The tea-producing regions of India sit snuggly against the jungles of western Burma. Mandalay, Penang, and Singapore are the historical homes of vibrant Indian communities. However, as Sunil Amrith notes at the start of his book, Crossing the Bay of Bengal, modern observers draw an almost tangible line between India—South Asia—on the one hand and Burma, Malaysia, and Singapore—Southeast Asia—on the other. As a result, the Bay of Bengal, which functioned as an integrated political, economic, and cultural region for much of recorded history, has almost completed disappeared from view in contemporary scholarship. Instead, the histories of the bay's peoples have been artificially isolated and virtually quarantined from one another, first by the emergence of the postcolonial nation state and second by the hegemony of geographic area studies. Amrith's book sets out to record the “almost completely untold” story of the “rise and decline of the region” (p. 1) as a connected entity, in a well-researched, engaging, and readable narrative. More importantly, his book stands out as an important contribution to the growing body of literature that seeks to challenge the largely continental biases of the academy.

Amrith's book in many ways parallels well-worn paths previously tread by historians like K. N. Chauduri and Thomas Metcalf for the wider Indian Ocean. Working with a somewhat more geographically limited scope, he charts the correlation of commercial interest and the projection of political power across the Bay of Bengal from the first millennium CE to the twenty-first century. Unsurprisingly, Amrith tells us that the shores of the bay were first drawn together as early as the sixth century by the South Asian Pallava dynasty, while it emerged as a full-fledged and integrated economic region under the maritime empire of the Cholla dynasty between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. The mastery of the waters between South Asia and the Malay Peninsula by the latter was complete enough for the bay to be referred to as “the Cholla Sea” in contemporary texts. Thus, the efforts of the Portuguese (the first to christen the region with the name by which we know it today) and later the British to exert economic if not always direct political dominance over the maritime space between India and Southeast Asia was the legacy of an already long, time-honored tradition.

Amrith's work, however, goes much further than many earlier histories of the Indian Ocean. Rather than simply charting the topographies of commerce and empire around the bay's littoral, he maps a much more interesting sea of interconnected family trees, community, and spirituality. Again, like earlier works, much of the book under review is concerned with the movement of goods and people under the aegis of empire. Central to his story is the labor migration of Tamils who crossed the bay to Southeast Asia from the second half of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War in Asia. He argues, however, that rather than permanent inward or outward flows, migration was characterized by the circulation of individuals around the bay's shores rather than the creation of permanent settlement for most of its history. Such circulations were important because they left their mark in terms of cultural (e.g., food, dress, marriage patterns) and spiritual (e.g., Muslim saint veneration and the construction of Hindu temples) custom, creating a kind of wider Bay of Bengal spiritual and cultural sphere. But it did not result in the creation of diasporas or, more importantly, distinct permanent communities scattered across the various shores who might eventually be viewed as alien minorities. This, Amrith writes, was almost wholly a function of European empire and did not begin to emerge until the 1920s. The development of diasporic communities who viewed themselves (and were viewed by others) as distinct was driven in part by increased demands for labor but more importantly by an increased proportion of women who began to make the journey. However, the development of more permanent diasporic communities coincided in many places with the rise of early anti-colonial nationalism. It was this confluence, in Amrith's view, that led to the rapid unraveling of “the world of the Bay of Bengal” (p. 3).

Long held together by kinship, commerce, and cultural circulation, the postcolonial Bay of Bengal quickly fragmented with the rise of the nation-state. Those who had moved across the bay during the age of empire and settled on shores other than their own were forced to make a choice. Either make a place for themselves as “minorities” or return to a putatively natal “home” many may have never seen. In some places, such as Malaysia, such transitions were relatively painless; in others, such as Burma, they were much more fraught. In any case, as Amrith points out, their journeys to citizenship were never easy and for many they “remain unfinished” (p. 4).

Amrith's study of the Bay of Bengal is an important addition to the scholarship on the Indian Ocean. However, it also represents a valuable critique of the geographic area studies paradigm that is a central pillar of research in the humanities and social sciences. The area studies model, at its best, revolutionized our understanding of the globe. However, as Amrith's book amply demonstrates, the persistent historical interactions of people across these largely artificial boundaries should give the academic community pause and cause us to reflect on their unquestioned utility. The arbitrary, and above all rigid, boundaries of region—largely the legacy of European colonialism and Cold War geopolitics—while illuminating in some respects have tended to stifle critical inquiry in others. In the case of the Bay of Bengal, the arbitrary division created between South and Southeast Asia has obscured the deep history of the region's cultural and social dynamism for more than three generations. Equally important, it demonstrates how the categories of the academy can also obscure the causes of the problems of the present.