Book

For centuries, the Bay of Bengal was a world of movement. Merchants crossed its waters, pilgrims and monks travelled between sacred centres, communities settled across its shores, and fishermen followed customary routes that did not correspond to modern international boundaries. Political powers changed, but the sea continued to connect rather than simply divide. Then the meaning of the sea began to change. A maritime world organised through overlapping jurisdictions, customary routes and transregional networks was gradually transformed into a space of measured territories, exclusive jurisdictions and enforceable borders. Waters that had once connected communities came to separate states. Movement that had once been routine could become a border crossing, and a fisherman could become an intruder in waters long familiar to his community. Before the Borders: Connectivity, Identity and the Territorialisation of the Bay of Bengal traces this transformation across the longue durée. It reconstructs the networks that sustained the Bay's connectivity—monsoon circulation, religious institutions, merchant guilds, diaspora communities and port networks—and examines their relationship with states and political power. The book argues that territorialisation was not a single event but a cumulative process. Through knowledge, measurement, classification, administration, jurisdiction and enforcement, maritime space was gradually transformed into an object of territorial sovereignty. The Bay of Bengal is placed within a wider comparative framework encompassing the Mediterranean, South China Sea, Caribbean and Black Sea, allowing the book to identify the conditions under which maritime connectivity becomes durable—and the circumstances under which it fragments. At its heart, Before the Borders is a history of how the meaning of space changes: how a sea becomes a territory, how movement becomes a legal problem, and how borders transform the social worlds that existed before them. The sea remained. The connections changed. The borders came later.