This book is an account of how the British imagined and represented the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) to make it amenable to their rule. As Angma Dey Jhala writes in her introduction to An Endangered History, “studying this fluid border area reveals a number of important developments in how colonial states created and imagined porous frontier zones, and the consequences of such colonial policies on later nation state formation” (p. xvii). Far from being an isolated backwater, the CHT was shaped by interactions with its Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist neighbors and, as colonialism progressed, with other parts of Britain's empire. Jhala's narrative focuses on the lives of colonialism's agents on the frontier and the forms of their engagement with the peoples who lived there. She extends that genre to which Ronald Inden's Imagining India and Bernard Cohn's paper on the Indian Census were such seminal forerunners, by applying their insights to one liminal corner of the empire. The result is a granular examination of the process of colonial knowledge creation and its political consequences for the “tribal” people who fell through the crevices that sundered Hindu from Muslim in the run-up to independence.

The book has four chapters plus an introduction and an epilogue. In chronological sequence, focusing on different British officials and their relations with the people of the CHT, the chapters trace how the forms of colonial knowledge production changed over time. The first chapter discusses how Francis Buchanan (1762–1869), who traveled in the CHT in 1798, drew on concepts in botany and natural history to understand the culture, language, and religion of the local people and to classify them as he did the fauna and flora. The cultures he described were hybrids, woven from strands derived from indigenous, Bengali, and Burmese practices. Jhala writes, “In applying Linnaean categories to human societies, botany was from the first hierarchical in nature, supporting the ‘myth of European superiority’” (p. 13).

Following this is a chapter on Thomas Lewin (1839–1916), an early colonial administrator who defined the region through the lens of gender and women's roles, focusing on the relative gender equity and freedom enjoyed by hill women to differentiate the hill people from their neighbors. Jhala discusses the influence on Lewin of his mother, to whom he was devoted, and the Chakma queen, Rani Khalindi, to whom he most decidedly was not. Jhala describes “female resistance and agency and one colonial official's response to it” (p. 49) as the Chakma queen strove to assert her autonomy even as Lewin sought to limit it.

As the nineteenth century progressed, the narrative and ethnographic approach that Lewin took to representing the CHT was replaced by a way of knowing based upon information collected in questionnaires and surveys, while descriptive work was pushed to the margins. The central figures in the third chapter are W. W. Hunter (1840–1900), who, more than any other individual, shaped the census as a tool of Indian ethnology and developed the gazetteer as an instrument of that knowledge, and R. H. Sneyd Hutchinson, who followed in his footsteps in the CHT thirty years later.

The last chapter is devoted to an examination of the career of James Phillip Mills (not John, as the author says—this is an error), a colonial administrator who became a professor of anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Mills (1890–1960) drew on anthropological theory of his day to explain society and culture in the hills, but in the process, he “reinvented ideas of indigenous ‘culture’ and ‘authenticity’” (p. 170) and thereby weakened their institutions and indigenous leadership.

Jhala's method in all these chapters is to follow her description of each character's knowledge-producing practices with a discussion of the intellectual contexts in which they operated, as well as the practical requirements of their activities. In doing so, she illuminates the wider intellectual milieu in which knowledge production in British India was embedded and to which it contributed.

The epilogue discusses two letters from indigenous leaders sent to British authorities and Indian nationalists advocating two different futures for the CHT. The chiefs, drawing on the work of colonial writers discussed in this book, advocated for the CHT to be treated as a princely state within India; a republican argued that the CHT should be part of a “Greater Bengal” also located within India. In the event, the CHT went to Pakistan, and the consequences for its indigenous people have been immeasurably tragic.

Jhala has written a perceptive and finely grained account, based on deft use of the archive, of how British knowledge and forms of representation of a particular corner of its empire developed and changed over the period of colonization and what the consequences have been for its people. This book should be read by scholars of South Asia in general and by those who wish to have insight into how knowledge of “others” is produced and the political and intellectual contexts in which those operations are carried out. It has much to say also to the history of anthropology. It is lucidly written and will work well in graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses.