Presented By: Center for Southeast Asian Studies
Friday Lecture Series | Shifting Archipelago – Land Reclamation in Straits Settlements and British Borneo
Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Assistant Professor of history, Yale University
Attend in person or via Zoom: https://myumi.ch/7Pq8d
The islands in the Indo-Malay archipelago are constantly getting closer to one another due to land reclamation which began in earnest under colonial rule. Northern Borneo, and the British Straits Settlements (Penang, Melaka and Singapore) were reclaimed extensively but not in the same way due to different political and labor configurations. British, Japanese and other European private enterprise financed the bulk of land reclamation in the former while the colonial government paid for it in the latter entirely. Reclaimed land expanded Singapore’s harbor and port facilities. Increase in rubber exports from the 1920s onwards prompted the British to finance land reclamation in Southeast Asia.
Nurfadzilah Yahaya is an Assistant Professor of History at Yale University. She received her BA (2003) and MA (2006) from the National University of Singapore, and her PhD (2012) in History from Princeton University. Before coming to Yale, she taught at the National University of Singapore. From 2012 to 2015, she was the Mark Steinberg Weil Early Career Fellow in Islamic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Nurfadzilah Yahaya specializes in history of Southeast Asia, Indian Ocean history, legal history, history of infrastructure, and environmental history. Her first book, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020; paperback 2022) demonstrates how colonial subjects entrenched European colonial legalities in British and Dutch territories in Southeast Asia by playing several jurisdictions against one another from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Drawing on archival sources in Malay, French, Arabic, Dutch and English, she reconstructs family, religious, bureaucratic, and commercial legal orders across the Indian Ocean.
Yahaya’s current book project ‘Overflow: History of Land Reclamation in the British Empire in the Twentieth Century’ lies at the intersection of environmental history, urban history, science and technology studies, legal history, and history of infrastructure.
If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us at cseas@umich.edu. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.
The islands in the Indo-Malay archipelago are constantly getting closer to one another due to land reclamation which began in earnest under colonial rule. Northern Borneo, and the British Straits Settlements (Penang, Melaka and Singapore) were reclaimed extensively but not in the same way due to different political and labor configurations. British, Japanese and other European private enterprise financed the bulk of land reclamation in the former while the colonial government paid for it in the latter entirely. Reclaimed land expanded Singapore’s harbor and port facilities. Increase in rubber exports from the 1920s onwards prompted the British to finance land reclamation in Southeast Asia.
Nurfadzilah Yahaya is an Assistant Professor of History at Yale University. She received her BA (2003) and MA (2006) from the National University of Singapore, and her PhD (2012) in History from Princeton University. Before coming to Yale, she taught at the National University of Singapore. From 2012 to 2015, she was the Mark Steinberg Weil Early Career Fellow in Islamic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Nurfadzilah Yahaya specializes in history of Southeast Asia, Indian Ocean history, legal history, history of infrastructure, and environmental history. Her first book, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020; paperback 2022) demonstrates how colonial subjects entrenched European colonial legalities in British and Dutch territories in Southeast Asia by playing several jurisdictions against one another from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Drawing on archival sources in Malay, French, Arabic, Dutch and English, she reconstructs family, religious, bureaucratic, and commercial legal orders across the Indian Ocean.
Yahaya’s current book project ‘Overflow: History of Land Reclamation in the British Empire in the Twentieth Century’ lies at the intersection of environmental history, urban history, science and technology studies, legal history, and history of infrastructure.
If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us at cseas@umich.edu. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.
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