Nurfadzilah Yahaya- "British Hydrocolonialism in Southeast Asia"
Across the British Empire, from the Caribbean to Hong Kong, colonial engineers perfected the art of manufacturing new territories from dredged sand and legal precedent, creating landscapes so thoroughly naturalized that their colonial origins disappeared beneath accumulated sediment and bureaucratic authority. In Southeast Asia, this imperial technique confronted an unusual challenge: governing an archipelagic world where traditional territorial boundaries made little sense. Colonial authorities responded through extensive land reclamation projects, mobilizing Asian labor and private capital to systematically transform fluid coastlines into solid ground. From Singapore's harbors to North Borneo's shores, these engineering campaigns reshaped both physical landscapes and local communities, imposing European concepts of fixed territory upon regions long accustomed to maritime flexibility.
Fadzilah Yahaya is Assistant Professor of History of Southeast Asia at Yale University. Her first book, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia was published by Cornell University Press in 2020 where she demonstrates how colonial subjects entrenched European colonial legalities in British and Dutch territories in Southeast Asia by playing several jurisdictions against one another. Her current book project is entitled ‘Overflow: History of Land Reclamation in the British Empire in the Twentieth Century.’ Before Yale, she taught at National University of Singapore and Washington University in St. Louis. She received her PhD in History from Princeton University.