Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Seaports provide material foundations for globalization. In the long history of global mobile connectivity that now forms globalization, the Indian Ocean is the world's oldest arena of expansive long-distance sea travel. People have sailed monsoon winds among coastal environments connecting Europe, Africa, India, and China since prehistoric times. Indian Ocean ports grew in number, size, wealth, and permanence over the centuries and anchored the rise of seaborne empires connecting Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Modernity traveled among industrial port cities along with lower unit costs for shipping and a dramatically increasing scale of shipping in volume, value, distance, and speed. Capital investments in seaport infrastructure grew with the scale of mobility through ports connecting producers and consumers by land and sea in commodity chains that eventually embraced people around the world with increasingly intricate, expansive interdependence, and also with ever more entrenched spatial inequity. The result is the current global seaport space of interwoven connectivity strung along the coastlines of globalization on all the continents.

AbstractThe forceful expropriation of land, labour, water, and other productive resources is fundamental for processes of agricultural expansion and intensification. What is known today as 'land grab' was theorized by Marx as 'primitive accumulation' and by David Harvey as 'accumulation by dispossession'. Today it is most prominent and controversial in Africa, where the governments of India and China are major perpetrators; and it also drives most contemporary urban expansion in India and China. This article deploys David Washbrook's idea of 'country politics' to explore the process of land grabbing in the early-modern expansion of agrarian Bengal, where local peasant society and worldwide imperial political economy came together to expand frontiers of farming in what is now the Sylhet District of Bangladesh.

SANGHAMITRA MISRA, Becoming a Borderland: Space and Identity in Colonial Northeastern India, London and New Delhi: Routledge, 2011, pp. 236.

Historical understandings of globalization in Asia should not begin as they typically do in social science and policy analysis with the global geography of national territories that came into being after 1945. Long distance mobility moving in many directions at various speeds shape local realities everywhere in Asia from ancient times, Until the sixteenth century, Europe remained an peninsular outlier in a vast Asian space of human mobility running from Mediterranean to Pacific, along the Silk Road and coastlines from East Africa to Japan. After 1500, a sea-going world economy included the Americas, propelled European hegemony, and encompassed the Asian circulatory system, attaching its Western, Southern, and Eastern regions to networks of power dominated by Europe and the US. Those attachments stand out in today's world of nations, where states manage the political economy and cultural politics of globalization, but Asian dynamics of mobility over the long term and down to the present demand more academic attention, particularly as they pertain to coastal regions, inland frontiers, and expansive cultural spaces of territorial power. - David Ludden is Professor of Political Economy and Globalization and Chair of the Department of History at New York University.

Historical understandings of globalization in Asia should not begin as they typically do in social science and policy analysis with the global geography of national territories that came into being after 1945. Long distance mobility moving in many directions at various speeds shape local realities everywhere in Asia from ancient times, Until the sixteenth century, Europe remained an peninsular outlier in a vast Asian space of human mobility running from Mediterranean to Pacific, along the Silk Road and coastlines from East Africa to Japan. After 1500, a sea-going world economy included the Americas, propelled European hegemony, and encompassed the Asian circulatory system, attaching its Western, Southern, and Eastern regions to networks of power dominated by Europe and the US. Those attachments stand out in today's world of nations, where states manage the political economy and cultural politics of globalization, but Asian dynamics of mobility over the long term and down to the present demand more academic attention, particularly as they pertain to coastal regions, inland frontiers, and expansive cultural spaces of territorial power. David Ludden is Professor of Political Economy and Globalization and Chair of the Department of History at New York University.