Global Asia: 

Mobility, Territory, and Imperial Modernity 

Chapter Abstracts

1. Placing Mobility

People on the move have made and remade human environments for millennia by settling and resettling, here and there; seeking, finding, and building places to live and work and call home; constructing borders, investing in territories of many shapes and sizes, transforming and demolishing old habitats, and moving on.  M0bile spaces and territorial powers to control and organize mobility expanded in scale as mobility accelerated and expanded over centuries, shaping and reshaping human environments countless times, forming spatial histories at many levels of scale. Global Asia is a vast array of spaces that traveled around Asian steppes and southern seas from ancient times and circled the globe after 1500; its history reveals dialectics of the imperial modernity that we inhabit today. [TEXT].

2. Nature Moving

Climate, ecology, terrain, and technology shape spatial histories by encouraging people to settle in some places more than others, inspiring people to make and protect territorial investments, inciting people to seek greener pastures, and creating new spatial possibilities. Mobility and territory interact in specific natural environments. Eastern hemisphere climates — from frozen arctic to sweltering tropics — form spaces for mobility and territory which have changed during centuries of warmer and colder weather. Human labor and technology transform natural environments, but Asian monsoons are a constant force, defining seasonal calendars and annual conditions. Every year, cold dry winter winds blow south and east from frigid north into the sea, and watery summer winds blow inland, together forming distinctive Asian spatial and temporal frames for histories of mobility and territory. [TEXT]

3. Nomad Homelands

Semi-arid central Asian steppe grasslands became mobile homelands for peoples who have traveled in all directions over 1.5 million square miles of transitional ecologies from Mongolia to Ukraine which connect the cold dry north with warmer wetter lands south of thirty degrees north latitude.  Steppe mobility shaped environments all around Eurasia: myriad migrations over millennia — mostly invisible in historical records — over long and short distances, mingled all around Eurasia, as people traveled and settled in search of pastures,  farmland, jobs, patrons, markets, safety, security, and conquest. Turkic, Arab, and Mongol migrations propelled an expansive nomad millennium that spread nomad territorial influence deep into Russia, Persia, India, China, and Europe, enabling the rise of the great Asian empires that conquered the steppe to launch the early spatial history of imperial modernity. [TEXT]

4. Destination Tropics

Many centuries of migration south, east, and west out of colder, dryer, northern climates enlarged and diversified human environments in warmer, wetter, monsoon lands, where wheat, millets, and rice fed agrarian populations clustered around rivers. River valleys became arteries for travel among steppes, mountains and plains into land-and-sea-facing coastal lands where distinctive sea-connected spatial histories unfold in the tropics. Increasing productivity in the tropics attracted inland settlers into southern coast lands and more settlers also came from around the Asian circulatory system that expanded in the medieval warm period (under Sung-Chola-Abbasid regimes, circa 900-1200),  more under Mongols, after 1200, and most of all after 1498, when Europeans sailed Atlantic and Indian Oceans to form imperial colonies in the Asian coastal tropics. [TEXT]

5. Oceanic Markets

Sailors riding monsoon winds tied Afro-Eurasian coastal regions loosely together in prehistoric times, when Malays sailed seven thousand miles west to settle Madagascar. Ancient Romans bought pearls and spices that came by ship from India. Over later centuries, more and more merchants from Asia’s three peninsulas — west, central, southeast — sailed to settle in ports in coastal regions from Arabia and Africa to China, where they joined inland settlers to form land-and-sea-facing coastal environments. Post-Mongol increasing mobility over land and sea tied coastal regions more tightly together and delivered more Asian products to Renaissance Europe, where passions for Asian consumer goods propelled Europeans overseas to seek territorial control in the mobile Asian circulatory system, which they extended across the Atlantic and Pacific to coastal regions in Europe and the Americas. [TEXT]

6. Port Landings

Ports of many kinds connected mobility and territory where water meets the land, on rivers, in oases, and on the coast. Global Asia inland ports became strategic sites for imperial urbanism, but in the age of sail, into the nineteenth century, most ports around Asian seas remained small landing sites hosting fishing communities, merchants, and other traveling settlers. After 1200, mobility overland and overseas increased inland imperial expansion and also tied Asian coastal regions by sea more tightly into expansive networks of power and productivity. Europeans then sailed the Asian circulatory system to build their own ports in the Asian tropics. Seaborne networks then connected all the continents and Asian ports became strategic sites for inland and overseas imperial interaction. The global network of ports growing out of the Asia circulatory system became the mobile homeland for imperial modernity. [TEXT]

7. Imperial Territory

Imperial territory is mobile space where coercive and cultural powers produce status ranks among people and places, channeling wealth and aspiration up the ranks, spreading elite languages, arts, religion, law, and knowledge, and building physical and cultural infrastructure to naturalize imperial order. Ancient empires produced civilization models for later imperial projects, which expanded, multiplied, and diversified as mobility increased. Military-merchant alliances became dominant: ever-larger more mobile armies needed more mobile merchants and bankers to finance imperial expansion; increasing capital accumulation became ever-more essential for imperial territory. Nineteenth century industrial mobility for armies, navies, and capital investors produced conflicts within and among empires that forced the contested reorganization of imperial territory inside twentieth century national state boundaries. [TEXT]

8. Global Metropolis

Places articulate the scale and content of imperial territory: great cities anchor networks of mobility and power that form imperial expanse, accumulating the most wealth, influence, and stature; these decrease down the ranks of cities, towns, villages, and poor neighborhoods; they fade away beyond the pale. All kinds of assets and social aspiration travel up the ranks, favoring people with higher status personal qualities, including race, language, religion, knowledge, wealth, fashion, and ideology. In global spaces of industrial mobility, struggles of imperial aspiration reshuffled imperial ranks and locked them legally into national state boundaries, as ever-expanding accelerating mobility at sea, on land, and in the air aggravated imperial inequity to force more and more people into cities and provoke more conflicts over inequity traveling networks among far-flung places crossing all national state boundaries.  [TEXT]

9. Inequity Anthropocene

Global Asia has been expanding globally for three centuries in modern imperial territories where Euro-American military and market power have concentrated wealth and power at the apex of ranks ranging down among cities, towns, villages, households, and individuals around the world. Dialectics of imperial modernity have sustained the adaptive flexibility and productivity of capitalism with a widening range of creative elements and diversities, which we see in Global Asia, where everyday struggles of imperial aspiration, resistance, and adaptation have challenged and reshuffled imperial ranks, facing the multi-faceted arsenal of Euro-American supremacy. Global Asia is now challenging and perhaps transforming imperial modernity as it forms novel counter-hegemonic and ethno-transnational spaces of social life spanning InterAsia, AmerAsia, and AfroAsia.  [TEXT]