WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

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.

Reena Goldthree is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and is also associated faculty in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Program in Latin American Studies. She is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean, with particular interests in the history of social movements, labor and migration, and Caribbean feminism. At Princeton, she teaches courses that examine Caribbean, Latin American, and Afro-Latino/x histories from the colonial period to the present. She earned her B.A. in History-Sociology (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Columbia University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Duke University.

Professor Goldthree is the author of Democracy’s Foot Soldiers: World War I and the Politics of Empire in the Greater Caribbean (Princeton University Press, 2025). Drawing on archival sources from the Caribbean, England, and United States, the book reveals how the crisis of World War I transformed Afro-Caribbeans’ understanding of, and engagements with, the British Empire. Her work has also appeared in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, The American Historian, and Radical Teacher. She is the co-editor of a special issue of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies on gender and anti-colonialism in the interwar Caribbean (December 2018). She has also published peer-reviewed essays in New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 2018), Caribbean Military Encounters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Teaching American Studies (University of Kansas Press, 2021), and Global Circuits of Blackness: Interrogating the African Diasporas (University of Illinois Press, 2010). Her research has been supported by the American Historical Association, Coordinating Council for Women in History, Ford Foundation, Institute for Citizens & Scholars, Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Fulbright.

Lecturer | Department of History
Areas of Expertise: Transnational and Cross-cultural Communication between China and Southeast Asia

Having been born and raised in Cape Town (South Africa), I was influenced by its histories of anti-apartheid struggle and especially its connections to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans that developed with greater intensity from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The intertwined pasts of Indian Ocean areas and regions in particular stimulated the development of my intellectual interests as an academic, resulting in my training as a world and global historian of the connections across this oceanic space between Africa and South Asia. In particular, I research and write about the intersecting histories of western India and southeastern Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and about how these histories were mediated by particular social and commercial networks of South Asian merchant groups. Central to my research interests have been identifying how local, self-sustaining capitalists structured exchange fuelled by reciprocal consumer demand across the western reaches of the ocean at a time, from the 1750s, of growing and competing imperial interests for control over the global commerce of the Indian Ocean.

My first book, Ocean of Trade thus examined the multiple dynamics of Vāniyās, South Asian merchants with network headquarters in Diu and Daman in Gujarat in western India, in connecting local and regional commercial systems in South Asia, and East and Southeast Africa with rapidly intensifying global systems of material, social and cultural exchange from the mid-eighteenth to the first half of the nineteenth centuries. The book argued that the entanglements of peoples in these two regions deepened during these years and was mediated in critical ways by Vāniyās as they reoriented and consolidated new commercial frontiers along the ocean’s southwest littoral and interior.

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