Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Matthew Reeder, Department of History, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

From its earliest years, the island of Penang has always been a place of movement and mobilities. The Pearl of the Orient, as it came to be known, was and continues to be a site for the circulation of goods, people, capital, knowledge, and culture. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the island became home to a cosmopolitan population of settlers and sojourners who came from all over the world, bringing with them new connections, new products, new ideas, and new cultures which helped constantly remake the port-city of George Town. This paper sheds light on the under-examined place of Penang in world history during the age of empires, with a particular focus on how the island became entangled within a dizzying array of networks that stretched across Asia and far beyond it. Going beyond the conventional focus on more prominent port-cities like Batavia, Hong Kong, Manila, Shanghai, and Singapore, I demonstrate the importance of reconsidering the place of ‘regional’ entrepôts like Penang which had a far more crucial role in global history than has previously been recognised. The paper focusses on the role of one community in particular, the Peranakan Chinese, and their role in building and expanding their own professional and personal networks as well as the complex ways in which they leveraged and appropriated the city’s connections across the British, Dutch, and Japanese empires. Exploring these intra-, trans-, and extra-imperial networks reveals a richer and more complex history of the island-state not only in relation to how it fit within global processes and events over the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries but how it helped shape these developments as well.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Bernard Z. Keo is Assistant Professor of International History and Politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. A political historian by training, he specialises in the intertwined processes of decolonisation and nation-making in the post-World War II period. His further research interests include the Malayan Emergency, urban life in the port-cities of Southeast Asia, and transnational networks across the Malay World. He also teaches and researches in the digital humanities, having been part of the team that built Virtual Angkor, a digital education platform which was awarded the Roy N. Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History from the American Historical Association in 2018, the Mediaeval Society of America’s Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize in 2021.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this hybrid talk has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.