At a time when the world is confronting the largest refugee crises in human history and images of displaced persons perilously crossing oceans on rafts and wooden boats are etched in our minds, it is heartening to read a volume that examines what it means to belong in an oceanic space surrounded by contending nation-states. Michael Laffan's edited volume Belonging across the Bay of Bengal is an important addition to a growing number of studies on the eastern Indian Ocean in the modern period. The contributors collectively show how belonging was articulated, represented, and negotiated under colonial institutions, as empires waned and nation-states rose. The volume emerged from a long series of conferences on rethinking area studies sponsored by the International Institute for Asian Studies and the Mellon Foundation.

The eleven essays are organized in a broadly chronological order into three thematic parts, as explained in the introduction (pp. 1–11): part one, “Sacred Itineraries, Indian Bodies”; part two, “Merchants, Migrations, and Rights”; and part three, “Cosmopolitan Hybridities.” The volume includes seventeen images of maps, archival photos, and reproductions of archival documents and periodicals. The editor has done a fantastic job of putting the essays into dialogue with each other while explaining the larger themes in the introductory chapter, “Dhows, Steamers, Lifeboats.” From tracing the continuities of Buddhist and Muslim sacral geographies across the two regions to illustrating how pan-ethnic categories such as “Tamil” and “Malay” appear in Dutch and English colonial archives, the essays create resonance across the volume's three themes.

Additionally, by calling attention to lesser-known histories of the Bay of Bengal, the volume undoes three sets of boundaries: the first is the area studies divide between South and Southeast Asia; the second, between Buddhism and Islam; and the third, between Dutch and British imperialisms. The four essays in part one, by Anne Blackburn, Marieke Bloembergen, Teren Sevea, and Arjun Naidu, analyze how pilgrimage networks, sacred sites, and saint-revolutionaries engendered a notion of shared Indic pasts across the Bay of Bengal in the early to mid-nineteenth century. The three essays in part two, by Torsten Tschacher, Chie Ikeya, and Nira Wikramsinghe, examine how southern Indians who had long inhabited Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia were categorized as temporary migrants by the colonial census, exacerbating definitions of citizenship and belonging into the 1920s. In part three, Bhavani Raman, David Henley, Clare Anderson, and Michael Laffan move forward in time to the 1950s to consider immigration and citizenship just as incipient nation-states began to transform preexisting interregional mobilities.

A challenge that Indian Ocean studies confronts in the modern period is one of old wine in new bottles. That is, are oceanic histories merely repackaged imperial histories of British, Dutch, and French colonial empires? This problem should come as no surprise given the spate of new work in the last two decades that has drawn heavily on colonial archives, whether they are located in London, Zanzibar, Mumbai, or Jakarta. A sizable portion of the primary sources used across the essays in this volume draw on standard metropole repositories such as the India Office Records, the National Archives in Britain, Leiden University Archives, and national archives in former colonies, including Sri Lanka, Singapore, Indonesia, and South Africa. However, the contributors overcome the challenge of oceanic histories slipping into imperial histories by incorporating alternative textual traditions that undercut colonial and postcolonial narratives—for instance, Sevea's rich trail of Malay and Tamil hagiographies of “mad” itinerant sayyid keramats who unsettled the colonial state's coercive apparatus by transforming its carceral spaces into sites of healing and miracles. In the third part, Raman's exploration of Jaffna-born Professor Thani Nayagam's polysemic writings reveals an intellectual invested in understanding Tamil culture as constituted by multiple port-cities and places of settlement in the Bay, rather than by locating it in an original, territorially particularistic idea of a “homeland.” All the essays illustrate the possibilities of undercutting colonial archives, not merely by “reading against the grain,” but by incorporating new multilingual textual genres from the Indian Ocean littoral.

Thinking specifically of assigning the volume's essays for an undergraduate survey course on the modern Indian Ocean, it would have been useful for the editor to include a few appendices of primary sources—perhaps a sample from a translation of Malay saint-renegade's hagiography or a colonial report about immigration in Sri Lanka, Burma, or Singapore, so that students could also work with the materials. Other than the missed opportunity of an appendix of sources, the volume is a welcome contribution to the field, in the Bay of Bengal in particular, as it provides innumerable insights into how a wide variety of communities came to inhabit this space. Through it, both specialists and undergraduates can trace the complex genealogies of disputes over border making and majoritarian politics across the region today.