Fall 2019 Global Asia Colloquium

Meets on Fridays, 4:00-6:45.  701 KJCC (53 Washington Square South), with Wine and Cheese. (Link to details)

6 Sept. 4:00-5:30. Fiona Kidd (NYUAD). “The Central Asian Fur Roads: roots, connectivities and globalizations in the ancient world” 

Fiona Kidd is Assistant Professor of History and Art and Art History at New York University Abu Dhabi. She teaches in the history, art and art history, and ancient world programs, with a special focus on Central Asia. She has been involved in archaeological, museum-based, and archival research in Central Asia for almost 20 years. After gaining her PhD in 2005 at the University of Sydney, she concentrated on fieldwork in the historical region of Khorezm in north western Uzbekistan, and in particular on a first century CE corpus of mural paintings. Following shorter projects in Afghanistan (2007) and Kazakhstan (2010), and as an Assistant Curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2012-2014), in 2015 she began a new collaborative field project in the Bukhara oasis of Sogdiana (Uzbekistan),Borderlands and rural landscapes in Central Asian antiquity, which she co-directs with colleagues from the United States and Uzbekistan. Under the umbrellas of archaeology and art history, agro-pastoral relations, identity, and craft production have been consistent themes across these interdisciplinary projects.                      Here is the essay that will be the subject of her presentation.

             5:30-6:45. Open discussion about Global Asia in the next two years.

13 Sept.  — NO COLLOQUIUM History Department Retreat

20 Sept. Phillip Bowring (Journalist), and Zoe Griffiths (Baruch CUNY)

4:00 – 5:15 Philip Bowring, “Austronesian Asia.” Link to Reading (1)

Phillip Bowring is a journalist based in Asia since 1973 and previously in Sydney, Africa, and London. He has variously been correspondent for the Financial Times, Editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, a columnist for the International Herald Tribune, and independent columnist and consultant on regional political and economic issues. He has an MA in History from Cambridge University where he is a Fellow Commoner of St Catharine’s College. He is married to Hong Kong legislator Claudia Mo. His recreation is competitive sailing.

Abstract:  This is a region which needs to be recognized in its own right, not as a sub-set of the recently created concept “South East Asia”. In his book Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, Philip Bowring shows the evolution of this linguistic and cultural entity from its emergence following the last Ice Age, through its role as sailing and trading link from east to west, its divisions by colonialism and imported religions, to today, when it encompasses some 450 million people. Particularly at this time of focus on China’s “historic” claims, the actual history of this maritime region, particularly the pre-colonial eras, needs to be far better known by policy-makers, academics, and journalists. In this presentation, Bowring will define the main themes of this history and its lessons for today.

5:30 – 6:45 Zoe Griffiths, “Modern Losers: Why the History of Early Modern Ottoman Port Cities Has Yet to Be Written.”   [Link to Reading(1) (2)]

Zoe Griffith is an Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College, CUNY. Her research and teaching are centered on the history of the Middle East and Islamic world, especially the social, economic, and legal history of the early modern Ottoman Empire. She completed her PhD from Brown University in 2017 with a dissertation on the political economy of Egypt’s pre-colonial Mediterranean port cities at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Abstract: Egypt was the most valuable province in the early modern Ottoman Empire, supplying the empire with locally grown rice and sugar, and distributing the totality of the world’s coffee (via Yemen and the Red Sea) until the early eighteenth century. Yet Egypt’s early modern port cities have received virtually no scholarly attention, coming into focus only with Alexandria’s transformation as a colonial port in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. This disconnect, between Egypt’s cultural and commercial vitality and historians’ lack of interest in its vibrant early modern port cities, is striking but hardly unique. In this presentation, I will discuss some of the epistemological and methodological issues that have caused historians to overlook Ottoman spaces and actors whose primary importance lay beyond their relationship to the rise of industrial capitalism, and how these problems might be addressed in future scholarship. I also argue that Egypt’s Mediterranean ports offer an ideal case study for the political, cultural, and fiscal pressures that would launch the Ottoman Empire along a path of modernizing reforms from the 1780s onwards. 

27 Sept. SPECIAL EVENT:  Kashmir Today: Article 370 and Beyond.

SPECIAL LOCATION: Jerry H. Labowitz Theater, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, 1 Washington Place.  4pm-6pm

FEATURING

Mona Bhan, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Ford Maxwell Professor of  South Asian Studies, Syracuse University

 Haley Duschinski,  Associate Professor of Anthropology, Director of the Center for Law, Justice, and Culture, Ohio University

Hafsa Kanjwal, Associate Professor of South Asian History, Lafayette College

David Ludden, Professor of History, New York University

Co-sponsors:  Gallatin School of Individualized Study and Gallatin Human Rights Initiative

4 Oct. Matt Shutzer (Harvard), Manu Vimalassery (Barnard)

4:00-5:15 Matt Shutzer, Indigenous Labor and Agrarian Capitalism: The “Frontier” in India’s Plantation-Mining Complex [Link to Readings (1) (2)]

Matthew Shutzer is a historian of the environment and science and technology. He is currently an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. His manuscript, The Energy State: Fossil Fuels, Economic Development, and Extractive Democracy in Postcolonial India, examines the emergence of the Indian developmental state in the era of global fossil fuel production. Matthew received his Ph.D. from New York University in Modern South Asian History in 2019.

Abstract: This presentation takes up the issue of changing agrarian relations in India’s Chotanagpur plateau during the pivotal era of European capital investment in mines, plantations, and railways beginning in the early nineteenth century. Whereas earlier scholars have highlighted the expansionary or “frontier” dynamics of both European capital and British imperial governance in the Chotanagpur region, this presentation will instead examine the mobility of indigenous or Adivasi communities in shaping processes of agrarian change and networks of labor recruitment. I will argue that the remaking of Chotanagpur as a major “coolie” labor recruiting depot, as well as a site of plantation agriculture and coal extraction, occurred within regional shifts in agricultural land reclamation and the weakening of the social authority of landowners over Adivasi agrarian labor. This perspective on the conjunctural processes attending the arrival of European firms and imperial governors into the region is consequential because it challenges a mode of framing Adivasi identity in terms of fixed territorial belonging shaped primarily by modes of frontier governance. The reframing of Chotanagpur’s history in this way will allow us to consider the significance of colonial capitalism in producing indigenous histories at regional and global scales, as well as the manner in which these same processes created hierarchical distinctions within Adivasi communities themselves.

5:30 – 6:45 Manu Karuka,“Railroad Colonialism” [Link to Readings (1) (2)]

Manu Karuka is the author of Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019). He is a co-editor, with Juliana Hu Pegues and Alyosha Goldstein, of “On Colonial Unknowing,” a special issue of Theory & Event, and with Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, and Sujani Reddy, he is a co-editor of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). His work appears in Critical Ethnic Studies, J19, Settler Colonial Studies, The Settler Complex: Recuperating Binarism in Colonial Studies (UCLA American Indians Studies Center, 2016, edited by Patrick Wolfe), and Formations of United States Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2014, edited by Alyosha Goldstein). He is an assistant professor of American Studies at Barnard College.

Abstract: This chapter covers a history of railroads and colonialism. Spanning Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America, it examines historical periods and patterns in imperialism, as they materialize in distinct phases of railroad construction and maintenance in the colonized world.

11 Oct. Prasannan Parthasarathi (Boston College), Enze Han (University of Hong Kong)

4:00-5:15 Prasannan Parthasarathi: Agriculture, Environment, and Famine in Tamilnad, 1850-1900 (Link to Readings)

Prasannan Parthasarathi received a PhD in economics from Harvard and is Professor of South Asian History at Boston College. He is the author of The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720-1800 (Cambridge, 2001), The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles (Oxford, 2009), and Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence 1600-1850 (Cambridge, 2011), which received the Jerry Bentley Book Prize of the World History Association and was named a Choice magazine outstanding academic title. He is now working on a study of agriculture and the environment in nineteenth-century South India. His articles have appeared in Past and Present, the Journal of Social History, Modern Asian Studies, and International Labor and Working Class History. He is on the editorial boards of International Labor and Working Class History, The Journal of Social History, The Medieval History Journal, and Textile History, and served on the editorial board of the American Historical Review.

Abstract: This chapter is drawn from a book that traces the development of agriculture in nineteenth- century Tamilnad from the perspectives of political economy and environment. The chapter examines the famines of the late nineteenth century, with some focus on the terrible dearth of 1876-78. It shows that changes in the political economy and in the environment converged to produce unprecedented hunger in the Tamilnad countryside. Political economy tells us that the
regime of risk was transformed under British rule and the environment shows us that the decline in the scope of self-provisioning pushed many closer to the margins of subsistence.

5:30 – 6:45 Enze Han:  Asymmetrical Neighbors: Borderland State-Building between China and Southeast Asia (Link to reading)

Dr. Enze Han is an Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and Public
Administration at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include ethnic politics in China, China’s relations with Southeast Asia, and the politics of state formation in the borderland area between China, Myanmar and Thailand. Previously he was Senior Lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. His research has been supported by the Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and British Council/Newton Fund. During 2015-2016, he was a Friends Founders; Circle Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA. He is the author of Asymmetrical Neighbours: Borderland State Building between China and Southeast Asia (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Contestation and Adaptation: The Politics of National Identity in China (Oxford University Press, 2013). He has also published numerous articles in WorldDevelopment, The China Quarterly, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Pacific Review,Security Studies, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Chinese Journal of International Politics, among others.

Abstract: Is the process of state building a unilateral, national venture, or is it something more collaborative, taking place in the interstices between adjoining countries? To answer this question, this book takes a comparative look at the state building process along China, Myanmar, and Thailand’s common borderland area. It shows that the variations in state building among these neighboring countries are the result of an interactive process that occurs across national boundaries. Departing from existing approaches that look at such processes from the angle of singular, bounded territorial states, the book argues that a more fruitful method is to examine how state and nation building in one country can influence, and be influenced by, the same processes across borders. It argues that the success or failure of one country’s state building is a process that extends beyond domestic factors such as war preparation, political institutions, and geographic and demographic variables. Rather, it shows that we should conceptualize state building as an interactive process heavily influenced by a “neighborhood effect.” Furthermore, the book moves beyond the academic boundaries that divide arbitrarily China studies and Southeast Asian studies by providing an analysis that ties the state and nation building processes in China with those of Southeast Asia. 

15 Oct. TUESDAY Special Event ……. Here is the reading.

Kerr-Ritchie (Howard University). “Creole Uprising.” A BOOK LAUNCH FOR Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade (Cambridge 2019). in 53 Wash Sq South, KJCC 216, 4:30-6:30

18 Oct. Yijun Wang (NYU)

4:00-5:15  Yijun Wang “Creating Guangdong-style Pewter: Innovations and Transmissions of Technology in the Context of Maritime Trade in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” …….. Here is the reading.

Yijun Wang is an Assistant Professor of History at NYU. Her research interests include material culture, history of technology, and gender in early modern China. Yijun is especially interested in the connections between knowledge, technology, and power. Her current book project, tentatively titled From Tin to Pewter: Craft and Statecraft in Qing China, examines the transmissions of technology and changes in the culture of statecraft in China from 1700 to 1850s. By tracing the itinerary of tin, she explores how imperial expansion and global trade affected knowledge production and transmission, gradually changing the culture of statecraft from Confucian didacticism to technocratic statecraft. Yijun has contributed an article to The Silver Age: Origins and Trade of Chinese Export Silver (Hong Kong Maritime Museum, 2017).

Abstract: China became the “world factory” since the seventeenth century. Its luxury commodities, such as silk, porcelain, and furniture, influenced European consumer culture and fashion, and even led to the emergence of Chinoiserie—a style inspired by Chinese decorative art. This presentation, on the other hand, discusses the influence of European art and the impact of global trade on a kind of mass-produced, everyday objects—the Chinese pewter. In the eighteenth century, artisans in Guangdong began to create heavily decorated, silver-like pewter objects, which are in a hybrid form that shows both European and Chinese influences. These pewter objects were called Guangdong-style pewter, and they widely circulated in both domestic and international markets. This presentation examines the creation of Guangdong-style pewter to show how the introduction of tin from southeast Asia led to innovations in metallurgy, and how European commodities inspired stylistic changes and technological innovations. I am going to contextualize the innovation of pewter artisans in the trade networks, local craft traditions, and local ecology to show that technology was embedded in the assemblage of social, economic, material and ecological networks. I argue that the creation of Guangdong-style pewter shows the local adaptation of new forms and styles, the negotiations between materials and practices, and the entanglement between the global trade network and the local craft community. 

21 Oct Monday Special Event

Book launch — After Rana Plaza: Labor, Global Supply Chains, and The Garment Industry, edited by Sanchita Saxena.  5:30 -7:30 PM Stern School, kaufman Management Center, Room 55, 3rd Floor, MC Bldg.

25 Oct. Alan Mikhail (Yale) and Neelam Khoja (Yale) 

4:00-5:15 Alan Mikhail “Columbus the Muslim”

Alan Mikhail is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Yale University. He is a historian of the early modern Muslim world, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt whose research and teaching focus mostly on the history of empires and environments. Professor Mikhail is the author of three books and over thirty articles. He recently received the Anneliese Maier Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His book Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt and Environmental History (University of Chicago Press, 2017) received the Fuat Köprülü Book Prize from the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2014) won the Gustav Ranis International Book Prize from the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. His first book, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge University Press, 2011), received three prizes, including the Roger Owen Award of the Middle East Studies Association. His articles have been recognized by the Alice Hamilton and Leopold-Hidy Prizes of the American Society for Environmental History, the Wayne D. Rasmussen Award of the Agricultural History Society, and the Ömer Lütfi Barkan Prize of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. He has also reviewed for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Abstract: Christopher Columbus lived the vast majority of his life in a Mediterranean world in which the Ottoman and Mamluk Empires dominated the eastern part of the sea and were in constant economic, political, and confrontational interaction with the Christian states of Europe. This talk considers the importance of Islam in shaping Columbus’s life and voyages. In doing so, it thinks critically about the role of Islam in the Spanish decision to send him across the ocean and in the early history of the Spanish Caribbean. It furthermore uses this Muslim history of Columbus to suggest ways of analyzing early modern periodization and the place of Islam in the making of the modern world.

5:30-6:45 Neelam Khoja “Genealogical Affiliations and Territories: Mughal Placement of Afghans”

Neelam Khoja is a historian of trans-imperial and trans-regional early modern and modern Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Her research interests include political and social history of Muslim empires and nation-states within the Persianate zone from the 16th-20th centuries. Khoja received her doctorate from Harvard University in Histories and Cultures of Muslim Societies from the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department and holds Master’s degrees in Islamic Studies from Claremont Graduate University and Harvard Divinity School. She is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at the MacMillan Center at Yale University. She is working on her first monograph, tentatively titled, Known Geographies: Afghan Sovereigns, Space, and Society in Eighteenth-Century Iran and Hindustan. 

Abstract: As early as the fifteenth century, authors and historians used “Afghan” as a category of belonging and identity. Within the larger Afghan collective there existed different genealogies. A person would be associated to the larger community of Afghan who shared the same real, fabricated, or imagined genealogy. The members of the larger community, did not necessarily have to be related to each other by blood; rather, their inclusion could be based on shared occupations, such as serving in the army, or based on political allegiance and physical proximity to a ruler. In secondary scholarship, scholars have used the word “tribe, clan, or kinship” when describing the Afghans. Inadvertently, the association of Afghans as being “tribal” has de-legitimized Afghan contributions to historiography due to misreading and mistrusting primary sources written by Afghans, especially in the early modern period.

This presentation troubles the usage of “tribe, clan, and/or kinship” and introduces the term “genealogical affiliation.” It underlines that a genealogy—even if it was not real—was imagined and invoked by people within and without the group, and underscores people actively affiliated with said genealogy, whether they were born into it or not. In Mughal sources, these genealogical groups were further associated with certain territories. Through closely reading Mughal sources, beginning with the Bāburnāma, the presentation maps where the Afghans were located and how they moved from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The aim of the presentation is to trace genealogies associated with territories in and around Iran and Hindustan, and how the Mughal referred to and represented the Afghans. 

1 Nov.  Jennifer Gaynor (Buffalo) and Elvan Cobb (Rice University)

4:00-5:15  Jennifer L. Gaynor “The Maritime Dynamics of pre-Westphalian Interpolity Relations in Southeast Asia” Link to Readings: (1) (2)

Jennifer L. Gaynor earned her PhD in History and Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and prior to coming to SUNY at Buffalo held fellowships at Michigan, Cornell, and the Australian National University. A scholar of Southeast Asia and its surrounding seas from the seventeenth century to the present, she is the author of Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia: Submerged Genealogy and the Legacy of Coastal Capture (Cornell University Press, 2016).

Abstract: Historians of Southeast Asia have used a range of metaphors—mandalas, galactic polities—to describe the organization of Southeast Asian polities. Rather than invent metaphors, this talk examines the relations between port polities and their reliance on sea people to arrive at a picture of maritime dynamics in early modern interpolity relations. With deep precursors in the early history of the region, similar dynamics fed regional imperial formations, and external powers from the Cholas to the Dutch had to contend with them. Sea people, their skills, and their networks, were central to these political dynamics. Although colonial ideology cast them as pirates and sea nomads, this talk illustrates their prominent roles in expansionary states, their political and military support from autonomous amphibious hubs, and their capacity to change allegiances strategically. Analysis of these dynamics helps to clarify the mechanisms of power shifts between port polities in the coastal, archipelagic, and intraregional past.

5:30-6:45 Elvan Cobb “Camels to Railways: Locating the Global Mobilities of Izmir”

Elvan Cobb, Spatial Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in Levantine Studies,  Ph.D. History of Architecture and Urbanism, Cornell University. Elvan is a historian of the built environment, exploring the effects of modernization projects on spatial practices. Focusing on the Ottoman Empire, the modern Middle East and the Islamic world, her work brings an interdisciplinary approach to the study of space by engaging with histories of technology, archaeology, travel, environment and the senses. Elvan serves on the editorial team of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture and she is the assistant director of a diachronic archaeological field project in Armenia. 

Abstract: In the 17^th century, Izmir became a prominent port city of the eastern Mediterranean, intensifying connections between Europe and Asia.  From its roots as a productive entrepôt for the British Levant Company, Izmir increasingly gained strategic importance in the trade relationships of the Ottoman and British Empires.  The city reached its apex as a port city when concessions granted to British companies enabled the establishment of Izmir as the terminus point of a critical western Anatolian rail network.  This increased the flow of goods from the city’s fertile hinterland and from the broader trade networks of the Middle East.  Although conveyed to the port in large part by the railways, traffic also remained heavily dependent on camel caravans.  This multi-modal transportation infrastructure thus supported Izmir’s role as an active node in global networks.  This presentation examines Izmir’s place in shifting global mobilities between the 17^th and 19^th centuries.

8 Nov. Kate Imy (U North Texas) and  Kalyani Ramnath (Harvard)

4:00-5:15 Kate Imy  “Crossing the Black Waters: Purity and the Body in the First World War British Indian Army” Link to Readings: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)(6) (7)

Kate Imy is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Texas, where she is affiliated with the History Department, the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and the Military History Center. She earned her PhD from Rutgers University and was a recipient of a Fulbright fellowship (India), an IHR-Mellon fellowship (U.K.), and two Critical Language Scholarships (Hindi and Urdu). Her first book, Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army will be released by Stanford University Press in 2019. Her work has appeared in Gender & History, Twentieth Century British History, the Journal of British Studies, and the blogs of the Institute of Historical Research and Royal Historical Society. Her first article, entitled “Queering the Martial Races: Sex and Circumcision in the Twentieth Century British Indian Army” won the Nupur Chaudhuri prize of the Coordinating Council for Women in History at the American Historical Association Conference. She is currently a managing editor of the British Journal for Military History. She is developing a second book project on international soldier and civilian experiences of war in Singapore and Malaya.

Abstract: During the First World War, roughly 1.4 million South Asian soldiers and civilians fought on behalf of the British Empire. Most fought in campaigns and battlefields as far afield as France, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Singapore. Yet for many, overseas service engendered intersecting concerns about crossing the “Black Waters” of the ocean. Novelist Mulk Raj Anand described this belief as “all who went beyond the mountains or across the black waters were destined for hell.” For some, the issue related partially to the caste purity of high caste Hindus, and the need for specific provisions in matters as diverse as dining, bathing, and seeking medical aid. Yet this proved to be far more than a “religious issues” for colonial officials to condemn or accommodate. As many as 200,000 soldiers who fought in the “Indian Army” were not Indian but Nepali. Most of them did not identify as Hindu or as high-caste. Nonetheless, British military officials coordinated unprecedented efforts to facilitate purification ceremonies for Nepali—but not Indian Hindu—soldiers. Instead, they increasingly demobilized Indian Hindus for being too logistically burdensome due, they alleged, to caste requirements. This paper explores caste purity in the Indian Army within the context of debates about health, anti-colonialism, and national sovereignty. It suggests that soldiers, colonial officials, and civilian leaders understood, regulated, or rejected so-called “religious” mandates for complex reasons that reveal the contested state of soldiers’ bodies in the midst of global war and anti-colonial rebellion.

5:30-6:45 Kalyani Ramnath “Madras, Rangoon and Colombo: Life and Law in Postwar South Asia”

“I am a historian of modern South Asia, with research and teaching interests in legal history, histories of migration and displacement, transnational history and questions of archival method. At present, I am a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at the Centre for History and Economics at Harvard University. I received my Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 2018. I also hold a bachelor’s degree in arts and law (B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) (JD equivalent) from the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) and a master’s degree in law (LL.M.) from the Yale Law School. From 2010 – 2012, I served on the faculty of the NLSIU. See Transit, my latest piece on the forgotten ferry crossing across the present-day India Sri Lanka maritime boundary here. For a list of upcoming talks, see here.”

15 Nov. Subah Dayal (NYU) and Alexis Dudden (U Conn) 

4:00-5:15 Subah Dayal, Elegies to the Port: Surat and Vengurla in the Persianate imaginary Link to Readings (1) (2)

Subah Dayal is a historian of the Indian Ocean, with a focus on early modern South Asia and the Persianate world. Her current book draws on literary and archival materials in Persian, Urdu, and Dutch to examine how regional household lineages in the Mughal empire’s peripheries transformed institutions and circulation networks in the Indian Ocean. Her research interests are in connected histories, household studies, comparative early modernities, global history, and pre-modern documentary and manuscript cultures. Her publications include “Vernacular Conquest? A Persian patron and his image in the 17th-century Deccan” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (Duke, 2017); “Making the ‘Mughal’ Soldier: Ethnicity, Identification, and Documentary Culture in southern India 1600-1700” forthcoming in the Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient (Brill, 2020), and “On Heroes and History: Responding to the Shahnama (The Book of Kings) in the Deccan 1500-1800” will appear in the edited volume, Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in Circulation (Indiana University Press, 2020). Dayal also developed pedagogical approaches for teaching connected histories in the classroom through an NEH Summer Institute Fellowship in 2017 on ‘Beyond East and West: Exchanges and Interactions across the Early Modern World (1400-1800).’ After receiving her BA from Rutgers University and Masters from the Center for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, Dayal earned her PhD in History from UCLA, where her research was funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. Before coming to Gallatin, she was assistant professor of South Asian history at Tulane University and Clemson University.

Abstract: Recent revisions in maritime history have urged shifting our attention from the world of commerce and trade in Indian Ocean port-cities (largely examined through European-language archives) to exploring them as nodes of intellectual exchange (studied through chronicles, treatises, and administrative documents in Persian and Arabic). This paper will turn to a kindred body of Persianate materials, namely in the pan-regional literary idiom of Dakkani Urdu, that memorialized the lifecycle of two port-cities in the seventeenth century – Surat in Mughal Gujarat and Vengurla in the Deccan on the Konkan coast. It will investigate how regional vernacular poet-historians in inland courts, who had never visited the port-city, attempted to make sense of its rise, fall, and destruction.

In doing so, regional literati largely ignored the presence of European actors, so often heralded in scholarship as keepers of these gateways to the seas. Vernacular poets understood port-cities as critical sites where local, regional, and imperial sovereignties were bitterly contested, negotiated, and redefined. Formulating new narratives that connected maritime and agrarian power, seventeenth-century actors plotted contestations between the Deccan sultans, the Mughals, and the Marathas over Surat and Vengurla onto a wider canvas of contentious politics. Entering the story of maritime power from a different textual register – poetic memories of the port-city –  allows us to connect the study of Persianate literary cultures with Indian Ocean social history. Rather than viewing these nodes merely as sites of commercial exchange, we may then unearth what the early modern port-city meant to contemporary non-European observers, who never passed through it, but were deeply aware of its role in transforming the social and economic world of the western Indian Ocean.

5:30-6:45 Alexis Dudden, “Japanese Territorial Disputes and the Legacy of Empire.” (Link to online reading)

Alexis Dudden is professor of history at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches modern Japanese, Korean, and international history. Dudden received her BA from Columbia University in 1991 and her PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 1998. She has lived and studied for extended periods of time in Japan and South Korea, with awards from Fulbright, ACLS, NEH, and SSRC as well as fellowships at Princeton and Harvard. She is the 2015 recipient of the Manhae Peace Prize, and her books include Troubled Apologies Among Japan, Korea, and the United States (Columbia) and Japan’s Colonization of Korea (Hawaii). Currently, Dudden’s research centers on Japan’s territorial contests with regional neighbors, completing a book project tentatively called, The Opening and Closing of Japan, 1850-2020 (with Oxford). She publishes regularly in print and online media, most recently, “America’s Dirty Secret in East Asia” (NYT).

22 Nov – 13 Dec. No meetings.

SPRING TERM 2020

SPRING 2020 Special Events

COMING IN FEB. 2020

FEB 14. Grace Easterly “From Imperial Port City to Logistics Hub: The Production of Strategic Space in Djibouti (1859-Present)” (Link to Reading)

Grace Easterly is the Program Assistant for the South Asia Program at the Stimson Center, a security think tank in Washington, DC. She graduated summa cum laude from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study with a BA in International Political Economy, Geography, and Security and a minor in French. Her senior thesis focused on the strategic history of Djibouti and the broader Western Indian Ocean region. While at NYU, she was an Africa House Fellow for research in Ethiopia and Djibouti and a recipient of the Gallatin Dean’s Award for Summer Research, the Horn Fund for Environmental Research, and the Dean’s Award for Graduating Seniors.

Abstract: This paper examines what I call the production of strategic space, or the process in which this place, the Republic of Djibouti and its capital, the port city of Djibouti, became strategically valuable to different states–including the French Empire, the United States, and China–over time. Throughout the period from 1859 to the present, the strategic value of Djibouti fluctuated as states reacted to global events, political economic contexts, and discursive shifts in the global system. These events constantly shifted state interests, re-configuring their conceptions of the importance of Djibouti’s territory. As a result of this process, spaces within Djibouti became strategic relative to other spaces. The port, for example, was more important to French authorities than the desert hinterland, which was considered primarily a useless wasteland. Authorities organized space within Djibouti to reflect these government priorities, which had a profound impact on Djibouti’s inhabitants’ mobilities, economic opportunities, and political freedoms. The ordering of space within Djibouti reflected state interests, exposing the relationship between geography and power, strategy and spatial organization.

TBA

Charlotte Brooks “Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China during the Nanjing Decade” (Readings in Primary Sources: Chinese Digest)

Originally from California, Charlotte Brooks earned her B.A. in Chinese history from Yale University and worked in China and Hong Kong after college. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in U.S. history from Northwestern University and taught at the University at Albany-SUNY, before coming to Baruch College. A scholar of race, immigration, and urban history, she has published widely on Asian American history, especially Chinese American history.

Abstract: In the first decades of the 20th century, almost half of the Chinese Americans born in the United States moved to China—a relocation they assumed would be permanent. Fleeing racism, thousands saw the tottering Chinese empire and its successor republic as a land of opportunity. However, during the 1930s, the new Guomindang (Nationalist) regime increasingly considered Chinese American citizen immigrants in China to be a politically and socially suspect population. My presentation will explore the often tense relationship between Chinese American citizen immigrants and the Nationalist regime between 1928 and 1937, as well as the longer-term impact of their mutual suspicion.

James Gerien-Chen, “When the Japanese Empire Met the Chinese Diaspora in Late Qing South China.”

James Gerien-Chen received his PhD in Japanese history from Columbia University in 2019 and is currently the Borg Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia. His research interests include the histories of Japanese imperialism in Taiwan, China, and Southeast Asia, and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of migration, borderlands, and law. 

Abstract: After Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, colonial and diplomatic officials sought to expand the empire’s influence along longstanding social and commercial networks that connected Chinese residing in Taiwan to their places of origin in South China and the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. Crucial to this ambition was the legal designation Taiwan sekimin, or “subjects registered in Taiwan,” which officials conferred on subjects who moved outside the island colony. Over time, the category expanded to include local and diasporic Chinese across the region, tying Japanese interests to sekimin and their networks there. This presentation will explore a debate between Japanese diplomatic and colonial officials and Chinese local authorities over the nationality status of one such Taiwan sekimin, Lin Mouchang, through an investigation of a commercial debate in 1906. I use official records to reconstruct jurisdictional conflicts over determining his legal status (was he a Japanese imperial subject? Or a Chinese subject? What did either of these legal categories entail, and could one be both?) and the authority to adjudicate commercial disputes. By doing so, I show that the mobility of Taiwan sekimin and its very legality as a category both shaped and were shaped by Japanese expansion and Chinese diasporic networks. Scholars have characterized these jurisdictional conflicts as arising from individuals’ mobilizing a personal strategy of commercial gain. This presentation treats this characterization of merchants as self-interested individuals, rather, as an artifact of archival knowledge production by authorities, and proposes instead that jurisdictional conflicts over legal status were constitutive, rather than derivative, of such a characterization of colonial subjectivity.