Category Archives: Global Asia Blog

Gaza

Global Asia Blog
With the start of Ramadan, friends and colleagues associated with Duke’s Palestine Seminar have put together this linktree of organizations that need immediate support. There has been a special request for donations to go to Care for Gaza and the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, which are focusing on food donations, an issue of urgent concern. I hope you’ll consider giving what you can, and do please share the link with others who may be interested.
 
 

https://wp.nyu.edu/davidluddenhomepage/2023/10/18/conditions-in-gaza-2023/

On Colonialism and Empire

Global Asia Blog
On “colonialism versus empire” as frames for modern South Asian History. 
 
“Colonialism” literally refers to an ideology or process of producing and maintaining colonies; it seems to be applied exclusively to European colonies, going back to Greek and Roman times, when ancient “empires” consisted of Greek and Roman settlements (colonies) scattered around the Mediterranean. Rome is the model (See Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper. Empires in World History:  Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 2010.) 
 
Enforcing Roman law among peoples subjected to the military power of Roman rulers in and around Roman colonies produced Roman imperial subjects who were not Roman and subjected to superior Roman authority and power; that subjugation became the basis of what we could call subaltern identities. Colonial subjects were ranked as imperial subjects; fighting colonial power meant fighting imperial power in or around a Roman colony; living with Roman power became practical and its influences suffused local societies. That colonial modeling of empire has been imported into modern world history.
 
The term colonialism has not been applied to pre-modern Asian imperial territories, which were in fact formed in ways similar to the empires built around colonies around the Mediterranean. The idea that colonial subjugation to imperial territorial expansion has produced modern nation-state territories is becoming acceptable with reference to Xinjiang, Tibet, Kashmir, NE India, and elsewhere. It is very more broadly useful in a long-term view but has been buried under the global authority of national territorialism. 
 
What are called “national territories” all across Eurasia today were formed by many centuries of mobile colony formation by imperial powers and with the subjugation of peoples who became subjects under forms ruling authority which came from elsewhere — notably North India and North China — and which produced superior classes of people who lived and settled among locals and wrote their history — e.g. in South India, South China, and Central Asia — creating what came to be called “civilizations.” Imperial status ranks that formed territorial power relations and underpinned cultural authority in the classical Asian empires have been turned into timeless traditions bleached of their imperial conquest heritage by imperial authorities who composed the texts that modern scholars have used to write pre-modern Asian history. 
 
When modern scholars use European colonialism as a frame for modern history, they implicitly endorse that civilization frame, by treating the only relevant colonial conquest narrative as beginning with Europeans. The politics of that framing become more obvious when we notice that Hindutva ideologues have extended the timeline of colonial subjugation back to include the Mughals. We can usefully extend it back further to include the colonial conquests by Hindu imperialists who established Brahmanical hegemony. 
 
That longer view thus takes seriously the long and diverse historical layering of imperial power relations, over many centuries, which came to include the long period of European ascendancy to the higher echelons of imperial authority in South Asia. Colonialism studies instead start with the “rise of the West” and project modern colonial domination back to early European settlements. This seems most compelling in Bengal, which became the “beachhead” for British European expansion, its imperial capital, and the homeland of Indian nationalism; so it seems that British imperial domination was in the cards in Bengal from the outset, which is hardly true.
 
The truth is well known: coastal British colonies became centers for inland imperial expansion by engaging with, emulating, and expanding military dynamics and strategies of territorial power around their settlements; and like imperial powers before them, by attracting allies to their cause from various levels in existing imperial ranks. So modern colonial imperialism in South Asia was embedded in evolving dynamics of imperial territorialism, as it was also fed and enriched by networks of mobility and capital accumulation in which the British scrambled for supremacy around the world, and which  included a great many non-British actors who made the British Empire possible. Landed, commercial, and ruling elites at various levels around South Asia made The Raj possible and made it work. Those alliances and interdependencies began to fray as upwardly mobile subaltern groups scrambled to capture higher and higher levels of imperial authority; that scramble became nationalism. 
 
The survival and renovation of imperial ranks inside national politics is increasingly prominent today. All of this leads me to argue that studies of “colonialism” may provide a good way to draw a line between Europeans and subject Others on all the continents and thus to unify the world history of European expansion, which makes sense and is useful politically; but colonialism does not capture the historical dynamics of power relations in Asia that actually explain how Europeans rose for a time to the top ranks in the world of imperial capitalism. Colonialism is better understood when it is located inside processes of empire that reach far back into the Asian past and continue into the future. [Ref: “Imperial Modernity: history and global inequity,” Third World Quarterly, 33:4, 2012, 581-601)

Mobile Missionary Spaces: The Basel Mission

Global Asia Blog

The BASEL MISSION mission was founded as the German Missionary Society in 1815. The mission later changed its name to the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society, and finally the Basel Mission. The society built a school to train Dutch and British missionaries in 1816. Since this time, the mission has worked in Russia and the Gold Coast (Ghana) from 1828, India from 1834, China from 1847, Cameroon from 1886, Borneo from 1921, Nigeria from 1951, and Latin America and the Sudan from 1972 and 1973. On 18 December 1828, the Basel Mission Society, coordinating with the Danish Missionary Society, sent its first missionaries, Johannes Phillip Henke, Gottlieb Holzwarth, Carl Friedrich Salbach and Johannes Gottlieb Schmid, to take up work in the Danish Protectorate at Christiansborg, Gold Coast.[3] On 21 March 1832, a second group of missionaries including Andreas Riis, Peter Peterson Jäger, and Christian Heinze, the first mission doctor, arrived on the Gold Coast only to discover that Henke had died four months earlier.

A major focus for the Basel Mission was to create employment opportunities for the people of the area where each mission is located. To this end the society taught printing, tile manufacturing, and weaving, and employed people in these fields.[4] The Basel Mission tile factory in Mangalore, India, is such an endeavour. 

Arijit Chatterjee has been researching the Tile Factories and the printing press in Mangalore to study their architectural characteristics and social relevance. Some of my publications can expand the subject  here: 

https://architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-193723
https://architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-1937248

With the decline of the terracotta industry in the latter half of the 19th century, local factories which sustained a century of cross-continental trade are being demolished and I have made use of its material remains as a point of departure to ‘make’ and accommodate reuse  and repair as a core focus in my practice : 


https://architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-193590
https://architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-193632

Arjit is currently the 2021 James Harrison Seteedman fellow (Washington University in St Louis,MO,USA) and I will be travelling to the US next year to present the fellowship. Maybe we can meet then. Do let me know if your students or any program wants to work on this subject. My partner is currently enrolled as a phd fellow in AArhus School of Architecture, Denmark and her research focus is on the ‘ecologies of residue’ as the tile travelled, its imprints in contemporary building culture.

IIAS: Visualising history and space in the Basel Mission Archives (PDF file).

Assignments

Global Asia Blog

All assignments go into the Student Google Folder. Assignments are due in the folder by midnight on the date listed below. 

These are one-page minimum reflections on the prompt listed below, based on readings, discussion, and field visits. The first four are phrased as questions to which I append my own answers AFTER I have read through student papers, to clarify points that that I want to get across in the first part of the cours. 

1. Thursday Jan 5. Q: What were the causes of the plagues in ancient Rome? (And think about why we do not have accounts of ancient plagues in Asia.) A: Roman demand for Asian products brought pepper and other commodities to the ancient Mediterranean, some by land but mostly by sea, up the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. Roman consumer demand also brought plague, which infected troops fighting Roman imperial wars in Mesopotamia, who carried both Antonine and Justinian plagues back to Rome. Soldiers and workers died during the Justinian Plague in sufficient numbers to weaken Roman imperial power, notably in Syria, where early Muslim communities encountered the plague. (We lack records of plague in ancient Asia because of the mobility and low-density of populations in areas where plague travelled, but there were clearly outbreaks in densely populated parts of India and China.) 

2.  Friday Jan 6. Q: How did the Black Death reflect historical change in the previous millennium? A: The Mongol Empire built routes of mobility and centers of trade and political power inside expansive Turkic spaces of mobility all across the steppe. Mongol expansion increased the mobility of people and animals that carried the plague to Europe. At the same time, centuries of agricultural and population expansion, particularly in warm centuries after 800, increased the density of populations in places where pandemics became killer epidemics. 

3.  Saturday Jan 7. Q: What could be said to be historical stages in the globalization of disease? A: Stage One is the ancient (pre-600CE) commercial interaction of Europe and Mediterranean, by land and sea. Stage two: their more intensive late medieval interaction after the Mongols (note the travels of Marco Polo in the 1300s). Three: the post-1500 seaborne Columbian exchange. Stage Four: the post-1600 global expansion of European seaborne empires. Those can reasonably defined as the four main historical stages in the globalization of pandemic disease into the 20th century. 

4. Monday Jan 9. Q: Consider the case of cholera as pandemic, epidemic, and endemic? A: Cholera seems originally to have been endemic in deltaic localities in lower Bengal (and perhaps in some other watery coastal regions of tropical India). It became epidemic in coastal regions because of increasing population density in urban areas driven by ongoing commercial and English imperial expansion, around Madras and Calcutta, in 1817. Cholera became pandemic by traveling with troops, merchants, and other migrants along routes of British imperial globalization, which eventually brought cholera to coastal regions and to port cities around the world, including New York City.   

5. Tuesday Jan 10. Write your paper on your BRAC presentation project theme,. 

6. Wednesday Jan 11. Consider your theme in the context of socio-economic inequality.

7. Thursday Jan 12. Discuss pathocoenosis in the Bangladesh context

8. Monday Jan 16. Discuss the politics of public health in the context of globalization.

9. Tuesday Jan 17. Write a brief description of your paper topic and indicate some source materials that you will use. 

10. Wednesday Jan 18. Write up a short presentation your final paper.

10 page paper due at midnight on Jan 20. Discussion and Presentations in class. Jan 19-20. 

maps

Global Asia Blog

Roman Empire

Indian Ocean Connections to Asian Trade: The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea

Turkic Migrations (550-1200). In 552 a powerful new Turkic confederacy developed in the Altai Mountains. It spread from China to the Caspian Sea, pushing Bulgarian and Slav nomad warriors deeper into Europe.  

 

Mongol Imperial Expansion: The Mongol Empire covered the most contiguous territory in history, during the period 1206- 1368. 

The Height of the “Silk Road”

Marco Polo: the Venetian explorer Marco Polo famously used the Silk Road to travel from Italy to China, under the protection of Mongols, arrived in Kublai Khan’s summer palace, Xanadu, in 1275. He spent 24 years in Asia, at Kublai Khan’s court, and returned to Venice, again via the Silk Road routes, in 1295.

The Columbian Exchange

 

European Seaborne Empire and Exploration: 1500-1850

Cholera— in Earth.org: Pandemic cholera began its travels in 1817, in the Ganges Delta, with contaminated rice. In 1837, it reached Kabul, in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia, carried by British Troops, and spread into Iran and Derbent (Russia), on trade routes. In 1845, it crossed the Arabian Sea on ships; it spread north into Iran and Iraq, along the Tigris and Euphrates, and found its way into the Black Sea and Istanbul; from there it traveled to Europe, and in 1848m reached Norway, England, Spain, the Balkans, and North Africa (when pilgrims from cholera-plagued Mecca returned to Egypt). In 1849, it was carried to New York and New Orleans on ships loaded with drinking water.

Routes of the second world cholera pandemic (1826-1837).

Routes of the second world cholera pandemic (1826-1837). | Download Scientific Diagram

The researchers’ six-stage story of how the seventh cholera pandemic evolved into its modern form around the Middle East and Asia.

 D. HU ET. AL. PNAS 113, 46 (14 NOVEMBER 2016) © NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCESThe researchers' six-stage story of how the seventh cholera pandemic evolved into its modern form around the Middle East and Asia.