Content summary: Indian Ocean has always been one of the focus of global environmental history research. Focusing on Bay of Bengal , we link South Asia and Southeast Asia to explore the relationship between the climate of "monsoon Asia" and immigration activities, and on this basis, further elaborate on the research results in the intersection of immigration history and environmental history disciplines, which will help us understand the current environmental challenges and propose directions for future research.
Author: Sunil Amrith is currently a professor in the Department of History at Yale University. In 2006, he received a Ph.D. in History from the University of Cambridge. From 2015 to 2020, he served as professor of history and director of the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University. Since 2020, he has served as professor of the Department of History at Yale University and chairman of the South Asian Studies Association (SASC). In 2017, he won the highest award in the American cultural world - MacArthur Award . Representative works include: Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (2013, Chinese translation "Crossing the Bay of Bengal: Nature's Fury and the Wealth of Immigration", Zhejiang People's Publishing House in July 2020); Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (2011); Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930-1965 (2006).
Xu Lu, Chen Jiazi, Li Xinghao Translation
Source:
Source: "International Journal of Social Sciences" (Chinese Edition) 2022 Issue 2 P82—P86
Editor: Liang Guangyan Zhang Nanqian
Introduction
Indian Ocean has always been one of the focus of global environmental history research. Focusing on the Bay of Bengal region, this article links South and Southeast Asia regions to explore the relationship between the "monsoon Asia" climate and immigration activities. On this basis, we will further elaborate on the research results in the intersection of immigration history and environmental history disciplines, and propose directions for future research. This article describes it related to my books "Crossing the Bay of Bengal: Nature's Rage and the Wealth of Immigration" and "Unruly Water: Immigration, Environment and the Birth of Modern and Modern South Asia". The contents of these two books are closely linked, both viewing the Indian Ocean as an interactive network between people and the environment, and on this basis combines environmental history and immigration history.
Re-understand "monsoon Asia"
I myself am from a researcher on immigration history. About 15 years ago, I started a new study focusing on immigration from India to Southeast Asia. At that time, the research on immigration history was booming, and new problems, methods and historical materials emerged. A essay by Adam McKeown in particular is deeply inspired. In 2004, he published an article in the Journal of World History entitled Global Immigration: 1846-1940. This article marks a real breakthrough in the study of immigration history and challenges some hypotheses in Western academic circles about Asian immigration, such as the Asian society is a static farming society, Asian immigration is not a free immigration, Asian immigration is not a settled immigrant, etc. The most important thing about this article is to show the three major immigration waves that appeared around the world from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, pointing out that in addition to the transatlantic immigration waves that scholars are familiar with, there are two other immigration waves during the same period, one is the immigration of Chinese and Indians to Southeast Asia, and the other is the immigration of Northeast Asia , the so-called "breaking into the Kanto". Past research has focused more on transatlantic immigration, while scholars studying South Asian history have rarely paid attention to immigration issues, and they have focused more on issues such as nationalism, popular politics and rural communities. In general, this article and other research 15 years ago made me realize that research on immigration history requires a global perspective, and that Asia will replace Europe and the Indian Ocean will replace the Atlantic Ocean, becoming the focus of research. At that time, I was not interested in environmental history, but just tried to avoid my immigration research falling into " environmental determinism ". This is actually an overcorrection and ignores the impact of environmental factors on immigration.Not only me, many immigration history books at that time did not specifically list entries related to climate, natural disasters, or environment. Although many scholars studying immigration use natural metaphors such as “immigration torrents” and “immigration waves,” they do not include environmental factors into the narrative of immigration history.
However, as the research deepened, I began to notice the importance of environmental factors in the study of immigration history. From 2007 to 2008, I began to work on oral history and interviewed workers who immigrated to Southeast Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. To my surprise, the stories they told were all about plantations, about trees, about landscapes, but not about navigation. One of the old men I interviewed was 80 years old at the time and spent his whole life in the plantation. When he told his immigration experience, he was particularly concerned about the trees in the plantation, telling me when the tree was planted, or recalling what kind of story the tree had. The academic tradition of immigration history has made me often ignore environmental factors when discussing immigration, but the stories I hear here are closely related to land or landscape. This reminds me of some concepts I had previously expressed doubts, such as "monsoon Asia". Colonial geographers and French anthropologists working in Vietnam used this concept. "Monsoon Asia" means that many Asian countries share the climate element of monsoon, forming some common cultural characteristics, such as planting rice. "Monsoon Asia" itself does not involve immigration, but I realize there is a connection between the two. In the early 20th century, the entire region that stretched from South China through Southeast Asia to southern India was being transformed by the movement of immigrants. For example, those who travel to Malaysia today will see shrines in the plantation, built by immigrant workers who believe in Hindu . Apparently, immigrants would only build shrines in certain places that gave them spiritual power. This is not a random decision. Maybe a tree will remind them of their hometown, or maybe a tree is very similar to what they are familiar with. Anthropologists believe that this is a universal, conscious decision, and immigration gives this landscape unique meaning.
Based on this, my research questions turned to the "monsoon Asia" from the perspective of immigration. From the perspective of immigration, "monsoon Asia" is not a static space determined by the climate, but a dynamic space full of exploitation and suffering. This is why the environmental dimension is becoming more and more important to my academic research. Another important issue related to the study of "monsoon Asia" in the Indian Ocean environmental history
and "monsoon Asia" is that Asian countries have tried to get rid of their dependence on nature since the mid-20th century. Former Indian Prime Minister Nehru believes that modern science and technology have largely curbed the unpredictable nature, so environmental factors such as "monsoon Asia" no longer play a decisive role now. However, things are not that simple, and the large dams built in India in the past have had serious consequences. This idea of conquering nature was not just a personal creation of Nehru, but a common idea in Asian countries at that time. After the 1940s, the number of immigrants from India and China to Southeast Asia dropped sharply. In the 1920s and 1930s, families in southern India might have traveled to Malaysia, and by the 1950s, they were more likely to migrate in India by rail rather than searching for jobs overseas. Another link between the above-mentioned Indian dam and immigration is that the first Indian workers to build dams were Indian refugees who fled back from Myanmar . During the of World War II, Japan invaded British Myanmar, and some Indian refugees returned from Myanmar, many of them hiked back to India. After World War II, political changes made these immigrants find that they could never return to Myanmar, so they engaged in engineering construction in India to serve the national goal of conquering nature. It took me a long time to realize that this is the connection between immigration history and environmental history, which is also the true purpose of my book Crossing the Bay of Bengal: Nature’s Fury and the Wealth of Immigration” and “Unruly Water: Immigration, the Environment and the Birth of Modern and Modern South Asia.
On the other hand, this time node in the mid-20th century also has different significances for immigration history and environmental history.For immigration history in many regions, especially in the Indian Ocean, the mid-20th century was almost an end, and the large-scale trans-ocean population mobility in India and Southeast Asia is heading for an end. For environmental history, the 1940s and 1950s were regarded as the starting point of "Acceleration". By 1950, human influence on the earth's ecology began to rise sharply, and these effects mainly came from developed industrial countries in Europe and the United States. Existing environmental history research often ignores the decolonization process and only explains why the great acceleration occurs at this point in time from the macro global environmental changes. Until recently, we have begun to consider the specific position of the newly independent Asian countries in the "big acceleration". Representative research is the article "Asian Neocenter: The Development of Electricity and Fossil Energy" published by Elizabeth Chatterjee in the Journal of Asian Studies. She believes that the "big acceleration" of emerging Asian countries such as India and China occurred in the late 20th century, not in the 1950s. The driving force of this "delayed acceleration" is not capitalism , but the state. She pointed out that India's energy consumption is growing because more and more people believe that using electricity is a right and that a free country should protect its citizens' electricity use. In fact, the Indian government failed, and in India, more than 100 million people still lack electricity today. Chatgi's research shows that 1950 was not the starting point for "great acceleration" for China, India and Southeast Asia, and similar transformation happened even later, because these emerging nation-states were eager to get rid of the legacy of the colonial era. In short, we need to consider the relationship between decolonization and "great acceleration".
Urbanization has played a key role in the "great acceleration". We need to carefully think about the relationship between immigration, urbanization and environmental transformation. The adjustment of nation-state boundaries in the mid-20th century led to a large number of refugees flowing. In 1947, the partition of India and Pakistan led to a large number of refugees pouring into cities such as Delhi , Mumbai and Karachi . Some studies have speculated that the 20 cities with the largest number of people affected by the climate in the 1970s (the figure below), 9 of which were in Asia, mostly in the Indian Ocean and China's coastal areas, some were once colonial port cities, or entry and crossing points of immigration waves. Urbanization not only requires a macro description, but also needs to be understood from a cultural perspective. Indian writer Amitav Ghosh wrote in his nonfiction work "Great Disorder: Climate Change and Incredible" that before the 17th and 18th centuries, most ports in Asia and Europe were at a certain distance from the ocean. But since the 18th century, Europeans have directly established cities such as Mumbai and Madras (renamed " Chennai " in 1996) on the coast. From the colonists' worldview, near-shore means power and security, symbolizing control and conquest. Historically, these coastal cities have shaped the self-awareness of postcolonial countries. Take Mumbai as an example. Mumbai has been India's "dream city" in the 1940s and 1950s, because many people's dream of overseas immigration was shattered and they turned their ambitions to Mumbai. This was reflected in Indian movies and poetry at that time. Arun Kolatkar is one of Mumbai's greatest poets. Since the 1970s, environmental elements have begun to become more and more prominent in his poems. He uses expressions such as "sinking" to remind people that Mumbai has potential environmental risks.
Thoughts on "climate immigration"
What can historians do in today's news and policy debates about "climate immigration"? I would like to illustrate this as a report published in " New York Times " in July 2020, titled "Climate Migration". I am not completely denying this article, but it is representatively a reflection of historians’ lost voice in the current climate change and immigration issues. The article is based on a statistical model that attempts to assess the extent to which climate change and other environmental crises will drive immigration in Latin America and concludes that climate change will be a huge driving force for immigration in the 21st century.The passage about South Asia in the article states that South Asia has nearly one-quarter of the world's population and will soon become the most food insecurity in the world, so many people are fleeing to Persian Gulf , otherwise the heat wave in South Asia will cause a catastrophe by the end of the 21st century.
From the perspective of historians, this view has many problems. First of all, immigration from India to Persian Gulf is not new, which has appeared in the 1970s and is also a period when Indian Ocean immigration began to grow again after 20 years of lows. Immigration from Kerala to the Persian Gulf region from the southwest India, forming a very regular and huge wave of immigration. The use of the word "fled" in the article is very misleading. These people are not fleeing their homes, they are just normal immigrant workers. Secondly, climate change as the main reason for immigration is also untenable. Immigration has appeared long before people feel the impact of climate change. There are many other reasons why people choose to immigrate, such as inequality in opportunities across India. Of course, Kerala is indeed troubled by floods, and it is also the area that India has the most affected by climate change, but therefore it is biased to describe all immigration as "climate immigrants". Finally, the article believes that most Indian immigrants have "resettling" in the Gulf region, which is also wrong. The Gulf countries have the strictest citizenship restrictions in the world, so most workers have to return to India after a few years.
What I want to express is that my understanding of history will warn us that some major conclusions are complex and need to be treated with caution. The article "Five Dimensions of Reduction in Climate Science" co-written by geographers Jonathan Rigg and Lisa Reyes Mason notes that today's decision makers have oversimplified ideas that climate change is the cause of all problems. This is actually ignorance of history. The article mentioned above relies heavily on statistical models, but the author also admits that it is "hard to model individual ideas." Research on immigration history has made me realize that mobility and fixedness are interconnected. As climate change affects South Asia more and more severely, people may also be trapped in place and cannot migrate. Joya Chatterji's book Trapped in Bangladesh: Stagnation in the Immigration Era expresses this view. Reading this book will make many people realize that they are trapped at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic is raging. The problem is that people trapped are not random, and those who cannot access the immigration network and move in it may be because they are sick, disabled, or need to bear certain responsibilities. So I think that this is not always the case from the perspective of immigration and environmental history when we imagine the whole world thinking about how to deal with climate change.
In the process of conducting an examination of rural and fisheries along the coast of India, I discovered how history has profoundly influenced people's choices in another way. There are a lot of livelihood options there, and climate change is just one of the factors that affect people’s choices. When I asked locals what they had to live on, they suddenly started talking about immigration, which made me realize that, except for the poorest families, almost every family has at least one family member overseas, most of them in Southeast Asia and others in the Gulf. These families have long-term connections with Southeast Asia or West Asia, and the existence of a network of relationships is the prerequisite for immigration. On the contrary, poor families have no connections, at most they go to Chennai, the largest city in southern India. It can be seen that the relationship between ancient immigration patterns and environmental changes is very important.
clarifies the relationship between immigration history and environmental history, which helps us understand the current environmental challenges. It should be noted that climate change does not necessarily lead to people leaving their hometowns. We need to look at immigration from a historical perspective. Sometimes immigration is not even a viable option. If we do not understand the history of India in the 20th century, pay attention to the political debate on citizenship, and know who can immigrate, we cannot truly understand immigration in the Indian Ocean. This is the humanistic value of immigration history and environmental history.
