2026-06-27 –, Room 106 (Seats 105)
How did mobile workers shape the modern world order? This plenary asks historians to explain the intertwined histories of labor migration and diaspora across Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean, highlighting how workers moved through imperial systems, commercial circuits, and diasporic communities and how labor migration stimulated new social formations, political movements, and transregional connections that reshaped the modern world.
Bin Yang, professor in the Department of Chinese and History, at City University of Hong Kong, is the author of Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan—Second Century BCE—Twentieth Century CE (Columbia University Press, 2008), Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money: A Global History (Routledge, 2019), and Discovered but Forgotten: the Maldives in Chinese History, c. 1100—1620 (Columbia University Press, 2024), in addition to more than ten Chinese monographs. He has published widely in prestigious journals such as American Historical Review, the China Quarterly, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Modern Asian Studies, Journals of World History and Journal of Women’s History. And he is one of the founding members of the Asian Association of World Historians, which, since 2008, has worked to promote world history teaching, research, and graduate training in and for Asia.
Lecturer | Department of History
Areas of Expertise: Transnational and Cross-cultural Communication between China and Southeast Asia
Research Areas
South Asian History, Southeast Asian History, Global History
1) Research on the History of Intra-Asian Trade
My research focuses on the history of intra-regional trade in maritime Asia from the sixteenth century onwards, spanning from East Asia to West Asia and East Africa. While this region has had a thriving maritime trade since ancient times, the globalization that began at the end of the fifteenth century led to further development of intra-regional trade. My primary research goal is to uncover the realities of this trade by utilizing Western-language sources such as the records of the Dutch East India Company, as well as local sources, including Japanese material. In addition, I work on the history of intercultural coexistence in port cities across maritime Asia that served as transit hubs for international trade.
2) Global History Research
I have a keen interest in historical research methodologies and historical narrative techniques, which extend into the field of global history. My first focus is on the global networks and transformations from the sixteenth century to the present, particularly through the lenses of economic history, environmental history, and cross-cultural history. Second, I am engaged in improving comparative methodologies as a framework for global history. For example, instead of the conventional comparative history approaches commonly seen in Japanese academia, such as comparisons between Japan and the West or Japan and East Asian countries, I aim to introduce novel comparative perspectives and present new historical interpretations.
forthcoming
forthcoming