Publications

Between 1850 and 1950, the Indian Ocean teemed with people, commodities, and ideas: pilgrims and armies, commerce and labor, the politics of Mahatma Gandhi and the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore were all linked in surprising ways. Sugata Bose finds in these intricate social and economic webs evidence of the interdependence of the peoples of the lands beyond the horizon, from the Middle East to East Africa to Southeast Asia. In following this narrative, we discover that our usual ways of looking at history—through the lens of nationalism or globalization—are not adequate. The national ideal did not simply give way to inevitable globalization in the late twentieth century, as is often supposed; Bose reveals instead the vital importance of an intermediate historical space, where interregional geographic entities like the Indian Ocean rim foster nationalist identities and goals yet simultaneously facilitate interaction among communities. ‘A Hundred Horizons’ merges statistics and myth, history and poetry, in a remarkable reconstruction of how a region’s culture, economy, politics, and imagination are woven together in time and place.

Praised for its “unusual breadth and ambition” in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Kumkum Chatterjee believes the book’s “most powerful idea” is that the “territorially delimited nation-state may not necessarily be the most relevant or appropriate entity for a better and more comprehensive understanding of nationalist identity and imagination. Bose seeks to show how Indian soldiers serving overseas, or Indian labor serving in the mines and plantations outside India, imagined and perceived an Indian homeland. Particularly interesting is the discussion of how the two iconic figures of Indian nationalism, Gandhi and Bose, during their stays in South Africa and Southeast Asia, respectively, derived valuable lessons about how to accommodate “internal” differences of caste, religion, class, etc. within anticolonial, nationalist movements.”

David Arnold in The Times Literary Supplement finds the book “timely” and “thought-provoking”, Martin Lewis in the Geographical Review calls it “an empirically rich work based on a careful and creative use of primary sources” with the writing “crisp and accessible… The author couches his arguments in social theory, but does so in a graciously understated way.”

Published by Permanent Black in India and Harvard University Press in the rest of the world in 2006; paperback in 2009.