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This entry looks at the commons (land and other resources that are subject to common use) and wildlife conservation (protecting plant and animal species and their habitats). Historically, the societies of Northeast India had developed sophisticated ideas about shared resources. These were challenged by colonial and postcolonial concepts, an encounter that has many dimensions. Here, this entry focuses on just one: the emergence of zones that the state set aside for the protection of wildlife. ‘Vertical’ conservation spread throughout Northeast India, and this led to tensions between humans over who actually own the local habitat and has the right to fashion it. It also created new confrontations between humans and protected ‘flagship species’. Social scientists suggest that we can mitigate these complications by imagining ‘interspecies communities’ that embrace humans, animals, and plants.

Which approaches do historians and other social scientists use to analyze social processes in the spaces between Yunnan and the Bay of Bengal? And how can these approaches contribute to scholarly critiques of state centrism? To explore these questions, this chapter examines some metaphors that researchers employ to frame these spaces. It distinguishes four types: structured, liquid, spatial, and sensory metaphors. It argues that these metaphors need closer scrutiny but that they can act as useful antidotes to the ways in which “India” and “China” (and “Myanmar” and “Bangladesh”) routinely get framed in scholarly debate and policy discourse.

Our current spatial imaginations of Northeast India are comprehensible only in view of the moment of the Partition of British India in 1947. This chapter deals with four spatial issues to demonstrate how Partition changed the rules of the game and came to act as a pivot around which ‘writing the Northeast’ has revolved ever since. First, the history of Northeast India begins with Partition in 1947 — Northeast India is a new space. Second, Northeast India is a space of multiple contested incorporations. A third spatial perspective is verticality, the social importance of differences in land altitude. Fourth, the homeland logic that powered Partition continued to operate in Northeast India, turning it into a fragmenting space. This approach helps us to reconsider the Partition of 1947 as a mindset that determines the way we study the region. Looking beyond the national scale, we need to devise research projects that treat Northeast India as a Northwest (of Southeast Asia), a South (of the Himalayas), a North (of Bangladesh, Arakan and Chinland), or a Centre with links to all these regions.

Thomas Machell was a remarkable character. Born in 1824, he was the son of a Yorkshire parson who wanted him to become a clerk in a mercantile house. But Thomas showed an adventurous streak. Not enamoured with ‘the idea of quill driving in an office’, he decided, at the age of 15, to run away from home to seek his fortune. His ten-year-old brother demanded to be taken along. ‘We walked three hundred miles [to London, Portsmouth and Brighton] and endured considerable hardships before we discovered that we had left our good fortune behind us and that we had better go back and look for it’. After this adventure, Thomas begged his father to send him to Australia ‘where I secretly determined to amass an immense fortune and bring it all home to him’.1 Instead, his father sent him to sea.

Our lives have become unimaginable without plants that at one time existed only in quite different parts of the world. Rice, maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cassava and countless other crops have spread all over the world and are important ingredients in the daily nutrition of hundreds of millions, or even billions, of people. Natural rubber enables car transport on all continents, and cotton and flax are indispensable in the textile industry.

How can we use historical source material to pinpoint social change? Embedding Agricultural Commodities shows six different ways, based on different types of historical source. Each chapter is concerned with the same process: the embedding of commodities in existing agrarian systems. Embedding is the term we use for the process of forging an agricultural commodity chain: introducing a new cash crop and making sure it endures.

Over the past 500 years westerners have turned into avid consumers of colonial products and various production systems in the Americas, Africa and Asia have adapted to serve the new markets that opened up in the wake of the "European encounter". The effects of these transformations for the long-term development of these societies are fiercely contested. How can we use historical source material to pinpoint this social change? This volume presents six different examples from countries in which commodities were embedded in existing production systems - tobacco, coffee, sugar and indigo in Indonesia, India and Cuba - to shed light on this key process in human history. To demonstrate the effectiveness of using different types of source material, each contributor presents a micro-study based on a different type of historical source: a diary, a petition, a "mail report", a review, a scientific study and a survey. As a result, the volume offers insights into how historians use their source material to construct narratives about the past and offers introductions to trajectories of agricultural commodity production, as well as much new information about the social struggles surrounding them.

In this theme section we explore why and when states knowingly refrain from recording people and their activities. States are not simply in pursuit of enhanced “legibility”; at times they also need to be able to “look away.” In explaining strategies of nonrecording, our focus is on how subjects negotiate with state recording agencies, how nonrecording relieves state agents from the burden of accountability, how the discretionary power of individual state agents aff ects (non)recording in unanticipated ways, and how states may project an illusion of vigorous recording internationally while actually engaging in deliberate nonrecording. Presenting case studies from China, Greece, the Netherlands, India, and Romania, we show that strategies of nonrecording are fl exible, selective, and aimed at certain populations—and that both citizens and noncitizens can be singled out for nonr ecording or derecording. In analyzing this state-produced social oblivion, divergences between national and local levels are of crucial signifi cance.

The partition of 1947 created two new independent states, India and Pakistan. The eastern part of Bengal joined Pakistan. Pakistan was a highly ambitious experiment in twentieth-century state making. And yet, from the beginning the state was beset with enormous challenges. This excerpt from a recent survey history of Bangladesh explains how these challenges worked out in East Pakistan and why political struggles soon crystallized around the issue of the Bengali language. This historical background is indispensable to understand the intense emotions surrounding the national language in Bangladesh today.