Fifty kilometres off Port Blair lies an island the modern world has agreed, by law, never to enter. North Sentinel Island is home to the Sentinelese, one of the last peoples on Earth who have never been absorbed into the societies around them — and who have made their wishes on the matter unmistakably clear, using the only vocabulary available to them: arrows, drawn bows, and two and a half centuries of refusal. The Forbidden Shore tells the story of everyone else: the eighteenth-century surveyors who first charted the island; the colonial officer who abducted Sentinelese captives in 1880; the Indian anthropologists who spent decades leaving gifts on the beach; the fishermen and the American missionary who did not survive uninvited landings; and the lawyers, administrators, and coast guards who eventually built one of the strangest legal structures in the world around a few hundred people who never asked for it — an exclusion zone whose entire purpose is not to extract a resource or repel an enemy, but to protect the right of a population to remain unknown. Drawing on the author's own background in the law of the sea and island jurisdiction, this book treats North Sentinel not as an anthropological curiosity but as a legal and ethical case study without real parallel: what happens when a state, an international system, and a curious world are all forced to organise themselves around a single, unanswerable question — what do we owe to people who have told us, clearly, that they want nothing from us at all? Inside, you will find: A full historical timeline, from the first 1771 sighting to the death of John Chau in 2018 The legal architecture of the exclusion zone, and how it compares to other protected-access regimes worldwide, including Portugal's Ilhas Selvagens The place of uncontacted peoples in international law and the doctrine of sovereignty without consent A clear-eyed reckoning with disease, tourism, voyeurism, and what "protection" actually requires A reference Island Fact Sheet, glossary, and full bibliography for readers and researchers alike Carefully researched and written at a deliberate distance — no photograph or identifying image of the Sentinelese appears in these pages, by design — The Forbidden Shore is for readers of narrative nonfiction, legal history, and anthropology who want to understand not just an island, but the boundary the rest of us agreed to draw around it.

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• Earth and related Environmental Sciences - Natural Sciences
• Law - Social Sciences
• Anthropology - Social Sciences