• ISBN13: 9789380607207
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: History
• Publisher: Ratna Sagar
• Publisher Imprint: PrimusBook
• Publication Date: August 18, 2011
• Pages: 524
• Original Price: INR 1395.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 962 grams

This volume visualizes the cultural space of the northern Bay of Bengal as embracing upland landlocked areas—Ava, Yunnan, the Tripuri, Dimasa and Ahom states—not usually seen as part of maritime history, therefore suggesting that they too be studied as part of the social and commercial networks of the Indian Ocean. There are not one but two deltas here: the western delta, corresponding to the present West Bengal, and the south-eastern delta, in present Bangladesh. The essays in this volume question the conventional fault line located on the south-eastern Bengal delta, between the historiography of South and SouthEast Asia. Concentrating on commodity and currency flows, travel, trade routesand interactive networks, this volume proposes that these areas be viewed as crossroads, mediating flows between the land-dwelling and aquatic worlds.

Rila Mukherjee is Professor and Head, Department of History, School of Social Sciences, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India. While she specialized on the silk trade and traders in eighteenth century Bengal for her doctoral dissertation, she remains deeply interested in Bengal's prior commercial and cultural interactions within the Bay of Bengal. She is the author of Strange Riches: Bengal in the Mercantile Map of South Asia (2006) and Merchants and Companies in Bengal: Kasimbazar and Jugdia in the Eighteenth Century (2006). She has recently edited Networks in the First Global Age: 1400-1800 (2011).