Lars Kury
Infrastructuring Nature: The Malacca Strait and the Making of an Environmental Transit Corridor, c. 1870-1910
Bildbeschrieb: Percy Carpenter, 1854, Singapore from Mount Wallich at Sunrise
In the twenty-first-century world, historical accounts of global interconnectedness are increasingly taking an interdisciplinary approach that challenges conventional notions of territoriality. This project aims to utilize the analytical potential of "environmental transit corridors" to gain deeper insights into such dynamics and their ecological dimensions. By combining the research fields of infrastructure history and environmental history, this project adopts a multi-species and multi-natural approach to examine the transformation of non-artificial transit corridors into environmental types of infrastructure in the age of high imperialism. Using the Malacca Strait as an empirical case study from the period between c. 1870 and 1910, the project argues that imperial intervention in late nineteenth-century non-artificial transit corridors caused a process of “environmental infrastructuring,” an engineering process of both nature and culture, including multiple agencies and lasting impacts on the corridor’s global connectivity.