SCROLL DOWN: messages are in chronological order
January 16
Dear Class,
I look forward to meeting you all on Monday in my Zoom meeting room.
The course description and weekly syllabus are online. All the required and recommended course readings are also online. You will need to be logged into the NYU system to access many of the readings. You need to be logged into zoom to enter my meeting room.
I will keep required readings under 100 pages per week, and expect you to read them carefully, but the recommended readings can add much more, to be read as suits your individual interests.
In the first week of class, we will be in-person in my meeting room on both Monday and Wednesday, but from the second week, I will have a recorded lecture for you on Monday, and we will meet in person on Wednesday.
Do the readings and absorb the lecture before class on Wednesday, but your response papers are not due until Friday.
Deliver all written work to me in a GoogleDoc file shared with me. I will also provide a GoogleDoc file for everyone to record questions and suggestions concerning topics of interest to you. We can tailor the specifics of all the 5-page written assignments to your own interests, within parameters set by the themes in each part of the course.
The Syllabus will evolve: the basic template for readings is set now in the syllabus, but details will change and I will add things as we go to make it more user-friendly.
Be prepared to discuss your own academic interest in this course on Monday. I will have some things to say at the outset, but I want to hear about you and I want to answer any questions you may have about the course.
See you then
all the best
david
January 25
We agreed that students will meet before class to (1) discuss the reading and recorded lecture, (2) formulate points for discussion in class on Wednesday, and (3) designate one student to lead the discussion. The Wednesday class will be devoted to discussion, including any questions and concerns you may have, and all students will participate.
Although we need to share a common understanding of the major themes and Global Asia trends, students are free to concentrate their attention on specific themes, problems, and regions of most interest to them personally. One way to organize discussion is for the leader to present the broad themes at the start of class, and then for each of us to focus on particulars.
With all this in mind, I have had second thoughts about the wisdom of giving you a prompt for your 1-page response papers. We can discuss this on Wednesday, but I think it best for you to decide what you think is most important to include in those short papers. My little blurbs to introduce the readings and my lecture/slides indicate how I tell the story of Global Asia; you can focus on that, if you like, but you might also want to ask questions, provide your own ideas, and offer critique or refinement of my approach. I do still want the papers by Friday, however, so I can read them before I start the week’s work.
My responses to Response Paper #1.
Feb 2
Maximus: this is very much the kind of “response” I have in mind, weaving the reading into your ongoing learning process. The “indescribably complex” argument is for me simply a way to open up learning beyond constraints imposed by assumed regulatory concepts like nation and state, or modernity and tradition. The problem then becomes figuring out what new ideas to put into their place, or rather to use to put them into their place. That is what we are working on. Your idea about the infrastructure of mobility discipline by industrial investments (i.e. railways, but also steam ships and the big ports that host those ships and define lines of transport connecting interior continents to inter-continental travels) is one of the ideas that both connects the “modern national state” to the past (via old routes of mobility and territorial formations, i.e. empires) and also differentiates a past and its future forming a discontinuity. So histories of mobility and territoriality are fill with both long-duree continuities and event-based discontinuities.
Sakshi: Your response is an excellent representation of your good understanding of a major point in the readings. That is great and this strategy will serve you well.
I think of the theme that you are focusing on here as the historical interaction of political/territorial and cultural/mobile innovation. Such interactions in post-Mongol centuries have clear implications for the politics of contemporary national states. And inversely, national politics have clearly shaped our culturally specific reading of the pre-national past; very notably the “divergence” between East and West (a theme that I consider for economic history in “Modern Inequality and Early Modernity: A Comment for the AHR on Articles by R. Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz.” The American Historical Review, vol. 107, no. 2, Apr. 2002, pp. 470–80.
Pursuing that line of thought, I would like to point out that Casale’s argument that “new religious identities and divergences [were] the ‘outcome rather than the starting point of a shared process of inter- and intra-state legitimation,” can be understood an argument against established assumptions that Shia-Sunni and Hindu-Muslim differences — i.e. “cultural facts” — [like East-West difference] exist prior to and independent of politics, and drive political activity, rather than being shaped by politics. This idea that fixed cultural facts drive politics is very much part of our present-day politics, and also of now-old fashioned (but still influential) habits of thought across the Humanities and Social Sciences. [For a particularly noxious example, see Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” originally published in Foreign Affairs, which has generated an industry of critique that you can find nicely in the Bobst catalogue.]
A theme you might want to pursue is the ways empires shaped what became 20th century national cultures — and largely account, notably, for the idea that India is a Hindu nation. That idea marks a serious discontinuity from trends that include Akbar’s effort to create a cultural formation that could be legibly legitimate across the vast array of cultural differences that the Mughal sought to integrate as they had never ever been integrated previously.
Hi Sharon: I appreciate your clear focus on state power as a problem for economic development, and on contrasts between Asia and Europe. Today, that contrast looks rather different, with the “rise of Asia” in the world economy, and particularly China. It is likely this rise has influenced historical studies. It has certainly bolstered ideas that were percolating among scholars before that rise had made a major intellectual impact in the west. As you will see in my response to Sakshi, above, I argued some years ago in the American Historical Review that history of “divergence” between Europe and Asia, had been infected by assumptions of a priori differences between Europe and Asia that were in fact a product of European military/political expansion in Asia after 1800.
The idea of Europe had been framed long before 1800 by contrasts with Asia; here is a good collection of readings: The Idea of Europe: Enlightenment Perspectives. We need to be aware of the problems that using this contrast brings to Asian history.
As it happens, the themes that you are concerned with — the economic context and implications of expanding imperial power in post-Mongol empires — are the subject of next week’s reading and later discussion. I would be very happy for you to work on this question of the rise of the military class in post-Mongol empires and their role in economic development. They clearly sucked up more and more wealth in the form of taxes than regimes had ever done before — and they did a lot of destructive fighting — but #1 they had to spend that wealth to enhance their stature and military power, which formed effective demand for all sorts of things, including human labor, including for the military, #2 their competition (inside imperial regions and among them) put a premium on increasing the taxable productivity of their territories, and #3, last but not least, they were constantly interacting with and becoming increasingly dependent upon merchants, bankers, and rustic financiers in developing currency-laden market economies that stretched overseas. Imperial territorial imagination thus went out to sea, the Ottomans into the Indian Ocean, the Mughals into the Bay of Bengal, and the Qing around the South China Sea (also the Ming into the Indian Ocean before 1430).
Feb 19
Hi Sharon,
Concerning the 18th century military labor market, I think the best way to explain this in more detail — which is clearly a good idea — would be to note that the only book I know on the subject pertains to a large North Indian caste group, the Rajputs, who have been understood as professional soldiers in the service of various rulers from Mughal times. They were also rulers themselves, but when the Mughals took power they became subordinate imperial authorities and the younger generations could not conquer to form their own kingdoms, so they went to fight for others, Mughals and their competitors, to receive various forms of remuneration, including cash wages. The book is only in hardback –D. H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and sepoy: the ethnohistory of the military labour market in Hindustan, 1450-1850 (Cambridge 1990) — so I can’t get it to you online, but here is a link to a good review. Bayly was I think referring primarily to that research, by Dirk Kolff, which was published around the same time as Imperial Median.
Since then, the topic has been widely explored in other studies of eighteenth and early 19th century warfare all over South Asia. Basically, the idea is that soldiering was not only a job for professional warriors like Rajputs, it became a regular job option for many peasants during the off-season — that is, dry months when there was little or no work on the farm — and particularly in bad years, when the monsoon was meager, harvests poor, prices high, and off-farm income highly sought-after. So people with money to spend who wanted troops and services for war spent money hiring them. That is what the Company did, and though it wanted the rulers with whom it formed alliances to pay the bill, they refused to pay for troops who were fighting for others, even their allies. What rulers wanted — and what the Company wanted — was to hire fighting forces as cheaply as possible to win battles to gain tax income.
Feb 21 — on 5-page paper #1
Dear Sharon and Sakshi,
I am writing to you together — and copying Danial and Maximus — because you clearly have a strong grip on the central theme of Part One of the course: the positive interaction — if not symbiotic relationship — of Global Asia and European political economies in coastal regions of Asia in the 16-18th centuries.
Sakshi is focusing on slavery and Sharon, on port cities; both were critical components of that interaction; and they both entail entanglements of coercion and commercialism that pertain across Eurasia generally.
I think one good way to appreciate why this approach is relevant is to recognize that it counteracts the simple “rise and fall” narrative that persists in histories that say the rise of European power BEFORE 1800 meant the fall of Asian imperial powers. That may seem to be true in island SE Asia and in India, until we attend to details in coastal environments, where rising European trade actually strengthened coastal polities where Europeans became participants, becoming, in effect, Asian powers themselves, counter-intuitive as that may seem given the dominance of national narratives assuming eternal opposition between Europe and Asia.
The shifting EuroAsian quality of slavery and of port cities during these centuries seems to me to be a theme that connects your two papers. I am not trying to force you to agree, but in light of pre-1500 histories around the Indian Ocean it seems reasonable to suggest that a Eurasian perspective — or better yet, Afro-Eurasian perspective — makes sense, rather than assuming an absolute cultural opposition of Asia and Europe and thus writing a zero-sum story of European power rising as Asia declines.
I would suggest that the Europe-Asia rise-and-fall, and Asia-versus-Europe zero sum game story begins to become prominent, and to make some sense, in the 19th century, as we will see empirically in the Rosling video, and we can also see in the codification of nationalist imperial historiography, with James Mill’s History of British India, first published in 1817 — for the EICo — which became a kind of imperialist bible. In saying this, I am clearly in disagreement with historians like Tirthankar Roy, who treat the simultaneity of rising British and declining Mughal imperial power as cause-and-effect.
Feb 28
Hi all,
I look forward to reading your papers. I will be delayed a few days because of other crashing deadlines.
I have a presentation in “History in the Headlines” at NYUAD on Tuesday, at the same time as our class, 7-8:30AM for me, which I would like you to attend or at least view the recording. I have asked the course technical assistant to make that possible, because she hosts the zoom meeting.
For our class on Wednesday, please do the reading for last week and as much of this week as you can manage, but definitely watch and discuss the Rosling video, and be ready to discuss the question of “divergence” between Asia and Euro-Amerca in trajectories of economic development. You can take notes or store the History in the Headlines session, for later discussion, though parts of it might be relevant this week.
Looking ahead, for the rest of the course, we are working on the last two centuries, first with some overview of long-term trends and debates about them, and then focusing on specific themes.
cheers
cheers
david
3 MarchThe recording for “The Rohingya Crisis Continues” discussion in History in the Headlines on March 2, 2021, is available here.