Willem Van Schendel
Biographic Data
| ID | 237162 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Willem Van Schendel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Willem |
| FAMILY NAME | Van Schendel |
| SIGNATURE | VAN SCHENDEL W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7641-4056 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 731 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Overcoming marginality
This article argues that we must pay attention to how local scholarship focusing on the borderlands of Southeast Asia is decolonizing Southeast Asian studies. The field of ‘Zo studies’ presents an example. It is unusual because local scholars take the lead, unlike in Southeast Asian studies as a whole, where Euro-American knowledge production has been, and continues to be, privileged and prominent. The Zo lands straddle the borders of Myanmar, In…
A hole in the British empire
This article considers a long-term stand-off between two forms of governance. Until the very end of British rule in India and Burma, a cluster of small polities effectively held imperialism at bay. Despite being surrounded, they remained independent and self-governing (in British parlance: ‘unadministered’) up until the eve of the Second World War. They have so far been overlooked in the historiography, and yet these rugged hills provide a unique…
Interspecies Mapping and Timing
This article argues for an interspecies methodology to challenge the human-derived spatial and temporal constructs that underpin most historical narratives. It also seeks to qualify the entrenched dichotomy between wildness and domestication. To this end, I focus on the interaction between humans and “mithuns” (Bos frontalis), bulky bovines endemic in the mountain forests of the eastern Himalayas. In this large region—covering parts of India, Mya…
Non-Human Labour History? Three Short Questions
Multi-species history, environmental humanities, Anthropocene studies and robotics all challenge core notions underlying labour history, such as ‘work’, ‘labour’ and ‘worker’. The note poses three questions about ‘non-human labour’ with a view to strengthening the dialogue between labour historians and practitioners of these new scholarly fields
Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces
Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces,' in 2019. This was the last of four events at which researchers presented and discussed ongoing work in Northeast India, Myanmar, Yunnan, Tibet, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia.We are much indebted to our project's research team members Mandy Sadan, Arupjyoti Saikia, and Dan Smyer Yü for their knowledge, inspiration, collegiality, and friendship over the years.We
Maritime Silk Road
Maritime Silk Road
Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces
Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces,' in 2019. This was the last of four events at which researchers presented and discussed ongoing work in Northeast India, Myanmar, Yunnan, Tibet, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia.We are much indebted to our project's research team members Mandy Sadan, Arupjyoti Saikia, and Dan Smyer Yü for their knowledge, inspiration, collegiality, and friendship over the years.We
A History of Bangladesh
Bangladesh did not exist as an independent state until 1971. Willem van Schendel's state-of-the-art history navigates the extraordinary twists and turns that created modern Bangladesh through ecological disaster, colonialism, partition, a war of independence and cultural renewal. In this revised and updated edition, Van Schendel offers a fascinating and highly readable account of life in Bangladesh over the last two millennia. Based on the latest…
Fragmented sovereignty and unregulated flows
The concept of the Silk Road has recently been repackaged as a China-led inter-state enterprise that will lead to ‘a win-win attempt for all’. This technocratic utopia of superior infrastructure, smooth transport routes, and boosted trade should be challenged, because it ignores the countless flows and networks across Eurasia that states fail to control. The zone connecting China to India across Myanmar and Bangladesh exemplifies the obstacles th…
Being a Slave. Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean
This multidisciplinary volume brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean. The volume discusses a variety of qualitative data on the experience of being a slave in order to recover ordinary lives and, crucially, to place this experience in its Asian local context. Building on the rich scholarship on the slave trade, this volume offers a unique perspective th…
Rethinking the Bangladesh state
The study of the Bangladesh state continues to be a path less travelled for scholars of South Asia. The articles in this special issue aim to offer fresh perspectives based on recent ethnographic work on a variety of aspects of the state by new young national and international scholars. Overall, there is a pressing need to pay closer attention to the state and to think about it in new ways, and in this brief concluding article, we offer some thou…
Ethnicity and Democracy in the Eastern Himalayan Borderland
Borderland Histories, Northeastern India
A War Within a War
In 1971 a war led to the creation of Bangladesh. Instantly three narratives sprang up: the war as a national triumph, the war as betrayal and shame, and the war as a glorious campaign. Today more layered interpretations are superseding these 'first-generation narratives'. Taking the case of insurgents from neighbouring India who, against their will, became embroiled in the war, this article seeks to contribute to 'second-generation narratives' th…
The Camera as Witness
The Camera as Witness lifts the veil off the little known world of Mizoram and challenges - through unpublished photographs - core assumptions in the writing of India's national history. The pictures in the book establish the transformation of this society and the many forms of modernity that have emerged in it. It emphasises how 'indigenous people' in Mizoram used cameras to produce distinct modern identities and represent themselves to themselv…
Spatial Moments
Camera As Witness
What Is Agrarian Labour? Contrasting Indigo Production in Colonial India and Indonesia
In scholarly writings, the term “agrarian labour” is used variously. It can refer to a very specific set of productive activities – the cultivation of crops and animal husbandry – but it can also have the much broader connotation of rural or non-urban labour. These different uses can be confusing, especially in comparative research. This paper starts from the French comparative agriculture school and its conceptualization of three nested scales o…
Asian Borderlands
Global Challenges (FSW)
Borderland Lives in Northern South Asia
This book provides valuable new ethnographic insights into life along some of the most contentious borders in the world. The collected essays portray existence at different points across India's northern frontiers and, in one instance, along borders within India. Whether discussing Shi'i Muslims striving to be patriotic Indians in the Kashmiri district of Kargil or Bangladeshis living uneasily in an enclave surrounded by Indian territory, the con…
Labour Migration and Human Trafficking in Southeast Asia
Introduction
This is a book about transnational mobile practices. The contributors share a common concern: to push social analysis beyond received notions of legality and illegality and to think outside the box of state authority versus criminal behaviour. In doing so, we join a growing group of social scientists searching for new ways to understand the relationship between human behaviour and multiple authorities. For us, simple dichotomies will not do; inst…
Introduction. Mobile Practices and Regimes of Permissiveness
Working on Labor
Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance
Area studies' use a geographical metaphor to visualise and naturalise particular social spaces as well as a particular scale of analysis. They produce specific geographies of knowing but also create geographies of ignorance. Taking Southeast Asia as an example, in this paper I explore how areas are imagined and how area knowledge is structured to construct area 'heartlands' as well as area 'borderlands'. This is illustrated by considering a large…
Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands
The historical study of borderlands has been unduly restricted by an emphasis on the legal, political, and geographical aspects of borders and by a state-centered approach. Too often, the question has been how states have dealt with their borderlands rather than how borderlands have dealt with their states-culturally, economically, and politically. This article outlines a comparative approach to the social dynamics (struggles, adaptations, and cr…
Stateless in South Asia
Onlyin the eyes of the law are we indians." With these words Anu Chairman sketched the position of tens of thousands of people living beyond the reach of state and nation in dozens of enclaves in South Asia. Much of the recent wave of literature on the nation is concerned with critiquing an earlier generation of scholars who tended to assume a correspondence between nations and states. In the new literature, the connections among nation, state, t…
The Invention of the 'Jummas
This paper deals with socio-cultural innovation in the hills of southeastern Bangladesh. Outsiders have always been struck by the ethnic diversity of this area. The literature-written mainly by British civil servants, Bengali men of letters, and European anthropologists-presents a picture of twelve distinct 'tribes', all practising swidden or shifting agriculture, locally known asjhumcultivation. In addition, there are Bengali immigrants who do n…
I Am Not a Refugee
In the wake of Partition-the break-up of British India in 1947-millions of people moved across the new borders between Pakistan and India. Although much has been written about these 'Partition refugees,' a comprehensive picture remains elusive. This paper advocates a rethinking of the study of cross-border migration in South Asia. It argues especially for looking at categories of cross-border migrants that have so far been ignored, and for employ…
Asian Borderlands
Global Challenges (FSW)
Easy come, easy go
Working Through Partition
Partition, the break-up of colonial India in 1947, has been the subject of considerable serious historical research, but almost exclusively from two distinctive perspectives: as a macropolitical event; or as a cultural and personal disaster. Remarkably, very little is known about the socioeconomic impact of Partition on different localities and individuals. This exploratory essay considers how Partition affected working people's livelihood and la…
Labour Migration and Human Trafficking in Southeast Asia
A Politics of Nudity
This article uses photographs to explore the meanings of nudity in a district of Bangladesh. Throughout the colonial and postcolonial periods, photography was a major tool here in the framing of a confrontation between local and external cultural styles. In this confrontation, nudity was used as a visual marker of specific, but contradictory, local characteristics. It stood variously for primitivity, underdevelopment, indecency and indigeneity. I…
Being a Slave. Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean
This multidisciplinary volume brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean. The volume discusses a variety of qualitative data on the experience of being a slave in order to recover ordinary lives and, crucially, to place this experience in its Asian local context. Building on the rich scholarship on the slave trade, this volume offers a unique perspective th…
Madmen' of Mymensingh
Southeast Asia
In this issue we focus on claims made by Willem van Schendel in an article 'Southeast Asia: An idea whose time is past?'. Specialists in the field, invited to comment, are Robert Cribb, James D. Sidaway, and Tharapi Than. Willem van Schendel, Southeast Asia: An idea whose time is past? - 'Southeast Asia': A good place to start from (Robert Crib) - Long live trans-area studies! (James D. Sidaway) - If scholar foreign policy works... (Tharapi Than)…
Stretching Labour Historiography
Studies of working people have long been framed by the concepts of “free” and “unfree” labour, a pair that distinguishes workers who are fully proletarianized from those who are not. Proletarians are working people without property, and therefore compelled to sell their capacities for money, but at the same time personally free to choose whom to sell their capacities to. Such (double-) free labour is contrasted with labour that is unfree, either …
Rethinking the Bangladesh state
The study of the Bangladesh state continues to be a path less travelled for scholars of South Asia. The articles in this special issue aim to offer fresh perspectives based on recent ethnographic work on a variety of aspects of the state by new young national and international scholars. Overall, there is a pressing need to pay closer attention to the state and to think about it in new ways, and in this brief concluding article, we offer some thou…
A War Within a War
In 1971 a war led to the creation of Bangladesh. Instantly three narratives sprang up: the war as a national triumph, the war as betrayal and shame, and the war as a glorious campaign. Today more layered interpretations are superseding these 'first-generation narratives'. Taking the case of insurgents from neighbouring India who, against their will, became embroiled in the war, this article seeks to contribute to 'second-generation narratives' th…
Non-Human Labour History? Three Short Questions
Multi-species history, environmental humanities, Anthropocene studies and robotics all challenge core notions underlying labour history, such as ‘work’, ‘labour’ and ‘worker’. The note poses three questions about ‘non-human labour’ with a view to strengthening the dialogue between labour historians and practitioners of these new scholarly fields
Origins of the Burma rice boom, 1850-1880
Interspecies Mapping and Timing
This article argues for an interspecies methodology to challenge the human-derived spatial and temporal constructs that underpin most historical narratives. It also seeks to qualify the entrenched dichotomy between wildness and domestication. To this end, I focus on the interaction between humans and “mithuns” (Bos frontalis), bulky bovines endemic in the mountain forests of the eastern Himalayas. In this large region—covering parts of India, Mya…
What Is Agrarian Labour? Contrasting Indigo Production in Colonial India and Indonesia
In scholarly writings, the term “agrarian labour” is used variously. It can refer to a very specific set of productive activities – the cultivation of crops and animal husbandry – but it can also have the much broader connotation of rural or non-urban labour. These different uses can be confusing, especially in comparative research. This paper starts from the French comparative agriculture school and its conceptualization of three nested scales o…
After the limelight
The “Comilla experiment” is by far the best-known rural development program in Bangladesh. It started in 1959–60 as a field project for government officials following a course in rural development at the Academy for Village (later: Rural) Development near Comilla town. This Academy (together with its twin in Peshawar, West Pakistan) was created in 1959 after an earlier program for rural development, the Village Agricultural and Industrial Develop…
After the limelight
The “Comilla experiment” is by far the best-known rural development program in Bangladesh. It started in 1959–60 as a field project for government officials following a course in rural development at the Academy for Village (later: Rural) Development near Comilla town. This Academy (together with its twin in Peshawar, West Pakistan) was created in 1959 after an earlier program for rural development, the Village Agricultural and Industrial Develop…
Peasant Mobility. The Odds of Life in Rural Bangladesh
Peasant Mobility
Madmen' of Mymensingh
Self‐rescue and survival
(1986). Self‐rescue and survival: The rural poor in Bangladesh. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 41-59
Rural Labourers in Bengal, 1880 to 1980
Origins of the Burma rice boom, 1850-1880
Slow Change in Colonial South India
The Invention of the 'Jummas
This paper deals with socio-cultural innovation in the hills of southeastern Bangladesh. Outsiders have always been struck by the ethnic diversity of this area. The literature-written mainly by British civil servants, Bengali men of letters, and European anthropologists-presents a picture of twelve distinct 'tribes', all practising swidden or shifting agriculture, locally known asjhumcultivation. In addition, there are Bengali immigrants who do n…
Three Deltas
Introduction Precolonial Agrarian Relations Agrarian Relations in the Early Colonial Period Agrarian Relations in the Late Colonial Period Post-Colonial Agrarian Relations Conclusion
Three Deltas
Easy come, easy go
Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands
The historical study of borderlands has been unduly restricted by an emphasis on the legal, political, and geographical aspects of borders and by a state-centered approach. Too often, the question has been how states have dealt with their borderlands rather than how borderlands have dealt with their states-culturally, economically, and politically. This article outlines a comparative approach to the social dynamics (struggles, adaptations, and cr…
Working Through Partition
Partition, the break-up of colonial India in 1947, has been the subject of considerable serious historical research, but almost exclusively from two distinctive perspectives: as a macropolitical event; or as a cultural and personal disaster. Remarkably, very little is known about the socioeconomic impact of Partition on different localities and individuals. This exploratory essay considers how Partition affected working people's livelihood and la…
Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance
Area studies' use a geographical metaphor to visualise and naturalise particular social spaces as well as a particular scale of analysis. They produce specific geographies of knowing but also create geographies of ignorance. Taking Southeast Asia as an example, in this paper I explore how areas are imagined and how area knowledge is structured to construct area 'heartlands' as well as area 'borderlands'. This is illustrated by considering a large…
A Politics of Nudity
This article uses photographs to explore the meanings of nudity in a district of Bangladesh. Throughout the colonial and postcolonial periods, photography was a major tool here in the framing of a confrontation between local and external cultural styles. In this confrontation, nudity was used as a visual marker of specific, but contradictory, local characteristics. It stood variously for primitivity, underdevelopment, indecency and indigeneity. I…
Stateless in South Asia
Onlyin the eyes of the law are we indians." With these words Anu Chairman sketched the position of tens of thousands of people living beyond the reach of state and nation in dozens of enclaves in South Asia. Much of the recent wave of literature on the nation is concerned with critiquing an earlier generation of scholars who tended to assume a correspondence between nations and states. In the new literature, the connections among nation, state, t…
I Am Not a Refugee
In the wake of Partition-the break-up of British India in 1947-millions of people moved across the new borders between Pakistan and India. Although much has been written about these 'Partition refugees,' a comprehensive picture remains elusive. This paper advocates a rethinking of the study of cross-border migration in South Asia. It argues especially for looking at categories of cross-border migrants that have so far been ignored, and for employ…
Illicit Flows and Criminal Things
Read an excerpt from the book
Illicit Flows and Criminal Things
The Bengal Borderland
Stretching Labour Historiography
Studies of working people have long been framed by the concepts of “free” and “unfree” labour, a pair that distinguishes workers who are fully proletarianized from those who are not. Proletarians are working people without property, and therefore compelled to sell their capacities for money, but at the same time personally free to choose whom to sell their capacities to. Such (double-) free labour is contrasted with labour that is unfree, either …
A History of Bangladesh
Bangladesh is a new name for an old land whose history is little known to the wider world. A country chiefly famous in the West for media images of poverty, underdevelopment, and natural disasters, Bangladesh did not exist as an independent state until 1971. Willem van Schendel's history reveals the country's vibrant, colourful past and its diverse culture as it navigates the extraordinary twists and turns that have created modern Bangladesh. The…
Introduction
This is a book about transnational mobile practices. The contributors share a common concern: to push social analysis beyond received notions of legality and illegality and to think outside the box of state authority versus criminal behaviour. In doing so, we join a growing group of social scientists searching for new ways to understand the relationship between human behaviour and multiple authorities. For us, simple dichotomies will not do; inst…
Introduction. Mobile Practices and Regimes of Permissiveness
Political science (28 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Geography (24 works) · History (19 works) · Archaeology (16 works) · Economics (14 works) · Law (14 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (14 works) · History (11 works) · Ancient history (10 works)