Pelagic Passageways: The Northern Bay of Bengal Before Colonialism
AUTHOR – Rila Mukherjee
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- AUTHOR : Rila Mukherjee
- HB ISBN : 9978-93-80607-20-7
- Year : 2011
- Extent : xii + 520 pp.
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Pelagic Passageways
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INFORMATION
- AUTHOR –
- ISBN – 978-93-80607-20-7
- Year – 2011
- Extent: 400 + 40 coloured illustrations
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Due to the frontierization of nation-states, maritime historians have tended to ignore the northern Bay of Bengal. Yet, this marginal region, now dispersed over the four nation-states of India, China, Myanmar and Bangladesh, was not marginal in the past. Until recently, however, historians have concentrated largely on the ‘big four’: the Gujarat, Malabar, Coromandel and western Bengal coasts.
Extreme eastern South Asia — Bengal and the lands to its north-east fanning into Burma and China, or modern India’s north-east and beyond — is the focus of Pelagic Passageways. This regional unit, including diverse topographic features: plains, forests, estuaries, deltas, rivers, mountains, lakes, plateaus and remote passes, oscillates between unity and fragmentation, between centrality and marginality in the larger space of the Bay of Bengal. To attempt a history of this space is indeed challenging. There is not one, but two deltas here: the western delta, corresponding to present West Bengal in India and centred now on Kolkata, and the south-eastern delta, in present Bangladesh, centred on Dhaka, and running into Arakan. Not merely in terms of location, but on a historical axis too, the two deltas are vastly different as they have followed disparate trajectories, dictated in part by their geographies. Pelagic Passageways, therefore, questions the conventional fault line, located on the south-eastern Bengal delta, between the historiography of South and South-East Asia.
Concentrating on commodity and currency flows, travel, trade, routes and interactive networks Pelagic Passageways visualizes the cultural space of the northern Bay of Bengal as embracing upland landlocked areas — Ava, Yunnan, the Tripuri, Dimasa and Ahom states — not usually seen as part of maritime history. This collection of essays suggests that they too were a part of the social and commercial networks of the Indian Ocean. While these countries literally fell off the map, this volume proposes that we see these areas instead as crossroads, mediating flows between the land-dwelling and aquatic worlds.
The Editor
Rila Mukherjee is Professor and Head, Department of History, School of Social Sciences, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India. While she specialized on the silk trade and traders in eighteenth century Bengal for her doctoral dissertation, she remains deeply interested in Bengal’s prior commercial and cultural interactions within the Bay of Bengal. She is the author of Strange Riches: Bengal in the Mercantile Map of South Asia (2006) and Merchants and Companies in Bengal: Kasimbazar and Jugdia in the Eighteenth Century (2006). She has recently edited Networks in the First Global Age: 1400-1800 (2011).
Contributors
John Deyell l Tilman Frasch l Pamela Gutman l Biman Hazarika l Thibaut D’Hubert l Jacques P. Leider l Rila Mukherjee l Nicholas G. Rhodes l Bin Yang
‘This book defines the place of the Bay of Bengal in the larger Indian Ocean world, relative to the historical significance of its polycentric ports, trade, commercial/financial, and cultural networks. The book addresses regional upstream-downstream linkages, characterized by human dialogue rather than domination that extended beyond contemporary political borders, most notably in the connection between the Bay and China’s Yunnan province.’— KENNETH R. HALL, Professor of History
Ball State University, Indiana and
Member, Advisory Board
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
‘The key contribution of this book is that it asks us to look at the northern Bay of Bengal, and its surrounding landed areas, and to consider if this is a region which has enough commonalities so that it can be studied just as we study, say, India’s west coast, or the Coromandel. At first sight this is an extraordinary claim, for we are looking at parts of four different modern states — India, Bangladesh, China and Myanmar — with a host of different languages, and with vast geographical differences, from deltas to flood plains to mountains. The achievement of the book is that it makes a powerful case for a positive answer.’— MICHAEL N. PEARSON, Emeritus Professor of History
University of New South Wales
Due to the frontierization of nation-states, maritime historians have tended to ignore the northern Bay of Bengal. Yet, this marginal region, now dispersed over the four nation-states of India, China, Myanmar and Bangladesh, was not marginal in the past. Until recently, however, historians have concentrated largely on the ‘big four’: the Gujarat, Malabar, Coromandel and western Bengal coasts.
Extreme eastern South Asia — Bengal and the lands to its north-east fanning into Burma and China, or modern India’s north-east and beyond — is the focus of Pelagic Passageways. This regional unit, including diverse topographic features: plains, forests, estuaries, deltas, rivers, mountains, lakes, plateaus and remote passes, oscillates between unity and fragmentation, between centrality and marginality in the larger space of the Bay of Bengal. To attempt a history of this space is indeed challenging. There is not one, but two deltas here: the western delta, corresponding to present West Bengal in India and centred now on Kolkata, and the south-eastern delta, in present Bangladesh, centred on Dhaka, and running into Arakan. Not merely in terms of location, but on a historical axis too, the two deltas are vastly different as they have followed disparate trajectories, dictated in part by their geographies. Pelagic Passageways, therefore, questions the conventional fault line, located on the south-eastern Bengal delta, between the historiography of South and South-East Asia.
Concentrating on commodity and currency flows, travel, trade, routes and interactive networks Pelagic Passageways visualizes the cultural space of the northern Bay of Bengal as embracing upland landlocked areas — Ava, Yunnan, the Tripuri, Dimasa and Ahom states — not usually seen as part of maritime history. This collection of essays suggests that they too were a part of the social and commercial networks of the Indian Ocean. While these countries literally fell off the map, this volume proposes that we see these areas instead as crossroads, mediating flows between the land-dwelling and aquatic worlds.
The Editor
Rila Mukherjee is Professor and Head, Department of History, School of Social Sciences, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India. While she specialized on the silk trade and traders in eighteenth century Bengal for her doctoral dissertation, she remains deeply interested in Bengal’s prior commercial and cultural interactions within the Bay of Bengal. She is the author of Strange Riches: Bengal in the Mercantile Map of South Asia (2006) and Merchants and Companies in Bengal: Kasimbazar and Jugdia in the Eighteenth Century (2006). She has recently edited Networks in the First Global Age: 1400-1800 (2011).
Contributors
John Deyell l Tilman Frasch l Pamela Gutman l Biman Hazarika l Thibaut D’Hubert l Jacques P. Leider l Rila Mukherjee l Nicholas G. Rhodes l Bin Yang
‘This book defines the place of the Bay of Bengal in the larger Indian Ocean world, relative to the historical significance of its polycentric ports, trade, commercial/financial, and cultural networks. The book addresses regional upstream-downstream linkages, characterized by human dialogue rather than domination that extended beyond contemporary political borders, most notably in the connection between the Bay and China’s Yunnan province.’— KENNETH R. HALL, Professor of History
Ball State University, Indiana and
Member, Advisory Board
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
‘The key contribution of this book is that it asks us to look at the northern Bay of Bengal, and its surrounding landed areas, and to consider if this is a region which has enough commonalities so that it can be studied just as we study, say, India’s west coast, or the Coromandel. At first sight this is an extraordinary claim, for we are looking at parts of four different modern states — India, Bangladesh, China and Myanmar — with a host of different languages, and with vast geographical differences, from deltas to flood plains to mountains. The achievement of the book is that it makes a powerful case for a positive answer.’— MICHAEL N. PEARSON, Emeritus Professor of History
University of New South Wales