Category Archives: Uncategorized

Feb 5. Book Launch, Frank Perlin, City Intelligible

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Book Launch/Discussion

Frank Perlin, City Intelligible: A Philosophical and Historical Anthropology of Global Commoditisation before Industrialisation  (BRILL, 2020,  Studies in Global Social History, Volume: 38) (discount order form)

The book is available online in PDF: here and here, and the Webinar recording is available for viewing online here. 
  February 5, 2021, 9:00-10:30 (EST)
The recording of panel presentations for the January 22 Webinar discussion at the Center for Modern Indian Studies, Gottingen is available at https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/podcasts+and+webinars/637208.html.

Discussants: Ravi Ahuja (Göttingen), Tania Bhattacharya (Harvard), Anirban Karak (NYU), Andy Liu (Villanova),  and Anna Sailer (Göttingen), with introductions by Manu Goswami, David Ludden, and Andrew Sartori (NYU), and response from Frank Perlin.

Frank Perlin is also the author of The invisible city : monetary, administrative, and popular infrastructures in Asia and Europe, 1500-1900 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993) and Unbroken landscape: commodity, category, sign and identity : their production as myth and knowledge from 1500 (Aldershot : Variorum, 1994)

City Intelligible seeks to integrate a transcendental philosophical anthropology of commoditisation before industrialisation with a social and cultural, thus empirical anthropology of commodity production and exchange that is global, thus inter-cultural. It treats commodification as a singular and privileged evidence of the universal status of human reasoning, and one that grounds the translational character of human exchange throughout the early centuries, and yet that simultaneously founds ubiquitous cultural differentiation. The book constitutes, therefore, a refutation of the predominant tendency in the humanities to represent cultural difference as inhibiting the very possibility of effective intercultural translation.

City Intelligible treats the factors of economic history as forms of cultural expression, but determined, in their turn, by a continuum of complex societal formation from the very beginnings of intensive agricultural and social settlement. It seeks to derive evidence for the universal foundations of human reasoning through analysis of the culture of commoditisation in marrying a thoroughgoing Kantian analysis of what constitutes a commodity with the historical evidence, an approach aspiring to ground the very concept and possibility of a universal human cultural nature underlying all human differentiation. First there is that question of how such translational exchanges of what are local cultural products even possible; thus the question; what is a commodity.
 
The empirical side of this work is especially concerned with differentiating a human generated nature … a second nature … distinct in form and kind from the contextual and englobing Darwinian-type nature with which are conceptually familiar and that englobes all reality; it is that second cultural nature that forms the specific human context of all historical experience and agency, and I seek, therefore, to determine its form and content. This empirical part undertakes a detailed consideration of the extended lines of production and of circulation especially characterising cloth manufacture in the sub-continental South Asia, thus from the cotton in the field to its final products, and including the phases of marketing and composition of type that connect each step of such production and circulation the one to the others, and thereby transiting territory indifferent to frontiers of whatever kind as also to scale, and necessarily entailing in its turn a density of marketisation both local and global in extents, — enabling commodity-exchange and what, therefore, one may judge as intercultural translatability. It is this sequential entirety of steps that goes to constitute what we call the commodity. For this reason the book is much focussed on describing the individual anonymous agency underlying such historical process. Clearly, production and circulation, labour in the field and exchange in the market place, are regarded as entirely interdependent. The second aspect with which I am concerned is intercultural exchange itself.
 
 A new book, The Missing Discipline, is now in composition constituting what virtually is a second volume to City Intelligible, and concerning the commodity. It seeks to expose Adam Smith’s (and later Marx’s) contention concerning the structural foundations generated by the huge transfer of a «surplus» of value from agriculturalist to a dominating class that underlies the possibility of any complex agriculturally-based society prior to industrialisation, and that in turn grounds … makes possible … the complexity of any such society itself (manufactures, institutions, social strata). This implies, as I read it, that all kinds of such society are also commercial capitalist. Its second concern is with  the intercultural character of such a translational nexus.
 

Dec 4, 2020 The Garment Sector and Covid in Bangladesh

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“The Garment Sector Unraveling in Bangladesh: Rethinking the Health, Safety, and Livelihoods of Workers During a Global Pandemic,”
December 4th, 8am PST, 11AM in NY
COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on the global economy and on supply chains worldwide. Inherent inequities present at all layers of this complex network have left workers vulnerable, and their livelihoods have become even more precarious under the current global pandemic. This webinar, “The Garment Sector Unraveling in Bangladesh: Rethinking the Health, Safety, and Livelihoods of Workers During a Global Pandemic,” is a rare opportunity to bring together scholars in the social sciences, public policy, and healthcare to explore the role that workers’ physical and mental health plays in shaping our attitudes towards labor rights and how Covid-19 provides us with an opportunity to rethink our approach. 

Please join us to listen to these experts on Friday, December 4th at 8am Pacific Time on Zoom. Please go HERE to register.

This program is a joint collaboration between Stanford CARE, the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley, the UC Berkeley Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Stanford Center for South Asia.

Tamil Merchants in China

Special Events, Uncategorized
SPECIAL EVENT

Nagapattinam to Quanzhou, The First Tamil Diaspora –
Tracing Tamil Merchants in Historical Maritime Asia 
Webinar Lecture Link 
by John Guy 

Saturday 7 November @ 7.00 am. ET USA. (8.00 pm. SGT Singapore)

The Indian Heritage Centre, Singapore is presenting this lecture and discussion in their Sojourner to Settler Webinar Series,   moderated by Arun Mahizhnan. 

Registration at: https://peatix.com/event/1670364/view
 

Tamil Merchants in China Lecture by John Guy
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DECOLONIZING HISTORY

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Hosted by the

Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University

Why are the histories of certain peoples and places prioritized over others? How do these historical erasures contribute to social injustice today? In this unique series, titled “Decolonizing History,” the Lepage Center seeks to advance the public interest by asking questions about how history is written, taught and understood. The series will challenge how historical knowledge is produced and offer diverse and inclusive ways to study and interpret the past.

 

September 2020

Decolonizing the Curriculum:

 Challenging Eurocentric Teaching and Learning

 

Part I

Wednesday, September 9th, 2020
12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. EST

A Conversation with Dr. Manjeet Ramgotra

Who is at the center of our curricula and who is at the margins? Join us for an open and honest conversation that examines how education and learning have historically played a role in prioritizing certain peoples and places over others. Dr. Manjeet Ramgotra is a Lecturer in Political Theory at SOAS University of London and advocates for the inclusion of more women and people of color in university curricula.

Co-sponsored by the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Villanova University.

Event held via Zoom. RSVP here (required).

 
manjeet ramgotra
 
 
 

The Global Asia Colloquium

Event Archive, Friday Colloquium, Uncategorized

The Colloquium meets on Fridays, 4:00-6:45. With Wine and Cheese,

in 701 KJCC (53 Washington Square South). Any change of time or venue will be announced on the schedule. 

Come One and Come All !!  

We often have two presentations: 4:00-5:15 and 5:30-6:45.  

The Colloquium is venue for discussing Global Asia research in a wide range of disciplines. It is also a graduate course in History open to students in any discipline in the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium.

The Global Asia Colloquium is substantially funded by a grant to NYU Centers for Global Asia in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai by the Luce Foundation.

April 12 Global Asia Colloquium. Barry McCarron

Event Archive, Friday Colloquium, Uncategorized

GLOBAL ASIA COLLOQUIUM

Fridays, 4:00-6:45. With Wine and Cheese.  (unless otherwise indicated) we meet in 

701 KJCC (53 Washington Square South). Come One and Come All !!

April 12. Barry McCarron (NYU), “Mobility, Empire, and Exclusion in the Pacific World: The Irish and Chinese Experience in Comparative Perspective

 

 

Abstract:

 

This talk explores the nature and significance of relations between Irish and Chinese people in the Pacific world since the late eighteenth century, which will enrich understanding of some of the major historical processes examined in the NYU Global Asia Colloquium such as mobility, connectivity, and territoriality. Nineteenth-century Western imperialism, mining booms, and the construction of transcontinental railroads brought large numbers of Irish and Chinese people into contact in the Pacific world including major Pacific port city environments such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Sydney, San Francisco, and Vancouver, where both groups experienced contrasting experiences in terms of mobility (both spatial and social).

Between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century, thousands of Irish people served in China on behalf of the United States and the British Empire. Irishmen played a significant role in the gunboat diplomacy that gave rise to the first of a series of “unequal treaties” that granted foreign powers concession and privileges in China. In their wake came a stream of Irish diplomats, soldiers, administrators, consular officials, and police, to name but a few, who helped expand and maintain the century-long treaty port system that undermined China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Other Irish, most notably Robert Hart, were leading players in China’s integration into a Euro-American-dominated international system that demanded new modes of trade and foreign relations. Hart was the most influential foreigner in China soon after becoming Inspector-General (1863-1908) of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (1854-1950), a largely Western-staffed Chinese government organization (with an Irish-born Inspector-General for 62 years of its 96-year existence) that produced revenues key to China’s state-building efforts, served as an intermediary between Chinese and foreign officials, and helped China adjust to Western imperialism and a global capitalist economy.

While Irish people were a major part of the treaty system that opened China’s door to Western imperialism, they were also among the most vocal advocates of closing the door on Chinese immigration to the United States and the British Empire in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes in California, New South Wales, Victoria, Otago, and British Columbia brought tens of thousands of Irish and Chinese into close proximity and direct contact. Both groups contributed to the rapid growth of these resource-rich and labor-scarce white settler societies by extracting precious metals such as gold, silver, and copper and laboring in a variety of industries such as agriculture, manufacturing, and transcontinental railroad construction. At the same time, the Irish diaspora was also a major force behind anti-Chinese movements that gave rise to Chinese immigration restriction laws in the Anglophone settler world and caused major friction in China’s relations with the United States and Britain.

Despite the historical significance of Irish and Chinese cross-cultural contacts and exchanges in the Pacific world, scholars have yet to examine the full range of relations between both groups. This talk, drawing on multinational archival research including Chinese-language sources in my forthcoming book project, examines Irish and Chinese cross-cultural encounters and comparative experiences in the Pacific world and links these research findings with broader questions about the forces of mobility, connectivity, and territoriality that shaped the modern Pacific world.

Global Asia Colloquium | April 5 | Gyan Prakash | Co-sponsored by South Asia NYU

Event Archive, Friday Colloquium, Uncategorized

The Global Asia Colloquium

APRIL 5, 2019, 4:00-6:45. 

701 KJCC (53 Washington Square South). With Wine and Cheese. 

A Book Launch of US Edition for Gyan Prakash’s new book,         
Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point

with discussion by Manu Bhagavan (Hunter College, CUNY), Manu Goswami (NYU), Meghna Chaudhuri (NYU), and Sanjay Ruparelia (The New School)

On the night of June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in India, suspending constitutional rights and rounding up her political opponents in midnight raids across the country. In the twenty-one harrowing months that followed, her regime unleashed a brutal campaign of coercion and intimidation, arresting and torturing people by the tens of thousands, razing slums, and imposing compulsory sterilization on the poor. Emergency Chronicles provides the first comprehensive account of this understudied episode in India’s modern history. Gyan Prakash strips away the comfortable myth that the Emergency was an isolated event brought on solely by Gandhi’s desire to cling to power, arguing that it was as much the product of Indian democracy’s troubled relationship with popular politics.

Drawing on archival records, private papers and letters, published sources, film and literary materials, and interviews with victims and perpetrators, Prakash traces the Emergency’s origins to the moment of India’s independence in 1947, revealing how the unfulfilled promise of democratic transformation upset the fine balance between state power and civil rights. He vividly depicts the unfolding of a political crisis that culminated in widespread popular unrest, which Gandhi sought to crush by paradoxically using the law to suspend lawful rights. Her failure to preserve the existing political order had lasting and unforeseen repercussions, opening the door for caste politics and Hindu nationalism.

Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. His many books include Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City (Princeton), Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India, and Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton). He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

 

 

*Abstract and bio retrieved from Princeton University Press, 2019

 

AY 2018-2019

Uncategorized

The Global Asia Colloquium

 Spring 2019. Fridays, 4:00-6:45. With Wine and Cheese.  (unless otherwise indicated) we meet in 701 KJCC (53 Washington Square South). Come One and Come All !!

When we have two presentations, they occur 4:00-5:15 and 5:30:6:45.  

The Colloquium is venue for discussing Global Asia research in a wide range of disciplines and also a graduate course in History open to students in any discipline in the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium.

1 Feb   PORT DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOP

Workshop Title: Building Between Land and Sea: Nature, Infrastructure and Development in South Asia

Devika Shankar (Princeton), “A Coast of Curiosities: Changing Perceptions of Nature and the Development of Cochin’s Harbour (1860-1900)   

Chandana Anusha (Yale), “The story of a piece of land:  Port-led changes in the Gulf of Kutch, Western India”

Ayesha Omer, “Coal Ground”

Discussant: Jerome Whitingon (NYU)
 
8 Feb Global Asia and New York Immigrant City

in Glucksman Ireland House, 1 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003  

Book Launch: David Riemers (NYU), All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants, and the Making of New York. Presentations: David M. Reimers (NYU), Robert Snyder (Rutgers–Newark). Discussants: Hasia Diner and Kevin Kenny (NYU)

15 Feb Urbanism, Photography, and Dhows: The Swahili Coast and Western Indian Ocean

Prita Meier (NYU),”The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast 

Nidhi Mahajan (UC Santa Cruz), “On Dhows and Dangers of the Sea: Navigating Risk and Protection in the Western Indian Ocean.”

22. Feb. 11th Annual NYU Global South Asia conference 22-23 Feb.

Venue: Institute for Public Knowledge, 20 Cooper Square, 5th floor.

Global Asia Colloquium Panel:  
“Spaces of Mobility in South Asia.” 

Neelam Khoja (Harvard), “Claiming Qandahar, Claiming Sovereignty: How Iranian and Afghan Warlords Legitimized Emerging Empires in Early Modern Iran and Hindustan”

Ayesha Omer (NYU),  “Digital Connections on the New Silk Road: A Study of the Pak-China Fiber Optic Cable”

Rishad Choudhury (Oberlin), “Pilgrim Passages: Tradition and Transition in the South Asian Hajj.”

1 March. No Meeting. History Department Prospective Students’ Day

7-9 March. Imperial Connections Conference 

Venue: Ireland House.

Thursday, March 7: 5:00 – 6:30 pm. Introductory talks by Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper

Friday, March 8:   9:30-6:00. Introductions and Panels: 

Saturday, March 9: 10:00-2:30. Panels and Closing Remarks. 

15 March. Sunil Amrith (Harvard), Francis Bradley (Pratt Institute)
Mobility and Territoriality Around the Indian Ocean, 1750-1950

4:00- 5:15. Francis Bradley (Pratt Institute), “Mecca to Southeast Asia: The Patani Islamic Knowledge Networks.”

5:30-6:45. Sunil Amrith (Harvard), “Space, Inequality, and the Bay of Bengal’s First Migration Crisis”

22 March         no Meeting Spring Break and AAS in Denver

29 March. Barry Flood (NYU), “Architecture as Archive: India, Ethiopia and a Twelfth-Century World System”

The talk presents new research that highlights connections between medieval Ethiopia, Arabia and India that were previously unsuspected. Building on Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony (1991), which argued for the emergence of a ‘world system’ fostered by Mongol rule, it considers the possibility of an emergent world system in the century before the advent of the Mongols, and the role of Ethiopia within it.  

5 Apr   Gyan Prakash (Princeton). A Book Launch of US Edition for his new book, Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point

with discussion by Manu Bhagavan (Hunter College, CUNY), Manu Goswami (NYU), Meghna Chuadhuri (NYU), and Sanjay Ruparelia (The New School)

12 Apr Barry McCarron (NYU), “Mobility, Empire, and Exclusion in the Pacific World: The Irish and Chinese Experience in Comparative Perspective.”
19 Apr.  Heather Streets-Salter (Northeastern) and Manu Vimalassery (Barnard)
Conflict, Mobility and Empire 

4:00-5:15. Manu Vimalassery (Barnard), “Empires Tracks.”

5:30-6:45. Heather Streets-Salter (Northeastern), “Opportunity, Mobility, and Anticolonialism in Southeast Asia during the Great War.”

26 Apr Eric Tagliacozzo (Cornell), Johan Mathew (Rutgers)
Commodities, Consumption, and Capitalism 

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

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

3 May. Beatrice Manz (Tufts) and Ismail Alatas (NYU)

Boundaries and Boundary Crossing

4:00-5:15. Beatrice Manz, “A New Look at the Mongol Conquest of Eastern Iran 1219-1223”

5:30-6:45: Ismail Fajrie Alatas, “Border Crossing and Sectarian Boundary Making:
Reforming ʿĀshūrāʾ in early 19th century Muslim Southeast Asia” (READING is HERE)

10 May. Commodities, Nations, and Globalization. 

4:00-5:15. Elise Bortz, Catherine Korren, Ha-Young Kwon, Richard Seeno, and Taylor Upchurch (NYU, Liberal Studies) on ““The Symbolism of Dates in the Arabian Gulf States,”

5:30-6:45: Murphy Halliburton (Queens College), on “Indian Pharma,  Ayurveda, and Global Patents: A Struggle for the Control of Medical Knowledge.”

 
Fall 2019: outline only. More details on the way.

6 Sept. Fiona Kidd (NYUAD)

                        13 Sept.  — NO COLLOQUIUM History Department Retreat

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

27 Sept. TBA

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

11 Oct. Prasannan Parthasarathi (Boston College)

15 Oct. TUESDAY Special Event Jeff Kerr-Ritchie (Howard University). Creole Uprising

18 Oct. Mahnaz Yousefzadeh (NYU), Yijun Wang (NYU)

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

                      25-26 Oct. AFGHANISTAN and INDO-PERSIA workshop

1 Nov. Subah Dayal (Tulane), Jennifer Gaynor (Buffalo)  

8 Nov. Kate Imy (U North Texas)

15 Nov. Kalyani Ramnath (Harvard), Alexis Dudden (U Conn) 

22 Nov. Yih-chuen Liao (New Delhi Central Asia Artifact Collection)

6 Dec.Charlotte Brooks (Baruch) — my TUFTS gig means I will not be here

13 Dec. Grace Easterly (Stimson Center)

SPRING 2020. (Special Events Planning)

MARCH 13-14: Global Asia Symposium: “Afghanistan and Indo-Persia.” 

MARCH 27-8. Global Asia Workshop (19WSN): “Coastal Environments in Monsoon Asia.”