Cannons for the Coast: Reading Seventeenth-Century Southeast Bengal from the Maldives Islands

Abstract

Professor Shigeru Akita’s important publications focus on British imperial history and global history, and highlight his use of the copious colonial archives. While not denying the importance of colonial archives for scholars, this essay explores the role of precolonial archives in understanding the history of a person, place, or region, underlining the archives’ importance but also pointing to some of the difficulties associated with their use when southeast Bengal of the early seventeenth-century is the topic. Moving away from the dispatches, letters, and consultations that constitute the “reality” of colonial South Asia, and using early modern travel narratives and maps instead, it shows a different spatial othering that arises through a faulty understanding of the pulling forces of shared connections. Events demonstrate the influence of factors other than geographic proximity, and instead of emphasizing sovereign states, as does cartography, they reveal mnemonic commercial and cultural itineraries linking distant places such as the southeast Bengal-Arakan (Bangladesh-Myanmar) coast and the Maldives Islands.