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History Along the Coastal Zone of Southern Asia

This paper is part of a larger book project, History Escapes the Nation: Regions and Localities in the World History of Southern Asia

The project has three parts.

Part One: Territoriality in History

Here I argue that contemporary ideas about the physical shape, territorial boundaries, and cultural geography of all regions of the modern world, including South Asia, derive from projects of political boundary making since the early nineteenth century. Within this general argument, my primary concern is the invention of India as a bounded territory imbued with Indian nationality. This peculiarly modern India emerged in opposition to neighboring territories through the politics of British imperialism and then acquired its modern cultural substance through generations of intellectual and political work by self-consciously Indian nationals, initially and still most influentially, perhaps, Calcutta's bhadralok intelligentsia. The creation of Pakistan in 1947, new Indian states in 1956, and Bangladesh in 1971 altered perceptions, experiences, and academic representations of South Asian territory not only in and for the present, but for history as a whole, because of cultural imperatives imposed by the teleological construction of national identities.

In pre-modern times, ideas about human living space in South Asia and elsewhere were conditioned by different but also political formations of territoriality. My substantive examples are drawn from the empirical evidence that comprise territorial markers in medieval and early modern texts of various kinds.

· I argue that medieval inscriptions and other medieval markers of territory, like some of their ancient predecessors, represent individual assertions of authority in individual sites, within networks of relationships among powerful people who crossed culturally empty space to connect places that can be visualized as islands of power within archipelagos of elite authority. This site-specific form of social power over land did not cover the landscape comprehensive or fill out the territory that it described. Its textual proliferation in the first millennium of the Common Era represents an increasing incidence of the announcement of individual political presence in specific sites; and at the same time, it marks movements across conceptually empty space to the other sites, typically to a place already occupied by someone else, to form alliances and to assert authority.

· New kinds of territorial markers proliferate from the fourteenth century onward and cover much of South Asia by the end of the sixteenth century, when we can say that an early modern formation of territoriality had covered a great many localities from Punjab to Bengal and south across the peninsula to Kanya Kumari. The many innovations that generate this process of reterritorialization had many points of origin - some in Central Asia, some in the Indo-Gangetic Plains, and some in the Central interior of the Indian peninsula.

The last of these -- in the peninsula -- are of most interest to me now. In the late medieval period, new representations of territoriality in the peninsular indicate change in the geographical relationships between the interior and coast. Before then, kings along the coast had produced the textual material that defined most recorded localities, and the interior peninsular uplands were a political frontier, very poorly articulated in the early medieval records. Land outside nadus along the coastal plain within 50 to 75 miles of the sea were mostly empty spaces according to the early medieval inscriptional records.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, rulers in the interior changed the character of territoriality in the entire peninsula. Imperial Kakatiyas in Warangal and Hoysalas in Dvarasamudram produced inscriptions that like the Cholas and Pandyas before them listed the places they conquered. But they paid more attention to describing the extent of territorial authority, marked by places on the borders of competing imperial claims. Royal domains now took on more of the appearance of demarcated territories, replete with landmarks that served to mark their extent in much the same way as watercourses, hills, rock outcrops, and named places had served to mark the boundaries of ur and devadana land in early-medieval grants. Hoysalas, for instance, define their territory as stretching from the mountains in the west, to Kolar in the East, to the River Krishna in the north, to Salem in the south. The language of inscriptions also marked this territory linguistically, because their domain was contiguous with emerging textual production in early Kannada, as Sheldon Pollock has shown.

Hoysalas' were conquered by the Rayas of Vijayanagar, whose multi-lingual empire contains epigraphy in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Grantha, as well as Sanskrit, and whose expanse is marked by the novel claim that Rayas were "Lords of the Eastern and Western Oceans"(Filliozat 1973: xvi), expressing the "idea of maritime lordship." As Phil Wagoner points out, quoting Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "throughout most of the 15th and 16th centuries, Vijayanagara remained essentially an inland state … a 'massive, agrarian-based imperial formation,'" (Subrahmanyam 1993:11), with little direct political or economic involvement along the coast. Wagoner argues convincingly that it was not direct control over the coast or the sea trade that justified this title, but rather the Rayas' personal power to adorn themselves with precious commodities from overseas trade, specifically, unguents and other precious objects that came to Hampi from overseas, including Chinese porcelain.

By the fifteenth century, rulers in the uplands and plateaus of the interior, forming a triangle from Aurangabad to Hyderabad and Mysore, dominate political history. They define territoriality in new terms. None controlled the sea trade or much of the coast for very long, and yet, they all depended on the Indian Ocean trade for their survival. There was thus a disjuncture between their need for and claims over trade along the coast and the physical reality of their control over resources.

Localities along the coast retained a visible separateness even as representations of imperial authority turned the coast into parts of inland empires. This kind of disjuncture between the interior and the coast continued into the modern period, when political power expanded upland into the interior from the coastal plains under the banner of East India Company Raj.

Modern territoriality emerged slowly, beginning in the sixteenth century, when more and more rulers, like the Rayas of Vijayanagar, defined territories in South Asia through relations among men of rank who were spread over landscapes that they conceptualized as being under their authority. This more spatially inclusive and comprehensive conceptualization of territoriality is embedded in rituals and accounts of both mansabdari and nayankara, as well as in the theory and practice of iqta among the Ottomans. Although participants knew full well that their power ran along the marches and linear routes between forts and towns that connected their individual sites of power to one another, imperial authority envisioned its territory as spanning all the space in between. Earlier medieval empty spaces in-between sites of power were slowly but steadily filled in by imperial claims and conquests, and by more-and-more regular payments of tribute that became territorial systems of agrarian taxation and entitlement.

Interstitial emptiness was being eliminated from ruling-class ideas about territoriality, despite gaps in power and real disjunctures between spatial representations and practices. Modern modes of territoriality expanded in the eighteenth century in many regions of Eurasia, including South Asia, and they succeeded in eliminating empty spaces entirely during the nineteenth century, when they formed continuous landscapes of social power over all the land and all its inhabitants. In the process, modern states and modern intellectuals erased the moving frontiers and the linear networks which had carried modern territoriality across the countryside.

The history of social power in territory is thus the secret to the history of change in claims about, beliefs in, and concepts of geographical boundedness. The activity of marking boundaries both incorporates and excludes "outsiders." It exerts power over people inside the territory, as the people who do the boundary-making fill in the gaps, so to speak, between all the individual sites and routes of power. The modern intellectual production of Indian Civilization as a comprehensive territorial entity - covering all the space of India entirely - formed a comprehensive space for native history; and simultaneously, it established the authority of the representatives of Indians over territories and histories inside the boundaries of the nation.

People who had once had interior spaces to themselves became minorities and aliens. Border crossing became a law-and-order problem. Having enforced their own control over the boundaries of India, the British, logically, became objects of exclusion themselves. Muslims, Christians, tribals, and many others have also felt the sting of otherness under nativist assertions of authority over all the territory of Indian culture.

The modern practice of reading historical records from centuries past into the territorial confines of modern states is one technology of power by which modern modes of territoriality control the space of the nation along with everything and everyone inside it. Prying open the old gaps the can still be found between claims over national territory and the histories of peoples who happen to live inside national states can provide some breathing space for cultural opposition to nationalist chauvinism.

Textbooks and reference books - such as Joseph E. Schwartzberg's A Historical Atlas of South Asia -- which use the territorial boundaries of modern nations as convenient storage containers for geographical data from the past can also be viewed as intellectual technologies of national boundary enforcement. The same can be said for Area Studies programs, which have worked assiduously to enforce the separation of national territories and to partition South Asia into cultural territories that appear to have ancient, pre-political reality.

Once we appreciate that territorial power constitutes an institutional and cultural mediation between

· the human experience, perception and everyday use of space, on the one hand, and
· authoritative representations of geography, on the other;

we can better understand the importance of such phenomena as (1) the relative marginality of all countries outside India in South Asian studies, (2) the segregation of colonial Sri Lanka, (3) the exclusion of Burma from studies of British India, and (4) the exclusion of South Asians overseas from South Asian studies until they finally entered through the backdoor of diaspora, once they had migrated in sufficient numbers to the US and Britain. Why does it make sense to exclude Indians in Fiji, Malaysia, the Caribbean, Singapore, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Africa from Indian history? Because Indian history is imagined geographically inside national boundaries.

By the same token, when we see that territorial power mediates social being in space and representations of geography, we can appreciate that TODAY we are confronted with a contest between national and global modes of territorial power. They make competing claims to localities in South Asia, that is, to individual sites of everyday human activity, as they do around the world. I am not the first to have argued that globalization and the real as well as imagined threats that it poses to national states inform recent innovations in nationalism, including Hindutva. We work in a world in which enclosed national powers and expansive capitalist powers are fighting it out to control historical geography.

The vocabulary and institutional forms of this conflict are new. But operation of a politics of territoriality is not new. It has produced many changes in previous centuries in the substance of territoriality. Conflicts between mobile, boundary-crossing power and sedentary, boundary-making power have occurred many times. Historically, in fact, boundary-making, border-crossing, boundary-erasing, and border-imagining modes of social power most often work together to redefine territoriality. Power inside boundaries depends more than it cares to admit on external powers that often appear in rhetoric merely as alien threat.

Part Two: South Asia in Eurasia

The second and third parts of the book explore territoriality in South Asia from what we can reasonably call "world history" and "local history" perspectives. They displace and contextualize the history of national and global territorialism by using empirical evidence that depicts human spaces which have been written over and obscured by the institutionalized use of national boundaries to collect, interpret, and exclude historical evidence of all kinds.

The first historical space that needs to be reconstituted is Eurasia itself, which has been obscured by what Martin Lewis aptly describes as a mythical division of continents between Europe and Asia. These two spaces -- Asia and Europe -- are at best, as anyone can see on a physical map, poorly defined parts of a continuous landmass; they comprise one macro-historical space, and not two different "continents" at all. In Eurasia, and more broadly, within what Marshall Hodgson called Afro-EurAsia, South Asia is a poorly defined part of the south,

1. lying physically in-between the huge expanses of Central Asia and the Indian Ocean,
2. straddling the ecological transition between arid lands to the West and Humid Tropics to the east, and
3. forming a huge, centrally located bulge of land along the rim of the Indian Ocean between Africa and Southeast Asia.

South Asia is a land in between, perfectly placed physically to be a region of intersection and connectivity.

The idea of South Asia is actually deceptive, because this definition of the territory looks down on the subcontinent from northern Asia. If we turn a world map upside down, the coast takes on much more prominence as a massive shore of the Indian Ocean. From Sindh to Bengal, including Sri Lanka, South Asia is physically as much the Indian Ocean's northern shore as it is a southern part of the Eurasian landmass.

When we look at old routes of transportation and communication, from the time of the Mauryas onward, a more complex image appears. We see two realms.

· One South Asia runs across the Indo-Gangetic plains, which appear as the southern and richest agricultural region of Southern Eurasia, with the largest population and wealth in a world of routes running overland from the Mediteranean through Tibet to China and south from Central Asia. This was the geographical perspective from which India was defined as the land "beyond the Indus," the India of Alexander the Great and also of Babur, Humayun, and Akbar. From this vantage point, the land further "to the south" - the old Dakshina Path - continued to be a land that one entered by crossing the Vindhyas going south from Malwa into Khandesh, and from there, the major route ran down the Godavari to its Delta. From Bengal, there was another route along the Orissa coast, which is the route that Gupta emissaries traveled to Kanchipuram. Jean Deloche represents this overland view "from the north" in his mapping of the "great Z" of pre-railway transportation routes in India, which actually misses most of the peninsular coast, except in Gujarat and along the stretch from Orissa to Tamil Nadu. Lakshmi Subramaniyam has found that in the eighteenth century, the hundi trade out of Calcutta ran across the plains of the north, south to Bombay, and along the coast to Vizagapatam. This became the geographical basis for financial transactions that the East India Company needed to wage war against Marathas; against whom their most valuable ally, the Nizam of Hyderbad, straddled routes along the Godavari basin.

· There is another South Asia, however, which appears along the northern shore of the Indian Ocean, which has from ancient times contained the richest agricultural land, the densest population, and the richest source of supplies of all kinds for people moving between the Mediterranean and China. Traversed in short stops along segmented seas routes which have hugged the shore running from one small port to another for as long as we have any historical records, this South Asia has its own historical geography. Until the end of the first millennium, the western and eastern parts of South Asia faced west and east, respectively. The west coast looked to the Mediterranean; the east coast looked to the South China Sea. Medieval Sanskrit scholars traveled to Java and Ankhor from the east coast. Tamil inscriptions appear along the South China coast. On the other hand, Geniza manuscripts depict a steady flow of migrants and traders from west Asia for whom "India" was actually Sindh, Gujarat, the Konkan Coast, and perhaps above all, Cochin. Arabs, Christians, and Jews formed a significant part of the population in of the medieval western coast, where Greek texts were translated to lay the basis for what would become known as Indian astrology. In the first millennium, Sri Lanka and the tip of India straddled east and west and formed a subcircuit of intense maritime interaction, migration, and cultural influence, from southern Kerala to Batticoloa and Kanchipuram. For the Cheras, Cholas, and Pandyas, this was an integral part of their world. Tamils settled naturally in Sri Lanka and fisher families and toddy tappers spread all along this southern coastal zone. Medieval irrigation technology that fed the early Pallavas in Kanchi probably came along these routes from Sri Lanka.

What separates the historical geography of South Asia across the great medieval divide between the first and second millennium is the simultaneous rise of sultanic states all along the spine of the interior peninsula, which brought the inland routes of Northern Asia down south as far as Madurai, and the weaving together of the eastern and western halves of the Indian Ocean trading system, which by the fourteenth century connected China with the Meditarranean with a steady flow of goods and people, all moving along the northern shore of the Indian Ocean. By the time that the Vijayanagar Rayas were claiming sovereignty over the eastern and western seas, South Asia was fully knitted into overland and sea-borne networks that criss-crossed Eurasia, which intersected one another most influentially in South Asia. Crucial routes of interconnection between the land and sea routes of Eurasia ran through territory contested between Vijayanagar and Bijapur, the Raichur Doab. At this point in history, in the sixteenth century, Rayalaseema was a central place in Eurasia --- something we can hardly imagine traveling through its parched and starved landscape today - and from this perspective, it make sense that that the first Portuguese visitors at Vijayanagar praised it as the biggest and richest city in the world.

Part Two of Remapping History thus continues the argument (which I began in my 1994 article, "History Outside Civilisation and the Mobility of Southern Asia" ) that South Asia should be understood empirically not as closed civilization-space - as it has been depicted by generations of orientalists, Indologists, historians, geographers, and anthropologists on the basis of a strategic collection of small number of Sanskrit texts, unrepresentative samples of cultural practices, and British imperial maps -- but rather as a vast constellation of historical spaces, which have changed in their shape and content over time, and are strung together along zones of mobility and communication which have conditioned their composition in various ways.

The central idea here is that mobility rather than stationary sedentarism, networks of transport and migration rather than enclosed cultural regions, and expanding zones of connectivity rather than enduring nuclear centers of power and stability, constitute the most accurate framing perspective on South Asia as a region of history in Eurasia.

As she was looking east from Cairo to explain its position in the fourteenth century, Janet Abu-Lughod concluded that South Asia was "on the way to everywhere" in the early centuries of the present millennium. But even more than she indicates in her remarkable book, by the time of the Delhi Sultanate, routes by land and sea were running through expanding agricultural territories in South Asia to stimulate a new burst of urbanization and economic complexity in agrarian regions, which made South Asia a uniquely productive zone of connectivity and production in Eurasia. China's economy was bigger, but localities along routes running through South Asia were much more intensely connected. Connections increased dramatically in later centuries

· by land with the creation of an imperial zone running across Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal territories and

· by sea with the expansion of Arab, Armenian, and European trade

In her view, the expansion of European power represents declining Asian power in the Indian Ocean system. But this is looking back from the watershed marked by the arrival of Vasco da Gama on the western coast. Andre Gunder Frank argues persuasively, however, that the economic ascendancy of Europe over Asia did not in fact occur until the nineteenth century, before which European capitalists were climbing up on the backs of Asian economies. His division of Asia and Europe and his narration of their contest for supremacy, take us back, however, to the myth of the continents, which we have left behind. The important points to take way from his book is that the arrival of the Europeans should not be itself taken as a huge watershed and that focusing on the Eurasian economic system as a whole can provided an important corrective to ideas about European superiority in the early-modern period that originated in Europe and were used to explain European imperial expansion in Asia. In addition, focusing on the arrival of South Asia as a central zone of connectivity in Eurasia helps us to better understand discontinuities between conditions in the early medieval centuries and those that typify localities in later medieval and early modern times.

Simply put, South Asia is not the same place in the first and second millennia. Telling the story of its history through a prior commitment to its territorial unity and then focusing on the arrival of outsiders as watersheds and turning points -- whether those outsiders are ancient Greeks, Turks, Afghans, Muslims, or Europeans -- obscures the history of mobility through southern Eurasia that repeatedly redefines territories and modes of territoriality and separates ancient and early medieval histories of historical space in South Asia decisively from later medieval, early-modern and modern formations. From the fourteenth century onward, border crossing accelerated, and along with it claims about invasion and violation; and at the same time, boundary formation and controlling sites along routes of transport became more compelling political project, for the Rayas of Vijayanagar as much as for Delhi Sultans and Timurid padshahs.

By emphasizing the local importance in South Asia of widespreading historical mobility and connectivity in Eurasia, we can reinterpret all the periods of political and cultural transition in South Asia, which have been interpreted incessantly as periods of "invasion," "conquest," "upheaval," and "reaction" -- the dominant trope for self-enclosed national cultures that claim the status of civilizations. The rise of so-called Muslim states and of British India have been quite typically modeled on one another. They look rather different when the idea of "indigenous Indian culture facing foreign invasion" is extracted from the book of clichés with which historians write history.

Part Three: Localities in South Asia

The last part of the book is the one I am working on now and the one I most want to present for discussion with you today. Here I am interested in cutting out the spatial history of what I call "localities" in South Asia from the deadening grip of both the national and global modes of territorial imagination. This work is situated in what I think of as an emerging post-national phase of historical writing. It beings from a simple theoretical assertion, that different people have different histories; and it proceeds to localize history so as to understand peoples' differences, particularly inside the boundaries of national territories, but also across boundaries which have been created, for example, by the partition of British India.

· The first assertion is now well established among historians in most of the world, and in South Asia, it has been elaborated most astuted by feminists and by Subaltern Studies, who both argue eloquently that subaltern subject positions must be historicized separately, however densely they may be imbricated with dominant groups in society.

· The spatial, social, and temporal location of gender and subalternity have not been an explicit theoretical concern for feminists or for Subaltern Studies -- except in so far as they have theorized the location of gender and subalternity inside British India and national states that emerged from it -- but empirically, in scholarly practice, most writing in both genres comes to us in the form of localized case studies in which the particularity places-in-time is actually of great importance. Essays in Sudesh Vaid and Kumkum Sangar's Recasting Women go some distance in this direction by documenting regional difference among women's histories in colonial India; and Bina Agarwal's A Field of One's Own systemizes the patterns of difference in the nexus of marriage practices and inheritance. But this research remains in the tradition of studies of "regional diversity," I would say. A good example how Subaltern Studies is pushing the historical localization of difference is Shahid Amin's book on Chauri Chaura, which argues that urbanites in Delhi, the central site of the Indian nation state, have a history that is very different from that among villagers and townspeople on the other end of UP.

Ajay Skaria's recent book goes even further. In line with a Subaltern Studies tradition, he argues that Bhils in the mountainous Dangs of eastern Gujarat have a wholly different way of understanding history than do modern folk and peoples all around them in the plains. Similarly, Nita Kumar argues that not only do different groups in Banaras - pandits, merchants, and artisans - have different histories of education, each rooted in distinctive modes of social reproduction; but the city of Banaras also has a different educational history than Calcutta, reflecting the slower, later, and more contingent expansion of the power of colonial educational institutions in the interior as compared to the coast. Sheldon Pollock has indicated to me in a recent conversation concerning his five years of collaborative research with a knowledgeable collection of scholars in South Asia on the histories of regional literatures that Bengali literary culture -- centered on Calcutta -- seems more preoccupied with problematic of British colonialism than any other. Regional literatures have different histories. The last example I would like to site is Sonia Amin's study of women Muslim writers in east Bengal, which considers the specificity of the history of Muslim bhadromahila.

These are but a few indications of what appears to me to be a recent trend toward more sophisticated research on what I am calling the localization of history in South Asia, which is beginning to push beyond studies of regional culture into problems of deeper historical difference in South Asia.

The connectedness of historical localities like Gorakhpur and Delhi, the Dangs and Bombay, and Banaras, Calcutta, and Dhaka is of course critical for explaining their respective composition, as well as for appreciating differences among local histories. Such connections are forged among localities with unequal power; and connections among places with differential power in history goes back to ancient times. In South Asia, as in other parts of the world, the complexity of these spatial entanglements need not be reduced theoretically or homogenized empirically into the transformations of a civilization or a culture, however diverse and regionalized. Separate but interacting local histories are beginning to escape from the confines of nations, religious traditions, and the world system. But detaching the localized from the encompassing histories that have long preoccupied historians, in which locality merely indicates specification and diversity, seems to me to indicate a contestation over the subject and the locus of history itself.

Unpacking elements of connectivity and separateness among localities - that is, among countless individual spatial domains of history - is becoming a new area for research and debate. The coincidental appearance of two histories of peoples in the hills of Western India by Sumit Guha and Ajay Skaria indicates some lines of debate that will guide research.

To simplify, we can say that Ajay Skaria takes a more anthropological view of cultural difference and of separateness among the Bhils, who appear in his (fieldwork-based) account to retain, even today, visible elements of a very old (perhaps timeless) identity, one opposed to peoples around them, close-by, in the plains. He depicts their world of "wildness" as having been breached and subordinated violently, in a totally unprecedented manner, by the British colonial state, which brought alien modernity into the uplands. On the other hand, Sumit Guha documents the interaction of peoples in the hills and plains over centuries, including the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when both the hills and plains were forced into their modern trajectory by British imperialism. He argues that some features of Dangi political organization that Skaria takes to be "indigenous" were in fact adaptations to colonial conditions.

Who is right on their points of contention is not my concern here. The critical point is that discussions of these two books must focus on the specificity of the histories of tribal peoples rather than on the history of India that would seek to encompass them, even though the subjects of these histories live inside India. Two methodological features of these books particularly interest me.

· First, they both look at hill peoples in India using theory and scholarship that also embrace other parts of the world. Their analytical framework may, in fact, owe more to studies of cultural and political difference among hill tribes in other parts of the world than to South Asian studies or Indian national history. Reflecting a sturdy division among scholars elsewhere, they respectively highlight cultural separateness in Skaria's case and political connectedness in Guha's case.

· Second, they employ different temporal perspectives, which highlight their concern with historic isolation and integration, respectively. Skaria draws a sharp line between pre-colonial and colonial times, which are strongly associated with Bhil notions of moglai and mandini, that is, "freedom" and "restraint." By contrast, Guha documents historical change in the uplands in its relations with the lowlands over centuries that include the colonial and national periods.

Both concentrate on problematics of agency and identity. For Guha, agency among people in the hills is embedded in histories of interaction, conflict, and negotiation among different groups in the hills and the plains, within a long history of what used to be called "integration" or "the agrarian system," now extended by Guha to embrace the mountains as well as the plains. For Skaria, on the other hand, the distinctive cultural agency of the Bhils is found in their specific activity as a group remembering, representing, and reconstructing their past inside the Dangs.

These problematics of agency and identity are located historically in places at the bottom ranks of extensive spatial hierarchies of social power. Elite and subaltern Bhils both live in uplands subordinated to lowland localities in India and the wider world. Crispin Bates has done a nice job showing how tribal labor from hills filled agricultural spaces in Khandesh and Berar as the integration of hills and plains took its modern form within linear networks of rail transport and unequal exchange, which concentrated all forms of power in ranked urban centers, including Nagpur and Bombay, and further up the chain of commodity markets and capitalist power, in London. The history of the Bhils is therefore both a separate, localized, subaltern history and also a part of a history of the Bhils' connectedness to other localities of power and identity, each of which has its own internal history of agency and identity.

Twenty years from now, South Asia may appear as a set of changing, connected sites of power strung along changing routes of migration, communication, mobility, exchange, and power; rather than as a set of "cultural territories" or vast enclosed spaces that we refer to as "regions" of a "civilization" or a set of "nations."
I have another example in mind … coastal zone … with a great variety of localities in it, which are connected to one another in a pattern that clearly does not represent a cultural or historical region by any established definition … but which is nonetheless a pattern that helps to make sense of history along the coast and is distinctly different from the interior.

Data from historical records pertaining to spatial experience and activity since the early medieval period indicate that people have used human spaces in ways very different from those that records indicate when read into modern modalities of territorial perception. When we focus on the actual evidence of spatial history, we see the closure of territory as artificial, functional, and symbolic - rather than representing the actual limits of spatial activity and geographical mobility and communication. Records that express territorial authority are mechanisms of territorial control and expressions of power and institutional enforcement; whereas historically, effective interactions across space have tended in general to expand more or less continuously.

I proceed by documenting different kinds of spatial activity and experience in different kinds of landscapes and among different kinds of people.

And we have abundant historical documentation to this effect. What we now call globalization is, empirically, a very, very long-term historical process, in which more and more places on the planet have come into more intense interaction, during physical transformations of human living space by (1) increasingly intensive modalities of resource exploitation, (2) denser human settlement patterns, and (3) declining costs of transportation and communication.