Different parts of the world are said to have "entered modernity" – a tenuous phrase at best – at different times. For Southeast Asia, there is an argument to be made that this transition was happening just as we move into the eighteenth century. How and why was this the case? What signals are there to connote this change? This presentation examines that question in regional form, across the width and breadth of the "lands beneath the winds". I sketch out an argument for why Southeast Asia is so important in understanding histories of connectivity in Asia, bridging the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asian worlds. Southeast Asia acted as a "hinge" in Asian history writ-large; this talk explores some of the ways that we might see that process in action.
Eric Tagliacozzo is the John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier (Yale, 2005) which won the Harry Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies, and of The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford, 2013). He is also the editor or co-editor of a dozen other books, including the Asia Inside Out trilogy, from Harvard University Press. He is the Director of Cornell’s Comparative Muslim Societies Program (CMS), as well as Cornell’s Modern Indonesia Project (CMIP), and serves as editor of the journal INDONESIA. His newest monograph, In Asian Waters: Charting Asia’s Maritime History From Yemen to Yokohama, recently came out with Princeton University Press.
This talk is part of The Global Eighteenth Century Speaker Series co-sponsored by the Gipson Institute and the Global Studies Program.