George Passman Tate was an assistant superintendent employed by the Survey of India who headed the surveys undertaken by two missions that determined large parts of the borders of Afghanistan, the Baluch-Afghan Boundary Commission of 1895-96 and the Seistan Arbitration Mission of 1903-5. The first of these surveys was carried out to delimit the so-called Durand Line, the border between Afghanistan and British India (present-day Pakistan) that was negotiated during the 1893 mission to Kabul by Sir Mortimer Durand of the Indian government and codified in an agreement signed by Durand and the ruler of Afghanistan, Amir 'Abd al-Rahman Khan. The second survey was to Seistan, or Sistan, a region that straddles eastern Iran and southern Afghanistan (and parts of Pakistan). It was undertaken after the governments in Kabul and Tehran asked Great Britain to arbitrate the border between the two countries in this region. The book contains an introduction by Colonel Sir Henry McMahon, the British commissioner on both missions. Most of the book is taken up by Tate's account of the Seistan Mission. He describes the journey overland from Quetta (in present-day Pakistan) to eastern Iran and the region of the marshy Hamun-i Helmand (present-day Daryacheh-ye Hamun) fed by the Helmand River. Tate offers vivid descriptions of the harsh and forbidding climate, the famous "Wind of 120 Days," and the people, economy, and social conditions of the region. The final chapter is devoted to the Helmand River. The book includes illustrations and two fold-out maps, one showing the route of Tate's travels, and another the region of the Daryacheh-ye Hamun. Tate describes the work of the surveying parties, but he offers little insight into the politics surrounding the determination of the borders, a topic which, as Sir Henry McMahon phrased it in his introduction, he "felt himself debarred from touching." Tate filed a number of official reports in which these topics were discussed.

George Passman Tate was an assistant superintendent employed by the Survey of India who headed the surveys undertaken by two missions that determined large parts of the borders of Afghanistan, the Baluch-Afghan Boundary Commission of 1895-96 and the Seistan Arbitration Mission of 1903-5. The first of these surveys was carried out to delimit the so-called Durand Line, the border between Afghanistan and British India (present-day Pakistan) that was negotiated during the 1893 mission to Kabul by Sir Mortimer Durand of the Indian government and codified in an agreement signed by Durand and the ruler of Afghanistan, Amir 'Abd al-Rahman Khan. The second survey was to Seistan, or Sistan, a region that straddles eastern Iran and southern Afghanistan (and parts of Pakistan). It was undertaken after the governments in Kabul and Tehran asked Great Britain to arbitrate the border between the two countries in this region. The book contains an introduction by Colonel Sir Henry McMahon, the British commissioner on both missions. Most of the book is taken up by Tate's account of the Seistan Mission. He describes the journey overland from Quetta (in present-day Pakistan) to eastern Iran and the region of the marshy Hamun-i Helmand (present-day Daryacheh-ye Hamun) fed by the Helmand River. Tate offers vivid descriptions of the harsh and forbidding climate, the famous "Wind of 120 Days," and the people, economy, and social conditions of the region. The final chapter is devoted to the Helmand River. The book includes illustrations and two fold-out maps, one showing the route of Tate's travels, and another the region of the Daryacheh-ye Hamun. Tate describes the work of the surveying parties, but he offers little insight into the politics surrounding the determination of the borders, a topic which, as Sir Henry McMahon phrased it in his introduction, he "felt himself debarred from touching." Tate filed a number of official reports in which these topics were discussed.

In the 1970s, in his capacity as government representative from the Afghan Institute of Archaeology, Ghulam Rahman Amiri accompanied a joint Afghan-US archaeological mission to the Sistan region of southwest Afghanistan. The results of his work were published in Farsi as a descriptive ethnographic monograph. The Helmand Baluch is the first English translation of Amiri’s extraordinary encounters. This rich ethnography describes the cultural, political, and economic systems of the Baluch people living in the lower Helmand River Valley of Afghanistan. It is an area that has received little study since the early 20th Century, yet is a region with a remarkable history in one of the most volatile territories in the world.

Travels in Beloochistan and Sinde is a first-hand account of a journey taken in 1810-11 through parts of present-day India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq. The author, Henry Pottinger (1789-1856), was a lieutenant in the East India Company who, along with a friend and fellow officer, Captain Charles Christie, volunteered to undertake a mission to the region between India and Persia (present-day Iran), about which the East India Company at that time had little knowledge. The two men journeyed from Bombay (present-day Mumbai) to Sind (present-day southeast Pakistan) from where, disguised as Indians, they traveled overland to Kalat. They were quickly recognized as Europeans, but they were able to continue their journey to Nushki, near the present-day border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. There the men separated. Pottinger continued westward to Persia, through Kerman to Shiraz and Isfahan. Christie traveled north from Nushki into Afghanistan, through Helmand to Herat and from there into Persia to Yazd and Isfahan, where he rejoined Pottinger. Christie was directed to remain in Persia, where in 1812 he was killed in a Russian attack. Pottinger returned to Bombay via Baghdad and Basra. The book is in two parts. The first is a detailed account of Pottinger's journey, with observations on climate, terrain, soil, plants and animals, peoples and tribes, customs, religion, and popular beliefs. The second is an introduction to the history and geography of the provinces of Baluchistan and Sind. An appendix reproduces part of the journal kept by Christie on his travels through Afghanistan. The book contains one colored illustration at the front and a large fold-out map after the end of the text. Pottinger went on to have a distinguished career with the East India Company and the British government. In April 1843 he was appointed the first British governor of Hong Kong.

Thomas Simpson provides an innovative account of how distinctive forms of colonial power and knowledge developed at the territorial fringes of colonial India during the nineteenth century. Through critical interventions in a wide range of theoretical and historiographical fields, he speaks to historians of empire and science, anthropologists, and geographers alike. The Frontier in British India provides the first connected and comparative analysis of frontiers in northwest and northeast India and draws on visual and written materials from an array of archives across the subcontinent and the UK. Colonial interventions in frontier spaces and populations were, it shows, enormously destructive but also prone to confusion and failure on their own terms. British frontier administrators did not merely suffer 'turbulent' frontiers, but actively worked to generate and uphold these regions as spaces of governmental and scientific exception. Accordingly, India's frontiers became crucial spaces of imperial practice and imagination throughout the nineteenth century.