Portals of Globalization: Repositioning Mumbai’s Ports and Zones, 1833-2014

Abstract

While ports are traditionally considered national infrastructure sites that connect states to global markets, special economic zones and past free ports are portrayed as threats to national sovereignty. This book calls these narratives into question as it explores the history of planning Mumbai’s ports and free zones during periods of global and regional transition from the British Raj, to national independence, to economic liberalization. The book opens with a study of an unsuccessful plan hatched by merchants in 1833 to make Bombay a free port to deal with an emerging British India and the advent of free trade. The book ends with how India’s current special economic zones and emphasis on port expansion are part of broader goals to reposition India in transregional Asian trade, to connect Mumbai with northern India, and to enact local plans for a global city that threaten the very port that first connected Mumbai to the world. To understand the functionality of these port and zone projects beyond typical policy prescriptions, this book proposes portals of globalization as a spatial format that fosters processes of reterritorialization.

Biographical Note

Dr. Megan Maruschke (SFB 1199, Leipzig University, Germany)
Originally from the US, Megan Maruschke came to Leipzig in 2010 to join the Erasmus Mundus MA Programme “Global Studies – A European Perspective”. She also studied in Italy and Poland. In 2012, she started her PhD research at Leipzig within the Research Training Group (GK 1261): “Critical Junctures of Globalization”. She wrote her dissertation on the history of free port and free trade zone practices since the mid-nineteenth century in Mumbai, India. Her current research deals with the way in which the French Revolution challenged concepts of space in the Americas.

Image source: De Gruyter, Link (23 April 2019)