Events

ABSTRACT

This talk considers the production of the Bay of Bengal as a social, political, and imaginative space. For centuries the Bay of Bengal served as a maritime highway between India and China, and then as a battleground for European empires, shaped by the monsoons and by human migration. Imperial powers in the nineteenth century, abetted by the force of capital and the power of steam, reconfigured the Bay in their quest for coffee, rice, and rubber. Millions of Indians crossed the sea in one of the largest migrations in modern history. Booming port cities like Singapore and Penang became the most culturally diverse societies of their time. By the 1930s, however, economic, political, and environmental pressures began to erode the Bay’s centuries-old patterns of interconnection.

The Bay fragmented as a coherent region in the second half of the twentieth century: it was carved up by the boundaries of nation-states; its histories (and its archives) were parceled out into separate national compartments. The post-war organization of academic knowledge drew a sharp distinction between the study of “South Asia” and “Southeast Asia.” But the resurgence of inter-Asian connections has seen the reinvigoration of the Bay of Bengal as a regional arena. An escalating environmental crisis sheds new light on enduring patterns of connection across the sea, while creating new forms of material interdependence, and making the Bay central to strategic competition between Asia’s rising powers.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sunil Amrith is Reader in Modern Asian History at Birkbeck College, University of London. His new book, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants has just been published by Harvard University Press. He is also the author of Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge, 2011), and Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930-65 (Palgrave, 2006).

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Mr Jonathan Lee via email: jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg