Rubber has been a key commodity for industrial societies since the nineteenth century. Yet, studies of the impact of the production of this good on various regions around the world have mostly been narrowly focused on the industry and its workers. My forthcoming book, Rubber and the Making of Vietnam, adopts a broader lens, […]

"The Ottoman Refugee and Euro-American Colonial Terror: A Global Story" Although the majority of Ottoman refugees in the 1878-1912 period remained internally displaced, significant numbers found their way to new continents, themselves in the throes of colonialist expansion. These pioneers’ stories require looking into the larger context of modern exploitation economies under which these Ottomans […]

  At the end of the eighteenth century, a fantastic global plot was conjured up by a network of invested individuals that eventually reached the highest levels of the British state and the Admiralty. The plan: to transplant South Pacific breadfruit to the Caribbean Islands to feed the slaves of empire. Slaves grew sugar that […]

  Colonization is not a one-time land grab, but rather an ongoing process of claiming space. Batavia, as the Dutch urban port city on Java in the seventeenth century was known, provides an opportunity to explore the role of gender in this unfolding process. There, the appropriation of local and regional terraqueous space relied on […]

  In the variegated landscape of the Filipino paranormal, one phenomenon garnered worldwide attention in the last quarter of the twentieth century: psychic surgery. A form of spiritual healing in which the practitioner, or espiritista, usually male, operates on the body of the patient without anaesthesia and using only his hands, psychic surgery achieved particular […]