By Sunil Amrith

Crossing the Bay of Bengal has just been published in the United States by Harvard University Press. It will be available in the UK and in Asia from late October. More information, including a video about the book’s key themes, is available here.

Crossing the Bay combines the work I have been doing for several years on the history of migration across the Bay of Bengal, with more recent research on the region’s environmental history, undertaken as part of the “Coastal Frontiers” project.

The project will continue to delve into the questions that Crossing the Bay raises: questions about how different sorts of environmental change have been experienced in the past; and about what a historical perspective might contribute to understanding the urgent, accelerating effects of climate change—to which the Bay of Bengal’s coastal frontiers are acutely vulnerable.