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Crossing the Roof of the World
A one-day conference on people and geopolitics in Trans-Himalayan trade presented by the UCLA Central Asia Initiative
Friday, February 19, 2010
10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
UCLA Faculty Center
Los Angeles, CA 90095
This conference focuses on the political, economic, and social significance of trans-Himalayan trading systems and the role trade has played in linking different ecological zones and societies within Central Asia and extending outward to South, Southeast, and East Asia. Traditionally this trade was based on caravans using pack animals and required traversing great distances and inhospitable terrain, including some of the world’s highest mountain passes. While the long-distance trade of luxury items such as silk may be better known, Central Asia also was crossed by subsidiary networks of shorter distances that linked nomadic pastoralists to settled farming communities and provided a means to supplement locally specialized productive systems. Traders transported both humble domestic necessities and goods of great value; these items included tea, wool, salt, grain, fruit, medicinal plants, building stone, as well as precious metals, gems, artworks, horses, and other livestock. By providing access to essential commodities and high-value goods, trans-Himalayan trade supported larger population aggregations than otherwise could exist in harsh high altitude and arid climates and provided the foundation for merchant towns along the major routes.
The conference papers will discuss both short- and long-distance trade at far-flung nodes of these trading networks, ranging from western China to Afghanistan and India, and across time, from antiquity to the present. On the one hand, they will consider key geographical, historical, and political factors that alternatively hindered or facilitated regional linkages-including the impacts of colonialism, nation-state formation, and modernization on trade. On the other hand, they will examine these processes and events from the perspectives of the communities involved and show how the need to compensate for local resource deficiencies and the need to stabilize political relationships led seemingly remote, geographically isolated, and culturally closed societies to engage with the outside world. The papers will illuminate the impact of trade on local cultures and on individuals in these interconnected communities, demonstrating how trade involves not only the exchange of material goods, but also the interchange of people and ideas.
With presentations by:
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, James Madison University
Arash Khazeni, Claremont McKenna College
Nancy Levine, UCLA
Yudru Tsomu, Lawrence University
Wim van Spengen, University of Amsterdam
Cost: free
Special Instructions
rsvp to eleicester@international.ucla.edu
For more information please contact
Nick Menzies
Tel: 310-825-0007
nmenzies@international.ucla.edu
Sponsor(s): Asia Institute, Central Asia Initiative
Asia Institute's 2009 Public Lecture Series Steeped in History: The Art of Tea is held in conjunction with the UCLA Fowler exhibition also titled, Steeped in History
View events from this series
Tea and Chinese Cultural Aesthetics
Podcast of public lecture by Pei-kai Cheng, Chinese Civilisation Centre, City University of Hong Kong
From Elephants to Tea: The Nilgris Under Colonial Rule
Podcast of public lecture by Sanjay Subrahmanyam at the Fowler Museum at UCLA as part of the Steeped in History: The Art of Tea exhibit.
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