‘Neither the Hills nor Rivers will Obstruct’: Revisiting the East India Company’s 1767 Expedition to Nepal.

This thesis challenges existing nationalist and colonialist interpretations of the 1767 expedition to Nepal on behalf of the British East India Company, and those encounters that followed before the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814-1816. The thesis then posits an alternative interpretation that explores the agency and influence of previously neglected, marginalized figures, by drawing upon the works and criticisms of postcolonial/decolonial approaches and Subaltern Studies, and new interpretative frameworks pioneered by borderlands studies. Marginalized historical agents played a significant role within the events of 1767, determining the expedition’s outcome and influencing subsequent approaches. There is furthermore a wider pattern of influential marginalized historical agency in Anglo-Himalayan encounters. Therefore, the inclusion of such marginalized experiences, agencies and agendas in our analysis of encounters proves critical to existing and emerging debates around who pulled the strings of EIC eighteenth-century colonialism.