Month: August 2019

Deolonizing History

The colonization of World History began when Europeans carried their own peculiar forms of historical knowledge production deep into all the continents. Colonized History thus developed so as to privilege Europe, its colonies, and their relations with “others.” Colonized historical space became ubiquitous with the European-styled mapping of territorial management, all around the world. Even the empires, nations, and world regions ruled by “others” came to inhabit historical time synchronized with Europe’s ancient, medieval, and modern epochs.

Colonization sparked constant opposition. Indigenous, national, revolutionary, and post-colonial histories multiplied in many languages over the centuries. The result is a vast corpus of historical knowledge that reaffirms the fundamental centrality of colonization.

Decolonizing History requires alternative perspectives on space, time, and human agency that are not derived from colonization or its opposition.  Global Asia provides such a  perspective by showing that colonization emerged inside the vast spatio-temporality of connective mobility and territoriality that is Asia’s Circulatory System. Dynamic forces developed in Asia during the long first millennium — from Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan — which propelled Europe overseas, sustained the evolution of imperial modernity, and is now unraveling History’s colonization. 

Global Asia Fall 2019

In Fall Semester 2019, I will offer Global Asia as a Core Course at NYU-NY. 

GLOBAL ASIA

COURSE DESCRIPTION 

CORE-UA 546. Lectures: MW, 2:00pm-3:15pm , Tisch Hall UC50

Instructor: David Ludden,  del5@nyu.edu. Office: KJCC526. Office hours: Wed 11-1

Assistant Instructors: Arash Azizi, Ilan Benattar,  Anirban Karak, Leela Khanna

Assignment Dates, Policies, Weekly Schedule, Resources

This course is based on the simple fact that Asia’s dynamic role in world today provides a new starting point for studies of History. The old starting point was the idea that Europe, Asia, Africa, and Americas were composed of separate, fixed cultures, called “civilizations,” each with their own destiny. Today, that idea is archaic and its poisonous effects are obvious: when the West ruled the world, that idea helped to separate and subordinate non-white people; the same idea still fosters ideologies of national purity that mobilize millions against “alien threats” and bolster global inequity by making The West appear to be the paragon of progress and modernity. 

Traditional ideas about Asia lost their credibility when Asia began its rapid rise in the world of globalization, in the 1980s. The Financial Times has now proclaimed that an “Asian Century is set to begin,” when Asia will be “the center of the world.”  Even Wikipedia now describes the “Asian Century” that we live in. Understanding Asia’s dynamism has become a subject of interest for all variety of scholars, students, and policy-makers. 

Research into Asia’s current global dynamism quickly discovered that Asian cultures were never separate, closed, and static. Asian cultures have never been locked inside the national boundaries that we see on maps today. Rather, Asia has always been a sprawling diverse collection of inter-connected societies, cultures, and economies, with extensive connections across Africa and Europe and influential ties to the Americas after 1500.

The rise of Asia today is not the result of recent globalization; neither is it the result of any one culture, nation, or civilization, forging ahead, all of a sudden, for the first time. Rather, Asia remains a vast, complex, multi-cultural, inter-connected, driving force in globalization, today, as it has been for many centuries: Asia’s current rise to global prominence is a continuation of very long-term trends.

This Global Asia course is part of NYU’s Global Asia program, which has centers of research and teaching at NYU campuses in New York, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi.  This course is a one-semester survey of Asia’s dynamic mobility, connectivity, interaction, exchange, innovation, and territorial transformation, from ancient times to the present.  The course has two parts. (Each part will form the subject of a one-semester course that will be offered in NYUAD in 2020-21, and subsequently in New York.)

Both parts emphasize spatial dynamics around Asia’s Circulatory System, spanning Central Asia and the Indian Ocean, which had prefigured China’s new Belt-Road Initiative by 1300. 

  • Part One covers ancient, classical, medieval, and early-modern periods — into the 19th century — to study “traditional Asia” as a historical process of dynamic spatial connectivity, and thus to relocate Europe’s global expansion in a Global Asia context.
  • Part Two explores the creation of the modern world, after 1200, through Asian histories of global connectivity that shape Asian localities and world regions. 

All these Global Asia courses begin by looking critically at national maps, because the world maps that we see from early school days permanently freeze global geography and thus conceal Global Asia dynamics. The world that national maps describe only came into being after 1945, when they were drawn under the impress of the world’s most powerful nations, who were victors in World War Two. Maps that formed a global cookie-cutter of national territories thus became a lasting legacy of Western imperialism. 

National maps erase the human mobility that forms the historical context of all cultures. Human mobility and mingling make cultures dynamic. Asia’s mobility is the secret to Asia’s dynamic role in world history. Global Asia focuses our attention on the historical mobilityof peoples and cultures. We see that spaces of mobility create environments where territorial power and authority exert control over  cultural assets and investments.

Mobility and territoriality go together to shape one another. Mobility creates and changes social environments, while social forces of territorial enclosure work to define regions, places, and routes of travel. Boundaries separate and define territories, but they are imposed, constructed, and enforced inside spaces of mobility. Territorial discipline creates cultural boundaries that become part of human identity and generate passions attached to places, regions, and nations, where mobility and cultural mixing and mingling are always at work changing environments where people live and strive to make life meaningful.  

Rather than being fixed and static, as they appear to be on maps of nations and civilizations, territories defined by ruling authorities are historically malleable, contingent, adaptive spatial forms: powerful people work to maintain territorial order inside spaces of mobility they do not control. Over the centuries, powers to enforce territorial order have expanded spatially and become more rigorous, as technology has also accelerated and extended mobility. Long distance travel has transformed more localities in more and more far flung regions, as territorial authorities have exercised more power over larger spaces. 

In this light, we see that globalization is a very long-term process of expansive spatial connectivity and territorial transformation; it begins in Asia, in ancient times. We consider that process across seven time periods.

  1. During 300BCE-600CE, an Asian Circulatory System emerged as travels by land and sea knitted together empires spanning Central Asia, West Asia, Mediterranean, Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal, Tropical Asia, and Northeast Asia.
  2. During 600-900,  massive nomadic horse warrior steppe migrations broke up old imperial territories in East, South, and West Asia — for instance,  they smashed the Roman Empire — and then trade routes shifted and connected imperial Byzantium, Arab Caliphates and Turkic warrior domains with Tang China and peninsular India. 
  3. In 900-1200, tropical economic development produced new routes of opportunity connecting the Indian Ocean and Central Asia, running through India. Trade and imperial power expanded in South India and Southeast Asia, increasing connectivity around the Bay of Bengal, Arabian Sea, East Africa, and Persian Gulf.  
  4. In the 1200s, massive Turko-Mongol military migration further integrated the Asian Circulatory System and pushed it around the Black Sea into Russia and Europe. Post-Mongol empires — circa 1300-1500 — focused military support for commercial investments in more concentrated connected territories. Increasing Asian wealth led Europeans blocked from direct access to Asia to invest in seaborne military mobility that brought the Spanish to America and the Portuguese to Asia by 1500.
  5. During early modern centuries, circa 1500-1800, Asia’s largest ever empires generated massive wealth as their coastal regions sustained expansive European military commercialism.  An Interwoven Globe composed of seaborne networks anchored in port-cities around the world enriched Asian territories where European imperial power slowly increased its ability to control the mobility of economic assets around colonial port cities.
  6. During the period 1800-1950, European control over industrial mechanized mobility and military technology produced modern imperial capitalism that gave Europeans dominance over global mobility and territorial order. Asian territorial nationalism developed in that imperial context. Two World Wars among imperial nations, including Japan, destroyed the global European imperial order, which mobile nationalists and revolutionaries had rendered unsustainable.
  7. During 1950-2020s, Asia’s globalization continued with the global imposition of national state territorial authority, which remains unstable today, because of  internal and external challenges from mobile economic, political, social, and cultural forces, all enhanced by technological change. The so-called “rise of Asia” is really an increase in Asian wealth relative to the pre-1950 century when it was suppressed by Western imperial control over the mobility of Asian economic assets.

    In this course, we collapse these periods into a four-part sequence that provides a framework for student writing assignments. 

Semester Outline

Part One (Weeks 1-6),  Building the Asian Circulatory System in the Long First Millennium, circa 300BCE-1300CE (from Ashoka to Kublai Khan)

Part Two (Weeks 7-9), Military Commercialism: Forging Global Regimes of Trade and Production, 1279-1820 (from Kublai Khan to Napoleon)

Part Three (Weeks 10-12), Commercial Militarism: Transcontinental Empireand The Wealth of the World, 1400-1950 (from Zheng Ho to Hirohito)

Part Four (Weeks 13-15), States of Capital Accumulation: Empires, Nations, Development, and Globalization, 1870-2020 (from Lenin to Xi)

Afghanistan and Indo-Persia

An Outline Spatial History of Afghanistan

David Ludden, NYU

11 August 2019

Struggles of many kinds have raged for centuries over control of territories enclosed by the national map of Afghanistan. Standard histories of that legacy focus on great power efforts to sustain central state authority — from Ghaznavids, Timurids and Safavids to the Great Game, Cold War, and today, imperial America – and thus they conceal the dynamic complexity of the historical space in which everyday people have produced Afghanistan’s fractured coherence.

Scholars call that space Indo-Persia. It is composed of influentially interconnected historical regions spanning what are now Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Those regions include Khorasan, Transoxiana/Mawara-un-Nahr, Badakshan, Wakhan, Baltistan, Kashmir, Panjab, Kabul, Sistan, Makran, Sindh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Delhi, Awadh, Bihar, Deccan, and Bengal. Major cities include Nishapur, Mashhad, Marv, Herat, Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent, Balkh/Mazari Sharif, Kabul, Kandahar, Srinagar, Lahore, Multan, Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Surat, Patna, Hyderabad, and Dhaka.

The Persianate qualities of Indo-Persia appear in its intricate cultural heritage, in its languages, literatures, arts, customs, religions, aesthetics, and genealogies. Its Indian qualities appear in the trajectory of its social expansion, over many centuries, from routes connecting the Steppe with Persia, moving south and east, into Indian monsoon spaces, where summer rains feed rice and wheat and winter winds carry ships to ports in Sindh and Gujarat.

Many centuries of travel, migration, and settlement made Indo-Persia a vast human land bridge connecting the Steppe and the Indian Ocean. Indo-Persia thus became a generative space of mobility and territorial contestation in Asia’s very long process of globalization, which began two millennia before Vasco da Gama arrived, in 1498. After that, Europeans increased global connectivity with mobility at sea, but before, during, and after, Asia’s expansive globalization travelled around The Steppe and the Indian Ocean through Persia, India, and China.

Around The Steppe, horse warrior nomads and merchants propelled globalization from prehistoric times: Indo-Aryans, Turks, Mongols, Sogdians, Armenians, and many others. Around the Indian Ocean, merchants and sailors connected distant shores, riding monsoon winds: Greeks, Africans, Arabs, Gujaratis, Tamils, Chinese, Bugis, and many others. All the agents of globalization travelled through Persia, India, and China, where they joined countless local investors in the imperial economic development of agriculture, trade, and manufacturing, which drew upon and accelerated connectivity across Central Asia and around southern seas. All great imperial territories in Asia developed in connective spaces between The Steppe and The Sea.

That spatial pattern of development entailed continuous movement of population, culture, and imperial power from north to south, out of the dry Steppe into fertile Persia, India, and China. Warriors from The Steppe built all the great Asian empires, but in different ways. In China and Persia, Steppe warrior horse nomads rode straight into the plains and a strict cultural opposition developed between peoples of The Steppe and The Sown. By contrast, Indo-Persia includes thousands of miles of Hindu Kush pathways connecting South Asia with The Steppe and Khorasan. Those mountains served as a capillary filter for millions of people who travelled in all directions: many died along the way, as did Alexander the Great’s exhausted troops, but many people settled down to work the land, raise animals, and pursue mercantile and military careers designed specifically for these mountainous spaces of mobility.    

Afghanistan took shape in those spaces, where militant settlers took control of local land and fought to control routes of travel. This produced a distinctive territorial politics dispersed among valleys woven together in a maze of routes through the mountains. Controlling those routes became increasingly profitable with increasing trade and by the end of the first millennium CE, military conflict over routes through the Hindu Kush had spilled into the plains. Ever since, imperial powers based in the plains have sought military control over those capillaries of trade connecting The Steppe and The Sea.

The cultural content of these capillary spaces changed as patterns of migration shifted in the eighth century. Until then, migratory settlers were mostly Indo-Aryan language speakers: Vedic Aryans, Kushans, Sakas, Indo-Greeks, and others. Buddhists, Hindus, and Zoroastrians were prominent. Monks and merchants from India and China travelled the mountains and the Silk Road thrived. A great shift occurred after 700, when Turkic horse nomads riding west from Mongolia, Arabs riding east from Syria, and Persians riding out of Khorasan combined to extend Abbasid imperial territory from Syria to Samarkand. Thereafter, Turkic language speakers became most prominent as Indo-Persia’s migrant settlers, increasingly mixing Turkic, Persian, and Mongol cultural qualities.

Migrations after 751 produced tribal identities and territories called “Afghan,” inside ever-more active, valuable pathways through the Hindu Kush. The year 751 is iconic because it was then that Turks, Persians, and Arabs fought under Abbasids to defeat T’ang forces at the Talas River (between Tashkent and Bishkek), forcing imperial China to withdraw permanently east of the Pamirs. Paper-making then spread through Abbasid territory and Islam travelled with Turks and with increasing Sufi influence all across Indo-Persia. Balkh eventually became Mazari Sharif. Afghan imperial territorialism began in 998, as Abbasid power declined and Mahmud of Ghazni formed marched through the mountains and into the lowlands across Persia and India. There followed a long series of imperial projects spanning Indo-Persia, running through Afghan territory; these reached the height of their institutional legitimacy under the Timurids.

The centrality of Indo-Persia for Asia’s economic development increased as the Abbasid Empire fell apart and further increased during and after Mongol imperial expansion, which drove many more migrants south into India, where – by 1300 –settlers from the Persianate north had produced Sufi silsilas and dynastic territories from Delhi to Bengal and Gujarat to Madurai. This increasing long-distance mobility through the Hindu Kush produced ever more profitable spaces for investment along all routes connecting The Steppe and The Sea.

Eighteenth century imperial struggles over Afghan territory reflect the increasing commercial and military value of routes through the Hindu Kush; these became more profitable bastions for diverse Afghan tribes pursuing control over local assets and also imperial targets for competing lowland rulers. That combination of local and imperial struggles for control over spaces of mobility steadily reduced the commercial value of long-distance trade through the Hindu Kush, which then became Afghanistan national state territory. China’s Belt-Road initiative is the most recent reiteration of Global Asia’s connective imperative to connect The Steppe and The Sea: the BRI route from Kashgar through the Indus Valley reflects another economic adaptation by people who invest in spaces of mobility to opportunities and obstacles produced by politics. Such adaptations are visible historically all across Asia from ancient times; now, they discourage long-distance mobility through Afghanistan and drive the national government to seek control over militant groups entrenched in ancient pathways.

Mountains and rivers provide the physical template for Afghanistan’s spatially fractured coherence. River valleys host major cities which have been sites for intense local investment for many centuries, situated at strategic points where hills meet the plains; thus, these cities ring the central massif and anchor routes into the lowlands in what are now respectively Iran, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan: Herat, Mazari Sharif, Kabul, Ghazna, and Kandahar. Ring roads around the central Hindu Kush massif connect these cities, and one major road cuts across to Kabul and Herat, reflecting old India-Persia routes, but the centrifugal trajectory of mobility into the lowlands combined with the localized mosaic of territorial control in the mountains makes fractured Afghan territorialism one obstinate legacy of many centuries of mobility across Indo-Persia.