ShawnaKim Lowey-Ball
I study premodern global history, with an especially keen interest in trade and trading cities on the sea-routes connecting the Middle East to China. My dissertation focuses that interest onto the port of Malacca in the period from 1400 to 1644. The work has two complementary goals. First, I hope to write the definitive history of Malacca over this period - a project which has been heretofore neglected. The second goal is to place developments in Malacca in a much broader Southeast Asian and even fully Eurasian financial and political context. Because of its role as the chief entrepot connecting the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean, Malacca was uniquely situated to experiment with new financial instruments and to share them across a number of ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse trading communities. Consequently, much of my work focuses on the financial instruments used in Medieval and Early Modern Asia, and on the international character of a city where these instruments were developed and traded; I spend a lot of time thinking about changing conceptions of money, specie, insurance, and financial derivatives in a premodern international-trading context. If I have any ulterior motive, it is to point out how sophisticated the financial landscape was "back then" and "over there."
Before coming to Yale, I got my BA in Government and Political and Social History at Cornell University. I subsequently worked at a hedge fund, and then spent the better part of a year traveling around the world. These days, I still manage to travel quite a bit; additionally I enjoy playing sports, eating good food, and trying my hand, usually unsuccessfully, at hard math problems.
