The classification of natural spaces and cultural practices as ‘heritage’ profoundly alters their form and function. Individuals and communities responsible for maintaining the space or practice are often subjected to the dictates of governments, non-governmental institutions and tourists’ tastes, whilst the symbols of heritage themselves are projected as emblematic of how the state wishes itself to be perceived. The condition of statelessness magnifies the vulnerability of communities to these processes of heritagization, with the state co-opting cultural attributes into icons of heritage without any prospect of redress and exacerbating the invisibility and relative lack of agency that characterize many stateless communities. This chapter explores these issues in the context of mobile maritime communities that are stateless or at risk of statelessness in Southeast Asia. It demonstrates how states such as Malaysia, Thailand and Myanmar have introduced restrictions on everyday livelihood practices through the imposition of marine protected areas and transformed other aspects of these communities’ lives, such as their houseboats, into objects of touristic consumption under the aegis of natural, cultural and intangible ‘heritage’ that serve to benefit the state yet further degrade the human rights of individuals in the affected communities.

The two worlds of Bengal and Malaya were connected through language, religion, maritime trade and colonial administration. In addition to being a trade route, the Bay of Bengal carried flows of migrants, information, ideas, cultural practices, pilgrims and soldiers over the centuries. However, this tie between the two worlds became more direct and extensive as British bureaucratic control spread over the Malay Peninsula from Calcutta, creating opportunities in various capacities for the Bengalis. By exploring the cultural contexts of migration, and the routes and nodal points of bonding with the Malay world, this chapter examines the administrative web that cemented existing flows of people, commodities and cultural practices from Bengal.

Linguistic and Cultural Links

The linguistic connection between Bengal and Malaya dates back to the early Christian era. In the Malay Archipelago and mainland Southeast Asia, Austroasiatic languages are widely spoken, which are also used throughout some parts of India, Bangladesh, Nepal and the southern borders of China. Hindu and Buddhist preachers from the Indian subcontinent, including Bengal, spread their beliefs in Southeast Asia in Sanskrit and Pali, leading to Indian linguistic influences in the region. The influence of Bangla, in particular, can be seen through the use of a pre-Nāgarī script. Srivijaya, a Buddhist thalassocratic empire based on the island of Sumatra, also had religious, cultural and trade links with the Buddhist Pala dynasty of Bengal.

The Malay language has borrowed many Sanskrit words. The Bangla script and the Sanskrit language are found in the Sejarah Melayu (Figure 1.1). Lanman suggests that Sanskrit influenced not only the Malay vocabulary but also ideas. About 45 per cent of the total Bangla lexicon is composed of naturally modified Sanskrit words and corrupted forms of Sanskrit. Similarly, there are many Sanskrit loanwords in the Bahasa Melayu. Although Bangla belongs to the Indo-European languages family, while Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian/Austronesian family, many common Sanskrit loanwords can be found in classic Malay and Bangla. Both languages have borrowed a good number of standard Arabic and Persian words (Tables 1.1 and 1.2).

One of the earliest references to Bengal in Malay texts is in Raja Culan's Misa Melayu (The Mass of Malay), dating back to the second half of the eighteenth century. It mentions that a British captain had come from Bengal.

Quantum Hall states are the first examples of topological insulators that demonstrate completely contrasting electronic behavior between the bulk and the edges of the sample. The bulk of the system is insulating, while there exists conducting states at the edges. Moreover, the Hall conductivity is quantized in units of a universal constant, e2/h. It became clear later on that the quantization is actually related to a topological invariant known as the Chern number. The geometric interpretation of this invariant is provided by the Gauss–Bonnet theorem, which relates the integral of the Gaussian curvature over a closed surface to a constant that simply counts the number of ‘genus’ (or holes) of the object. In solid state physics, the closed surface is the Brillouin zone, and the Gaussian curvature is analogous to a quantity known as the Berry curvature, integral of which over the Brillouin zone yields the quantization of the Hall conductivity.

In Chapter 1, we begin with a historical overview of the quantum Hall effect. The experiment and the physical systems are described with an emphasis on the two-dimensional (2D) nature of the ‘dirty’ electronic system in the presence of a strong perpendicular magnetic field at low temperature. The Hall resistivity as a function of the field shows quantized plateaus in unit of h/e2 with an accuracy of one part in more than a billion. Very surprisingly, the longitudinal resistivity synergetically vanishes at the positions of the plateaus for the Hall resistivity. This indicates the emergence of a phase with an inherent ambiguousness of being a perfect conductor and a perfect insulator at the same time. However, such an ambiguity can only be reconciled for an electron gas confined in a plane in the presence of a magnetic field.

Quite intriguingly, the presence of the perpendicular magnetic field introduces ‘another’ quantization, which replaces the band structure (energy as a function of the wavevector) of the electronic system. This quantization was shown via solving the Schrödinger equation in the presence of a Landau gauge. The resultant energy levels of this problem are the infinitely degenerate Landau levels, which slightly broaden due to the presence of impurity and disorder but still remain distinct and cause quantization of the Hall conductivity as the magnetic field is ramped up gradually.

Chapter 4 explores how a range of popular spy guides published in the second half of the eighteenth century both shape and reflect a sense of the city as home to fraud and deception. It situates these surveys of urban life alongside earlier precursors like Ned Ward’s The London Spy and mid-century writing about the city, including the novel, that presented the city as home to various cheats and frauds. The repetitive works, in which a new arrival is taken on a tour through the city by one versed in its ways, highlight various tensions in the representation of the metropolis in the period, including between claims to novelty and the repetition of familiar scenes and between an understanding of the city as a space of false appearances and an insistence that these performances can be read and understood.

The epilogue covers the development from Basel I to III and reflections on the evolution of capital regulation in the long run. Particular emphasis is given to the divergence of risk-weighted and risk-unweighted capital ratios among large, global banks – most of which have their roots in the nineteenth century. The chapter calls for a fundamental reassessment of banking regulation. From a historical perspective, regulatory frameworks are highly path dependent and seldom fundamentally reconsidered, aiming to increase financial stability. Moreover, once we accept a certain degree of banking instability in modern banking, the focus should be on who covers losses and how significant such losses can potentially be without the involvement of the public.

Despite an international legal and normative framework and other global efforts to prevent childhood statelessness, an estimated 70,000 stateless children are born each year in the countries that are home to the twenty largest populations of stateless persons. Children continue to be born stateless, largely due to the inheritance of statelessness from one generation to another. In Southeast Asia, the various causes of statelessness revolve around discriminatory nationality laws premised on race, ethnicity, gender, religion and many other grounds. This chapter examines the different forms of discrimination that engender and perpetuate childhood statelessness in this subregion. It argues that many hereditary and protracted cases of statelessness experienced by children result from direct and indirect discriminatory laws, policies and practices. Case studies from Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia are discussed to illustrate the dynamics of discrimination that arbitrarily deprive children of their right to a nationality. In addition, the chapter draws on the perspectives of the applicable international norms and their limitations, as well as presents some insights into potential solutions for countering this phenomenon.

In Pakistan, the term muhajir (migrant) carries religious, political, and biographical significance, pointing to the role that mass migration has played in shaping the country's experience of decolonization. Nearly six million people crossed into Pakistan as involuntary migrants or “evacuees” shortly after independence (1947) under the protection of an official “transfer of population” accord that was launched by the newly formed federal governments of India and Pakistan in an effort to stem the outbreak of communal genocide on both sides of the partitioned province of Punjab. The archive of the anticolonial nationalist period tells us that mass migration was not envisioned in the outline of Muslim emancipation. As late as June of 1947, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader and chief political strategist of the All-India Muslim League (AIML), could therefore advise his Muslim supporters to “stick to their homelands” in India and “avoid the temptation” to migrate to Pakistan (AIML June 9, 1947). Arriving against late colonial expectations, Muslim migrants entering Pakistan were referred to by the state and within public discourses as muhajireen (migrants/refugees), a term whose Islamic connotations were robustly utilized in the post-Partition context to frame the incoming population as affectees, co-nationals, and citizens-in-the-making.

Included yet distinguished from the larger body of mass migrants within Pakistan at the time of Partition were Muslims from northern and central India, who, in contrast to the majority of the muhajireen arriving in Pakistan at this time, were represented in emergent political terms as ideologically guided voluntary migrants. This section of Pakistan's mass-migrant population came to be referred to as “Muhajirs” in more durable and ethnically charged terms, a shift that is underscored by a linguistic and political transformation of muhajir from a descriptor into a proper name. The demographic upheavals associated with Partition were of such a scale that Muhajirs soon became a numerical majority in the major cities of the southern province of Sindh. The regional-, urban-, and neighborhood-level transformations resulting from this newly found “majority– minority” status were most evident in Karachi, the provincial capital and colonial port city, and the locus for this study.

Today, many millions will spend time reading an e-book. All will have excellent reasons for using digital formats. Some will read on screens because no other option is given: perhaps students whose lecturers assign digitised textbooks, or Kindle Unlimited patrons sitting down with a new novel that has no print edition. Others will have had a choice. If asked why, on that day and for that book, they opted for digital rather than print, readers will cite a familiar array of factors: speed of access, searchable text, and so on. They will explain how their personal requirements and circumstances make e-books the right choice at certain times. But many will do all of this while holding e-books at arm’s-length. E-books will be described as part of their reading lives; even an indispensable part. Yet they will remain distinct from ‘proper books’ and ‘actual books’.

The lack of citizenship or statelessness may be brought about by action, misaction and inaction of not only the state but the society in the country as well. The state and society often join hands in depriving a community of citizenship and, in so doing, both parties may act legally and extra-legally against recognizing and giving identity documentation to the community in question, again according to the text of the law, its implementation, or both. The society in question may opt to return citizenship to the same community and encourage the state or state-like entities to implement it. This chapter discusses the situation of the Rohingyas during the political transition in Myanmar (from 2011 to 2020) when the state and society joined hands in legally, extralegally, and/or socially depriving the Rohingyas of citizenship and identity documentation and arbitrarily implementing and mis-implementing the Myanmar Citizenship Law. The main part of the chapter traces the Rohingya moment during the Myanmar Spring (February 2021) and discusses four positive developments in the situation of the Rohingyas after the February 1, 2021 coup, concluding with a caution and some suggestions for the way ahead.