Colonialism is generally understood to encompass political domination, military expansion, and economic exploitation, but the British, in their nearly two centuries of rule over India, also achieved a thoroughgoing conquest of knowledge. In the backdrop of the Enlightenment impulse, which held that everything can be known, mapped, counted, categorized, and bounded, and the knowledge thus acquired reshaped into useable forms, the British in India created an epistemological state. The Colonial State and Forms of Knowledge: The British in India examines the fields and bodies of knowledge through which this state was created.