Living on the Edge

In this episode, Lisa Hellman (Bonn University) is interviewed by Edmond Smith about her research, exploring the border-making in the semi-nomadic Dzungar realm in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The Dzungar empire stretched from modern-day Siberia to modern-day Xinjiang, and challenged the Russian and the Qing empire alike, and a focus on their border making sparked a discussion about the methods and future of global history.

In this episode, Lisa Hellman interviews Edmond Smith (the University of Manchester) about border-making on the West coast of Africa. In the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries the Akan region was engaged in a profitable global gold trade via carefully regulated borderlands. In the north, market towns acted as hubs for the trans-Saharan gold trade while, to the south, trade with Europeans was restricted to trading posts on the Atlantic coast. In both cases, the gold trade was encouraged while outsiders – whether Wangara in the north or Portuguese in the south – were regulated in terms of their access to the gold-producing hinterland.

In this episode, Lisa Hellman interviews Barend Noordam (Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona) about his research about border-making as a cause and an effect of exchanges of military technology between the Ottoman and Ming empires during the 16th and 17th centuries.

His research is part of the project "Aftermath of the East Asian War of 1592–1598", which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 758347).

Lisa Hellman interviews Sari Nauman about her research, exploring border-making in the early modern Swedish empire, which included Finland. Her focus is the regulation and treatment of refugees, and she connects these to issues of security, and processes of securitization.