Sea coasts around the world are now wrapped securely in national states and their separate national histories, but they also have connected histories as homelands of globalization, as productive spaces, woven together by networks of oceanic mobility, which continue to nurture global capitalism. The world’s most productive coastal environments had been connected from ancient times by sailors across the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and South China Sea, but in the centuries running through and following the Mongol Empire, overland and overseas mobility expanded rapidly; this dramatically increased productive powers in coastal environments around the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, where commercial capital fed by local communities enriched Europeans who would then go on to imagine themselves as inventors of capitalism. This Webinar focuses on coastal environments around the Bay of Bengal, where local societies sustained militant European merchant companies. This is the start of a Coastal Histories Collaboration, and we invite others to share research on other coastal environments.
Vidhya Raveendranathan explains how fishing communities became the labor force and transportation infrastructure enabling global deep-sea merchant networks to attach themselves to the land to reap profits from the labor of inland weaving communities along the Tami coast in southeast India.
Marina Kaneti explains how social environments evolved on the coast over centuries to generate supportive host communities for sailors and merchants from overseas, becoming in the process vibrant inter-cultural spaces where women played critical roles in forging connectivity among locals and foreigners.
David Ludden explains how post-Mongol centuries of inland mobility traveling north to south down the Indian peninsula produced ever more complex and productive agrarian economies, generated cloth that fed world markets and enriched Dutch and English merchants, and eventually yielded the taxes that fed the growth of the British Empire.
March 11, 2021
Organizer: NYU Abu Dhabi Institute
Presenter: Marina Kaneti (NUS), David Ludden (NYU) and Vidhya Raveendranationan (NYUSH)