“Drawing on years of travel, many archives, and countless dockside conversations, Eric Tagliacozzo’s masterpiece shows how the connected past of maritime Asia has shaped our world.

this is a daring and thought-provoking book.'-Jonas Rüegg, H-Net Reviews In Asian Waters offers fascinating glimpses of a world at once strangely familiar and deeply foreign.'-Yorim Spoelder, Asian Review of Books 'A powerful history of rupture and change of technologies no longer in use, once-priceless goods that have lost their value, prominent port cities that have become provincial backwaters, and social worlds that have altered beyond recognition. The volume ends by asking what may happen if China comes to rule the waves of Asia, as Britain once did.Ī novel account showing how Asian history can be seen as a whole when seen from the water, In Asian Waters presents a voyage into a past that is still alive in the present. The book illustrates how India became central to the spice trade, how the Indian Ocean became a “British lake” between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and how lighthouses and sea mapping played important roles in imperialism. Paying special attention to migration, trade, the environment, and cities, In Asian Waters examines the long history of contact between China and East Africa, the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism across the Bay of Bengal, and the intertwined histories of Islam and Christianity in the Philippines. In this book, Eric Tagliacozzo chronicles how the seas and oceans of Asia have shaped the history of the largest continent for the past half millennium, leaving an indelible mark on the modern world in the process. The result was a massive circulation of people, commodities, religion, culture, technology, and ideas. In the centuries leading up to our own, the volume of traffic across Asian sea routes-an area stretching from East Africa and the Middle East to Japan-grew dramatically, eventually making them the busiest in the world.

Pacific Worlds by Matt K. Matsuda