Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. 353 pp. (Maps, figures.) US$29.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-72483-9.
The name, the Bay of Bengal, referring to the eastern wing of the Indian Ocean, is not one that resonates very strongly these days. But as Sunil Amrith explains in this beautifully written, elegiac book, the idea of “the Bay” was once a meaningful one amongst colonial administrators, mariners and the many common people who moved across it as coolies and traders, soldiers and slaves. Over more than a millennium the territories of the littoral of the Bay were bound together by culture, holy relics and movements of people and goods. It was “once a region at the heart of global history” (1), the maritime highway between India and China, where, in the European Middle Ages, great regional states of Asia encountered one another, and where later, from the end of the fifteenth century, the expansive European powers fought each other for supremacy. Then, over the century from about 1840 to 1940, when connectedness across the Bay of Bengal changed quite dramatically in scale with the arrival of steamships and railways, it was the site of one of the greatest movements of people of modern history. Amrith calculates that about 28 million crossed the Bay, in both directions, in this period, a figure that compares closely with the numbers of migrants (26 million) who arrived in the United States between 1870 and 1930, and which exceeds the numbers (19 million) of Chinese who moved into Southeast Asia over the same period. Very many of those, especially from south India, who moved into Ceylon, Malaya and Burma at this time, cleared forests in their sparsely settled frontiers for the benefit of capital, and so brought about both great wealth for the British empire (in which Malaya became the most valuable tropical colony), and enormous environmental change. Yet then, rather suddenly, from the 1930s, and especially with the Second World War and with the decolonization that followed it, this distinct world, with its own social imaginary involving expectations of mobility, broke apart. The Bay of Bengal was forgotten in the later twentieth century, carved up as it was by the boundaries of nation states, within which the citizenship of many of those who had moved across the sea—now treated as minorities—was contested. First in military strategy during the War, and then in academic area studies, it was split apart by the definitions of South Asia on the one hand, and of Southeast Asia on the other. Only in the present, when the Bay has become once again an arena of competition between rising powers—this time the Asian powers, China and India—has it come to be seen again as having some sort of an integrity as a region. Environmentally, too, the pollution of the sea and the over-exploitation of the resources of the Bay that has followed from its “enclosure” by being treated as “an extension of national territory” (260), is bringing about some awareness that it must be seen as a region.
This, in outline, is the story that Amrith tells: that of “The sea’s role in human history—and the consequences of that history for the sea” (31). Though he ranges widely his focus is on the history of movements of labour, of their cultural and political implications, and of their consequences for the environment (though, if I have a criticism of the book it is that its environmental history sometimes seems a little bit of an add-on, nowhere near as well developed as the history of labour). Of course the book treats of trade, and of the commodities that have so much shaped the history of the Bay: spices and rice, Indian textiles, American silver and more recently coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco and especially rubber (of which Malaya produced 70–80 per cent of global supply early in the twentieth century). But this is not primarily an economic history. Relatively little is said, as well, about the role of Chettiar capital—perhaps because this is a subject that has been well documented by other scholars.
The book starts with a short account of the monsoons and of their implications for navigation. It then touches briefly on ancient and medieval history—though those who might look to the book for an account of how Hinduism reached Southeast Asia will be disappointed—and proceeds fairly briskly to the role of the Tamil Muslim merchants in binding the Coromandel coast of south India with Southeast Asia, and then to that of the Portuguese and of the Dutch in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the focus is really on the rise of English power in the Bay, and on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These take up almost two-thirds of the text, and for many readers of this journal, the book will probably be important mainly for its accounts of labour migration and of its implications, including especially in struggles over citizenship. Scholars interested in the idea of Asia, too, will appreciate what it says about the division between South and Southeast Asia, and Amrith’s reminder of the brief moment towards the end of the colonial period when some nationalist leaders—Subhas Chandra Bose, Nehru and Aung San—had ideas about the possibilities of Asian federalism, smothered though they were by the tide of nationalism.
The book draws on impressive scholarship, combining archival research in the different nation states of the region, oral history and the author’s own observations and experience. His photographs of buildings in different port cities around the Bay help to document his own vision of “what the region does possess, richly, [which] is a practical ethic of coexistence” (284). His wider purpose is to show how the history of the Bay of Bengal constitutes “an archive of cultural resources that might help us to reimagine solidarity across distance” (5). Amen to that, in this age of continuing national and ethnic conflict. Altogether, this is a very fine contribution to the great corpus of “ocean studies,” inspired initially by Braudel’s Mediterranean.
John Harriss
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 729-731