Bordered by the Bay of Bengal to the south, and to the north by a series of hill ranges that separate it from the Himalayas, Assam, Burma, and the plains of upper India, the delta was formed over centuries by silt deposited in the sea by the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and the Meghna-the rivers which determined its ancient sites of settlement and defined its cultural sub-regions.2 Foremost among these was the basin shaped by the Hooghly on its descent through Bengal to the sea. HOOGHLY The Bengal delta, covering much of present-day Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, is the largest river delta in the world. The Hooghly came to be integrated into networks of encounter and exchange spanning different cultures and regions and, at least until the turn of the twentieth century, was renowned not only in Bengal and India but across the world. From the sixteenth century, successive external parties-among them Portuguese, Mughal, Dutch, British, French, and Danish-were drawn to the river. This book shines a light on the remarkable period when the Hooghly was at the centre of global history. Its tributaries and distributaries afforded access to deltaic Bengal, the Gangetic plain, and the Mughal heartland of Hindustan, linking northern and eastern India with territories across the Indian Ocean and beyond.
As the principal artery between lower and upper Bengal, it facilitated travel and communication between the coast and locations inland. Today, it is unlikely to be considered one of the great rivers of the world: at about 500 kilometres, its length is modest lacking natural depth, it has relied since the 1970s on waters dammed and distributed from the Ganges, like a middle-aged child dependent on the resources of an ageing mother.1 There was a time, however, when the Hooghly was a waterway of truly global significance, attracting merchants, missionaries, statesmen, soldiers, labourers, and others from Asia, Europe, and elsewhere. The Hooghly River, a distributary of the Ganges, winds its way into the Bay of Bengal through the western deltaic flats of its parent stream. INTRODUCTION THE HOOGHLY IN GLOBAL HISTORY Above all, I would like to thank Jeanne, whose support is immeasurable and whose feedback on each chapter-not least in urging me to write more clearly and engagingly (‘it’s a bit dry, tell a story!’)-has made this a better, more readable book. Friends and family following the progress of the book have helped greatly. I am grateful to colleagues at SOAS University of London and the Institut Catholique de Paris for their interest and ideas, along with staff in the SOAS Library and the British Library for their help and guidance. I would like to thank Michael Dwyer and his colleagues at Hurst for backing the project, the anonymous reviewers of the original manuscript for their efforts, and Rukun Advani at Permanent Black for his editing of the final draft. The writing of this book, like most, has relied on the support and input of others.
CONTENTSĪcknowledgements vii Introduction: The Hooghly in Global History 1. Hooghly: The Rise and Fall of the Portuguese 2. Murshidabad: The Kingdom of the Nawabs of Bengal 3. Plassey: The English East India Company’s Ascent 4. |handernagore: The French Revolution in Bengal 5. Serampore: Baptist Missionaries and the Power of Print 6. |alcutta: The Unfinished Conquest of Nature 7. Sagar Island: The Hooghly’s Global Future ISBN: 9781787383258 This book is printed using paper from registered sustainable and managed sources. A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library. Distributed in the United States, Canada and Latin America by Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. Ivermee to be identified as the author of this publication is asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. Printed in the United Kingdom The right of R. (Publishers) Ltd., 41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL © R. First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by C.
0 kommentar(er)
