This course explores the history of transnational Asia from the vantage points of its peripheries, rather than those of its largest empires and most populous modern nation-states. It focuses on small scale and indigenous societies, wildland margins, borderlands, settlement frontiers, and nomadic and maritime peoples. When it centers the rulers and denizens of nations and empires, it does so insofar as they engaged in practices such as settler colonialism, trade, conquest, and the exploitation of natural resources and the nonhuman world. It illuminates concepts such as shatterzones of empire, modes of resistance to state power, and cultural survival in colonized societies. This task is particularly salient with respect to Asia, a supercontinent that covers thirty percent of the landmass of the earth, stretching from the tropics to the Arctic, across which sixty percent of the world’s population speaks well over two thousand languages. Our collective reading will focus largely, though not exclusively, upon the early modern era. During the centuries of imperial expansion and conquest from roughly the 1400s through the 1800s, people and states expanded their reach over territory at an unprecedented pace, reshaped landscapes, and exploited both people and nonhuman species in new and highly impactful ways. One objective of the course is to prompt students to think spatially about complex territorial dynamics and power relations within their own geographical areas of study. Students will complete reading responses and longer papers in accord with typical requirements for graduate seminars. In addition, they will also learn how to use a range of media – from pencils and paper to digital tools – to complete maps and gazetteers that creatively depict the intricate, overlapping, unequal, and heterogeneous human geographies of the worlds that they are studying.
