State power and identification schemes in Rakhine 71 1967; Leach 1973; Lieberman 1978). Amrith (2013:1) described the areas which incorporate Rohingya homelands, as being the centre of trade and communications, later severed in the post-WWII era by physical and conceptual boundaries between Myanmar, Bangladesh, and India, and also between South and Southeast Asia. The Bay of Bengal was once a region at the heart of global history. It was forgotten in the second half of the twentieth century, carved up by the boundaries of nation-states, its shared past divided into the separate compartments of national histories. The regions that gave shape to the postwar organization of academic knowledge— the ‘areas’ of area studies— drew a sharp distinction between ‘South Asia,’ on one hand, and ‘Southeast Asia,’ on the other: the line between them ran right through the middle of the Bay. Section 3 of the 1982 Citizenship Law, then, was part of a broader anticolonial revisionist history that re-imagined Myanmar as a bounded state with a stable population and fixed ethnic identities that pre-dated the British colonial period. This is what Charney (2016) refers to as ‘the myth of 1824.’ Participants for this research also challenged this myth, highlighting the interconnected and dynamic nature of this region and impact of expansionist states. For example: In the past, Arakan extended beyond the Naf river. Chittagong was a part of Arakan. In fact, today’s Rohingya derive from the same populations as the Hindus in Rakhine today. The Burman’s came late to the region. Then later they began the Burmanisation of Arakan or Rohang. It’s an imperialist project that continues today.9 In 2018 fieldwork, I travelled with two Rohingya men to Shahpuri island, now part of Bangladesh, at the mouth of the River Naf where Myanmar and Bangladesh meet.10 Shahpuri, the two Rohingya men explained, was the place in which the first Anglo-Burma war began in 1824. The East India Company, which dominated Bengal at the time claimed the almost deserted island of Shahpuri in 1823.11 In an act of aggression aimed at the British with whom there had been many border disputes, the island was then attacked and occupied by troops of the Burmese Konbaung dynasty. This led to the British declaration of war in March 1824 (Phayre 1883; Harvey 1925). The two Rohingya men described the nearby Coxes Bazar area as ‘a place built by the British’ prior to this time, that was ‘full of refugees—both Rohingya and Buddhist Rakhine.’ They explained that the multi-religious population was pushed out of what is today’s Rakhine State by the Konbaung kingdom from central Burma that had annexed parts of Arakan and tyrannised the populations there (see also Phayre 1883; Harvey 1925). The British entry