Empire and Exile: Reflections on the Ibis Trilogy

Clare Anderson

doi:10.1093/ahr/121.5.1523

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between “history” and “fiction” in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy. The novels constitute a means of exploring the relationship between the local and the global in the making of the modern world, in particular by focusing on ordinary people’s experiences of empire. Ghosh uses opium as a narrative device to articulate forms of imperial degradation, and connects it to the history of forced labor mobility. Despite a shared political project that seeks to give dignity to subaltern people in history, the novels’ literary representation of the lives of men, women, and children is in some ways more nuanced than historians’ empirical constructions, which are necessarily pieced together from fragmented colonial archives. Thus the line between Indian Ocean “history” and “fiction” becomes unquestionably blurred.

Highlights

The Ibis trilogy - Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) - takes forward the concerns of Amitav Ghosh’s fourth novel, The Glass Palace (2000), by exploring the relationship between what might be termed the global and the local in world history
Its chronology stretches from the annexation of Burma in the nineteenth century to the Second World War and its aftermath
In the Ibis trilogy, Ghosh renders more expansive still the theme of connected Empire through the literary creation of an Indian Ocean and South China Sea of subaltern lives, which moves from the early nineteenth century to the present day

Summary

Introduction

The Ibis trilogy - Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) - takes forward the concerns of Amitav Ghosh’s fourth novel, The Glass Palace (2000), by exploring the relationship between what might be termed the global and the local in world history.

Results

Conclusion