Author: David Ludden

GLOBAL ASIA book notes and references

notes and references for         

GLOBAL ASIA: a world of mobility

Introduction

On the Spanish belief that Native Americans were Muslims: Alan Mikhail, God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World. New York: Norton 2020.

Ice Age Asian Migrations to the Americas: David Reich, Nick Patterson, and Andrés Ruiz, “Reconstructing Native American population history,” Nature, 488, 370-374, 11 July 2012. 

Quarantine: Vesna Zlata Blažina-Tomić, Expelling the plague: the Health Office and the implementation of quarantine in Dubrovnik, 1377-1533.  Montreal : McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015.  Chapter 5, “Control of Arrivals in Dubrovnik, 1500-1530.”

On political violence and displacement during the Covid pandemic, see 2020, see “Global Conflict and Disorder Patterns: 2020,” a paper presented at the 2020 Munich Security Conference at a side event hosted by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) in partnership with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP). It is an updated and expanded version of Global Conflict and Disorder Patterns: 2019. 

On border-making,  see Willem Van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia. London: Anthem South Asian Studies, 2005.  On its power and violence, see Reece Jones. Violent Borders : Refugees and the Right to Move. Vers0, 2016, and Suchitra Vijayan, Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India. Melville House, 2021.

On Area Studies and Asian mobility, see “Maps in the Mind and the Mobility of Asia,” Presidential Address for the Association for Asian Studies, Journal of Asian Studies, 62, 3, November, 1057-1078.(Short version, “Nameless Asia and Territorial Angst,”HIMAL, June, 2003.) Also relevant way to frame my approach would be as an escape from methodological nationalism, on which see Andreas Wimmer, and Nina Glic Schiller. “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences.” Global Networks, vol. 2, no. 4, 2002, pp. 301–34; and Anna Amelina, Anna, Devrimsel D. Nergiz, Thomas Faist, and Nina Glick Schiller, editors, Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Research Methodologies for Cross-Border Studies. Taylor and Francis, 2012.

On human activity changing natural environments, these are two early classics:  William L. Thomas, editor. Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. The University of Chicago Press, 1955; and William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples. Anchor Random House, 1975 and 1998. For inner Asia, see  John Brooke an Henry Misa, “Earth, Water, Air, and Fire: Toward an Ecological History of Premodern Inner Eurasia,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History.  For South Asia, see Christopher V. Hill, An Environmental History of South Asia. ABC CLIO, 2008. For China: Robert B. Marks, China: An Environmental History. Rowman and Littlefield, 2017.

The most detailed application of climate science to to Asian History is Victor B. Lieberman,  Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830. Cambridge University Press, 2003 and Strange Parallels, 2 : Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830. Mainland Mirrors Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands. Cambridge University Press, 2009, .

On the history of climate change studies, see “Climate Change and Anthropogenic Greenhouse Warming: A Selection of Key Articles, 1824-1995, with Interpretive Essays,” by Dr. James R. Fleming. 
 
On El Nino Famines: Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, 2002.
 
1. Nature
 

On Furs as currency on the steppe: [1] Peter Frankopan, The Silk Road: A New History of the World. New York: Kopf, 2016. pp. 103-104.

On the ninth century, an Arab traveler and geographer, al Masudi (Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn al-Masʿūdī), see Janet Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness the Fur Trade and Its Significance for Medieval Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

On North China and the Steppe: Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China. London: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
 

Steppes

On Mineral extraction and eco-damage in Siberia, which benefits distant urban populations and harms locals, see Andrew Wiget and Olga Balalaeva, Khanty, People of the Taiga : Surviving the Twentieth Century, University of Alaska Press, 2011.

On Scythian Gold: Andreeva, P. “Fantastic Beasts of the Eurasian Steppes: Toward a Revisionist Approach to Animal Style Art”. University of Pennsylvania (PhD dissertation), 2018. Stoddert, K. (ed.) From the Lands of the Scythians The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1985.  Williams, Dyfri; Ogden, Jack, Greek gold: jewellery of the classical world, Metropolitan Museum of Art/British Museum, 1994.

On North-South Taiga-Steppe trade: Noonan, Thomas S. “The Fur Road and the Silk Road: The Relations between Central Asia and Northern Russia in the Early Middle Ages.” Varia Archaeologica Hungarica, vol. 9, no. 6–7, 2000, pp. 285–301.

On taiga fur trade today: Hong Kong accounts for 70-80% of the world’s total fine fur exports. In a region where the technicalities of producing fur have been around for two to three thousand years, China has become an important manufacturing base for Hong Kong furriers due to their extensive knowledge in the trade. From 2013 to 2014, China produced 40% of the 87.2 million mink pelts produced around the world, amounting to a total global value of US$3.37 billion for that type of fine fur alone …. China …remains one of the biggest manufacturers of fox pelt, manufacturing over 91% of the 7.8 million fox furs produced globally. Forbes online (30 April 2015)

On imperial Russia irrigation on the steppe: Matley, Ian M. “The Golodnaya Steppe: A Russian Irrigation Venture in Central Asia.” Geographical Review, vol. 60, no. 3, 1970, pp. 328–46, https://www.jstor.org/stable/214037.

2. Persia 
 
Naming Iran: Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946. Princeton University Press, 1999, pp.216-226.
 
Persia and the Persianate world: Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam. University of Chicago Press, 1975. Brian Spooner and William Hanaway, editors. Literacy in the Persianate World : Writing and the Social Order, University Museum Publications, 2012. Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf, editors. The Persianate World : Rethinking a Shared Sphere. Brill, 2018. Nile Green, The Persianate World. University of California Press, 2019. Mana Kia, Persianate Selves : Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism,  Stanford University Press, 2020.Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021.  
 
On Iran’s linguistic diversity: Sanan Moradi, “Languages of Iran: Overview and Critical Assessment.” In: Brunn S., Kehrein R. (eds) Handbook of the Changing World Language Map. Springer, Cham, 2020.   H.Ghanbari and M. Rahimanian. “Persian Language Dominance and the Loss of Minority Languages in Iran.” Open Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 8, 2020, pp. 8–18.
 
 
On the myth of continents, see Lewis, Martin W. and Karen Wigen. Myth of Continents : A Critique of Metageography. University of California Press, 1997

On Epidemic Histories: Aberth, John. Aberth, John. Plagues in World History. Rowman and Littlefield, 2011. McNeill, William H. Plagues and Peoples. Anchor Random House, 1998. Pandemic Studies Resource Page.

On Alexander’s travels, see: Frank L. Holt, Alexander the Great and Bactria. E.J. Brill, 1988.  Ian Worthington, Alexander the Great: Man and God. Taylor & Francis Group, 2004. Andrew Chugg, Concerning Alexander the Great: A Reconstruction of Cleitarchus. 2015.  Waldemar Heckel, The Conquests of Alexander the Great. Cambridge University Press, 2007. ” Alexander the Great in Persia.” http://www.the-persians.co.uk/alexander1.htm  and Seleucids: https://iranicaonline.org/articles/seleucid-empire. Focus on

On Samarkand as the center of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samarkand. Samarkand (Maracanda) was the capital of the Achaemenid Sogdian Satrapy and center of Sogdian trade network: Y. Yoshida, “The Sogdian Merchant Network,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. Retrieved 25 Jul. 2021, from . FOR Brilliant online map-indexed articles and AI KHANOUM see: https://www.livius.org/articles/place/ai-khanum/Alexander the Great’s Imperial Route Map (from Bible History Online, 4 Aug 2021

 

On taiga vulnerability in climate change:  “Global Warming Cited as Wildfires Increase in Fragile Boreal Forest, New York Times, 10 May 2016.

On the history and fate of Alexandrias: The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites.  Richard Stillwell, William L. MacDonald, Marian Holland McAllister, Stillwell, Richard, MacDonald, William L., McAlister, Marian Holland, Ed.

On Lake Baikal and the Mongols: https://sacredland.org/lake-baikal-russia/.

On Parthian-Sassanian transition. The Mithra Temple Under the Streets of London (I thank Krishna Kulkarna for this information). Pierfrancesco Callieri, “On the Diffusion of Mithra Images in Sasanian Iran New Evidence from a Seal in the British Museum,” East and West,  40, 1/4 (December 1990), pp. 79-98.http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/sasanian-dynasty, http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Religions/iranian/Zarathushtrian/fire_temple.htm. 

On Sasanid-Gupta connections: Hossein Mohammadi, “Indo-Iranian relationship with special reference to Sassanid era (c.336 A.D. – 646 A.D.),” PhD Thesis, University of Pune, August 2007.

William NcNeil, Plagues and Peoples, New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1976, 1998.  R.P. Duncan Jones, “The Impact of the Antonine Plague,” Journal of Roman Archaeology, 9, 1996, 108-136. Danielle Gourevitch, “The Galenic Plague: a Breakdown of the Imperial Pathocoenosis and Longue Duree,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 27, 1, pp.57-69, in M.D.Grmek Memorial Symposium: “The Long Duree in Science and Medicine,” 10 April 2003 (2005), p.59. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23333795?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

On Sogdiana trade evidence: Valeri Hansen, The Silk Road : A New History. Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 113-139. https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1015307.

Ptolemy Asia Route Map

Transoxiana Map

On Silk Road: Liu, Xinru and Linda Norene Shaffer. Connections Across Eurasia: Transportation, Communication, and Cultural Exchange on the Silk Roads. McGraw-Hill, 2007. Liu, Xinru. The Silk Roads: A Brief History with Documents. Bedford/St. Martins, 2012. Kuzmina, E. E. The Prehistory of the Silk Road. Edited by Victor H. Mair, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Hansen, Valerie. The Silk Road : A New History. Oxford University Press, 2012. Frankopan, Peter. The Silk Road: A New History of the World. Kopf, 2016. 
 

On the Muziris trade agreement: Ships and the Development of Maritime Technology in the Indian Ocean. Edited by David Parkin and Ruth Barnes, Routledge, 2002, pp. 22-7, 36 59n8.

On Greek astrology in India: David Pingree, The Yavanajataka of Sphujidhvaja, 2 Volumes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1978. See also the Horoscope Astrology Blog.

Anchita Borthakur, “An Analysis of the Conflict in the Ferghana Valley,” Asian Affairs, 48:2, 2017, 334-350.
de, la Vaissière, Étienne. Sogdian Traders : A History. Brill, 2005, .
 

On empire as political form:  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper. Empires in World History:  Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton University Press, 2010. Ludden, David. “The Process of Empire: Frontiers and Borderlands.” Tributary Empires in Global History, edited by Peter Filbiger Bang and C.A. Bayly, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 132–50.

On the imperial China and Nomads: Hansen, Valerie. The Silk Road : A New History. Oxford University Press, 2012. Barfield, Thomas J. The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China. Basil Blackwell, 1989. Perdue, Peter C. China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Asia. Harvard University Press, 2005.

The Nomadic Horse People of Central Asia resource webpage Map of agrarian empires and nomad territories, circa 100CE
 
3. India
 

Bryant, Edwin, and Laurie Patton, editors. The Indo-Aryan Controversy : Evidence and Inference in Indian History, Edited by Edwin Bryant, and Laurie Patton, Taylor & Francis Group, 2005. 
 

David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999

Kenneth R. Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100-1500. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011.

Simon Digby, War-Horse and Elephant in the Delhi Sultanate; A Study of Military Supplies. Oxford: Orient Monographs, 1971.

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)