In Hooghly: The Global History of a River, Robert Ivermee recounts a familiar narrative of European colonialism in South Asia that is engaging and accessible to students and nonspecialists. He begins his account with the arrival of the Portuguese in Bengal in the early sixteenth century and continues to the present day, where, in the final dozen pages of his book he considers the future of the Bay of Bengal in light of twenty-first-century neoliberalism and climate change. The majority of the book focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a time when, Ivermee argues, “events on the Hooghly were of global significance” (8).

It is in this phrase that we can see the important reframing Ivermee accomplishes. Such broad colonial histories as his are often bounded by the teleology of the nation-state. Therefore, rather than provide what would be essentially a prehistory of modern India or Bangladesh—for the greater Gangetic basin of which the Hooghly River is a part traverses both nation-states—Ivermee's focus on the Hooghly as the first thread of a global web respatializes colonial history and demonstrates the historical contingency, rather than the inevitability, of our current system of nation-states.

To accomplish this, Ivermee begins by situating each chapter in a specific town on the Hooghly River: Hooghly, Murshidabad, Plassey, Chandernagore, Serampore, Calcutta, and Sagar Island. As Ivermee moves his focus downriver, the events in each chapter move forward in time. Additionally, significant events are marked by their place on the river. Fulta, where Robert Clive first landed in his 1756 bid to retake Calcutta from Siraj ud-Daulah, is described as the village “where the Rupnarayan joins the Hooghly” (79). When missionary and printer William Carey left Calcutta in the 1790s, he first found employment in Malda, “where the Hooghly and Padma go their separate ways” (130). This technique ensures the river is a constant presence in the book, even when it is not an active participant in events.

Overall, the narrative, theories, and primary sources of this book will be familiar to specialists of South Asian colonial history. For instance, in chapter 1, Ivermee leans heavily on the account of Frey Manrique to establish the Portuguese on the Hooghly, and in chapter 3, he tells the story of Clive, Siraj ud-Daulah, and the Battle of Plassey using nineteenth-century histories. In chapter 2, Ivermee presents the eighteenth-century reigns of Murshid Quli Khan and Alivardi as part of the rise of regional powers after the death of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb; regionalization rather than disintegration is the widely accepted interpretive framework of this period. Similarly, in this chapter Ivermee stresses the syncretism of Hindu and Muslim culture in Bengal, an interpretation borne out by the sources but often missing in nationalist histories written for popular audiences.

It is in chapter 4 that Ivermee delivers on his promise of a global history of the Hooghly River. Here, in the French-held territory of Chandernagore, Ivermee demonstrates how French philosophes incorporated ideas of South Asia and the tropics into their critiques of the decadent monarchy and how those critiques, in turn, inspired the French Revolution. Then, the narrative returns to the Hooghly River as the French inhabitants of Chandernagore arrest their royalist governor in the early 1790s. These events are all folded within the broader Anglo-French conflicts of the long eighteenth century, and the state of Chandernagore as a French possession is often determined by battles and treaties in the Americas or Europe.

There are instances, however, in which Ivermee misses the opportunity to tease out the global significance of an idea or event he first situates on the Hooghly. Chapter 5, for example, moves downriver to Serampore to introduce missionary William Carey and his vernacular printing press. From there, the focus shifts to Ram Mohan Roy and liberal reforms in early nineteenth-century Bengal. Missing, however, is a discussion of how liberalism on the Hooghly is part of a global trend. Similarly, Ivermee uses chapter 6 to showcase different technological interventions the citizens of Calcutta employed to tame the Hooghly but has few explicit links to the nineteenth century's belief in steam-powered modernity that these localized interventions imply. Such global connections are hinted at here and elsewhere, but none are as clearly drawn as are those with the French discussed in chapter 4.

Maps are also noticeably absent from the book. Ivermee's prose aids the readers in resituating themselves along the Hooghly, but a map of the river, if not the entire Gangetic watershed would be enormously helpful in visualizing the geography of the region. Another small absence is the lack of a note explaining why Ivermee chose to use colonial-era spelling (for example, Calcutta instead of Kolkata, Serampore instead of Srirampur).

That said, one of the strengths of Ivermee's Hooghly: The Global History of a River is the breadth of subject matter. It is an introductory text that presents a sweeping historical narrative and boldly drawn characters in compelling prose. It gives students and nonspecialists both an ample choice of subjects for further exploration and a primer on some of the conceptual mainstays of the discipline. In the final chapter of the book, Ivermee tells this reader that “existing institutions, practices, and prevailing ideas are not inevitable but historically contingent” (215), something he argues he has demonstrated through the chronological scope of his book. In this he is presenting history as possibilities rather than outcomes.

Ivermee has written an enjoyable and accessible introduction of the colonial history of South Asia. The contribution of his book lies in its framing: it moves along a river, across a watershed, and outward into a global network. Ivermee demonstrates how a regional focus bound within a particular more-than-human environment upsets the seeming inevitability of the political borders of nation-states. He invites readers to imagine history as a process of accretion along the banks of the river.