This essay focuses on the long history of archipelagic formations in the Bay of Bengal as sites of legal experimentation. This history is often narrated beginning with convict transportation and the permanent occupation of the Andaman Islands as a British penal settlement in 1857 and the violent erasure of indigenous cultures that followed it. This essay focuses instead on the hundred years preceding it where the English East India Company experimented with abandoning jurisdiction over the lesser-known islands off the Bengal and Burma coasts and people who lived on them, despite being in the position of a territorial sovereign. These experimentations were recorded most eloquently in legal and administrative records about crime - which included, for example, how assault and “river dacoity” on the deltaic islands of the Sunderbans in lower Bengal were to be dealt with and how men convicted of murder on the islands off the Tenasserim coast in southern Burma were to be prosecuted. In each case, prompted by tensions between the Company and the British Crown, policing and prosecution were abandoned, but this escaped public attention as it took place on the empire’s maritime edges. Although jurisdictional claims were central to the expansionist aims of the British empire in the nineteenth century around the Indian Ocean, these instances offer an alternate account of sovereignty, one where assertions and abandonments were both critical to the making of empires.

中文翻译：

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在安达曼海漂流：法律、群岛和海洋主权的形成


本文重点介绍了孟加拉湾群岛形成作为法律实验地点的悠久历史。这段历史通常从囚犯运输和 1857 年将安达曼群岛永久占领为英国流放地以及随之而来的对土著文化的暴力抹杀开始。本文的重点是在此之前的一百年里，英国东印度公司尝试放弃对孟加拉和缅甸海岸附近鲜为人知的岛屿以及居住在这些岛屿上的人们的管辖权，尽管他们处于领土主权的地位。这些实验在关于犯罪的法律和行政记录中得到了最有力的记录——例如，包括如何处理下孟加拉邦桑德班斯三角洲岛屿上的袭击和“河流破坏”，以及在缅甸南部特纳塞林海岸附近的岛屿上被判犯有谋杀罪的男子如何被起诉。在每起案件中，由于公司与英国王室之间的紧张关系，警务和起诉都被放弃了，但这并没有引起公众的注意，因为它发生在帝国的海上边缘。尽管管辖权要求是 19 世纪大英帝国围绕印度洋的扩张目标的核心，但这些实例提供了另一种主权解释，其中主张和放弃对帝国的形成都至关重要。