This book examines the British colonial administration’s successive attempts to transform the Nilgiri hills in South India into a governable landscape in the nineteenth century. The thinly populated region of 700 square miles, lying towards the end of the Western ghats at an elevation of 6,500 feet, possessed a lure, on a diminutive scale, similar to that of the Himalayan foothills of Northern India: a temperate, isolated and elevated environment to which Europeans staked a privileged claim.