This book explores China's ambition to build itself into a maritime power. Despite having a continental coastline of 18,000 kilometers and territorial waters that cover an area one-third the size of its land mass, China has traditionally been considered a continental power. However, Beijing is currently trying to change this historical situation through two national strategies. This book will use the world-island and sea-power theories to explore the development of China’s maritime power from historical and geopolitical perspectives. Using fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and comprehensive data collection, this book will present a series of compelling examples and vivid stories to help readers understand China’s maritime strategies, with interest for China scholars, historians and economists alike.

This book, originally published in 1983, demonstrates the importance of seaports in the growth of less-developed countries. The author focuses on the character of port activity within the context of transport systems and regional economic planning. General principles of port development are illustrated by detailed reference to one Third World port group, that of the Indian Ocean coasts of Kenya and Tanzania. The objective is not merely to illustrate the character of one specific group of ports, but to demonstrate methods of analysis and to underline the crucial role of ports in the development process.

Colonial architecture and urbanism carved its way through space: ordering and classifying the built environment, while projecting the authority of European powers across Africa in the name of science and progress. The built urban fabric left by colonial powers attests to its lingering impacts in shaping the present and the future trajectory of postcolonial cities in Africa. Colonial Architecture and Urbanism explores the intersection between architecture and urbanism as discursive cultural projects in Africa. Like other colonial institutions such as the courts, police, prisons, and schools, that were crucial in establishing and maintaining political domination, colonial architecture and urbanism played s pivotal role in shaping the spatial and social structures of African cities during the 19th and 20th centuries. Indeed, it is the cultural destination of colonial architecture and urbanism and the connection between them and colonialism that the volume seeks to critically address. The contributions drawn from different interdisciplinary fields map the historical processes of colonial architecture and urbanism and bring into sharp focus the dynamic conditions in which colonial states, officials, architects, planners, medical doctors and missionaries mutually constructed a hierarchical and exclusionary built environment that served the wider colonial project in Africa.

This book takes a long-run view of the global maritime trade of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia from 1700 to American Independence in 1776. Land argues that the three cities developed large, global networks of maritime commerce and exchange that created tension between merchants and the British Empire which sought to enforce mercantilist policies to constrain American trade to within the British Empire. Colonial merchants created and then expanded their mercantile networks well beyond the confines of the British Empire. This trans-imperial trade (often considered smuggling by British authorities) formed the roots of what became known as the American Revolution.

Urban history is a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field of research. The rate of urban growth in the twentieth century has also stimulated interest in the city as an object of socio-historical inquiry. Some historical studies on individual Indian cities like Bombay, Calcutta, Cawnpore, Delhi, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Surat and Madras have primarily explored the growth of urban centres by tracing their histories under colonial rule. This study offers a macro picture of the urban process under British administration, giving an understanding of how colonial capitalism shaped and imposed urban patterns in India. It contextualizes the urbanization of India in the world capitalist system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, explaining the multifaceted historical conditions in 1857, just before the imposition of direct Crown rule. Sahoo examines the socio-economic developments and demographic changes in India under British rule and analyzes the impact of the world capitalist economy, the pattern of urbanization under British rule, and the contribution of railways to urbanization. This volume is a profile of India’s primate cities, identifying the core, the periphery and the underdeveloped hinterlands.

Ouidah, an indigenous African town in the modern Republic of Benin, was the principal pre-colonial commercial centre of its region, and the second most important town of the Dahomey kingdom. It served as a major outlet for the export of slaves for the trans- Atlantic trade. Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries Ouidah was the most important embarkation point for slaves in the region of West Africa known to outsiders as the 'Slave Coast'. Exporting over a million slaves, it was second only to Luanda in Angola for the embarkation of slaves in the whole of Africa. The author's central concerns are the organization of the African end of the slave trade, and the impact participation in the trade had on the historical development of the African societies involved. It shifts the focus from the viewpoint of the Dahomian monarchy, represented in previous studies, to the coast. Here is a well documented case study of pre-colonial urbanism, of the evolution of a merchant community, and in particular the growth of a group of private traders whose relations with the Dahomian monarchy grew increasingly problematic over time. North America: Ohio U Press

Compares twentieth-century literature from a network of British colonial cities, tracing a new, peripheral history of urban modernism.

A bold new account of European imperialism told through the history of water In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world’s most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today. Spanning the major European empires of the period, Corey Ross describes how new ideas, technologies, and institutions transformed human engagements with water and how the natural world was reshaped in the process. Water was a realm of imperial power whose control and distribution were closely bound up with colonial hierarchies and inequalities—but this vital natural resource could never be fully tamed. Ross vividly portrays the efforts of officials, engineers, fisherfolk, and farmers to exploit water, and highlights its crucial role in the making and unmaking of the colonial order. Revealing how the legacies of empire have persisted long after colonialism ebbed away, Liquid Empire provides needed historical perspective on the crises engulfing the world’s waters, particularly in the Global South, where billions of people are faced with mounting water shortages, rising flood risks, and the relentless depletion of sea life.