Francis Buchanan in Southeast Bengal (1798)

Francis Buchanan was born in Scotland in 1762 and qualified as a medical doctor in 1783. He made several journeys to Asia and went on to become one of British India’s foremost surveyors. His travel accounts/surveys have been?published?and?republished?in?India.

In this volume Prof. Willem van Schendel presents a 200 years old, virtually unknown document ‘An Account of a Journey Undertaken by Order of the Board of Trade Through the Provinces of Chittagong and Tiperah in Order to Look Out for the Places Most Proper for the Cultivation of Spices’ by Francis Buchanan, M.D. Buchanan undertook this journey in 1798 and only one copy of his report survives in the British Library which has remained?unpublished?so?far.

It is the earliest detailed travel account on the region that we have and is a significant source of new information on eighteenth century Bengal, Arakan,?Tripura,?Cachar,?Manipur,?Mizoram?and?Burma.

His account is full of observations about social life, places of pilgrimage, ruins of centuries old Buddhist temples and stupas, etc. He also reports about quality of soil, geographical peculiarities and the state of agriculture, trade and local products in the regions he visited. The information furnished by him about the Chittagong Hill Tracts is simply invaluable for the re­construction?of?the?history?of?the?area.

The document is additionally important as a record of British expansion in the area. His account can also be seen as an example of how Europeans were beginning to understand the world about them more and more by means of a critical use of sources of information and by experiment. Further, the document being Buchanan’s first full travel account is important for a proper?understanding?of?his?later?surveys.

Finally, Buchanan is ‘first and foremost an intellectual forebear of all social scientists trying to make sense of social structure and social changes in South Asia’. So historians, students of economy and social scientists all will find the account invaluable.