Category: Global Asia Blog

Data from Statistical abstract relating to British India, in DIGITAL SOUTH ASIA LIBRARY (DSAL).

Figures for total ship transit through suez (History of the Suez Canal Company, 1858-2008: Between Controversy and Utility, by Par Hubert Bonin, 2010, Publications d’histoire économique et sociale internationale) indicate that British India trade accounts for a large proportion of initial steam ship transit through the Suez Canal (and its revenues).

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 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 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 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. 

An Outline Spatial History of Afghanistan

David Ludden, NYU

11 August 2019

Struggles of many kinds have raged for centuries over control of territories enclosed by the national map of Afghanistan. Standard histories of that legacy focus on great power efforts to sustain central state authority — from Ghaznavids, Timurids and Safavids to the Great Game, Cold War, and today, imperial America – and thus they conceal the dynamic complexity of the historical space in which everyday people have produced Afghanistan’s fractured coherence.

Scholars call that space Indo-Persia. It is composed of influentially interconnected historical regions spanning what are now Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Those regions include Khorasan, Transoxiana/Mawara-un-Nahr, Badakshan, Wakhan, Baltistan, Kashmir, Panjab, Kabul, Sistan, Makran, Sindh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Delhi, Awadh, Bihar, Deccan, and Bengal. Major cities include Nishapur, Mashhad, Marv, Herat, Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent, Balkh/Mazari Sharif, Kabul, Kandahar, Srinagar, Lahore, Multan, Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Surat, Patna, Hyderabad, and Dhaka.

The Persianate qualities of Indo-Persia appear in its intricate cultural heritage, in its languages, literatures, arts, customs, religions, aesthetics, and genealogies. Its Indian qualities appear in the trajectory of its social expansion, over many centuries, from routes connecting the Steppe with Persia, moving south and east, into Indian monsoon spaces, where summer rains feed rice and wheat and winter winds carry ships to ports in Sindh and Gujarat.

Many centuries of travel, migration, and settlement made Indo-Persia a vast human land bridge connecting the Steppe and the Indian Ocean. Indo-Persia thus became a generative space of mobility and territorial contestation in Asia’s very long process of globalization, which began two millennia before Vasco da Gama arrived, in 1498. After that, Europeans increased global connectivity with mobility at sea, but before, during, and after, Asia’s expansive globalization travelled around The Steppe and the Indian Ocean through Persia, India, and China.

Around The Steppe, horse warrior nomads and merchants propelled globalization from prehistoric times: Indo-Aryans, Turks, Mongols, Sogdians, Armenians, and many others. Around the Indian Ocean, merchants and sailors connected distant shores, riding monsoon winds: Greeks, Africans, Arabs, Gujaratis, Tamils, Chinese, Bugis, and many others. All the agents of globalization travelled through Persia, India, and China, where they joined countless local investors in the imperial economic development of agriculture, trade, and manufacturing, which drew upon and accelerated connectivity across Central Asia and around southern seas. All great imperial territories in Asia developed in connective spaces between The Steppe and The Sea.

That spatial pattern of development entailed continuous movement of population, culture, and imperial power from north to south, out of the dry Steppe into fertile Persia, India, and China. Warriors from The Steppe built all the great Asian empires, but in different ways. In China and Persia, Steppe warrior horse nomads rode straight into the plains and a strict cultural opposition developed between peoples of The Steppe and The Sown. By contrast, Indo-Persia includes thousands of miles of Hindu Kush pathways connecting South Asia with The Steppe and Khorasan. Those mountains served as a capillary filter for millions of people who travelled in all directions: many died along the way, as did Alexander the Great’s exhausted troops, but many people settled down to work the land, raise animals, and pursue mercantile and military careers designed specifically for these mountainous spaces of mobility.    

Afghanistan took shape in those spaces, where militant settlers took control of local land and fought to control routes of travel. This produced a distinctive territorial politics dispersed among valleys woven together in a maze of routes through the mountains. Controlling those routes became increasingly profitable with increasing trade and by the end of the first millennium CE, military conflict over routes through the Hindu Kush had spilled into the plains. Ever since, imperial powers based in the plains have sought military control over those capillaries of trade connecting The Steppe and The Sea.

The cultural content of these capillary spaces changed as patterns of migration shifted in the eighth century. Until then, migratory settlers were mostly Indo-Aryan language speakers: Vedic Aryans, Kushans, Sakas, Indo-Greeks, and others. Buddhists, Hindus, and Zoroastrians were prominent. Monks and merchants from India and China travelled the mountains and the Silk Road thrived. A great shift occurred after 700, when Turkic horse nomads riding west from Mongolia, Arabs riding east from Syria, and Persians riding out of Khorasan combined to extend Abbasid imperial territory from Syria to Samarkand. Thereafter, Turkic language speakers became most prominent as Indo-Persia’s migrant settlers, increasingly mixing Turkic, Persian, and Mongol cultural qualities.

Migrations after 751 produced tribal identities and territories called “Afghan,” inside ever-more active, valuable pathways through the Hindu Kush. The year 751 is iconic because it was then that Turks, Persians, and Arabs fought under Abbasids to defeat T’ang forces at the Talas River (between Tashkent and Bishkek), forcing imperial China to withdraw permanently east of the Pamirs. Paper-making then spread through Abbasid territory and Islam travelled with Turks and with increasing Sufi influence all across Indo-Persia. Balkh eventually became Mazari Sharif. Afghan imperial territorialism began in 998, as Abbasid power declined and Mahmud of Ghazni formed marched through the mountains and into the lowlands across Persia and India. There followed a long series of imperial projects spanning Indo-Persia, running through Afghan territory; these reached the height of their institutional legitimacy under the Timurids.

The centrality of Indo-Persia for Asia’s economic development increased as the Abbasid Empire fell apart and further increased during and after Mongol imperial expansion, which drove many more migrants south into India, where – by 1300 –settlers from the Persianate north had produced Sufi silsilas and dynastic territories from Delhi to Bengal and Gujarat to Madurai. This increasing long-distance mobility through the Hindu Kush produced ever more profitable spaces for investment along all routes connecting The Steppe and The Sea.

Eighteenth century imperial struggles over Afghan territory reflect the increasing commercial and military value of routes through the Hindu Kush; these became more profitable bastions for diverse Afghan tribes pursuing control over local assets and also imperial targets for competing lowland rulers. That combination of local and imperial struggles for control over spaces of mobility steadily reduced the commercial value of long-distance trade through the Hindu Kush, which then became Afghanistan national state territory. China’s Belt-Road initiative is the most recent reiteration of Global Asia’s connective imperative to connect The Steppe and The Sea: the BRI route from Kashgar through the Indus Valley reflects another economic adaptation by people who invest in spaces of mobility to opportunities and obstacles produced by politics. Such adaptations are visible historically all across Asia from ancient times; now, they discourage long-distance mobility through Afghanistan and drive the national government to seek control over militant groups entrenched in ancient pathways.

Mountains and rivers provide the physical template for Afghanistan’s spatially fractured coherence. River valleys host major cities which have been sites for intense local investment for many centuries, situated at strategic points where hills meet the plains; thus, these cities ring the central massif and anchor routes into the lowlands in what are now respectively Iran, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan: Herat, Mazari Sharif, Kabul, Ghazna, and Kandahar. Ring roads around the central Hindu Kush massif connect these cities, and one major road cuts across to Kabul and Herat, reflecting old India-Persia routes, but the centrifugal trajectory of mobility into the lowlands combined with the localized mosaic of territorial control in the mountains makes fractured Afghan territorialism one obstinate legacy of many centuries of mobility across Indo-Persia.