エピソード

  • Titas Chakraborty, "Empire of Labor: How the East India Company Colonized Hired Work" (U California Press, 2025)
    2025/04/15
    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world
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    1 時間 30 分
  • Bin Yang, "Discovered But Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, C. 1100-1620" (Columbia UP, 2024)
    2025/03/28
    Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, c.1100-1620 (Columbia UP, 2024) examines China's maritime activities in the Indian Ocean, especially as they relate to the Maldives. By weaving together the accounts of a 14th-century Chinese traveler (Wang Dayuan) to the archipelago, archaeological analysis of shipwrecks, maps by both the imperial court and Jesuits, records about items including cowrie shells and ambergris, and much more, Bin Yang argues that the Maldives — and the Indian Ocean world — shaped the Chinese empire. Discovered but Forgotten is a far-reaching and ambitious book that showcases both imperial China's maritime activities in the Indian Ocean world and how to do maritime history and global history, even when that means working with incomplete records and fragments of porcelain. This book should interest readers curious about East Asian history and global history, as well as anyone who doesn't yet know how important ambergris was to maritime trade and Ming China (spoiler: the answer is very). In addition to Discovered but Forgotten, interested listeners (and readers!) should also seek out Bin's previous books, especially Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money: A Global History (Routledge, 2019). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world
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    50 分
  • V. Chitra, "Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore" (Cornell UP, 2024)
    2025/03/23
    Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore (Cornell UP, 2024) reveals the ways that technical images such as weather infographics, sea-level projections, and surveys are fast remaking Mumbai's coasts and coastal futures. They set in place infrastructural interventions, vocabularies of development and conservation, and their lines and dots inscribe material conditions of existence and horizons of loss that entangle life forms. V. Chitra interlaces graphics and text by redrawing scientific images, the moments of their construction, the choices and consequences of what gets drawn and what does not, and how images are seen, performed, and manifest. These visual reconstructions show how images remake human-nonhuman relationships, arrange urban politics, and materialize landscapes in complex and contradictory ways. The multimodal format of Drawing Coastlines engages in the politics of its context where words and images combine to create coastal worlds, and to find, through a creative anthropology, openings to build new forms of care in the midst of crisis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world
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    1 時間 4 分
  • Andrea Wright, "Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea" (Stanford UP, 2024)
    2025/03/14
    Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea (Stanford UP, 2024) by Andrea Wright offers a critical and nuanced examination of the labor regimes that sustain the oil economies of the Arabian Peninsula. Challenging dominant narratives centered on state-building, elite wealth, and resource control, Wright focuses on the transnational laborers whose work has been essential to the region’s economic development. She explores how oil extractive economies depend not only on physical resources but also on the regulation, mobility, and discipline of migrant workers, particularly those from South Asia. The book traces the histories of labor migration across the Arabian Sea, revealing how colonial legacies, neoliberal policies, and contemporary state practices shape the lives of migrant workers. Wright argues that rather than being passive victims of state control, these workers navigate complex systems of power, leveraging networks and strategies to resist exploitation. From recruitment agencies in India to labor camps in the Gulf, she uncovers how workers contest the structures designed to discipline them—sometimes subtly, through everyday acts of defiance, and sometimes through overt resistance. At the heart of Unruly Labor is a critique of how oil economies function not just through the material extraction of petroleum but through the extraction of labor itself. Wright draws on ethnographic research, archival sources, and interviews to illustrate the racialized and gendered hierarchies embedded in these labor systems. She examines how Gulf states, in collaboration with sending countries, enforce restrictive labor policies that render migrants both essential and disposable. Yet, despite these constraints, migrants carve out spaces of agency, forging solidarity and alternative futures within and beyond the oil economy. By linking the history of oil to the lived experiences of laborers, Wright offers a compelling intervention in studies of the Gulf, labor migration, and global capitalism. Unruly Labor is essential reading for scholars of anthropology, history, and political economy, as well as anyone interested in the hidden forces that sustain global energy markets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world
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    32 分
  • Lindsay O'Neill, "The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey Into and Out of Slavery" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
    2025/02/21
    In 1716 two princes from Mpfumo—what is today Maputo, the capital of Mozambique—boarded a ship licensed by the East India Company bound for England. Instead, their perfidious captain sold them into slavery in Jamaica. After two years of pleading their case, the princes—known in the historical record as Prince James and Prince John—convinced a lawyer to purchase them, free them, and travel with them to London. The lawyer perished when a hurricane wrecked their ship, but the princes survived and arrived in England in 1720. Even though the East India Company had initially thought that the princes might assist in their aspirations to develop a trade for gold in East Africa and for enslaved labor in Madagascar, its interest waned. The princes would need to look elsewhere to return home. It was at this point that members of the Royal African Company and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge took up their cause, in the hope that profit and perhaps Christian souls would follow. John would make it home, but tragically, James would end his own life just before the ship sailed for Africa. In The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey into and out of Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), Dr. Lindsay O’Neill brings to life individuals caught up in the eighteenth-century slave trade. Dr. O’Neill also shows how the princes’ experiences reflect the fragmented, chaotic, and often deadly realities of the early British empire. A fascinating and deeply researched historical narrative, The Two Princes of Mpfumo blurs the boundaries between the Atlantic and Indian ocean worlds; reveals the intertwined networks, powerful individuals, and unstable knowledge that guided British attempts at imperial expansion; and illuminates the power of African polities, which decided who lived and who died on their coasts. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world
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    49 分
  • Parisa Vaziri, "Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
    2025/02/09
    From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slavery. How does a focus on blackness complicate traditional understandings of history and culture? Parisa Vaziri addresses this question by looking at residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Revealing the politicized clash between commercial cinema (fīlmfārsii) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zar which is both an African slave descendent practice and a constitutive element of Iranian culture, as well as to cinematic sīyāh bāzī (Persian black play). Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples—one of “absence” that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery. Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive (U Minnesota Press, 2023) explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the revelatory and little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery’s longue durée in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination. Parisa Vaziri is associate professor of comparative literature and Near Eastern studies at Cornell University. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world
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    1 時間 27 分
  • Jorge Flores, "Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
    2025/01/29
    Portuguese India was tiny—a handful of trading posts and enclaves, centered on the colony of Goa. The Estado da Índia faced the Mughal Empire and the Deccan Sultanates, large Muslim and Persian-based societies that ruled the subcontinent. How did Portuguese India survive? Well, by spying. Jorge Flores in his book Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World (University of Pennsylvania Press: 2024) explains how the Portuguese tried to learn more about their more powerful neighbors. Jorge Flores is Senior Researcher at the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Empire of Contingency. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world
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    56 分
  • China and the Indo-Pacific: Policies and Global Implications
    2024/12/27
    Why has the Indo-Pacific become the pre-eminent theatre of global geo-strategic and geo-economic competition? What is the interest and role of different actors such as China, Russia, the US, the EU and NATO in the region? How are small island developing states such as the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, and Vanuatu affected by challenges in the new security environment? In this episode, Professor Marina Svensson talks to Professor Anne-Marie Brady about her research on China’s strategic thinking and economic and political influence in the Indo-Pacific, with a particular focus on the small island states. The need for collaboration among like-minded partners in the region and other actors such as the EU is also addressed. This episode was produced and edited by Lisa Sihvonen and Tabita Rosendal. Anne-Marie Brady is a professor of political science and international relations at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Professor Brady is a specialist on Chinese politics, polar politics, China-Pacific politics, and New Zealand foreign policy. She is founding and executive editor of The Polar Journal. She has published ten books and over fifty academic papers and also written op eds for the New York Times, The Guardian, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, The Financial Times, among others. Further readings: Anne-Marie Brady’s work on the indo-pacific: https://www.aspi.org.au/report/when-china-knocks-door-new-caledonia https://thediplomat.com/2024/06/facing-up-to-chinas-hybrid-warfare-in-the-pacific/ https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/new-caledonia-crisis-a-turning-point-in-pacific-security/ https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/china-in-the-pacific-from-friendship-to-strategically-placed-ports-and-airfields/ The EU strategy: https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/eu-indo-pacific-strategy_en On NATO strategy: https://www.cfr.org/blog/natos-indo-pacific-aspirations This podcast was produced as part of EUVIP: The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe coordination and support action 10107906 (HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03). The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: · Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia) · Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland) · Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania) · Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) · Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland) · Norwegian Network for Asian Studies Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world
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    32 分