WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

This panel examines India’s long history of transregional connectivity without open borders, from pre-modern maritime trade to contemporary nationalism. Challenging linear narratives that equate globalization with universal openness, we argue that Indian history reveals alternative models of connection structured by empires, hierarchies, and states. This inquiry extends beyond physical borders to include the "epistemic categories" and "intellectual self-understanding" shaped by colonial pedagogy and institutionalized learning. India thus offers a critical vantage point for rethinking world history in a moment of renewed borders and political closure.
Spanning from the Harappan era to the digital age, the papers analyze interconnection shaped by trust-based systems, surveillance, and state power. Pre-modern trade networks linked South Asia to Africa and Southeast Asia through trust-based systems that remained socially bounded and uneven. Colonial rule intensified global entanglements through the circulation of labor and commodities while simultaneously redefining "knowledge, philosophy, and religion" through a "politics of translation" that framed indigenous traditions within European categories. Moments of crisis, such as global epidemics and the 1947 Partition, demonstrate how connectivity frequently provokes violent border-making and bureaucratic interdiction.
In the postcolonial period, India’s integration into global markets has coincided with hardened political borders, nationalist discourses, and new digital forms of exclusion. Taken together, this panel argues that India’s past complicates frameworks privileging globalization as a coherent or inevitable process. Instead, it highlights historical worlds that were connected but not "globalized" in the modern sense, offering essential conceptual tools for a present characterized by contested globalisms and the return of the border.