The Global Asia Colloquium

Fridays 4:00-6:45. 701 KJCC (53 Washington Square South). 

26 April 2019

Commodities, Consumption, and Capitalism

Readings

4:00-5:15. Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University, “How the Indian Ocean Spice Trade Made the World Modern”

Abstract: The quest for spices brought the world together in ways that we only recognize now. Though spices have been in circulation since Antiquity, it really was roughly from the “Contact Age” forward (circa 1500 CE) that they began to play a vital role in connecting the world’s scattered societies. Prior to that, the Mediterranean Basin and India were thinly connected by spices; further to the east, India and Southeast Asia were too, as were Southeast Asia and China further east from that. Venice built an empire on the control of spices from Asia, and Istanbul did the same after the age of the Venetians was gone. This presentation looks at these old histories as an engine for global connection. The barks and seeds of the Indian Ocean ended up launching the beginnings of the imperial age, when European state-making projects under the guise of “East India Companies” eventually carved up much of the known world. We will follow this process and learn a bit about the objects of this unparalleled affection—the spices themselves—along the way. 

Eric Tagliacozzo is Professor of History at Cornell.  He is the author of a history of smuggling in Southeast Asia (Yale, 2005) which won the AAS’s Harry Benda Prize in 2007, and a monograph on the pilgrimage to Mecca from that region (Oxford, 2013).  He is also the editor or co-editor of ten other volumes.  He is currently finishing a book on the history of the sea in Asia, from Istanbul to Yokohama.  He is the Director of the Comparative Muslim Societies Program (CMS), as well as Cornell’s Modern Indonesia Project (CMIP), and serves as editor of the journal INDONESIA.

5:30-6:45 Johan Mathew, Rutgers University, “Working under the Influence: Narcotics Consumption in Colonial Asia and Africa”

Abstract: In some ways the opiate crisis consuming headlines in the United States today is a radically new phenomenon, but in other ways it is a very old story. What is strikingly new is the willingness of cultural and political elites in the US to identify with the struggles of the “white working class,” and recognize the roots of drug consumption in the crisis of economically moribund communities. However the consumption of narcotics as a means of anesthetizing the pain of a capitalist economy is at least as old as the plantation. This paper seeks to explore the pain that Asian and African laborers endured and the socio-chemical relief they sought in the consumption of cannabis and opium. I turn specifically to the consumption of cannabis in South Africa and British India and the consumption of opium in the Philippines and Burma to attempt to trace this connection between new forms of labor and narcotics consumption. The tentative argument is that narcotics provided relief from the physical pain of repetitive and intensifying labor, but also that the sociality of consumption provided relief from the mental strain of loneliness in a migrant labor regime. 

Johan Mathew is an Assistant Professor of history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and is the author of Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (University of California Press, 2016). He is currently at work on a new project tentatively entitled Opiates of the Masses: A History of Humanity in the Time of Capital, which explores how human bodies adapted to the demands of industrial labor through the consumption of narcotics.

other USEFUL READING