Pelagic Passageways

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 i

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 has recently edited Networks in the First Global Age: 1400-1800 (2011).