The horrors suffered by Rohingyas in Myanmar today – which now appear ever more frequently and graphically in the news — represent one brutal extremity of a kind of victimization that haunts countless people whose only crime is living in old spaces of human mobility that modern empires carved into national territories. Methodological nationalism justifies their precarity with histories that provide charters for national belonging, tying citizens firmly to specific places inside national borders. In a world covered by nations, human rights depend on that belonging. Old spaces of mobility can thus become perilous homelands where nations produce minorities as aliens eligible for marginalization, exclusion, and expulsion. Histories of mobile social space may implicitly disenfranchise their residents, but we need those histories to escape methodological nationalism and explore interactions of mobility and territoriality that generate globalization, at many levels of scale. All these post-colonial predicaments challenge any history of the Rohingya crisis, which I approach here through local histories of Global Asia around the Bay of Bengal.
The “Carol Breckenridge Memorial Lecture Series in South Asian History” is an annual lecture by a distinguished scholar in the field of South Asian history and society, broadly defined. It was established with the generous support of Professor Arjun Appadurai, the former Provost of The New School. The lecture series has featured diverse vantage points on South Asian history and different generations of scholars, including Sir Christopher Bayly, Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Faisal Devji, and Ritu Birla.

David Ludden is Professor and Chair in the Department of History at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania, in 1978, and served on the Penn faculty from 1981 until 2007, when he came to NYU. He has directed South Asia programs at Penn, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Senior Scholars program (CIES), and NYU. He served as President of the Association for Asian Studies in 2002-3. His research focuses on very long-term histories of globalization in Asia, particularly as they concern trajectories of capitalist economic development, spatial inequity, natural environments, and changing material conditions in everyday life.

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