Adrift in the Andaman Sea: 
Law, Archipelagos and the Making of Maritime Sovereignty

IF 1.8 1区 历史学 Q1 HISTORY
Kalyani Ramnath
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Abstract

This essay focuses on the long history of archipelagic formations in the Bay of Bengal as sites of legal experimentation. This history is often narrated beginning with convict transportation and the permanent occupation of the Andaman Islands as a British penal settlement in 1857 and the violent erasure of indigenous cultures that followed it. This essay focuses instead on the hundred years preceding it where the English East India Company experimented with abandoning jurisdiction over the lesser-known islands off the Bengal and Burma coasts and people who lived on them, despite being in the position of a territorial sovereign. These experimentations were recorded most eloquently in legal and administrative records about crime - which included, for example, how assault and “river dacoity” on the deltaic islands of the Sunderbans in lower Bengal were to be dealt with and how men convicted of murder on the islands off the Tenasserim coast in southern Burma were to be prosecuted. In each case, prompted by tensions between the Company and the British Crown, policing and prosecution were abandoned, but this escaped public attention as it took place on the empire’s maritime edges. Although jurisdictional claims were central to the expansionist aims of the British empire in the nineteenth century around the Indian Ocean, these instances offer an alternate account of sovereignty, one where assertions and abandonments were both critical to the making of empires.
漂流在安达曼海:法律、群岛和海洋主权的形成
本文重点论述了孟加拉湾群岛作为法律实验场地的悠久历史。这段历史通常从 1857 年运送囚犯和永久占领安达曼群岛作为英国刑罚定居点开始,以及随后对土著文化的暴力侵蚀开始叙述。本文的重点则是在此之前的一百年里,英国东印度公司曾尝试放弃对孟加拉和缅甸沿海鲜为人知的岛屿以及岛上居民的管辖权,尽管它处于领土主权国的地位。这些尝试在有关犯罪的法律和行政记录中得到了最有力的记录,例如,这些记录包括如何处理孟加拉下游桑德班三角洲岛屿上的袭击和 "河上抢劫 "行为,以及如何起诉在缅甸南部特纳塞林(Tenasserim)沿岸岛屿上被判犯有谋杀罪的人。由于公司与英国王室之间的紧张关系,每起案件都放弃了警务和起诉,但由于发生在帝国的海洋边缘,因此没有引起公众的注意。虽然管辖权主张是 19 世纪大英帝国在印度洋周边扩张主义目标的核心,但这些事例提供了另一种关于主权的解释,即主张和放弃对帝国的建立都至关重要。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Past & Present
Past & Present Multiple-
CiteScore
2.80
自引率
5.60%
发文量
49
期刊介绍: Founded in 1952, Past & Present is widely acknowledged to be the liveliest and most stimulating historical journal in the English-speaking world. The journal offers: •A wide variety of scholarly and original articles on historical, social and cultural change in all parts of the world. •Four issues a year, each containing five or six major articles plus occasional debates and review essays. •Challenging work by young historians as well as seminal articles by internationally regarded scholars. •A range of articles that appeal to specialists and non-specialists, and communicate the results of the most recent historical research in a readable and lively form. •A forum for debate, encouraging productive controversy.
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