Final Report Summary - CFRONTIERS (Coastal Frontiers: Water, Power, and the Boundaries of South Asia)
The key research aims of Coastal Frontiers were to understand how vast environmental changes—rising sea level, coastal erosion, shifts in the monsoon’s patterns—are experienced and interpreted by local communities and individuals who live along the eastern littoral of the Bay of Bengal; and to examine how these transnational environmental issues have been addressed by local and national governments, and by international organizations since the early twentieth century. The project was conceived as a way to examine the intersection of environmental and political history in a region that has long been contested between empires, and between post-colonial nation-states, and which is now a region among the most vulnerable in the world to the effects of climate change.
However unprecedented the effects of climate change today, these effects have to be situated in the longer context of cultures who live with intimate knowledge of water’s fluctuations—the rains, the rivers, and the seas—and in the context of political decisions in the twentieth century that have had multiple unintended consequences. Coastal Frontiers’ empirical achievements were based on extensive archival research, undertaken in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, the UK, and the United States. In addition, the Principal Investigator and the Postdoctoral Research Associate undertook several oral history interviews with fishing communities, coastal officials, and scientists. This allowed us to form a complex picture of multiple local understandings and perceptions of environmental change.
This multi-sited, multi-archival investigation provided us with an unprecedented base of source material for our analysis of environmental change in India. Coastal Frontiers has shown that, by following the flow of water, we can gain a new perspective on modern Asia. Spaces of vulnerability, and spaces of environmental threat, rarely mould themselves to the borders of nation states.
Our attention to local perspectives suggests that climate change is only one among multiple crises that coastal communities are experiencing, some of which are more specifically rooted in regional, rather than planetary, economic and political processes. Expanding its conceptual framework, the project has charted the ways in which South Asia’s coasts form both an ecological and a strategic frontier, shaped by struggles over water that reach from the Himalayan rivers to the deep sea.
Coastal Frontiers has crossed and bridged disciplines. The project team itself marked a collaboration between a historian and an anthropologist: we have combined the techniques of intensive archival research and critical analysis of documentary sources with the immersive techniques of ethnography. Building out from there, the project has by made links between the humanities and the sciences. Given that Coastal Frontiers has contained a significant component of history of science—the history of meteorology and coastal ecology, for example—it was only natural to move from that to discussions with contemporary meteorologists and climate scientists.
The project’s flagship publication, the PI’s sole-authored book, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants, was awarded the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards prize for the best book on South Asian History in 2014.
However unprecedented the effects of climate change today, these effects have to be situated in the longer context of cultures who live with intimate knowledge of water’s fluctuations—the rains, the rivers, and the seas—and in the context of political decisions in the twentieth century that have had multiple unintended consequences. Coastal Frontiers’ empirical achievements were based on extensive archival research, undertaken in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, the UK, and the United States. In addition, the Principal Investigator and the Postdoctoral Research Associate undertook several oral history interviews with fishing communities, coastal officials, and scientists. This allowed us to form a complex picture of multiple local understandings and perceptions of environmental change.
This multi-sited, multi-archival investigation provided us with an unprecedented base of source material for our analysis of environmental change in India. Coastal Frontiers has shown that, by following the flow of water, we can gain a new perspective on modern Asia. Spaces of vulnerability, and spaces of environmental threat, rarely mould themselves to the borders of nation states.
Our attention to local perspectives suggests that climate change is only one among multiple crises that coastal communities are experiencing, some of which are more specifically rooted in regional, rather than planetary, economic and political processes. Expanding its conceptual framework, the project has charted the ways in which South Asia’s coasts form both an ecological and a strategic frontier, shaped by struggles over water that reach from the Himalayan rivers to the deep sea.
Coastal Frontiers has crossed and bridged disciplines. The project team itself marked a collaboration between a historian and an anthropologist: we have combined the techniques of intensive archival research and critical analysis of documentary sources with the immersive techniques of ethnography. Building out from there, the project has by made links between the humanities and the sciences. Given that Coastal Frontiers has contained a significant component of history of science—the history of meteorology and coastal ecology, for example—it was only natural to move from that to discussions with contemporary meteorologists and climate scientists.
The project’s flagship publication, the PI’s sole-authored book, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants, was awarded the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards prize for the best book on South Asian History in 2014.