Global Asia in the Modern World
Spring 2021
HIST-UH 2119. 1/17/2021 – 5/3/2021. MW 4:05- 5:20pm. GST. Online
Credit hours: 4. No Prerequisites.
Satisfies the pre-1800 History requirement. Global Thematic
Counts for History Program oceans systems: Indian Ocean and Asia-Pacific World
David Ludden
Professor of History
This course is about the globalization of human connectivity as an ongoing transformative process. A complete title might be “Asia as a Process of Globalization: Mobility, Territoriality, and the Scales of Spatial History.” We focus on Asia in its very broadest sense, including all the lands around the Indian Ocean and in MENA, connected intimately with Europe and Africa, from ancient times, embracing most of the human population, and forming a dynamic nexus for global connectivity whose increasing influence forms what the Financial Times calls our “Asian Century.” In this course, see how the wide range of Asian societies, cultures, and political economies have shaped and been shaped by expanding human mobility and by territorial dynamics of power and authority. We explore Asia as a creative human space, traveling the world. We study Asian histories of global capitalism, migration, nationalism, development, inequity, and politics that are producing ongoing global transformations in our own time.
Format:
In Spring 2021, this NYUAD course is fully online via Zoom and can thus include NYU students anywhere. I will be in New York. The Monday class will be a recorded lecture with a slide presentation. All course material is on the course webpage. The Wednesday class will convene in my meeting room, where I am also available for office hours on Fridays 6:00-9:00pm GST, by appointment. Attendance is required. All student writing should be composed in GoogleDocs and put in GoogleDrive Folders shared with me, where I can provide responses and comments.
Course Outline:
Part I. Weeks 1-5. 1380-1820.
The great Asian post-Mongol landed empires increased commercial mobility, investment, and capital accumulation. Asian wealth and power led Europeans to invest in seaborne mobility, which brought the Spanish to America and Portuguese to Asia, followed by the Dutch, English, and French. Asian political economies sustained military commercialism in global seaborne networks anchored in port-cities on all the continents, accelerating economic development in coastal regions.
Part II. Weeks 6-10. 1820-1920.
Seaborne imperial territory expanded around colonial port cities. Mechanized mobility and industrial militarism enabled Europeans to dominate the territorial organization of global capitalism. Industrial transportation channeled wealth and power into cities and towns to enrich rising elites in proportion to imperial status. Imperial power at many levels mobilized Asian land, labor, and capital for economic growth based on inequities baked into nationalism. Increasing conflict among empires, nations, and imperial ranks destabilized the territorial organization of global capitalism, launching decades of world wars, depression, and genocide.
Part III. Weeks 11-14. 1920s-2020s.
Nationalist movements produced a new twentieth century territorial order for the renewed expansion of global capitalism, while sustaining nineteenth century imperial inequities. Nation states became managers of competitive capital accumulation. Accelerating globalization produced more wealth, migration, refugees, inequality, and environmental degradation, along with “the rise of Asia” and increasing instability that prevents the solution of global problems of public health and climate change. Internet mobility in the twenty-first century “Asian Century” articulates a new round of ongoing territorial transformation.
STUDENT ASSESSMENTS
- Three five-page papers, each 20% of the final grad, for a total of 60%.
- Five one-page response papers, each is worth 5% of the final grade, for a total of 25%
- Class participation is worth 15% of the final grade. Including 5% for class presentations.
ASSESSMENT GUIDELINES
- All papers are double spaced, 12-point font, with one inch margins, with student name and assignment number in chronological order, as listed in the syllabus, in the header.
- All papers are submitted via individual student GoogleDrive Folder shared with the instructor
- 3 Five-page papers: due on Friday in weeks 6, 10, and 14. Paper topics are indicated on the syllabus. Papers will be judged on all aspects of quality: organized prose in a coherent sequence of paragraphs should focus clearly on the assignment and display a strong understanding of ideas and information from relevant course material.
- Students have the option of submitting a draft of their last 5-page paper for instructor feedback and revision.
- 5 One-page papers: due by noon on Wednesday in weeks 2, 3, 4, 5, and 9, based on weekly readings and the Monday online lecture, to prepare for class discussion and student presentations on Wednesdays. They should present an understanding of the course material. Asking questions and indicating doubts or confusion are appropriate in these response papers: they generate questions for discussion in class.
- Classroom participation. This grade is based on levels of personal participation in the course as a whole. Minimally, students should always show they are paying attention and never get distracted by computers, phones, doodling, daydreams, jinn, or chit chat. They should ask all questions in class, rather than privately. They should engage conversations. They should respond intelligently when the instructor asks, “What do you think about this?” Students will be also lead discussions of course material with short presentations. An evaluation of presentations counts for one-third of participation grade.
Weekly Schedule
CLASS SCHEDULE: MONDAY CLASSES ARE RECORDED Zoom LECTURES WITH LINKS IN THE SYLLABUS. See “messages to students” for details.
Review the syllabus regularly, because revisions and changes will occur.
Mobility, Territoriality, and Globalization, circa 1380-1820
Week 1
ORIENTATION
Monday, Jan 18: Introduction.
Here is a Prezi on Asia’s Circulatory System before 1500 (you can play it with the arrow in the top right corner). It presents a series of maps that focus on the inland mobility that was most decisive in propelling long-distance connectivity all across Afro-Eurasia well into the second millennium C.E. This course focuses on centuries after 1500, when inland imperial expansion propelled and sustained global connectivity increasingly propelled by capital accumulation in seaborne networks of inter-continental mobility.
Required Reading
This article lays out a framework for spatial history that we are developing in this course (and also in the NYU Global Asia program): David Ludden, “Maps in the mind and the mobility of Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies, 62, 4, 2003, 1057-78.
This article brings together long-duree historical patterns (described separately in the next two readings) to portray spatial history in the eastern half of the Indian Ocean: David Ludden, “Patterns of Mobility around the Bay of Bengal,” [a chapter for the forthcoming Cambridge History of Global Migrations, Volume 1, edited by Donna Gabaccia and Eric Tagliacozzo] (14pp)
Michal Biran, “The Mongol Empire and inter-civilizational exchange” (PDF), Chapter 20 in The Cambridge World History, pp.534-558 (Cambridge Core Link).
David Henley. “Ages of Commerce in Southeast Asian History.” In Environment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia: A Longue Durée Perspective, edited by David Henley and Henk Schulte Nordholt, Leiden: Brill, 2015, (JSTOR) pp. 120–132.
Recommended
These two articles represent efforts to formalize long-term perspectives on world history
Adam McKeown, “Periodizing Globalization,” History Workshop, 63, 1, 2007, 218-30. (JSTOR) (online PDF)
David Northrup, “Globalization and the Great Convergence: Rethinking World History in the Long Term,” Journal of World History, 16, 3, 2005, 249-267. (JSTOR)
Week 2
Empires
Monday, Jan 25: The great post-Mongol Asian empires expand, connect, extract, invest, and compete all around Asia’s Circulatory System, forming the spatial framework for modern territorialism: Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Russia, Ming, Qing.
The goal this week is (1) to get a broad familiarity with the territorial scale and production process of the major early-modern empires, (2) to appreciate the importance of these old empires for current national state territoriality and its ongoing struggles, and (3) to see how inland Asian imperial dynamics shaped early European seaborne expansion. With this background, we can turn, next week, to focus on the coastal regions and seaborne globalization.
Video and Slides
Video1 Week2 with slides: “Imperial frames for national territory.” Slides Only.
Read
Scott Levi, “Asia in the Gunpowder Revolution,” (OREAH). (30pp)
Peter C. Perdue, Helen F.Siu, and Eric Tagliacozza,” Introduction: Structuring Moments in Asian Connections, in Asia Inside Out: Changing Times, edited by Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C. Perdue. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. (Ebook) pp 1-22
Giancarlo Casale, “The Islamic Empires of the Early Modern World,” in The Cambridge World History, Volume VI, Part 1: The Construction of a Global World, 1400-1800 CE, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks,Cambridge, 2015. pp.323-344.
Laura Hostetler, “Imperial competition in Eurasia: Russia and China,” in the Cambridge World History, pp.297-322.
Stephen Blake, “Returning the Household to the Patrimonial-Bureaucratic Empire: Gender, Succession, and Ritual in the Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman Empires,” in Peter Bang and C. A. Bayly, editors. Tributary Empires in Global History, Palgrave MacMillan, 2011,pp 214-226
Reference: The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time, edited by Lynn Struve, Harvard University Asia Center, 2004.
James A Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang, Columbia University Press, 2007. (PDF online), pp. 40-78.
Assignment
One-page paper#1 due 12noon Jan 29.
Week 3
PRODUCTIVITY
Monday, Feb 1: Military conquest and authority produced territories spanning the Silk Road and Indian Ocean, thus connecting productive powers deep inland with expanding commercial networks overseas. Imperial ranks of wealth, power, and status forced more extensive connections, communication, and interdependence among more diverse societies and cultures, increasing the scale and local productivity of commerce, markets, and commodity production, along routes of imperial mobility, intersecting on the coast with global sea trade networks anchored in port cities.
Video and Slides
Video2 with slides: “Military Commercialism and Coastal Connections.” Slides Only
Read
These three readings describe the interaction of imperial systems of power and authority with economic development.
Richard von Glahn, “The Maturation of the Market Economy, 1550-1800,” Chap 8 in The Economic History of China, from Antiquity to 1800 (Cambridge, 2016), pp.295-347. (Cambridge Core link) (online PDF)
Giancarlo Casale, “The Islamic Empires of the Early Modern World,” in The Cambridge World History, Volume VI: The Construction of a Global World, 1400-1800 CE, 323-344. (Online PDF)
This article suggests the relevance of Asian imperial histories for contemporary trends inside national states: David Ludden, “Imperial Modernity: History and Global Inequity in Rising Asia.” Third World Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 4, 2012, pp. 581–601. (JSTOR) (PDF)
Recommended
K.Sugihara and R. Bin Wong, “Industrious revolutions in early modern world history,” in J. Bentley, S. Subrahmanyam, and M. Wiesner-Hanks (Eds.), The Cambridge World History, pp. 283-310)
These readings are particularly important for understanding how South Asia became the center of the world textile economy: Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib, editors. The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. I, c.1200 – c.1750. Cambridge University Press, 1982, Part 10, pp. 261-324.
These readings put economic history in southern Asia in global perspective.
Banaji, Jairus. A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism. Haymarket, 2020 especially pp.14-56.
David Washbrook, “India in the early modern world economy: Modes of production, reproduction and exchange,” Journal of Global History, 2,1, 2007, 87-111. (online PDF; in the Cambridge Core)
David Washbook, “Merchants, Markets, and Commerce in Early Modern South India,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 53, 1-12, 2010, 266-289. (Online PDF)
Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Christopher Bayly. “Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India.” The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 25, no. 4, 1988, pp. 401–24. (PDF online; in the cloud.)
Parthasarathi, Prasannan. Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants, and Kings in South India, 1720-1800. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
David Ludden, “Modern Inequality and Early Modernity: A Comment for the AHR on Articles by R. Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz.” The American Historical Review, 107, 2, 2002, 470–80. (PDF online; in the cloud).
Assignment
One-page response paper#2 due 12noon Feb 5.
Week 4
PORTS
Monday, Feb 8: As inland Asian empires matured, their sea coast and islands around the southern seas nurtured ports that became nodes of connectivity among all the continents. Seaborne networks of sailing mobility filled ports with novel ethno-cultural mingling, facing the sea at strategic locations on routes of commerce, commodity production, and capital accumulation.
Video and Slides
These two videos connect Fall and Spring semesters of Global Asia, serving as a link between histories of mobility and territoriality before and after the onslaught of modern industrialism, focusing on the centrality of ports:
Video with slides: “1500-1750, Vasco da Gama to Robert Clive.” Video with slides: “1750-1850, Seven Years War to Opium Wars.”
Looking ahead: be sure to attend our Global Asia Webinar on March 11, 5:00-6:30 in Abu Dhabi. “Mapping Coastal Environments: Homelands of Globalization,” with Marina Kaneti (NUS), David Ludden (NYU) and Vidhya Raveendranationan (NYUSH) [part of a Webinar Conference Series on Coastal Environments in Global Asia]
Read
Arturo Giraldez, The Age of Trade: The Manila Galleons and the Dawn of the Global Economy, Rowman & Littlefield, 2015 (Ebook) pp. 9-12, 142-59.
M. van Rossum, “The Dutch East India Company and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago Worlds, 1602-1795” OREAH (25pp)
Paul Van Dyke, “The Canton Trade, 1700-1842. OREAH (20pp)
Peter Perdue, “The Rise and Fall of the Canton Trade System -1: China in the World (1790s-1860s)” (5pp)
Sandy Prita Meier, Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere. Indiana University Press, 2016, pp. 26-65.(JSTOR)
Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990 (Ebook), pp. 1-10.
Testimonies of Enslavement: Enslavebility in Dutch-Ruled Cochin
David Ludden, “Patterns of Mobility around the Bay of Bengal,” [a chapter for the forthcoming Cambridge History of Global Migrations, Volume 1, edited by Donna Gabaccia and Eric Tagliacozzo] (14pp)
Recommended
N. Cook, “The Columbian Exchange,” in J. Bentley, S. Subrahmanyam, & M. Wiesner-Hanks (Eds.), The Cambridge World History, pp. 103-134.
R.L Barendse, Arabian Seas, 1700-1763 : The Western Indian Ocean in the Eighteenth Century, Brill, Leiden, 2009, pp.1-46 (Ebook)Recommended:
Kerry Ward, “1745: Ebbs and Flows in the Indian Ocean,” in Asia Inside Out: Changing Times, edited by Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C. Perdue. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. (Ebook), pp.163-185
Michael Laffan, “Cross-roads Regions: Southeast Asia,” Cambridge World History, VI, I, pp.372-392. (online PDF)
Peter Perdue, “1557. A Year of Some Significance,” in in Asia Inside Out: Changing Times, edited by Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C. Perdue. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. (ebook chapter 3, 22pp)
Jairus Banaji, “Islam, The Mediterranean and the Rise of Capitalism,” Historical Materialism, 15, 2007, 47-74 (PDF online)
A.C.S. Peacock, “The Ottoman Empire and the Indian Ocean,” (OREAH). (14pp)
REF: Indian Ocean in World History Website.
Richard B. Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 : European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500-1850. Ohio University Press, 2015.
“Maritime Diasporas in the Indian Ocean and East and Southeast Asia (960-1775),” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 49, No. 4, 2006.
Digital Archive Primary Sources: Indostan letters America by Bartholomew Burges (1735-1800). A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels (including Bernier, Hamilton-Buchanan, etc.), Guide to the India Office Records, 1600‒1858
Nancy Um, Shipped but Not Sold : Material Culture and the Social Protocols of Trade During Yemen’s Age of Coffee,. University of Hawaii Press, 2017.
Assignment
One-page paper#3 12:00 PM Feb 12.
SEARCH: THE WORLD DIGITAL LIBRARY
Week 5
MILITARISM
Monday, Feb 15: East India Companies and Commercial Militarism.
Video and Slides
Video 3 with Slides: “Commercial Militarism” (Slides Only)
Read
This reading sets the global context for European seaborne colonial networks through the eighteenth century.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, “Empires in their Global Context, c.1500-c.1800,” Chapter 6 (19 pp) in The Atlantic in Global History, 1500-2000, edited by Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Erik R Seeman.
And this reading describes the transition to military expansion of European power into the Asian interior. C.A.Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830, London: Longman, 1989, pp.1-74, 100-132. (PDF online) (the whole book is available in PDF and well worth reading). See also Bayly Chapter 1, pp.21-43, in R. Bessel, editor. War, Empire and Slavery, 1770-1830. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. .
These two readings describe EICo power relations in two coastal interior regions in the hinterlands of port cities in the eastern Bay of Bengal.
David Ludden, “The Process of Empire,” in Peter Bang and C. A. Bayly, editors, Tributary Empires in Global History, Palgrave MacMillan, 2011, pp.132-150.
Sangamitra Misra, “Peasants, Colonialism, and Sovereignty: The Garo rebellions in Eastern India,” Modern Asian Studies, 2021, PDF online (37pp)
REF: Though filled with annoying ads, this colonialvoyage.com site provides a nice guide to the scale of European seaborne networks of coastal colonies and territorialism into the early 1800s.
Recommended
These articles provide details on climate conditions that complicate understandings of political economy in late 18th-early 19th century transitions.
Victor Lieberman and Brendan Buckley, “The Impact of Climate on Southeast Asia, circa 950-1820: New Findings,” Modern Asian Studies, 46, 5, 2012, 1049-1096. (online PDF) (read the Cambridge Core MAS version for full citation access)
David Ludden, “Country Politics and Agrarian Systems: Land grab on Bengal frontiers, 1750–1800,” Modern Asian Studies, 51(2), 319-349. (Online PDF) (read the Cambridge Core MAS version for full citation access)
Richard Grove, “The Great El Nino of 1789–93 and its Global Consequences: Reconstructing an Extreme Climate Event in World Environmental History,” The Medieval History Journal, 10, 1&2 (2007): 75–98. (online PDF)
This article introduces current debates and useful approaches to the concept of primitive accumulation:
William Clare Roberts, “What was primitive accumulation? Reconstructing the origin of a critical concept,” European Journal of Political Theory, 19, 4, 2020, 532-552. (PDF online)
For details of Dutch expansion in Indonesia, to 1800, see M.C.Richlefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, since c. 1300, London, Macmillan, 1993, Chapters 6-9, pp. 61-105.
Assignment
One-page Paper#4, due 12:00 PM Feb 19: Preparing for 5-Page Paper #1. Describe the relationship between European seaborne empires and Asian empires in the 1700s and early 1800s.
1820-1920. Imperial Territories of Industrial Mobility
Week 6
IMPERIALISM
Monday, Feb 22. CLASS MEETING IN PERSON ON ZOOM TODAY, inmy meeting room. We will discuss the video byHans Rosling, “200 Years that Changed the World.” Study this video before class. Wednesday class Feb 24 will be a zoom recording.
Read
Kenneth Pomeranz,” Political Economy and Ecology on the Eve of Industrialization: Europe, China, and the Global Conjuncture,” The American Historical Review, 107, 2, 2002, 425-446, JSTOR . (online PDF)
Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created : Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present, Routledge, 2017, (Ebook) Introduction, pp.1-6, and Chapter 5 “The Economics of Violence” pp.162-202
Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850, Cambridge University Press, 2011. Ebook, pp.21-50, 263-69
British India and the 1857 Uprising. (a nicely illustrated view from the UK National Army Museum). Dalrymple’s “religious rage” theory.
Assignment
5-page paper #1 due Friday Feb 26, 5PM GST. See assignmen Week 5.
Week 7
INFRASTRUCTURE
Monday, Mar 1. Industrial transport infrastructure, the channeling of mobility, expansive intensification of control over territory, resource extraction, and linear configuration of urban central place inequity.
Read
Par Cassel, “Treaty Ports and the Foreign Community in Modern China,” (OREAH) (14pp)
Kate Boehme, “Origins of a modern Indian Capitalist Class in Bombay” (OREAH) (12pp)
Colette Dubois, “The Red Sea Ports During the Revolution in Transportation, 1800-1914,” Chapter 3 in Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, edited by Leila Fawaz, C.A. Bayly, and Robert Ilbert, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. pp.77-93 (Online PDF)
Kenneth McPherson, “Port Cities as Nodal Points of Change: The Indian Ocean,” Chapter 4 in in Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, edited by Leila Fawaz, C.A. Bayly, and Robert Ilbert, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. pp.94-114. (online PDF)
Amarjit Kaur, “The Impact of Railroads on the Malayan Economy, 1874-1941,” Journal of Asian Studies, 39, 4, 1980, 693-710 (online PDF)
Khalili, Laleh. Sinews of War and Trade : Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, Verso Books, 2020.
Aaron Jakes, “The World the Suez Canal Made,” Public Seminar, 2Apr 2021.
Week 8
COMMODITIES
Monday, Mar 8. Global networks of commodity production and consumption transform social space into interwoven territories of inequity stitched together by supply chains and by the mobility of labor and capital.
Video and Slides
Video 4 With Slides: “The Interwoven Globe at the Tip of India.” Slides only.
Video 5 with Slides: “Industrial Globalization: 1820-1920.” Slides only.
Read
David Ludden, “Empire and Agriculture,” draft chapter for the forthcoming Cambridge History of South Asia nineteenth century volume edited by Prasannan Parthasarathi, David Gilmartin, and Mrinalini Sinha (15pp)
Priti Ramamurthy,” All-Consuming Nationalism: This Indian Modern Girl in the 1920s and 1930s,” in The Modern Girl Around the World : Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, edited by Lynn M. Thomas, et al., Duke University Press, 2008. (Ebook), pp.147-173.
Alan Pryor, “Indian Pale Ale: An Icon of Empire.” (online PDF) 18pp.
Yangwen Zheng, “Opium in China.” (OREAH) (12pp)
Patrick Nevelingents, “A periodisation of globalization according to the Mauritian integration into the international sugar commodity chain (1825-2005).” (online PDF) 22pp.
Tariq Omar Ali, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta. Princeton University Press, 2018.
Reference
Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World. Cambridge University Press, 2013. (Ebook), Part Two pp.87-186.
John Richards, ”Opium and the British Indian Empire: The Royal Commission of 1895.” Modern Asian Studies, 36(2) 2002, 375-420. (PDF online)
Week 9
MIGRATION
Monday, Mar 15. – Recording for this week. “Cultures of mobility in travels to produce plantations, railways, settler frontiers, and imperial urbanism.”
Video and Slides
Video 6 with slides: “Global mobility and national territory: 1870-1920” Slides only.
Read
Sunil Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia. Cambridge University Press, 2011, ppp.42-80 and Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants, Harvard University Press, 2013. Ebook Central, pp. 101-43
Jayati Bhattacharya, “Connectivity across the Bay of Bengal in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” (OREAH) 18pp
Lynn Hollen Lees. Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1786–1941, Cambridge University Press, 2017. (Ebook), pp. 1-20, 167-171.
Naomi Hosoda, “2008: “Open City” and a New Wave of Filipino Migration to the Middle East,” in Asia Inside Out (Ebook), pp.281-306.
Assignment
1-page #5 paper due, Friday Mar 19. Synopsis for 5-page paper#2, on a topic of your choice.
Week 10
NATIONALITY
Monday, Mar 22: The construction of territorial attachments and identities, majorities, and minorities, as national facts of everyday life.
Video and Slides
Video 7 with slides “The imperial composition of national territory in spaces of global mobility.” Slides Only
Read
Shahla Hussain, Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Peter C. Perdue, “Ecologies of Empire: From Qing Cosmopolitanism to Modern Nationalism,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, No. 8, 2013, EJournal (online PDF) 27pp
Manu Goswami, “From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy, Territory in Colonial South Asia, 1870 to 1907,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40, 4, 1998, 609-636. (PDF online)
Oliver Schulz, “Port Cities, Diaspora Communities and Emerging Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire: Balkan Merchants in Odessa and Their Network in the Early Nineteenth Century,” pp. 127-148 in Trade, Migration and Urban Networks in Port Cities, c. 1640-1940, edited by Adrian Jarvis and Robert Lee. Liverpool University Press, 2008.
Nile Green, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam, Oxford: OUP. 2015. Chapter 6 “Making Islam in the Motor City,” (pp.207-234) and Chapter 7” Founding the First Mosque in Japan.” (pp.235-280).
Eric Harms, “Mobility’s Spatial Fix: Find the Vietnamese “Homeland” from the Outside In,” in in Asia Inside Out III: Itinerant People, Eric Tagliacozzo, Editor, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019, pp.29-51. (Ebook)
Nations, Displacement, and Disorientation: Malayalis in Tanzania
Assignment
5-page paper #2 due Friday Mar 26, 5PM GST. Topic of your choice.
1920s-2020s. Dynamics of National Territory
Week 11
CONFLICT
Monday, Mar 29. Imperial competition and struggles from below tear empires apart and produce struggles to consolidate a global territorial order of national state sovereignty.
Video and Slides
Video 8 with slides. “The Fragmentation of Imperial Territory 1: A World of Wars, 1914-1975.” Slides only.
Video for viewing: “Blood and Oil: The Middle East in World War 1,” (1:53 Youtube)
Read
Francis Pike. Empires at War : A Short History of Modern Asia since World War II. IB Tauris, 2011, pp.1-59
Nikki R. Keddie, “The Revolt of Islam, 1700-1993: Comparative Considerations and Relations to Imperialism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 36, 3, 1994, 463-87. (JSTOR) (online PDF)
Mark Selden, “East Asian Regionalism and its Enemies in Three Epochs: Political Economy and Geopolitics, 16th-21st Centuries,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 7, 9, 2009, 1-24. (29pp) (online PDF)
Week 12
SOVEREIGNTY
Monday, Apr 5. Empire to Nation as ongoing process.
Video and Slides
Video 9 with slides. “The Fragmentation of Imperial Territory 1: A World of Nations, 1950-2020.” Slides only.
Read
J. Go & J. Watson. Anticolonial Nationalism From Imagined Communities to Colonial Conflict. European Journal of Sociology, 2019, 60, 1 31-68. doi:10.1017/S000397561900002X (PDF online)
Nicolas Becquelin, “Staged Development in Xinjiang,” The China Quarterly, 178, 2004, 358-378. (PDF online)
Priya Satia, “Turning Space into Place: British India and the Invention of Iraq,” in Asia Inside Out II: Connected Places, edited by Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen Siu,and Peter Perdue, Harvard University Press, 2015. pp.271-301 (Ebook)
David Ludden, India and South Asia: A Short History. London: Oneworld, 2013, Chapter Five, pp. 169-194. (PDF online)
David Ludden, “The Centrality of Indo-Persia in Global Asia and Historical Formation of Afghanistan,” in “Afghanistan Roundtable,” Afghanistan, 4,1, 2021, 57-59.
Faye Yuan Kleeman, “Japanese Colonialism and Global Cosmopolitanism in East Asia,” Chapter 6 in Asian Cities: Colonial to Global, Amsterdam University Press, 2015, pp.143-158. (PDF online)
Andrew Boyd, “The Role of the Great Powers in the United Nations System,” International Journal, 25, 2 (Spring, 1970), 356-369. (online PDF) (JSTOR)
Dan Seng Lawn, “Burma/Myanmar: A Fulcrum of Great Power Politics,” World Affairs: The Journal of International Issues, 19, 4, 2015), pp. 108-129. (online PDF) (JSTOR)
Vicente Rafael, “Colonial Contractions: The Making of the Modern Philippines, 1565-1946,” OREAH 20pp
Week 13
CAPITALISM
Monday, Apr 12: Commodification, consumerism, social identity, labor control, nature, markets, and inequity.
Video and Slides
Video 10 with slides. “Capitalism and Imperial Modernity.” Slides only.
Read
Boike Rehbein, “Capitalism and Inequality,” Revista Sociedade e Estado, 35,3, 2020. (online PDF), 28pp.
David Ludden, “Introduction” to Capitalism in Asia: Perspectives from Sixty Years of the Journal of Asian Studies, (Ann Arbor, 2004) pp.1-10; “Imperial Modernity: History and Global Inequity in Rising Asia,” Third World Quarterly, 33, 4, 2012, 581-602 (PDF online), and “Spatial Inequity and National Territory: Remapping 1905 in Bengal and Assam,” Modern Asian Studies. 46, 3, 2012, 483-525 (PDF online)
Park Bun-Soon,”Riding the Wave: Korea’s Economic Growth and Asia in the Modern Development Era,” in Asia Inside Out II: Connected Places, edited by Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen Siu,and Peter Perdue, Harvard University Press, 2015. pp.271-301 (Ebook)
Johan Mathew, “Trafficking Labour: Abolition and the Exchange of Labour across the Arabian Sea, 1861–1947,” Slavery and Abolition, 2011, pp.1-18. (Online PDF). This became Chapter 2 in Johan Mathew, Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism Across the Arabian Sea, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.
Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019, pp. (Ebook), pp.40-59, 168-184
Bondage and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World, edited by Gwyn Campbell, Palgrave Macmillan US, 2018. (Ebook), Chapter 10 (pp.205-226).Sravani Biswas and Subho Basu, “Environmental Disaster in Eastern Bengal: Colonial Capitalism and Rural Labour Force Formation in the Later Nineteenth Century,” and Chapter 11 (pp 227-44)
Steven Serels, “Famine and Slavery in Africa’s Red Sea World, 1887-1914.”
The Useful Discomfort of Critical Climate Social Science
Akram-Lodhi, A.H., & Kay, C. (Eds.). (2009). Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Agrarian Transformation and Development (1st ed.). Routledge.
David Hundt and Jitendra Uttam. Varieties of Capitalism in Asia: Beyond the Developmental State, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017.
A. Sivanandan, “The market state vs the good society,” Race & Class, 2013, 54, 3, 1-9. (PDF online)
Shapan Adnan, “Land Grabs and primitive accumulation in deltaic Bangladesh: interactions between neoliberal globalization, state interventions, power relations, and peasant resistance,” Journal of Peasant Studies, 40, 1, 2013, 87-128. (PDF online)
Week 14
PANDEMICS
Monday, Apr 19. Climate, environment, health, and territorial disorder.
Video and Slides
Video with slides: “Localities of Global Asia in our pandemic age.” Slides only.
Video with Slides. David Ludden, “The Farmers’ Movement in India,” Lecture for History in the Headlines, NY, Feb 10, 2021
Video with Slides. David Ludden, “The Rohingya Crisis Continues,” “History in the Headlines” recording, March 2, 2021.
Read
Julie Livingston, Self-Devouring Growth : A Planetary Parable As Told from Southern Africa, Duke University Press, 2019. RECORDING: History in the Headlines, NYUAD, lecture, Jan 26, 2021
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry, 42, 2014, 1-23.
Saskia Sassen, “Territory and Territoriality in the Global Economy,” International Sociology. 2000, 15, 2, 372-393. (PDF online)
Siddhant Issar, “Listening to Black lives matter: racial capitalism and the critique of neoliberalism,” Contemporary Political Theory, 20, 2021, 48–71. (PDF online)
David Ludden, “Perilous Homelands,” Daily Star, April 1, 2019 (online PDF) 10pp. and “The Rohingya Crisis and the Violence of National Territory,” unpublished manuscript (20pp) (online PDF)
Matthew Shutzer, “Subterranean Properties: India’s Political Ecology of Coal, 1870–1975,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2021, 63(2): 400–432.
news re: corona virus and ecosystem destruction: John Vidal, “Destroyed Habitat Creates the Perfect Conditions for Coronavirus to Emerge.” Scientific American, March 18, 2020
Assignment
Optional preliminary draft of final paper due April 23.
Week 15
STUDENT PRESENTATIONS AND DISCUSSION
Monday and Wed, Apr 26, 28 – in person meetings for final paper presentations.
Week 16
STUDENT PRESENTATIONS AND DISCUSSION
Monday, May 3 – in-person zoom meeting for final discussion