Portals of Globalization

Repositioning Mumbai's Ports and Zones, 1833–2014

Megan Maruschke

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9783110612431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

While ports are traditionally considered national infrastructure sites that connect states to global markets, special economic zones and past free ports are portrayed as threats to national sovereignty. This book calls these narratives into question as it explores the history of planning Mumbai's ports and free zones during periods of global and regional transition from the British Raj, to national independence, to economic liberalization. The book opens with a study of an unsuccessful plan hatched by merchants in 1833 to make Bombay a free port to deal with an emerging British India and the advent of free trade. The book ends with how India's current special economic zones and emphasis on port expansion are part of broader goals to reposition India in transregional Asian trade, to connect Mumbai with northern India, and to enact local plans for a global city that threaten the very port that first connected Mumbai to the world. To understand the functionality of these port and zone projects beyond typical policy prescriptions, this book proposes portals of globalization as a spatial format that fosters processes of reterritorialization.

1Introduction

Globalization rhetoric, especially in the 1990s, described a flat, interconnected world comprised of capital flows, human mobility, and international trade. In this narrative, the world grows smaller as new technologies enable high-speed communication and transport, and larger as occurrences in far-away places not only feel close but also have immediate impact on other distant parts of the world. In this description, the nation state, once so central to explanations of societal cohesion and political order, constituted by territoriality, has been deterritorialized by global cities, special economic zones (SEZs), global corporations, supply chains, and other transnational actors and spaces that the state no longer controls.

Research in global history, however, has shown that state territoriality as a powerful spatial format for societal organization became ever more complete alongside increasing global connectedness over the course of the nineteenth century. Territoriality dates back to the seventeenth century, but it achieved added relevance with new technologies that enabled connectivity, advances in cartography, and the significance of the nation as a political unit in both empires and states. The nation state and territorial forms of organization emerged as world trade and migration increased, suggesting that this form of state control, which consists in its ideal type of borders and the even integration of state space, developed as a strategy to deal with flows of goods, capital, and people.1 Likewise, political geographers have also been historically informed about the changing nature of the state as only one form of state spatiality in history.2 Such discussions inform discourses in related disciplines on the emergence of new spatial formats and fuel research on the forms of political and economic organization such as the empires within which nation states emerged.3 Ulf Engel and Matthias Middell have linked synchronic changes in dominant modes of spatial organization to crises on a global scale, which they call critical junctures of globalization.4 In short, the nation state is not the end or beginning of history; instead, the nation state has become the dominant spatial format of social organization for a certain part of the world during a specific historical period and is not likely to prevail indefinitely. Other spatial formats such as regional organizations, global cities, and SEZs, to name but a few, have become more prevalent in the last several decades, though nation states remain relevant in the current global spatial order.

In particular, SEZs have attracted attention within the above narrative on the decline of the nation state. Such zones are associated with neoliberalism, enclaving, and offshoring that have deregulated certain economic sectors in particular places, thereby removing state sovereignty over parts of its own economy and territory. While most authors dealing with the rising number of such zones take them as further proof of a deterritorializing world since the late twentieth century, several scholars have shown the usefulness of these zones to the state beyond Western contexts. Aihwa Ong argues that neoliberalism in Southeast Asia takes a different form than it does in the West. Likewise, Loraine Kennedy shows that state rescaling in India, of which a rising number of SEZs appear to be a symptom, is an active state-based strategy in comparison to Western cases in which state rescaling emerged under crisis.5 This book furthers research that argues that zones and states have a more complex and ambivalent relationship than the standard narrative describes. Furthermore, this book, through the example of Mumbai, India, shows a longer history of using place and creating enclaves as part of both territorializing and globalizing projects pursued by a number of actors for much longer than the current research suggests, thereby examining the variety of spaces and processes of respatialization that have constituted the state and its reformulation under globalization since the mid-nineteenth century.

This book contributes to research on globalization by observing it “in action.” It unravels the past and present of zones and ports in India’s major trading city, Mumbai (formerly Bombay). This port city was chosen for this study due to its significance to India since the mid-nineteenth century, though in terms of world trade its positionality has remained secondary. In addition to hosting zones for many decades, Mumbai offers a rich look at various projects to reassert its dominance in shifting global, regional, and national frameworks, including through zone and port projects. This study demonstrates the importance of place and the role of various actors, including state agencies, in the production of globalization and territorialization in Mumbai from the interventions of Britain’s East India Company (EIC) to India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s agenda (from ca. 1833 to 2014). This book investigates the planning of ports and zones, focusing on periods of global and regional change: the British Raj (1858), the period when India gained national independence and developed its particular economic strategy to cope with the world of Cold War competition (1947), and finally more recent attempts at economic liberalization (1991). Mumbai’s ports and free trade zones (FTZs) are sites through which state and non-state actors have channelled their globalization and territorialization projects; this book asks how they have negotiated shifting world orders and dealt with new national strategies at a local level.

The port and zone plans illustrated here, whether realized or stalled, demonstrate how state and non-state actors have repositioned the city within shifting global, regional, and national frameworks. This history calls master narratives on SEZs, often seen as Western projects to deterritorialize developing states, into question, showing the complexity of the zone’s usefulness to a variety of actors and its association with territorial forms of organization. This book argues that the global history concept of portals of globalization – places in which global flows are particularly dense and institutions have been established to deal with global connectivity – is an important lens for analysing the implementation of globalization projects in local places and the repositioning of these sites in global spatial orders.

Sites of Globalization: Ports and Zones

Although research on globalization tends to focus on flows, connectivity, and circulation, these mobilities are difficult to observe.6 Processes of globalization become tangible in particular sites such as metropolises, border checkpoints, trading centres, ports, and SEZs. These sites perform a regulatory function in managing globalization. They are the location where various actors with competing projects meet and where these actors institutionalize their competencies in dealing with “the global.” Furthermore, these sites may become symbolic points of reference in debates on what it means to live in a global age and how to deal with a global past. Place is, therefore, a methodological entry point to observe globalization projects in action and their effects.

Among studies on place and globalization, Saskia Sassen’s work on what she calls global cities is well known. She has closely focused on fixed infrastructure that fosters global mobility.7 Her work was a major contribution to globalization research because it explained why a world globally connected by, for example, digital networks, remains so place bound. She maintains that globalization is not an all-encompassing “flattening” process but an uneven and partial strategy.8 Sassen writes: “Global processes are often strategically located/constituted in national spaces, where they are implemented usually with the help of legal measures taken by state institutions. The material and legal infrastructure that makes possible the global circulation of financial capital, for example, is often produced as ‘national’ infrastructure – even though increasingly shaped by global agendas.”9 She describes the insertion of global agendas into the national as an “unbundling” of national space. This unbundling is both a strategic move by the state (or nation, the term she typically uses) to connect the nation’s cities to “global circuits”, but this unbundling is also an effect of globalization processes that the nation cannot control.10 In addition to global cities, Sassen writes about other infrastructural forms, namely, the export processing zone (EPZ) or SEZ, originally set up by the state, which have also led to its unbundling but are part of state-based globalization projects. She notes that these sites are also nodal points through which global capital and trade flows are managed.11

By the late 1990s, as globalization became a household term, images of EPZs and sweatshops were used as a rallying cry in the alter-globalization movement, popularized by Naomi Klein’s book, No Logo.12 Klein explored similar themes of exploitation in her next book, The Shock Doctrine.13 These popular works, however, followed decades of criticism that stemmed from research in the 1970s that identified the zone as a key feature enabling a shift from manufacturing raw materials in the developed world towards low-cost manufacturing in the developing world, that is, the new international division of labour (NIDL).14 This criticism, which focused on lost employment opportunities in the West, was supported by claims that the zone was a tool for neo-colonial practices in former colonies.15 At the turn of the twenty-first century, criticisms of zones as part of a neo-imperial framework were still prevalent.16 Historians have looked at the rise of sweatshop labour and its implications for changing patterns of trade and employment.17 News of objectionable practices in zones and factories can travel quickly through today’s social media platforms. Examples include the series of suicides in China’s Shenzhen in 2010 and the deadly fire in a Bangladesh factory in 2012.18 FTZs have been sites in which the inequality produced by global trade and transregional value chains becomes particularly visible.

These zones, EPZs and SEZs, are designated areas in which the state eliminates certain national and local laws and taxes, often to attract foreign investment in the zone in order to generate exports and thereby foreign exchange earnings. Import and export tariffs on goods and other taxes are reduced or removed, and contemporary zones may be associated with tax havens.19 They are often fenced in and entry and exit is guarded. A study from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions found that most zones operate in countries with weak labour laws where production in industrial sectors relies on a (usually female) “cheap and compliant workforce.”20 The report notes that, in some instances, the EPZ as a policy tool exempts corporations operating inside the zone from complying with existing national and local labour laws as an inducement to attract foreign investors; however, the report states that the majority of the time governments simply decline to enforce labour laws in zones as part of an informal concession to corporations. These zones are thereby known as deterritorialized spaces that are cut off from the nation state’s authority. They are enclaves that carve out a state’s territory for investors.

When zones are generally considered problematic for the sovereignty of nation states, why do states continue to pursue them? The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that there were 79 zones in 25 countries in 1975. By 2006, the ILO recorded approximately 3,500 EPZs/SEZs in 130 countries, employing 66 million people.21 Two articles from 2015 in The Economist put the global estimate at 4,300 zones and rising.22 They have become so ubiquitous that tax enclaves like the Canary Islands have created their own zones.23 Zones are also currently associated with the tendency towards business service offshoring to the developing world, meaning they are no longer only associated with manufacturing and transport logistics as they were several decades ago.24 According to the ILO report, the majority of zones can be found in Asia even though as The Economist articles highlight, three in four countries host them.

Many of these zones manufacture for export. Ports are often connected to zones in order to enable their exports. Research in economic geography has focused on the links between ports and zones.25 The most dynamic research with this focus has looked at the port and zone combination as a “space of global articulation” that connects the state and its manufactured exports to global and regional trade routes.26 These studies are concerned with the changing geographies of ports and how they are embedded in other spaces of power such as states, urban spaces, and regional trade agreements. While ports have historically been understood in terms of their embeddedness within states, the emergence of private terminal operators in the last two decades has shifted the scale of analysis from the port to the terminal and the corporate networks of the terminal operator.27

Several authors have linked zones to offshoring practices. James Sidaway has connected EPZs to enclaves, which enables a broader understanding of the space and its association with uneven patterns of development.28 The EPZ or SEZ is only one form associated with offshoring and encla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Freeing the Port and Winning Land, 1830s–1860s
• 3 Territorializing Bombay Port, 1860s–1880s
• 4 An Export Processing Zone in the Making, 1940s–1980s
• 5 Managing World Orders, 1960s–1980s
• 6 Strategizing Global India and Transregional Mumbai, 1990s–2014
• 7 Globalizing Mumbai, 1940s–2014
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index