The Imperial Security State, at first glance, conveys a sense of familiarity, of a previously encountered, previously charted territory. The book certainly covers much that has been written about, and not only for, the British Empire. It is this sense of familiarity based on the extant literature on imperial security studies that makes it a difficult subject to reconsider with fresh perspective. The strength of James Hevia's book lies in the new insights it provides on subjects already written about.

The central argument of The Imperial Security State, through a study of the Indian Army Intelligence Branch, is that the colonial state's attempt at preserving imperial security led to the creation of specific “forms of knowledge” (2), hitherto unexamined. Hevia focuses on the British frontier with Afghanistan to analyze this colonial epistemology. Using Michel Foucault's formulations of a “military-diplomatic apparatus” and of “governmentality,” Hevia argues that special types of information, gathered by trained professionals, were required to insure the security of the colonial state. He concentrates on external security, the concomitant apparatus of military intelligence gathering, and the ramifications of this colonial “archive” for military strategy and for diplomacy. This archive was created by knowledge gathered using traditional covert activities, but Hevia uses a wider, more accurate definition that included the colonial state's endeavors in mapping, surveying, and “knowing” the territory over which the army would/could operate. The appropriately broad definition of intelligence allows him to incorporate projects of colonial science and technology into this “archive.” Hevia has trawled through the two major British archives in London—the British Library and the National Archives. The book is based on an impressive range of primary sources, though chiefly in English. Furthermore, Hevia, with a nod toward Edward Said, argues that this archive “produced the very object of its intervention: Asia itself” (16).

The Imperial Security State considers the professionalization of the British Indian Army within the larger context of European military developments. The creation of a specialized elite, with scientific and military training, to collect intelligence (chapter 3) is a significant, if unoriginal, consideration: colonial science was the handmaiden of colonial control. The mythology of the “Great Game” is convincingly challenged, too. Hevia examines the nature and content of information gathered on the frontier to suggest it was not a romanticized fantasy á la Rudyard Kipling, but a serious, institutionalized, and vital operation of, and by, a trained elite. The links among imperial policy, India, China, Central Asia, and Russia are cleverly analyzed. Hevia's expertise in Qing China enabled him to incorporate his English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth Century China (2003) to bolster the main argument in The Imperial Security State.

This impressive work is not without flaws. Five of the book's first six chapters build the foundation on which the last three analytical and insightful chapters are based. Chapters on “The Military Revolution of the Nineteenth Century” (chapter 2), “Imperial State Formation, the Professionalization of the Army and the Making of Experts” (chapter 3), “Forming Intelligence, Making an Archive” (chapter 4), “Disciplining the Space of Asia: Triangulation and Route Books” (chapter 5), and “Regulating the Facts of Asia: Military Reports and Handbooks” (chapter 6) revisit known subjects. The British Indian Empire, the reviewer's area of research, has generated substantial literature on these subjects, individually and in various combinations. Though revaluations are necessary, The Imperial Security State has not substantially affected the current state of knowledge. That more than half the book is dedicated to these subjects, therefore, seems an indulgence most scholars may not have received from a comparable press.

James Hevia is no ordinary scholar; his publication speaks to the breadth of his engagement with Qing China. It allows him a relatively strong comparative overview and the ability to connect knowledge formation in imperial China with British India. However, his command of nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asian historiography is, understandably, not as strong, and the consistent thoroughness of his corpus on China is missing. For instance, Richard Popplewell's Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904–1924 (1995) is a surprising omission. According to Hevia, the work of Bernard Cohn and Christopher Bayly constitute “political” intelligence gathering, and he believes that their concern with the “epistemological” issues of “civil administration” neglected military intelligence and the military. This does not do justice to the contributions, in particular, of Bayly because Hevia has only considered the former's Empire and Information (1996). Moreover, it can be argued that under any imperial dispensation, the boundary between the political and the military is rather porous, given that imperial administration is, ultimately, enforced by military superiority.

The Imperial Security State covers a huge temporal span—from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and the later military-diplomatic changes in nineteenth-century Europe, it focuses on the Indo-Afghan frontier between the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries and ends with Hamid Karzai's Afghanistan in the twenty-first century! This is too unwieldy a time frame, and therefore, the strongest part of the analysis is when Hevia examines the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The overdependence on English language sources means that there is no “Asian” voice. Hevia has not mentioned either the militarized Sultanate or the formidable Mughal administration and its impressive information collection—military and nonmilitary. The civil administration under Akbar's mansabdari system was based on military leaders: the revenue was collected by the military commander of respective regions. Furthermore, Hevia has not referred to any contemporary South Asian political power—the Marathas, Sikhs, Rajputs, Hyder Ali, or Tipu Sultan. Ranjit Singh and Tipu kept elaborate military establishments, including European officers, and imported European weapons. The East India Company sent spies to gather knowledge of their systems of animal breeding, equestrian training, and of gaining legitimacy. Nonetheless, this book, with strengths that outweigh its weaknesses, can be used with profit by most.