Maritime Asia In The Longue Duree

AY2017/2018 Semester 1

This course shall examine the history of Maritime Asia in the longue duree. It shall explore the roles of the seas and oceans in shaping the region?s history, away from the older models of land-bound nation-states. In doing so, it focuses on the mobilities of people, ideas, and commodities across these spaces. It shall examine different dimensions of Maritime Asia, from trade, business, and the economic infrastructures, to the social communities living and moving in these spaces and obtaining their livelihoods from them, cultural and religious systems and networks, political systems of governance, the environmental issues connected to the seas and maritime spaces, and the technologies and sciences associated with the traversing of such spaces. It also adopts a diachronic perspective tracing the transformations of Maritime Asia from the pre-modern to the early modern and the modern periods of Asian history, from the connecting of the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asian and East Asian seas to the Atlantic and the Pacific. Even as the centers of political power and the world-system shifted between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, Maritime Asia continued to be the fulcrum of this global system. Looking at Asia from the perspective of the seas and oceans, as well as the littorals and islands that they connect, highlights the importance of mobility as well as the cross-cultural encounters and cosmopolitan environments that they engender, To understand these dynamics and structures, an interdisciplinary approach will be crucial, bringing together environment, technology, logistics, urban studies, piracy, and governance the advent of air travel and transport, the oceans continue to be the most important spaces for the movement of goods and people, driving the global and Asian economies.