The Straits of Malacca is one of the most critical chokepoints of today’s global economy and a key arena of geopolitical competition. Roughly a quarter of global seaborne trade passes through this narrow maritime corridor, making it central to global supply chains, energy security, and international trade. In his PhD dissertation, Worldmaking in the Age of Empire: Environment, Infrastructure, and the Straits of Malacca, c. 1870s–1910s, Lars Kury traces the historical formation of this strategic corridor to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He shows how imperial expansion, new infrastructures, and the growing circulation of commodities transformed the Straits into a central artery of global capitalism, linking the entrepôt economies of the Straits Settlements to commodity frontiers and markets across the world.

Kury’s dissertation places this history of global capitalism within a broader planetary perspective. Global connectivity, it argues, cannot be understood through markets, technology, and political power alone, but has always been shaped by the transformation of environments and interactions with nonhuman forces. From today’s perspective, this history highlights a fundamental challenge: global economic activity is deeply embedded in planetary systems while simultaneously transforming and destabilizing them. The dissertation was supervised by Prof. Dr. Corey Ross, Director of the Institute for European Global Studies at the University of Basel, andProf. Dr. Andrew Denning, Professor of History at the University of Kansas.

Lars Kury has been affiliated with the Institute for European Global Studies since 2021, initially as Assistant for European Global Studies. Since June 2026, he has served as Deputy Managing Director and as a lecturer in European Global Studies. His areas of expertise include geopolitics and security in the Indo-Pacific, logistics and globalisation, the history of capitalism and infrastructure, and their environmental frictions.