Willem van Schendel

Bangladesh is a new name for an old land whose history is little known to the wider world. A country chiefly famous in the West for media images of poverty, underdevelopment, and natural disasters, Bangladesh did not exist as an independent state until 1971. Willem van Schendel's history reveals the country's vibrant, colourful past and its diverse culture as it navigates the extraordinary twists and turns that have created modern Bangladesh. The story begins with the early geological history of the delta which has decisively shaped Bangladesh society. The narrative then moves chronologically through the era of colonial rule, the partition of Bengal, the war with Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh as an independent state. In so doing, it reveals the forces that have made Bangladesh what it is today. This is an eloquent introduction to a fascinating country and its resilient and inventive people.

A History of Bangladesh

Joy L. K. Pachuau

The book challenges the stereotypes about and narrates the daily lives of the Mizos through the use of vernacular photography.

The Camera as Witness

Meghna Guhathakurta

Packed with images, first-person accounts, short stories, historical documents, speeches, treaties, essays, poems, and songs, this Reader is an unprecedented introduction to the historical, cultural, and political permutations that have created contemporary Bangladesh.

History, Culture, Politics

The Bangladesh Reader

Rural Labourers in Bengal, 1880 to 1980

Peasant Resistance and the Colonial Process in Eastern India, 1824 to 1833

Madmen of Mymensingh

Barak Kalir

Nonrecording States

Silk Producers and Officials in India and Bangladesh, 1880s to 1980s

Reviving a Rural Industry

Nationalist Rhetoric and the Challenge of Cultural Pluralism in Bangladesh

Who Speaks for the Nation?

This issue's theme section, titled "Nonrecording states" and guest edited by Barak Kalir and Willem van Schendel, shows explores why and when states knowingly refrain from recording people and their activities. Presenting case studies from China, Greece, the Netherlands, India, and Romania, the articles show that strategies of nonrecording are flexible, selective, and aimed at certain populations-and that both citizens and noncitizens can be singled out for nonrecording or derecording.

Nonrecording Sates

Over the past 500 years westerners have turned into avid consumers of colonial products and various production systems in the Americas, Africa and Asia have adapted to serve the new markets that opened up in the wake of the "European encounter". The effects of these transformations for the long-term development of these societies are fiercely contested. How can we use historical source material to pinpoint this social change? This volume presents six different examples from countries in which commodities were embedded in existing production systems - tobacco, coffee, sugar and indigo in Indonesia, India and Cuba - to shed light on this key process in human history. To demonstrate the effectiveness of using different types of source material, each contributor presents a micro-study based on a different type of historical source: a diary, a petition, a "mail report", a review, a scientific study and a survey. As a result, the volume offers insights into how historians use their source material to construct narratives about the past and offers introductions to trajectories of agricultural commodity production, as well as much new information about the social struggles surrounding them.

Using historical evidence, 1840s–1940s

Embedding Agricultural Commodities

Wolfgang Mey

Aditya Kumar Dewan

"'The Chittagong Hill Tracts : living in a borderland' examines the borderland between Burma, India and Bangladesh, inhabited by twelve distinct ethnic groups with strong cultural and linguistic links with southeast Asia. The three specialist authors of this unique book assembled more than 400 mostly unpublished photographs, many in colour, from over 50 private collections. 'The Chittagong Hill Tracts : living in a borderland' introduces the reader to the remarkable cultural variety and modern transformations of this virtually unknown region bridging southeast Asia and south Asia. At the same time it explores how, from the 1860s to the late twentieth century, photographers have portrayed the Chittagong Hill Tracts and their inhabitants. These photographers were both outsiders (travellers, officials, missionaries, anthropologists, development workers) and local people caturing their own world as they saw it. 'The Chittagong Hill Tracts' is the first comprehensive work on this complex region of Asia." -- book cover.

Living in a Borderland

The Chittagong Hill Tracts

The Odds of Life in Rural Bangladesh

Peasant Mobility

A look at South Asia beyond state and nation.

Beyond State and Nation in South Asia

The Bengal Borderland

a bibliography with special reference to the peasantry

Bangladesh

Bangladesh did not exist as an independent state until 1971. Willem van Schendel's state-of-the-art history navigates the extraordinary twists and turns that created modern Bangladesh through ecological disaster, colonialism, partition, a war of independence and cultural renewal. In this revised and updated edition, Van Schendel offers a fascinating and highly readable account of life in Bangladesh over the last two millennia. Based on the latest academic research and covering the numerous historical developments of the 2010s, he provides an eloquent introduction to a fascinating country and its resilient and inventive people. A perfect survey for travellers, expats, students and scholars alike.

The Bengal Borderland constitutes the epicentre of the partition of British India. Yet while the forging of international borders between India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma (the 'Bengal Borderland') has been a core theme in Partition studies, these crucial borderlands have, remarkably, been largely ignored by historians.

Michele Ford

Lenore Lyons

Since the signing of the UN Trafficking Protocol, anti-trafficking laws, policies and other initiatives have been implemented at the local, national and regional levels. These activities have received little scholarly attention. This volume aims to begin to fill this gap by documenting the micro-processes through which an anti-trafficking framework has been translated, implemented and resisted in mainland and island Southeast Asia. The detailed ethnographic accounts in this collection examine the everyday practices of the diverse range of actors involved in trafficking-like practices and in anti-trafficking initiatives. In demonstrating how the anti-trafficking framework has become influential – and even over-determining – in some border sites and yet remains mostly irrelevant in others, the chapters in this collection explore the complex connections between labour migration, migrant smuggling and human trafficking.

Critical Perspectives

Labour Migration and Human Trafficking in Southeast Asia

Pierre-Paul Darrac

Indigo and Espionage in Colonial Bengal

Global Blue

Itty Abraham

Illicit Flows and Criminal Things offers a new perspective on illegal transnational linkages, international relations, and the transnational. The contributors argue for a nuanced approach that recognizes the difference between "organized" crime and the thousands of illicit acts that take place across national borders every day. They distinguish between the illegal (prohibited by law) and the illicit (socially perceived as unacceptable), which are historically changeable and contested. Detailed case studies of arms smuggling, illegal transnational migration, the global diamond trade, borderland practices, and the transnational consumption of drugs take us to Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America. They allow us to understand how states, borders, and the language of law enforcement produce criminality, and how people and goods which are labeled "illegal" move across regulatory spaces.

Willem van Schendel

Books

Your next favorite book is out there