1. The very long first millennium, from ancient Greeks to medieval Mongols, is the formative epoch for Global Asia time-space, when societies, cultures, and political economies all around Eurasia took shape. People transformed spaces all around Eurasia with mobility that circled around the Central Steppes and Southern Seas. Classical ancient civilizations with canonical histories in separate, self-contained fictional territories were produced by transformative mobile forces traveling that epochal time-space.
2. Ancient mobility shaped distant territories. All major religions illustrate that process; so do pandemics that traveled slowly in ships and caravans from East and South West Asia to sicken Roman armies and workers and help unravel the Roman Empire. Ptolemy and The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea record known ancient spaces of Afro-Eurasia connectivity.
3. Asian circuits of mobility expanded dramatically overland during a millennium after the fall of Rome. This transforming of space around Eurasia began with Turkic migrations (500s) and peaked with Mongol (1200s) imperial armies riding and settling west from Mongolia as far as Ukraine and the Balkans. Meanwhile, Arab armies, merchants, and settlers traveled from the arid southwest along ancient Greek and Roman routes from Spain to the Steppe (600-700s), where Caliphate troops defeated armies from Tang China at the Talas River, in 751, at the hinge of overland mobility.
4. Overland mobility propelled overseas mobility, as more and more ships sailed routes spanning Tang China and Abbasid Persia. One telling ship has been found that was built in the West, filled with Chinese porcelain made for export, bound for Persia, and sunk off Sumatra near Belitung Island, around 830.  Foreigners living in the Tang port of Guangzhou included Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians from the West.
5. During warmer centuries (900-1200), expanding agrarian productivity propelled commercial mobility in southern seas, as the weight of Asian populations shifted south into more fertile rice-growing lands, feeding imperial territories along the coast in South (Cholas), Southeast (Sri Vijaya), and East (Sung) Asia. More and more spices, cotton, silks, and porcelain sailed from India and China to the Abbasid West; more Arab and Jewish merchants sailed east and south to settle in India and East Africa; more Tamil and Gujarati merchants sailed East to set up shop in Southeast, East, and Far East Asia.
6. In the Far West, Egypt and Palestine had connective Roman consumers to the Asia trade. After the Fall of Rome, Arab merchant-warriors seized all the connective spaces. Increasing Asia trade then produced increasing profits in Arab lands (recorded by tenth century Cairo merchants), and rulers in the north Mediterranean launched Crusades, in 1092, fighting for Palestine. 
7. Mongol imperial expansion (1200-1300s) combined massive military force with compliant commercial capital to expand all kinds of mobility across the Steppe into the Northwest (around the Caspian, Ukraine, Crimea, and Black Sea), and into South (Indo-Persia), East, Southeast, and Far East Asia. Mobile Mongol imperial territory tied coastal regions into inland networks of mobility to expand inland and overseas travel and trade from the Far East to Far West, all around the Steppe and Southern Seas, and into the Black Sea. Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta traveled those expansive mobile spaces mapped by Janet Abu-Lughod as a series of “circuits” in what she called a pre-modern Eurasian “world system.”
8. Black Sea ports became connectors for the Asia trade traveling steppe routes controlled by the Golden Horde. Ships heading south from Crimea delivered riches to Mediterranean consumers and investors, most of all in Venice, where diverse Asian goods and slaves arrived in Venetian ports and traveled around Europe. Bubonic Plague came that way (1347) to kill up to half the European population and begin the unraveling of feudalism.
9. Post-Mongol imperial territories in the West (Ottomans and Safavids), East (Ming and Qing), and South (Delhi Sultans and Mughals) arose in spaces where expansive mobile Mongol strategies and technologies for military domination acquired finance from commercial investors and systematic taxation. Interwoven imperial territories across Eurasia diversified, refined, and elaborated strategies of commercial militarism combining military power with commercial interests at unprecedented levels of scale and intensity, dramatized in grand imperial capital cities.
10. A trend that became modern began with Mongols: imperial powers mobilized massive military force to expand and protect market networks and investment opportunities, increasing all kinds of mobility.  The trend began in 1220, when Chinggis Khan conquered Khwarazm, in the western steppe, at the hinge of overland mobility, where he laid spatial foundations for the world’s largest commercial territory, a model for the future.
11. Expanding mobile inland territory embraced seaports to increase capital accumulation in expanding spaces of military commercialism from Ottoman Anatolia, to Mughal Surat and Bengal, to the Ming/Qing Yangtze and Pearl River deltas.
12. When Ottomans conquered Black Sea ports, in the 1450s, Renaissance Venetian merchants sailed West to find other routes East. Europeans then sailed all the oceans, building and conquering ports, producing global networks of seaborne mobility, where the “Columbian Exchange” of goods, people, and disease traveled among seacoasts around the world, boosting littoral productivity and commerce from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan.  
13. Europeans joined the expanding Asian sea trade, among post-Mongol inland territories where coastal productivity enriched and expanded overseas trade. After 1500, Europeans accelerated that trend and connected it to seacoast ports on all the continents; it has continued to the present day.
14. Europeans entered Asian coastal conflicts, where territorial claims by sailing warriors, called pirates, had swarmed around ports and mingled with inland politics for centuries, notably in Sri Vijaya, Malacca, and Japan. Europeans increased armed conflict on the coast and at sea globally. 
15. Inland and overseas spaces interweave on the coast: for 450 years after 1400, in the age of sail, increasing trade and gunpowder militarism combined with investments by farmers, merchants, artisans, and merchants to boost productivity and conflict around Asian ports where ships growing in size and number carried goods and services for consumers and along the coast and around the world.
16. Seaport coastal environments became distinctively dynamic, culturally, economically, and politically, with more diverse European settlers, more Eurasians, more import-export businesses, and more financial services for trade, taxation, and production. More numerous, wealthier, belligerent Europeans increased demand on the coast for ship- and port-building and related services: multilingual, intercultural, military, and diplomatic.
17. Inland military commercialism met overseas commercial militarism around ports: expanding European territorial ambitions to control routes through inland commercial spaces where imperial taxation also required financing for military, economic, and diplomatic resources provided financiers on the coast with investment opportunities and increasing commercial capital accumulation around ports from Cape Town to Edo, in the coastal heartlands of global commercial capitalism.
18. Eurasian imperial territory evolved on the coast combined inland and overseas imperial status ranks, rituals, power relations, and economic interests, all intricately entangled. In that context, there was very little resistance around seaport to the increasing power wielded by Dutch, French, and English companies expanding their control of inland mobility ater 1750. 
19. Coastal Eurasian imperial territory conquered inland space with increasing force, after 1800, as industrialization increased the mobile coercive power of armies backed by Euro-American governments extending their imperial territories into Asia. By the 1850s, white Christians from Europe and the US occupied highest ranks of status, command, control, and wealth in imperial territories extending inland from Asian ports on the coast.
20. Imperial territory became Eurocentric and global after 1820.  Europeans commanding Eurasian armies conquered inland spaces that industrial infrastructure locked into iron frames of territorial mobility with railways and steamships speeding inland Asia through ports and global networks where Euro-American people and places held top imperial ranks.
21. The intensity of imperial control over mobility increased, as discipline, surveillance, punishment, evaluating, measuring, mapping, and regulating exerting ever more control over mobile space, exemplified by the conquest of steppe nomads by imperial Russia and China, of natives in Australia and the Americas, and of mobile cultivators all over Asia. 
22. Imperial modernity covered the globe by 1920, dividing Asia into three macro-regions, based on the time/space of European imperial ascendancy, which began in the South, moved East, and finally embraced the West.
23. Unlike the Americas, Africa, and Australia, Asia did not host any major European settler colonies during the expansion of Euro-American imperial supremacy, and the ongoing and very long spatial histories of Eurasian connective became dynamic force forming and transforming spaces of imperial modernity
24. Resistance in the interior — warrior regimes connect to the West via the steppe and Indo-Persia. Survival from migrations in all directions. Aspiration upward mobility in imperial ranks, particularly in sites of Eurasian imperial formations and capital accumulatioin oh the coast. And competition with aspiration b raking through the ranks as in all the earlier imperialt eritories, e.g. Mongols ….
25. ons, ithy in the twentieth century.
26. the formative ity interaction 
27.  
28. Spatial histories in each … resistance, survival, aspiration, competition …
29. ethno-national Europeans 
30. Resist wealth and had from overseas   territory privileged sites for settler mingling and mobility in overlapping Asian coastal and European overseas spaces, as secure attractive sites for mobile investors and capital accumulation, and as arenas for developing expansive imperial power relations traveling inland and overseas.  
31. inside Asian spaces.   who mutually invested  … connecting all the world’s coastal regions, where inland met overseas territorial power. relations. 
32. aspirations traveled inland and inland territories embraced the coast. The post-1500 combination of inland Asian and overseas European territorial power formed a spatial frame for imperial modernity marching inland for the next four centuries under competing flags of European supremacy. 
33. Imperial modernity became global, after 1820, as industrial mobility controlled more and more rapidly moving living space with iron frames of railways, ports, roads, cables, cities, and military force; imperial regimes on all continents channeled increasingly productive resources up spatially organized ranks of wealth and power; and as increasing global productivity disfigured nature and launched climate change. 
34. Imperial modernity has new global forms and old spatial dynamics. As mobility expand, over millennia, territorial controls over mobility also expand; they also intensify, as more people in more places exert more control over more territorial resources. Imperial territory became a resilient, adaptable space form of social power relations traveling and working to establish and maintain interdependent status ranks among people who exert power down the ranks and channel rewards upward. These dynamics of imperial territory appear in Global Asia from ancient; they persist and change across regimes over centuries, now in the world of nations.  
35. Asian ports acquired territorial privilege in imperial modernity, which traveled inland from ports and privileged people and places according to their strategic value in the expansion and stability of imperial territory. Railways and later transport and communication infrastructure privileged the ports connecting inland and overseas imperial territory for for all kinds of investments and as homes for all kinds of imperial investors. . ,  is most strategic places on its routes of mobile expansion. The top 10 richest cities in Asia are Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Mumbai, Osaka, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Taipei and Singapore. 
36. ty spaces following the old pattern, spatial ranks of empirePeople have control in proportion to rank (per capita wealth is a good marker). with higher status have acquire assets and scope to improve their status in proportion to rank. spatially, and, at the same time, intensifies ed in scale as mobility has sped up more dramatically than ever before since 1850, propelled by social power relations on imperial spaces where people and places enjoy livelihood assets in proportion to their status imperial ranks. resistance, survival, aspiration, competition.  
37.  port cities, where all forms of capital accumulated along routes of inland and overseas mobility. Imperial investments in ports and railways produced port city centers of wealth and power inside imperial territories aspiration … investment  … competition … y, anchored global seaborne mobility,  cities whose power relations organized . formed by railways tied to ports hosting massive ships  GLOBAL TERRITORY …. 1880s
38. Ports became global cities .Global mobility.. imperial aspirations  Meiji Period (1868-1912). Japan has the most ports per land area of any political territory in the world. ‘s industry was dramatically transformed, creating a better economy. Some of the reforms included new railroads to join all four major islands, shipping lines, telegraph and telephone systems, and deep water harbors to allow bigger ships. conflict… 
39.  

Continue reading “Global Asia time/space”

List of first human settlements (from Wikipedia)

Linguistics and genetics combine to suggest a new hybrid hypothesis for the origin of the Indo-European languages. 

 

The Southern Dispersal Route refers to a theory that an early group of modern human beings left Africa between 130,000–70,000 years ago. They moved eastward, following the coastlines of Africa, Arabia, and India, arriving in Australia and Melanesia at least as early as 45,000 years ago. It is one of what appears now to have been multiple migration paths that our ancestors took as they left out of Africa.

 

Akilesh, K., et al. “Early Middle Palaeolithic Culture in India around 385–172 Ka Reframes Out of Africa Models.” Nature, vol. 554, 2018, pp. 97–110.

Luminescence dating at the stratified prehistoric site of Attirampakkam, India, has shown that processes signifying the end of the Acheulian culture and the emergence of a Middle Palaeolithic culture occurred at 385 ± 64 thousand years ago (ka), much earlier than conventionally presumed for South Asia.

Attirampakkam

New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

Published online by the Max Planck  Institute

JULY 27, 2023

Original publication
Paul Heggarty, Cormac Anderson, Matthew Scarborough, Benedict King, Remco Bouckaert, Lechosław Jocz, Martin Joachim Kümmel, Thomas Jügel, Britta Irslinger, Roland Pooth, Henrik Liljegren, Richard F. Strand, Geoffrey Haig, Martin Macák, Ronald I. Kim, Erik Anonby, Tijmen Pronk, Oleg Belyaev, Tonya Kim Dewey-Findell, Matthew Boutilier, Cassandra Freiberg, Robert Tegethoff, Matilde Serangeli, Nikos Liosis, Krzysztof Stronski, Kim Schulte, Ganesh Kumar Gupta, Wolfgang Haak, Johannes Krause, Quentin D. Atkinson, Simon J. Greenhill, Denise Kühnert, Russell D. Gray
Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages
Science, 28 July 2023, DOI: 10.1126/science.abg0818

 

Colonies — an idea that seems to be prevalent only for/in Greco-Roman settlement mobility before European overseas expansion

 

The Achaemenid Empire at its greatest territorial extent, under the rule of Darius the Great (522–486 BC) — with Royal Road and Central Places

 

The territorial history of Global Asia involves many centuries of interaction among empires and colonies; that history underlies the violence of national state territory today, in our world of imperial modernity and US empire.  All national state territories have been formed over centuries by accumulating settler colonies woven together by imperial authorities. Accumulating, overlapping, and conflicting settler and imperial territorial claims produced local conflicts, global wars, international law, and inequity enforced by colonial and imperial elites in the world of nations.     

Imperial territories, in many shapes and sizes, dominate territorial history, because they create enduring archives and infrastructure. At any scale, in any cultural milieu, empire is a territorial process, a dynamic, mobile, territorial formation, extending outward into frontiers — typically with military force — penetrating down ranks of wealth, power, and authority from cities to towns to villages, forming social power relations that channel wealth and status up the ranks toward a central apex. Potentially embracing inequitably vast social and cultural diversity, empire has no fixed boundary, but limits and frailties imposed by cost of maintaining the upward  flow of capital accumulation.  Strengthening empire means expanding, deepening, and securing power to move assets upward toward the center; challenges to that control increase the cost and potentially weaken imperial power. 

A colony is a territory where a group of people have moved to settle in a space occupied by other people. Colonies of settlers have come from elsewhere (at some point in the past); they are transplants, like colonies of bacteria in a host medium. They can likewise interact with the host in many ways: they can mingle and mix, dominate, submit, or remain separate nd marginal. Over the centuries, societies have grown as colonies of settlers arrive in various patterns traveling spaces of mobility expanding in scale over time. All localities begin with settlers arriving. Social space is typically inscribed somehow by the settler sequence. Strategic places on routes of mobility become specialized sites for settlers who live in in mobile spaces where towns and cities provide their homes and livelihoods. Its design as a place for mobile settlers makes urbanism a paradigmatic colonial process.    

Colony-empire relationships are ancient, ongoing, complex, dynamic, multi-faceted, and hotly contested. Early-modern overseas European colonies and subsequent colonial conquest currently appear as the singular dominant model for colony-empire relationships in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, where colonialism and imperialism represent contrasting ways to describe Western domination, focused respectively on culture [Weber]  and political economy [Marx].

to be continued — work in progress … 

in the age of anti-colonial nationalism, when native cultures in colonial host environments.

f migrant settlers inside tions from omake that assumption, and when imperial troops form colonies, it clearly makes sense, as it did in ancient Romans and Mongol colonies .  Colonies have diverse imperial connection. Countless migrant settlers have formed colonies in distant places: nomads, farmers, missionaries, merchants, artisans, and many others have formed culturally distinct territories in many spaces occupied by other cultures. That kind of settler mobility, settlement, and colony formation accumulates historically to produce most human environments, including all major cities.

At the same time, colonies have also served and developed inside empires. Empires have grown and strengthened by incorporating colonies into imperial ranks to augment the flow of wealth, power, and authority up the ranks. Colonies can also become unwitting imperial territories and still cling to other identities; they can begin as tools of empire, succeed or fail in that capacity, and develop opposing, independent agendas, which can  fragment imperial territory.   

Empires fall apart when constituent colonies become imperial territories internally strong enough to refuse to obey old imperial agendas and to independent control of their own resources. 

wealth, power, and authority. That range of possibilities populated Global Asia  …. ancient times to the present. . . … to be continued …. the world of mobility and settlement around the Central Asian Steppes and Sare evident historically. Some examples illuare useful. are host environments, mingled  home to elsewhere. in foreign countries in recent history. , the mobility of many groups across state borders of businesses, missionaries, workers, students, and others across e business transnational businesses, missionary n call it into. on the frontier. That assumption Many colonies colonies Thave various kinds ofThe relationship idea of colonialism implies malignant a colonial process understood as invasive and pathogenic.  ……… to be continued …. pandemic pathogens; specifically, in Africa and Asia, where European colonies formed empires, by extending their power forcefully outward, spatially, with military conquest, and downward vertically, with various forms of state power, to create modern state territories, where social movements emerged among people who identified themselves as representing the original native host medium invaded and conquered by colonial foreigners.

Empire and colony have acquired their distinctive contemporary identities in popular and academic discourse as ideas formed in the modern world of national states, where every nation has empires and colonies in its past and must work to construct itself, by contrast, as a cultural space of belonging with a permanent organic heritage inside its homeland. 

That same contrast separates the idea of the nation from imperialism and colonialism, which have a more elaborate academic opposition. 

Imperialism is an idea identified with Marx, Lenin, and the communist critique of capitalism: in that view, imperialism can continue after the official end of empires, because imperialism is about economic exploitation and imposed inequity rather than being a specific political form.  

Colonialism, on the other hand, is identified with Weber and Cultural Studies. It is the foreign occupation of cultural territories where foreigners have inserted and reproduced their economic and cultural power inside a native cultural space. Foreign cultural values, languages as well as economic interests and political systems were imposed upon peoples who must free themselves of that foreign domination, or contamination, to become truly self-ruling and sovereign. Nations thus emerge as natives rising up to overcome and expel colonialism. The invasive species analogy is useful here, along with ideas of ecological survival, preservation, and restoration.

The academic opposition of empire/imperialism and colony/colonialism is a Cold War construct ………..ng these two strands together can begin by noting that colonies form imperial territories that expand with the multiplication and integration of networks among imperial colonies …. to be continued .. 

Global Asia: 

Mobility, Territory, and Imperial Modernity

Intro 1

People on the move have made and remade human environments for millennia, by seeking, finding, and building places to call home, raising borders around cultures and peoples, investing in territory to include all kinds of things that travel with people on the move, transforming and demolishing old habitats, and moving on. As the scale of mobility has increased, over centuries, so has the scale and intensity of territorial control. That dynamic interaction continues to unsettle and reconfigure historical space, and has always been powerful in Asia, travelling around steppes and seas, from ancient times, then circling the globe, after 1500. The histories of Global Asia that we explore in this book serve to illuminate the contingent temporality of those borders on maps that separate spaces and places of all shapes and sizes to conceal the mobility of historical space transforming the world we live in. [Intro 2]

Spaces of mobility spinning around Asian steppes and southern seas expanded at a walking and sailing pace for many centuries, increasing in scale and volume, little by little, then accelerating after 1200 and 1500, and much faster after 1850. During the very long expansion of social space, more people in more places travelled and scattered over greater distances; they became ever more interconnected, as more different kinds of people intermingled, intermarried, and settled in more mixed environments, and humans took more control over their own natural environments.

Increasing mobility enabled more people to invest more energy and assets in territorial power, which as it expanded spatially became more complex and multi-layered, forming imperial spaces that channeled mobility, provided security for people on the move, and increased human control over people and nature. Impassioned attachments to particular places developed inside imperial territory, where increasing mobility always challenged territorial stability.  As a result, spatial history became a shifting kaleidoscope filled with multiple overlapping, contending geographies, sensibilities, ideologies, histories, and power relations, which eventually covered the globe, forming the world we live in.

Today’s maps conceal that kaleidoscope in the iron cage of static national state boundaries, while mobility increasingly accelerates and ever more people and things travel farther and faster to meet everyday local needs. Territorial powers and identities are also traveling, shifting, and mingling across national borders, exceeding, fracturing, and eluding state space. Migration, displacement, refugees, businesses, and imperial adventures form shifting, mobile spaces. Countless transnational and multinational organizations span borders tackling problems that afflict and elude nations. Yet all this spatial mobility is hidden by static state maps, which promote the illusion that national borders define social space everywhere.  

National state boundaries that now substantially control ideas about historical space are contingent products of spatial history. That contingency becomes visible when we establish a vantage point for historical studies outside the nation, following advice from William Appleman Williams,      “… leaving the present … going back into the heretofore … beginning again….” to see territories emerging inside expanding spaces of mobility. For as he says,     

The historical experience is not one of staying in the present and looking back.  Rather it is one of going back into the past and returning to the present with a wider and more intense consciousness of the restrictions of our former outlook. We return with a broader awareness of the alternatives open to us and armed with a sharper perceptiveness with which to make our choices.  In this manner, it is possible to loosen the clutch of the dead hand of the past and transform it into a living tool for the present and future.  (The Contours of American History, New York: Norton, 1988, pp.19-20).

History inside the nation depicts territories that prefigure the nation. That makes good sense, because modern ideas about history evolved inside national frames of spatial understanding, where history proceeds from ancient times to the present in one territory after another, until nations absorb all history. Boundary lines that organize historical space today prescribe modern ways to see the past in the world of nations.

By leaving the present, however, we can leave the nation. That is easy in Asia, because pre-modern histories are vast and remain vital in spatial discourse today. Traveling old historical spaces, we find new perspectives on spatial history: we see that mobile spaces made by nomads, sailors, warriors, frontier and fishing folk, migrants, travelers, farmers, traders, investors, pilgrims, missionaries, and others – have jostled with he territorial power of of kingdoms, empires, and states, which define historical space in strictly territorial terms. 

Territorial prejudices built into modern knowledge production provide cultural ballast for national states sailing unruly seas of mobile turbulence. Modern thought describes social space as being contained by boundaries, when social life is actually always on the move. The so-called sedentary societies are never immobile: mobility is essential; the boundaries are always imposed by territorial authorities, including historians. People are constantly moving around, often moving away, settling elsewhere, forming various degrees of spatial attachment and detachment. Territorial cultures valorize rootedness, origins, indigeneity, and homelands; they promote emotional, moral, and political ties to particular places that seem most intense where they are soaked in nostalgia in mobile spaces where localities are bundled into larger and larger territories, homelands for investments of emotional attachment: the national state is merely one of those homelands.

History that focuses intead on mobility reveals that constructing larger and larger territories of belonging and identity requires ever more expansive control over mobility, using a range of technologies to contain mobile spaces where people move to greener pastures, follow opportunity, flee harm, and rebuild lives here and there, adapting to change, animating spatial history, transforming territories, challenging borders, and dramatizing limits of territorial order.

Newspapers are filled with territorial struggles to control mobile migrants, refugees, workers, investors, assets, armies, and pathogens. Mobility propelled by climate change and inequities of globalization are visibly reshaping human geography. History can help us to rethink our way into a mobile future by following William Appleman Williams’ advice, going back into the past to explore the ways that mobility and territorial power have interacted and transformed one another, over time. We can thus begin to historicize future territorial possibilities in the world of nation. {Intro3]  [Pandemic Space]