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The Tamil country has a long history of being a part of the larger world of maritime trade in the Indian Ocean region, with its trade links extending even up to Rome in the ancient period. The coastline was thus dotted with ports which were essential links between the hinterland and the external world. Whereas the patterns of trade remained remarkably stable over the centuries, the scenario with regard to the ports and their relative prosperity

Focusing on the northern Bay of Bengal region, this book is a welcome addition to both the corpus of Indian Ocean studies in general, and to the study of smaller regions within this large body of water in particular. Divided into two parts, the first being ‘Chittagong and the Northern Bay of Bengal in the Early Historical Period’, and the second on ‘Shipbuilding Culture and Technology in Chittagong and the Northern Bay of Bengal’, the book, while not being strictly chronology bound, covers a wide sweep of history.

The history of Maratha-ruled States in the last quarter of the eighteenth century is rather complicated, to some extent because it is the intertwined history (apart from the Pune court) of four major States. These four were the territories ruled by the Shinde, Holkar, Bhonsle and Gaikwad dynasties, all of which acknowledged the Peshwa as their nominal overlord.

Fernand Braudel’s call for studying the interactions among interrelated ‘ensembles’ (politics, social hierarchies, economy and culture) in a complex society (Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, 1977, p. 8) finds resonance in this thought-provoking collection of essays on pre-modern South Asia. The seven contributors, including the three editors (who are authors too), demonstrate an exemplary maturity in handling pre-modern testimonies. In the current preferences for cultural studies in South Asian history, often privileging literary texts, synchronic treatments of the past(s) are common.

The very title of Bhairabi Prasad Sahu’s book The Making of Regions in Indian History: Society, State and Identity in Premodern Odisha suggests that he is looking for processes that went into the making of regions and the associated individualities. The book reminds this reviewer of a volume, Centres Out There? Facets of Subregional Identities in Orissa, edited by Hermann Kulke and Georg Berkemer, published in 2011 where attention was drawn to look beyond the ‘Golden Triangle’ of Bhubaneswar, Puri and Konarak and focus on their hinterland and periphery.

The book is a welcome addition to the field of the history of sociolinguistics and sociolinguistic anthropology. Though the book is very short with 122 pages of analysis, the history of sociolinguistics is accurately presented with a nuanced socio-cultural understanding of the Anglo-Indian community in Hyderabad. Divided into six chapters, including the introduction and conclusion.