercive power. This volume collects correspondence and regulations related to the British North West Frontier province. They document the complex colonial adaptation of legal codes and levers of power to control what were seen as archaic but enduring social, moral, and cultural norms based in Pakhtun customary social and devotional practices. Throughout this history, alternative voices disputed any claims to colonial legal or moral hegemony. Features of this history, including the latest version of the Frontier Crimes Regulation, continued into the early twenty-first century as active, highly debated features of state administrative policies.

This volume contains primary source documents related to the writing of the Punjab Frontier Crimes Regulation of 1887 and ensuing years of debate over the need for additional revisions to the FCR. In the years after 11 September 2001, a period of turmoil in Afghanistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, such debates were urgently continued, even as power relations meant they were less urgently acted upon.