History Without Borders: The Making of an Asian World Region, 1000-1800
Geoffrey C. Gunn
(Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2011)
With 20 col illus, 4 maps.
Hardback   444 Pages
ISBN 9789888083343

Description

Astride the historical maritime silk routes linking India to China, premodern East and Southeast Asia can be viewed as a global region in the making over a long period. Intense Asian commerce in spices, silks, and ceramics placed the region in the forefront of global economic history prior to the age of imperialism. Alongside the correlated silver trade among Japanese, Europeans, Muslims, and others, China’s age-old tributary trade networks provided the essential stability and continuity enabling a brilliant age of commerce.

Though national perspectives stubbornly dominate the writing of Asian history, even powerful state-centric narratives have to be re-examined with respect to shifting identities and contested boundaries. This book situates itself in a new genre of writing on borderland zones between nations, especially prior to the emergence of the modern nation-state. It highlights the role of civilization that developed along with global trade in rare and everyday Asian commodities, raising a range of questions regarding unequal development, intraregional knowledge advances, the origins of globalization, and the emergence of new Asian hybridities beyond and within the conventional boundaries of the nation-state. Chapters range over the intra-Asian trade in silver and ceramics, the Chinese junk trade, the rise of European trading companies as well as diasporic communities including the historic Japan-towns of Southeast Asia, and many types of technology exchanges. While some readers will be drawn to thematic elements, this book can be read as the narrative history of the making of a coherent East-Southeast Asian world long before the modem period.

Table of Contents

Tables and Figures
Maps and Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1.  Southeast Asia Between India and China

2.  Rise and Fall of the Southeast Asian ‘Charter’ Kingdoms

3.  Islamic Courts and Maritime Trading Ports

4.  The Tribute Trade System and Chinese Diasporas

5.  Commerce, Currencies, and Commodities

6.  The Iberian Maritime Networks

7.  Hegemonic Sequence: Enter the Dutch and English Trading Companies

8.  Nihon-Machi: Japanese Diasporic Communities of Southeast Asia

9.  The Intra-Asian Bullion Trade Economy Networks

10.  East-Southeast Asia in the Global Ceramic Trade Networks

11.  Knowledge Transfers: A Regional Technology Complex?

Conclusion
References
Further Reading
Index

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