Search

Ports offer key vantage points from which to write a global history, as their trade connects people, goods, and capital to far reaching parts of the world. Instead of focusing on trade connections, this article proposes studying the spatial frameworks of comparison in free port and free zone planning. Using reports from ports, ministries, and chambers of commerce, this article analyses these shifting frameworks for comparison in Bombay's port planning from the 1830s to the 1980s. Port planners, merchants, and ministry experts placed these ports and zones within shifting spatial frameworks, which determined which zones or ports could and could not be compared. These comparisons informed policy changes. Uncovering India's free port and zone debates reveals the plurality of concepts and policy models, not a single original zone that has spread around the world. This article asks how these actors understood the world, its changing spatial formats, and the role of free ports or free zones in these constellations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attempts to reframe the Age of Revolutions as imperial in nature have not fully integrated the French Revolution. Replying to this gap and criticisms of the Revolution's global turn, this essay positions the Revolution as both a moment of imperial reorganization and a sequence of political reinvention that exceed our current categories of empire and nation-state. These arguments open a forum comprising five contributions set in transimperial contexts that span from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean. The forum offers some points of reflection regarding the narratives, periodizations, and concepts that guide historians of the French Revolution as they navigate the global turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both global history and the new imperial history identify an emerging convergence of spatial formats, practices, and knowledge for organizing societies during the nineteenth century, though each emphasizes different competitive formats: the territorializing nation-state and the enduring empire. Rather than contrasting empire and nation-state, this article takes their combination seriously through the example of the respatialization of the French Empire during the Revolution and the reorganization of domestic territory into departments. The history of departmentalization underscores the emerging and changing interrelationships between nation and empire. The territorialization of metropolitan France, which developed out of imperial and transregional exchanges, was emblematic of the new type of empire that became a prevailing model for societal organization in the nineteenth century: the nation-state with imperial extensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the period of decolonization and the Cold War, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and US development agencies promoted free trade zones to developing countries. However, other zones emerged prior to and apart from these policy models, some of which, including India’s early zones, took on features of this model only by the 1980s. To make sense of zones within and beyond a UNIDO model, this article understands them through their connection to the rise of nation-state territoriality around the world. The zone is thereby a spatial strategy used in processes of state (re)territorialization to rearticulate state spatiality under the global condition. This article explores such a perspective by situating the history of India’s early free trade zones comparatively. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Comparativ: Leipziger Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte und Vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung is the property of Leipziger Universitaetsverlag GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Comparativ: Leipziger Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte und Vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung is the property of Leipziger Universitaetsverlag GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)