Month: May 2024

Global Asia

The posts under this menu heading concern my book project, which is rolling along:

Global Asia:

Mobility, Territory, and Imperial Modernity

it begins like this:

People on the move have forever made and remade human environments. Travelling and settling here and there; seeking, finding, and creating places to live, work, learn, worship, invest, raise families, buy and sell, and call home, people have also wrapped mobile space in many kinds of territory, in many ways, in many configurations. Over many centuries, mobility has increased in scale, and so have territorial controls over mobility: territories became larger, more complex, many-layered; after 1500, they circled the globe, producing social, cultural, economic, and political histories weaving micro- and macro-histories together with kaleidoscopic intricacy.

Though human survival has always depended upon mobility, rapidly increasing mobility during my lifetime has formed a new age of mobile experience: people have landed on the moon; they have sent hundreds of satellites into space, and thousands of ships and planes and billions of passengers (and pathogens) around the planet; and they have learned to walk surfing the internet on mobile phones. As people, commodities, images, news, music, ideas, money, and more have moved faster, farther, and more visibly than ever before, controls over mobility have also become more starkly visible, rigorous, and problematic, at many levels of scale, from the intimate and local to continental and planetary, in households, neighborhoods and national borderlands.

This book is about the very long history of mobility and territorial power circling Central Asia and the Indian Ocean from prehistoric times, circling the planet, after 1500, and shaping our world of imperial modernity