at Maiwand. For these services he was made K.C.S.I. in 1879. In 1889 he occupied the Zhob valley, a strategic advantage which opened the Gomal Pass through the Waziri country to caravan traffic. Sandeman's system was not so well suited to the Pashtun as to his Baluch neighbours. But in Balochistan he was a pioneer, a pacificator and a successful administrator, who converted the region from a state of complete anarchy into a province as orderly as any in British India. Legacy and evaluation Sandeman died at Bela, the capital of Las Bela state, on 29 January 1892. His nephew by his sister Julia was Walter Massy-Greene, who became a cabinet minister in Australia. Recent scholarship in postcolonial studies and on colonial Balochistan has disputed this overtly laudatory account of Sandeman's life and career as explicated in books such as Tucker's "Sir Robert G. Sandeman: Peaceful Conqueror of Balochistan" and Bruce's "The Forward Policy and its Results". At a conceptual level, the idea of colonial rulers bringing order to the colonized territory has been questioned by authors such as Edward Said and Nicholas Dirks who argue that this myth resulted from a misunderstanding of (mostly unwritten) local social and cultural norms. It was the product of an effort to make alien peoples and territories governable through the invention of categories of savage and civilized. In respect of colonial Balochistan, Simanti Dutta points out that Sandeman skillfully exploited an existing rift between the Baloch ruler, the Khan of Kalat, and his subordinate tribal chiefs to leverage his influence and project British power into a region which was strategically significant in the context of Anglo-Russian rivalry in Afghanistan. A careful examination of historical records suggests that there were a number of armed uprisings against British rule in Balochistan during and after Sandeman's tenure which had to be put down through the use of lethal force and imposition of crippling financial penalties on the defaulting tribes. Notes References Tripodi, Christian. "'Good for one but not the other': The 'Sandeman System' of Pacification as Applied to Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier, 1877–1947." Journal of Military History 73#3 (2009): 767–802. online Tucker AP (1921) Sir Robert G. Sandeman, K.C.S.I., peaceful conqueror of Baluchistan. Thornton, Thomas Henry (1895) Colonel Sir Robert Sandeman: His Life and Work on Our Indian Frontier Bruce, Richard Isaac (1900) The Forward Policy and its Results Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism. Said, Edward