This work reads the Nepali-language administrative archives of the Gorkhali state through an approach rooted in the history of knowledge. It pursues the goal of making knowledge a more capacious conceptual category capable of allowing investigations beyond the narrow boundaries of science and industry. Making knowledge capacious requires its own kinds of doing. And undoing. This work advocates for the undoing of a widespread tendency to approach places as nodes in the 19th century imperial networks of power, trade, and knowledge that joined together the world. The forces of empire and colonialism certainly reconfigured desires, elite material culture, and tools and technologies in the 19th century Gorkhali polity. But the things crafted, manufactured, and extracted in this work were not intended for global commodity markets joined together by imperial networks. Instead, they were part of a marketplaces of skills and things intended for local and regional consumption. Without the dramatic ruptures caused by, and manifested in, imperial trade networks, wage labour and factory work, mechanized technologies, and public pedagogical institutions, such places are conceptually often seen as margins or borderlands. They are peripheries to the central action of the networks and circulations that made the modern world. Grounded in a voluminous but understudied, non-colonial archive of the Himalayas and South Asia, this work thinks anew ways of making and knowing that shaped lives, livelihoods, and everyday striving in the 19th century. Pursuing relationships between power, knowledge, and skill, this work threads together two contrapuntal lines. One line attends to forms of governance. It unpacks the textual and oral cultures of bureaucracy as well as the political practices stemming from ideals of proximity and intimacy. Another line attends to forms of production. Each chapter is anchored by a specific thing –– households, ornaments, gunpowder and military hardware, saltpeter and sulphur –– representing a sector of state production. Heard as a single –– at times discordant, ragged –– melody, the two lines suggest that state-driven making and knowing operated in the tension between two sets of pursuits. On the one hand, the ruling apparatus was pursuing scale, intensification, extension, design, reverse engineering and the production of certain global artifacts communicating prestige and status. On the other hand, in pursuing the reproduction of their own power, the ruling elite hesitated to adopt new forms of production –– manifested in the dramatic restructuring of arrangements of tools, technologies, skill, labour, and know-how –– that would offer scale, intensification, and extension only at the cost of political and social disruption. In this context, much of the knowledge, skills, and practices that undergird production –– and the politics in which they were entangled –– remained with communities of skill, whether everyday or specialized. But these communities were embedded in assemblages of production regularly recalibrated and reconfigured by the state. This work unknots these assemblages as well as the practices that undergird communities of skill who were enfolded into but not entirely shaped by these assemblages.