Book project in development.
The project Volumetric sovereignty: Power and Hydrological Cycles in the History of Northeast Asia (working title) explores the role of maritime and atmospheric environments in the formation of commercial and political practices in Northeast Asia. Foregrounding sub-state actors navigating global currents in economy, politics, and science since the early modern period, the project revisits the archipelago’s history of infrastructure, risk and resource management. The exploration of spaces beyond the human habitat, including atmospheric, deep sea and subterranean worlds, as well as the extension of political claims to those realms take center stage. Of equal interest are objections to the appropriation and alteration, voiced by actors with divergent interests, that shaped negotiations over air and water pollution, land decline, displacement and the reshuffling of riskscapes. My project helps illumine historically grown dynamics in domestic and international power negotiations in Asia, in different environmental contexts and in a long term perspective. Operating at the intersection of political and climate history, it brings East Asian pasts into the making of the Anthropocene––as points of departure of now-globalized scientific and economic practices.
