Abstract

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.