New Histories of the Andaman Islands : Landscape, Place and Identity in the Bay of Bengal, 1790–2012

An innovative, multidisciplinary study of the historical development of the Andaman Islands, from 1790 to the year 2012. Combining approaches and methodologies from history and anthropology, the authors explore the theme of landscape, analyzing the transformation of space into place, and the making of identity and nation.

This innovative, multidisciplinary exploration of the unique history of the Andaman Islands as a hunter-gatherer society, colonial penal colony, and state-engineered space of settlement and development ranges across the theoretical, conceptual and thematic concerns of history, anthropology and historical geography. Covering the entire period of post-settlement Andamans history, from the first (failed) British occupation of the Islands in the 1790s up to the year 2012, the authors examine imperial histories of expansion and colonization, decolonization, anti-colonialism and nationalism, Japanese occupation, independence and partition, migration, commemoration and contemporary issues of Indigenous welfare. New Histories of the Andaman Islands offers a new way of thinking about the history of South Asia, and will be thought-provoking reading for scholars of settler colonial societies in other contexts, as well as those engaged in studies of nationalism and postcolonial state formation, ecology, visual cultures and the politics of representation.