Bücher der Reihe Dialectics of the Global

While ports are traditionally considered national infrastructure sites that connect states to global markets, special economic zones and past free ports are portrayed as threats to national sovereignty. This book calls these narratives into question as it explores the history of planning Mumbai¿s ports and free zones during periods of global and regional transition from the British Raj, to national independence, to economic liberalization. The book opens with a study of an unsuccessful plan hatched by merchants in 1833 to make Bombay a free port to deal with an emerging British India and the advent of free trade. The book ends with how Indiäs current special economic zones and emphasis on port expansion are part of broader goals to reposition India in transregional Asian trade, to connect Mumbai with northern India, and to enact local plans for a global city that threaten the very port that first connected Mumbai to the world. To understand the functionality of these port and zone projects beyond typical policy prescriptions, this book proposes portals of globalization as a spatial format that fosters processes of reterritorialization.

This volume investigates transnational religious spaces in a comparative manner by juxtaposing East Asian and African examples. It highlights flows of ideas, actors, and organizations out of, into, or within a given continental space - flows patterned mainly by colonialism or migration. The book examines cases where the transnational space in question encompasses both East Asia and Africa.

This book suggests that shifting the focus towards spatialization processes and spatial imaginations in 19th century cultural discourse provides unprecedented insights into the placemaking dynamics of the American West. Introducing spatial literacy into the humanities highlights the epistemic fracture points of traditional analytical categories, therefore emphasizing the utility of spatialization processes in literary and cultural studies.