The Role of the Seas in Southeast Asia

The seas play a significant role in life on Earth—this is as true today as it has been for millennia.

Eric Tagliacozzo knows this. As a professor of history at Cornell University, he studies Southeast Asia, one of the largest maritime arenas on the planet. He focuses on the movements of people, objects, and ideas throughout the region from the Colonial Age to contemporary times. Indonesia (the largest country in Southeast Asia) is also the world’s largest archipelago, Tagliacozzo explains, comprising some 17,000 islands. Connections forged across the seas here shaped Southeast Asia, but not always in ways that were foreseen, he says.

For example, the early great civilizations of the region built their prosperity on maritime trade, notably the selling of spices, which were readily produced throughout the eastern Indian Ocean and in demand outside the area. As colonization of the region by the British and Dutch increased, the trade arenas initially carved out along the coast by local merchants and local princes were absorbed by state actors as they established new political borders. Local people responded: to skirt the rules, avoid tariffs, and maximize their profits, traders began to smuggle commodities across boundaries—not just spices, but contraband that included opium, counterfeit currency, human beings, and more. The sea played a major part in the smugglers’ success.

“People across history have journeyed in many directions—sometimes simply to explore, other times to find better ways to live,” Tagliacozzo says.

He describes Bukit Cina (China Hill) in Malacca, Malaysia, to illustrate how “people wandered long distances—most often by traveling over the sea.” Bukit Cina is the location of one of the world’s largest Chinese cemeteries outside of China, with 12,000 graves, some of which date to the 15th century. There are accounts that the hillside had been first settled in the mid-1400s by a sultan of Malacca who married a Chinese woman. Historical records show that, by that time, Chinese had traveled to Malaysia for centuries, mainly for purposes of trade. (The distance from the Ming Dynasty capital in Nanjing to Malacca is more than 2,000 nautical miles.)

Unexpected Connections

“Waterways connect societies and geographies,” Tagliacozzo says. “By moving over water from place to place, people share commodities and knowledge. These connections shape local economies, cultures, and politics.”

In one of his research pursuits, Tagliacozzo studied the confluence of maritime travel and religion. He analyzed the significance of people making the Hajj (Muslim pilgrimage) from lands in the Indian Ocean to Mecca, beginning in the 13th century. They first traveled on sailing ships, and later (by the 19th century) on steamships. The pilgrimage aggregated many people from many different societies in the same place. As part of their experience, he explains, these religious wanderers—in some years half of the global total could come from Southeast Asia — prayed together, and they also traded goods such as carpets, brassware, gems, and spices. Their trade helped many pay for their voyages, and also helped begin the formation of important economic links, as well as religious ones, between Southeast Asia and Arabia. One result: Islam spread across Africa and Asia. Today, some 80 percent of Muslims are non-Arabic speakers, who live outside the Middle East.

“By moving over water from place to place, people share commodities and knowledge. These connections shape local economies, cultures, and politics.”

Another, perhaps more surprising result of this religious travel was the spread of cholera, Tagliacozzo says. The mass movement of people on Hajj became one of the main pathways for the disease, which moved from India to the Hejaz in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and then back with pilgrims on the transoceanic steamships to their home countries. The epidemic, which killed catastrophic numbers of people, spurred the European powers who controlled colonies in Southeast Asia to develop sanitary conventions to check the spread of infection.

Nutmeg mace, a spice from Indonesia

Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Maybe unsurprisingly, Tagliacozzo spends a good deal of time reading and discussing historical texts, as well as contemporary writings on Southeast Asia. (Among the Cornell courses he is teaching in 2019–20: The History of Exploration: Land, Sea, and Space—which he co-teaches with Steven Squyres, James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences, who is known for his work as scientific principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover Project. Tagliacozzo also will teach Transnational Local: Southeast Asian History from the Eighteenth Century, and a first-year writing seminar called Global Islam.)

“Because my research shows the connections forged among peoples and cultures, one of the things that it addresses is the need for tolerance and equality.”

What methodologies empower researchers to study people on the move through geographical spaces and time periods such as these? Tagliacozzo’s research interests draw on numerous disciplines in addition to history—anthropology, geography, oceanography, epidemiology, ethnolinguistics, and more. He has helped assemble international networks of scholars, collaborators, and subject-matter experts on the ground in specific regions around the world. They serve as consultants and partners, providing information, varying perspectives, and leads on a wide variety of topics—including, for instance, the names of currency collectors who might be able to provide examples of old counterfeit currencies. When necessary (especially in areas of strife or armed conflict), these contacts also have served as guides who can vouch for him with local communities.

An image from NASA's Visible Earth satellite, showing internal waves in the Banda Sea, Indonesia

“Other times, I wander around and talk with chance acquaintances, such as people on the street, or sailors on the docks and ships,” he says. “I’m pretty okay with getting dirt under my fingernails. I want to understand some of the things they already know, living and working where they do. I’m interested in speaking with all types of people related to my topic, folks who are spread across socio-economic divides and geographical ranges of all sorts.”

“I’ve always been interested in how societies connect, and how people moved,” he says. “I’m fascinated with stories of how people end up where they do.”

Tagliacozzo credits this curiosity to his high school years in New York City, where he studied at the Bronx High School of Science with people whose backgrounds were from all over the planet. Then, as a graduating college senior, he received a Thomas Watson Fellowship in a national competition—he used the grant to travel the Indian Ocean and South China Sea to interview spice traders for a year. From then on, he was sold on seafaring.

“Because my research shows the connections forged among peoples and cultures, one of the things that it addresses is the need for tolerance and equality,” he says. “I’m not a fan of the thinking that is rooted in the concept of ‘the West and the rest’—that is not a useful paradigm for humanity.”

Tagliacozzo explains that his biggest challenge is often one of national boundaries.

“My work, by its very nature, has been transnational,” he says. “My research has moved across many of the borders and boundaries of time and space, just like the subjects I study—whether they are adventurers, spice traders, smugglers, religious pilgrims, or people migrating out of a desire for better lives.”

His purpose, Tagliacozzo says, has often been to humanize the movement of people, to tell the stories of their common humanity. “There’s a kind of sadness to history; it is often melancholic and quiet. But it also can force broad thinking—about others’ lives and about our own.”

by Jeri Wall for Global Cornell

Eric Tagliacozzo (PhD, Yale University) is a professor of history in Cornell University’s College of Arts and Sciences. He is the director of the Comparative Muslim Societies Program, as well as the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, both part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. He also is a co-chair of the Migrations Taskforce.

He is one of two co-editors of the journal Indonesia. His most recent books include Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier: 1865–1915 (Yale University Press, 2005), and The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford University Press, 2013)—and he is currently finishing work on In Asian Waters: Charting Maritime Histories of Asia. He is also the editor or co-editor of 10 other books in print, and he is one of four co-editors of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Global Migration, a huge, sprawling project that brings together many dozens of scholars to rewrite the history of modern migration on a planetary scale.

Immigration Status and Workplace Inequalities

“The study of migrations in the contemporary world is central to my research,” says Shannon Gleeson. She is an interdisciplinary social scientist, in conversation with migration debates across disciplines—ranging from sociology to law and society, Latin American and Latinx studies, and industrial and labor relations.

“I’m interested especially in inequality at the workplace, and the ways that vulnerable workers—including migrants—navigate power at work, as individuals and collectives,” she says. “The current state of inequality, which affords some groups rights while criminalizing others, is rooted in a long history of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. In my work, I seek to understand how these dynamic immigration policies and worker protections came to be, and what are the factors that ensure that they are implemented or disregarded.”

“I’m interested especially in ... the ways that vulnerable workers—including migrants—navigate power at work, as individuals and collectives.”

For Gleeson, the Migrations global grand challenge is innovative in putting the movement of different species, capital, ideology, and forms of power in conversation with each other.

“The success of this initiative takes a delicate balance. The goal is not, for example, to suggest a false equivalency between bird migration and the flow of refugees,” she explains. “Instead, the aim is to put different researchers across the life sciences, humanities, and social sciences in conversation with each other to better understand the systems that spur migration, attempt to regulate it, and to what effect, and to whose benefit.”

“To work, this conversation must include expertise from a broad set of disciplinary approaches, with equal respect and deference to each," Gleeson says. "Direct collaboration need not always necessarily be the goal, but we must talk to each other to understand, for example, the full impact of border militarization here and beyond.”

Gleeson has worked across a range of disciplines in her own research. “The disciplinary spine of my work is sociology and demography,” she says, “but the mix of my colleagues and collaborators has always been interdisciplinary and multi methods. I find utility in being informed by other theoretical traditions and empirical approaches. This helps me understand the storied history of the labor movement with regard to immigrant workers, the lasting effects of decades-long U.S. interventionism that fuel the current exodus of Central American migrants, and the political and demographic forces that drive immigration policymaking at the national, state, and local level in the United States and beyond.”

Gleeson is engaged in various interdisciplinary collaborative projects that touch on these themes.

Studying the Role of Civil Society in Ensuring Immigrant Labor Rights

In her longest-standing collaboration, with Xóchitl Bada, associate professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Gleeson is researching the role of the Mexican Consulate in enforcing the rights of their emigrants abroad.

Through interviews with consular officials, U.S. labor standards enforcement agents, and more than 160 civil society groups across the United States and Mexico, the goal is to see how advocates are working to hold both the U.S. and Mexican governments accountable for the rights of migrant workers. The two sociologists also are attuned to differences across place, and are examining how local context shapes the specific challenges facing the local Mexican migrant population, which priorities enforcement officials adopt, which battles advocates take up, and to what effect.

The goal, Gleeson says, is to “spark conversation among interdisciplinary scholars, practitioners, and advocates — and ultimately shine a light on best practices of consular collaborations and the key role that civil society must play in ensuring immigrant labor rights on both sides of the border.

In their recent edited volume, Accountability across Borders: Migrant Rights in North America (University of Texas Press, 2019), Bada and Gleeson dive into these conversations with an interdisciplinary set of authors across the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

Analyzing DACA Implementation at the Local Level

With support from the National Science Foundation, Gleeson and Els de Graauw, associate professor of political science, Baruch College, City University of New York, are conducting an institutional analysis of the implementation of the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in three metropolitan regions: San Francisco Bay area, Greater Houston area, and New York City Metro area.

Their goal is to better understand how the localities are implementing DACA, and how that policy implementation is shaped by the characteristics of each community.

"We conducted 300+ interviews (some in Spanish) to better understand how place matters for the local implementation of immigration law—a federal prerogative in the United States,” Gleeson says.

Their study engages three main stakeholder groups in each location: elected and appointed government officials, civil society, and individuals who applied for and benefited from the DACA program.

“All of this work was undertaken during a time of changing political climate and immigration regulations,” Gleeson adds. She and de Graauw have completed data collection and are now synthesizing data analysis for publication.  

Examining Impacts on NYC's Migrant Workers

In another project, Gleeson is working with Kati Griffith, associate professor of labor and employment law, Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. With support from the Russell Sage Foundation, they are examining the effects of immigration status — for legal permanent residents, undocumented immigrants, and those with temporary protected status—on migrant workers in the New York City region.

“We are looking at how immigrants think about their rights at work and how immigrant status impacts their ability to make claims on those rights,” says Gleeson. “This project is a way to understand how inequality functions in the current moment. Immigration is a lens that helps me discern the role of the state, both in creating greater equity and in creating greater forms of division and inequality.”

One thing they find, Gleeson explains, is that workers with Temporary Protected Status face a unique set of challenges. “Despite having work authorization and protection from deportation, immigration enforcement at the workplace and the complex TPS bureaucracy make it difficult for them to get and keep a job.”

Considering Precarities Beyond Workplace Experiences

Over the years, Gleeson has come to understand that the study of migration cannot happen in a vacuum from other aspects of peoples’ lives.

She recalls a routine interview 15 years ago in the midst of her dissertation work, which included interviews with migrant back-of-house restaurant workers in California and Texas. She met up with a dishwasher, and the two discussed the man’s workplace experiences — fair wages, overtime pay, safety issues. This was a difficult conversation — because of his undocumented status, the questions were both hard for her to ask him, and hard for him to answer.

In the process of trying to document details about his work, this respondent — a migrant, a worker, a renter, a diabetes patient, a father to his daughter who was playing nearby — revealed a lot more about his life.

“You can’t isolate labor issues from the broader context of life—you can’t analyze just one covariate ...”

“I learned about the multiple forms of precarity he faced,” Gleeson says, listing the details he told her about: the abscess in his leg that made standing all day at his job difficult, his inability to get healthcare for himself or his family, the unbearable Houston summers inside his non-air-conditioned apartment.

“I realized from that interview that you can’t isolate labor issues from the broader context of life,” she says, “that you can’t analyze just one covariate — even though, as scholarly researchers, we try.”

Gleeson says that she often thinks about that man and his daughter now and wonders how their lives have unfolded and how they have navigated the various challenges in their lives.“Immigrant status is like a canary in a coal mine,” she says. “It forces us to think about the other precarities that will affect individual immigrants and immigrants at large.”

"Igualdad" sign at an immigration reform rally

Given that the U.S. workforce is nearly 18 percent foreign-born and five percent undocumented, Gleeson says, the ways in which we think about and understand these issues is critical.

“Like humans, practices of the state and practices of civil society also can cross borders. And how policy is implemented—in punitive or rights-based ways—affects the well-being of individuals on the ground,” she says. “That means we must consider the dynamic between immigrant rights on the books and how that plays out in practice, especially for the most vulnerable groups—migrants, racial minorities, women, and others.

“The people who agree to participate in her research are often struggling with a range of challenges, Gleeson says, “but they are also agentic—executing survival strategies and thriving. ”Throughout her work, Gleeson and her collaborators also have learned a great deal about how to gain access to communities and the best ways to partner with gatekeepers. This requires, she explains, “money, language capacity, cultural brokerage, and time to gain each other’s respect and trust.” But also, she adds, “it requires the humility of knowing that not all communities will want to participate in our research, and that is valid.”

“The Migrations global grand challenge asks us to think in expansive ways.”

Gleeson is optimistic about the potential long-term impact of the research she conducts, but she notes that change takes both action and ongoing reflection.

“What I am hoping is that we can illuminate a series of important questions for broader public debate — within the academy and with students,” she says. However, she cautions linking all of academic inquiry to the policy debate of the day or hour. “The more you tether yourself to the here and now of policy, the more you limit yourself from the long shadow of history and transformative thinking about the future. It is a critical balance, but also the purview and responsibility of academic inquiry.”

For her research to be meaningful, she says, approaches that are interdisciplinary, multiscalar, and multitemporal are crucial.

“The Migrations global grand challenge asks us to think in expansive ways,” Gleeson says. “We need to question and analyze human migration and consider what infringes on peoples' right to stay home, or their rights to make a safe life elsewhere. We need to engage in research and pedagogy that asks what it takes to realize changes on the ground—and who will bear the costs and benefits of these changes.”

by Jeri Wall for Global Cornell

Shannon Gleeson (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is an associate professor of labor relations, law, and history in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. She also is a co-chair of the Migrations Taskforce.

Gleeson's most recent books include Accountability Across Borders: Migrant Rights in North America, with Xóchitl Bada (University of Texas Press, 2019); Citizenship from Below: Precarity, Migration, and Agency, with Marcel Paret (Routledge, 2017); Precarious Claims: The Promise and Failure of Workplace Protections in the United States (University of California Press, 2016). She also has authored numerous journal articles.