Across the world's arid regions, land that is inhabited and used is being rendered administratively 'empty' — and, so rendered, made available for appropriation. This dissertation traces the instrument through which this most often proceeds: the colonial revenue category of 'wasteland'. Assembled in the nineteenth century to designate territory as marginal and open to acquisition, it has outlasted the empires that produced it. In the Thar Desert of western Rajasthan, postcolonial and now decarbonisation-driven states have repeatedly reactivated this inherited classification to authorise projects of their own: developmental irrigation, conservation enclosure and, most recently, some of the world's largest utility-scale solar installations. The project asks how these classifications acquired their governmental force, how they persisted or mutated across political ruptures, and what part they now play in producing new frontiers of dispossession under the banner of climate action.

In doing so, it speaks to the history of capitalism: the land frontier on which successive regimes of accumulation have drawn — agrarian, developmental, and now green — was not simply seized but administratively produced.