This conference, jointly organized by the Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai, and the CAPASIA Project, European University Institute, examines the role of infrastructure in Asia’s port cities from the thirteenth century to the present. Visual depictions of economic arenas and initiatives as diverse as “Maritime Asia,” the “Indian Ocean World,” and the “Belt and Road Initiative” convey an image of unbroken, linear exchange across Eurasia. But throughout their long history, the spaces of trade and interactions in the Indian Ocean have been non-contiguous, unconcentrated, and diffuse. Clusters of artisanal and navigational skill, banking expertise, wage labor, and mercantile networks concentrated in specific places. Today this may be truer than ever, most especially in the wake of the tectonic shifts in economic production that have occurred in parts of Asia over the past half century. And yet scholars lack both a shared spatial vocabulary to understand the character of material and immaterial exchange in the Indian Ocean and an appreciation of the peculiar infrastructures that exchange on sea and land demanded. While over the past generation scholars working in the vein of The Great Divergence have emphasized the primacy of region, their comparative work often took the empire or the nation-state as the point of analysis. By taking a much broader view in terms of both space and time, this conference brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to discuss the role of both material infrastructure (investment in port areas, warehouses, accommodation, social and cultural facilities; multicultural communities; etc.) and immaterial infrastructure (institutions; regulations and laws; system of banking and credit; formal and informal cultural institutions; heritage-making, family networks, etc.) in the Indian Ocean from the rapid increase in maritime linkages in the thirteenth century, to the age of European factories (1500-1800), and right through to today’s special economic zones and free trade ports. Starting from the transhistorical analysis of specific ports and trading posts, this conference aims to reflect on how infrastructure shaped the economic fabric and cross-cultural linkages in the Indian Ocean spaces.

This conference is co-organized by the Center for Global Asia at NYU Shanghai and the CAPASIA project at the European University Institute (EUI).

This conference is funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation programme under the ERC grant agreement No. 101054345.