This book is an account of how the British imagined and represented the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) to make it amenable to their rule. As Angma Dey Jhala writes in her introduction to An Endangered History, “studying this fluid border area reveals a number of important developments in how colonial states created and imagined porous frontier zones, and the consequences of such colonial policies on later nation state formation” (p. xvii). Far from being an isolated backwater, the CHT was shaped by interactions with its Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist neighbors and, as colonialism progressed, with other parts of Britain's empire. Jhala's narrative focuses on the lives of colonialism's agents on the frontier and the forms of their engagement with the peoples who lived there. She extends that genre to which Ronald Inden's Imagining India and Bernard Cohn's paper on the Indian Census were such seminal forerunners, by applying their...

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