*This event will be rescheduled. As part of the SEAC Southeast Asian Waters Seminar series Prof. Melissa Macauley (Professor of History, Northwestern University) will speak on how Chinese labourers and merchants's migration across maritime revealed a convergence in colonial sites that were critical to modern development. The talk will be chaired by Prof. Hyun Bang Shin.
Talk Abstract
In a story that dawns with the Industrial Revolution and culminates in the Great Depression, Distant Shores reveals how the migration of Chinese laborers and merchants across a far-flung maritime world linked their homeland to an ever-expanding frontier of settlement and economic extraction. At home and abroad, they reaped many of the benefits of an overseas colonial system without establishing formal governing authority. Their power was sustained instead through a mosaic of familial, brotherhood, and commercial relationships spread across the ports of Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Swatow. The picture that emerges is not one of Chinese divergence from European modernity but rather of a convergence in colonial sites that were critical to modern development and accelerating levels of capital accumulation. With a focus on the Chaozhouese (Teochew) native place group of Chinese, this talk will address these claims while discussing the methodological challenges of writing translocal history.
Speaker and Chair biographies
Prof. Melissa Macauley is Professor of History at Northwestern University. Her current work focuses on the interconnected history of China and Southeast Asia in the late imperial and modern eras, though she continues to publish in the field of Chinese social history and legal culture. Her most recent book is Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China's Maritime Frontier (Princeton, 2021).
Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune) is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of speculative urbanisation, gentrification and displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism with particular attention to Asian cities. His books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016), Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (Routledge, 2021), and The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia: Globalization and Urban Transformation (Routledge, forthcoming). He is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation.