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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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)