ABSTRACT
As we saw in chapter two, many of the traditional techniques used to control the frontier tribes relied in some way on making some people suffer for the activities of others. One of these, of which the British made considerable use in connection with the Mahsuds in particular, was keeping hostages. The first hostages were taken from the tribe in 1861, and by the early 1870s Macaulay was making arrangements for the Shaman Khels and Bahlolzais to supply as many as fifty-two of them. However, he tried to use them in a rather different way, and by the later 1870s they had become more like paid guests than traditional hostages. Indeed, after the Tank raid in 1879 Macaulay claimed that keeping them had never directly increased British control over the tribe, and that it was 'the indirect effects of the measure as a civilising agency' which were important.2
