Content area
Full Text
God has made the earth and the sea, and has divided the earth among men and made the sea common to all.
- Sultan of Makassar (Indonesia) to the Dutch ambassador, 1659 1
THE EARLY MODERN ASIAN MARITIME WORLD AND ECONOMY
According to an expression common in Southeast Asia, the water unites and the land divides. This expression came to mind when I visited the old seaport of Hoi An (known to the French as Faifo), some twenty miles south of Da Nang in central Vietnam, in 2007. The cities of Da Nang and Hoi An are located on a narrow coastal plain created by siltladen rivers and separated from the districts to the north and south by rugged coastal mountains that sweep down to the South China Sea. This topography of mountainous land broken occasionally by narrow river valleys, coastal plains, lagoons, and a few broad deltas (such as the Pearl, Red, Mekong, and Chaophraya) is common in large parts of Southeast Asia and southern China, as anyone who has traveled along or flown over these coastlines can attest. Water- especially seawater- heavily influenced the life and outlooks of the coastal peoples, fostering a maritime-oriented culture that provides an excellent geographical framework for understanding transregional history and connections.2
This orientation toward seas and rivers has led some historians to refer to a "water frontier," a single region stretching from the Yangzi delta in central China southward through Vietnam and parts of Cambodia and Thailand to both coasts of the Malay Peninsula. Others, influenced by Fernand Braudel's sweeping study of the Mediterranean basin, refer to the South China Sea, Gulf of Siam, and Java Sea after about the tenth century as an East Asian counterpart to the Mediterranean, or, connected through the Straits of Melaka, as an annex to the maritime "Silk Road" of the Indian Ocean. Hence, it can be seen as one long maritime avenue, with diverse subbranches, from the Yellow Sea to Arabia and the East African coast that transcended political boundaries. Not all historians find the "Asian Mediterranean" analogy compelling, partly because the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, which reverse themselves every six months, generally limited trading ships to sailing west or north half the year...