Logistics makes worlds. What are the stakes of this claim? First, it indicates that logistics is productive. This may seem a truism for, at least in current dominant understandings, logistics is deeply implicated in capitalist production, where it is defined (in handbooks and management manuals) as the art and science of getting the right thing to the right place at the right time. Undoubtedly, the techniques and technologies that undergird logistics as a system of communication and transport have their productive sides because, in the current wave of globalization , the organization of supply chains and production networks has been a central feature: stretching out production across time and space, facilitating a constant movement of goods, people, and information across sites, trading labour costs against transport costs, and, in doing so, eroding the distinction between production and circulation . But to claim that logistics makes worlds is to say something more than that logistics makes commodities, supply chains , or even globalizing patterns of interconnection. At base it is in an ontological claim, and it is in this sense that we use it to explore the making of a world region.
By subtitling this volume ‘The Labour of Making a World Region,’ we focus our investigation around the Asian region . The chapters that follow evolved within a wider project, ‘Logistical Worlds: Infrastructure, Software , Labour,’ which began in 2011 as an investigation into the global expansion of Chinese interests through logistical and infrastructural installations. The project conducted research in and around three shipping ports in order to deepen our understanding of the processes underlying, and obstacles to, this expansion. The ports were Kolkata—an important and unavoidable choke point in plans to extend Chinese trade routes to the west, Piraeus—where the Chinese state -owned enterprise COSCO now operates the port, and Valparaíso —where plans to expand the port to receive large post-Panamax craft from China have been delayed.
Two of these sites are located beyond the Asian region as it is usually conceived—Piraeus is in Greece , ten kilometres from the city of Athens , and Valparaíso is on the Chile an coast, adjacent to the Santiago metropolitan region—but this was precisely the point. We sought to map how logistics stretches the cultural and geographical region of ‘Asia’ beyond its assumed boundaries and changes the configuration of, and relations between, its conventional subregions . An additional concern was to show that regionalism is partly constructed through global operations of infrastructure, software , and data rather than simply through culture, civilization, and geography. The implications of these operations for labour practices and their attendant modes of subjectivity offer a means of analyzing the relationship of logistical practices to capital ist crisis and transition. The current volume addresses these wider research concerns by focusing on the case of Kolkata port and drawing on a series of contributions that explore the relevance of logistics in China’s rise as regional and global economic power.
China has a significant technical literature on logistics (物流) or wùliú in pinyin, meaning ‘material flow’ (Liu et al. 2016). Yet the role of China in the logistics industries has not been seriously examined in recent publications that have interrogated logistical practices , and modes of power, as a means of critically confronting contemporary capitalism (Toscano 2011; Bernes 2013; Cowen 2014). As an example, while Jesse LeCavalier’s (2016) The Rule of Logistics is an extensive account of the logistical activities of Walmart in the US, it offers little detail on the company’s operations in China. This is not to underestimate or dismiss recent contributions to the debate on logistics, to which the present authors have also contributed (Neilson and Rossiter 2011; Neilson 2012; Mezzadra and Neilson 2015; Samaddar 2015; Rossiter 2016). All provide insights into the fluid positioning of states with respect to commercial enterprise, the remaking of urban and wider global spaces in response to the imperatives of growth and productivity , the role of software and data in the control of labour mobility , the interface of capitalist accumulation with processes of militarization and securitization , and the role of infrastructure as a scaffold for the computational, architectural, and technical organization of globalization .
Some contributors to this logistics debate have also occasionally focused their analytical gaze on Asian or Middle Eastern realities. Keller Easterling (2014, 25–69), for example, mentions developments in China’s Shenzen, Korea’s Songdo City, and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Economic City in her exploration of economic zoning practices. Deborah Cowen (2014, 163–195) presents Dubai Logistics City as a primary example in her analysis of the urban forms promoted by logistics enterprises. Benjamin Bratton (2015, 112–15) explores the conflict between China and Google as part of his totalizing geopolitical vision of the new forms of power wielded by what he calls ubiquitous planetary computing. None of these works, however, inquires systemically—which is to say, both historically and in relation to current capitalist formations—into the role of logistics in making world regions . Rather, in these studies, regions either tend to give way to an urban scale focus or appear more broadly as the effects of wider global dynamics.
The ‘Logistical Worlds’ project is not alone in examining how logistics makes regions . Laleh Khalili (2017) has carried out research on the ties between war and trade in the Middle East, based partly on fieldwork conducted on a container ship travelling between Malta and Jabal Ali in the United Arab Emirates. Similarly, Charmaine Chua (2015) has investigated what she calls the ‘Chinese logistical sublime’ by pursuing ethnography on a container vessel travelling from Tacoma in the US state of Washington to Yantian in China, and on to Taiwan. These studies have affinities with the work of this volume, that is, with the tracing of logistical routes, routines, and labour regimes in order to understand the changing internal dynamics and relations between world regions . This is especially important in the case of Asia, since much of the stretching of supply chains across global expanses that occurred with the so-called logistics revolution—which began in the 1970s and was given fillip by the ‘opening’ of China in the 1980s—was accompanied by the emergence of Asia, and particularly East Asia , as a favoured site of industrial production. These changes have implications for patterns of trade and investment, international divisions of labour, and the emergence of what Aihwa Ong (2006) calls ‘lateral spaces,’ that is, the combining of transcontinental production channels with racialized and gender ed forms of labour segregation.
In recent times, the mode of globalization based on the transfer of production to Asia, by predominantly North Atlantic enterprises, has begun to shift. Programmes, such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which aim to establish new trade routes from China—through Central and South Asia —to Europe and beyond, presage a new development in Asia-driven globalization that goes against the isolationist and protectionist predilections of the current US presidency. Announced by Xi Jinping in late 2013, and accompanied by the formation of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank , this initiative reconfigures China’s geopolitical and geo-economic interests in relation to five major goals: policy coordination, facilities connectivity , unimpeded trade , financial integration, and people-to-people bonds (National Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China 2015). Alongside this development is India’s emergence as a global economic power, the longer-standing role of countries such as Japan and South Korea as industrial powerhouses, and the strategic positioning of cities like Singapore and Hong Kong within global circuits of logistics and finance.
While the Belt and Road Initiative represents a major logistical expansion that has the potential to redesign global trade routes and financial strategies, scholarly commentary has for the most part approached this initiative within the classical idioms of international relations and comparative politics (Callaghan 2016; Ferdinand 2016; Yiping 2016), thus foregoing the opportunity to rethink processes of political and economic change through the analytical frame of logistics. Despite some exploration of the programme’s financial implications (Sit et al. 2017) and the relevance of its cultural dimensions (Winter 2016), as well as the framing of its links to the decolonizing spirit of the 1955 Bandung conference (Wondam 2016), the Belt and Road Initiative’s potential to stimulate debate on the intersection of logistics and capitalism has gone unremarked.
In using logistics to provide an epistemic angle for the analysis of contemporary capitalism and Asia-led globalization , however, the present volume does not just restrict its attention to the Belt and Road Initiative. A distinct challenge in broaching Asia, whether as research object or method (Chen 2010), is recognition of its indistinct boundaries and internal heterogeneity. This applies as much to the theoretical approaches that emerge in the human and social sciences as to questions of political organization, economic practice, social process, or cultural tendencies. Studies of China’s rise, for instance, have generally drawn on approaches from world systems theory (see, for instance, Arrighi 2007 or Hamashita 2008) or interrogations of Chinese modernity (Wang 2011). By contrast, debates on India’s transition have been informed by the uneasy...