An Endangered History

An endangered history examines the transcultural, colonial history of the Chittagong Hill tracts, C. 1798–1947. This little-studied borderland region lies on the crossroads of Bangladesh, India and Burma and is inhabited by several indigenous peoples. They observe a diversity of religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, animism and Christianity; speak tibeto-burmese dialects intermixed with Persian and Bengali idioms; and practice jhum or slash-and-burn Agriculture. This book investigates how British administrators from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries used European systems of knowledge, such as Botany, natural history, gender, enumerative statistics and anthropology, to construct these indigenous communities and their landscapes. In the process, they connected the region to a dynamic, global map and classified its peoples through the reifying language of religion, linguistics, race and nation.