In Asian Waters

A sweeping account of how the sea routes of Asia have transformed a vast expanse of the globe over the past five hundred years, powerfully shaping the modern world 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. The result was a massive circulation of people, commodities, religion, culture, technology, and ideas. 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. 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. 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. The volume ends by asking what may happen if China comes to rule the waves of Asia, as Britain once did. A 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.

“Seamlessly connects geography, history and great power intrigue across the entire Indo-Pacific region, increasingly the fulcrum of world history.” —James Clad, Director, Asian Security Programs at the American Foreign Policy Council In the sphere of future global politics, no region will be as hotly contested as the Asia-Pacific, where great power interests collide amid the mistrust of unresolved conflicts and disputed territory. This is where authoritarian China is trying to rewrite international law and challenge the democratic values of the United States and its allies. The lightning rods of conflict are remote reefs and islands from which China has created military bases in the 1.5-million-square-mile expanse of the South China Sea, a crucial world trading route that this rising world power now claims as its own. No other Asian country can take on China alone. In Asian Waters, award–winning foreign correspondent Humphrey Hawksley breaks down the politics—and tensions—that he has followed through this region for years. Reporting on decades of political developments, he has witnessed China’s rise to become one of the world’s most wealthy and militarized countries, and delivers in Asian Waters the compelling narrative of this most volatile region. Can the United States and China handle the changing balance of power peacefully? Do Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan share enough common purpose to create a NATO-esque multilateral alliance? Does China think it can even become a superpower while making an enemy of America? If so, how does it plan to achieve it? Asian Waters delves into these topics and more as Hawksley presents the most comprehensive and accessible analysis ever of this region.

This volume investigates the nature of threats facing, or perceived as facing, some of the key players involved in Asian maritime politics. The articles in this collection present case studies on Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, China, and Southeast Asia as a whole and focus on domestic definitions of threats and conceptualisations of security. These studies map the differing understandings of danger in this region and explore how contending narratives of "threats" and "security" affect the national maritime security policy deliberations within the countries of this region. Those interested in maritime security and management in Asia will find this collection an invaluable addition to the literature on this topic.

From a MacArthur "Genius," a bold new perspective on the history of Asia, highlighting the long quest to tame its waters Asia's history has been shaped by her waters. In Unruly Waters, historian Sunil Amrith reimagines Asia's history through the stories of its rains, rivers, coasts, and seas--and of the weather-watchers and engineers, mapmakers and farmers who have sought to control them. Looking out from India, he shows how dreams and fears of water shaped visions of political independence and economic development, provoked efforts to reshape nature through dams and pumps, and unleashed powerful tensions within and between nations. Today, Asian nations are racing to construct hundreds of dams in the Himalayas, with dire environmental impacts; hundreds of millions crowd into coastal cities threatened by cyclones and storm surges. In an age of climate change, Unruly Waters is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Asia's past and its future.

Providing a comprehensive treatment of a full range of migrant destinies in East Asia by scholars from both Asia and North America, this volume captures the way migrants are changing the face of Asia, especially in cities, such as Beijing, Hong Kong, Hamamatsu, Osaka, Tokyo, and Singapore. It investigates how the crossing of geographical boundaries should also be recognized as a crossing of cultural and social categories that reveals the extraordinary variation in the migrants' origins and trajectories. These migrants span the spectrum: from Korean bar hostesses in Osaka to African entrepreneurs in Hong Kong, from Vietnamese women seeking husbands across the Chinese border to Pakistani Muslim men marrying women in Japan, from short-term business travelers in China to long-term tourists from Japan who ultimately decide to retire overseas. Illuminating the ways in which an Asian-based analysis of migration can yield new data on global migration patterns, the contributors provide important new theoretical insights for a broader understanding of global migration, and innovative methodological approaches to the spatial and temporal complexity of human migration.

Water, in its many guises, has always played a powerful role inshaping Southeast Asian histories, cultures, societies and economies.This volume, the rewritten results of an international workshop, with participants from 8 countries, contains 13 essays, representing a broad range of approaches to the study of Southeast Asia with water as the central theme.

This book is concerned with both the national security concerns of Asian maritime nations and the security of the Asian maritime commons. These are defined as the Pacific and Indian Oceans and associated seas, bays, and gulfs, with their included sea lines of communication (SLOCs). The most useful geographical designation for maritime Asia is the “Indo-Pacific.” Bernard Cole provides both a survey of the maritime strategies of the primary nations of the Indo-Pacific region and an evaluation of the domestic and international politics that drive those strategies. The United States, Canada, Russia, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, China, the Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, India, Pakistan, Iran, the smaller Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf states are all surveyed and analyzed. The United States, Japan, China, and India not surprisingly draw the most attention, given their large modern navies and distant strategic reach. The author concludes that the United States remains the dominant maritime power in this huge region, stretching from Canada to the Persian Gulf, despite its lack of a traditionally strong merchant marine. U.S. maritime power remains paramount, due primarily to its dominant navy. The Chinese naval modernization program deservedly receives a good deal of public attention, but Cole argues that on a day-to-day basis the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, as its navy is named, is the most powerful maritime force in Far Eastern waters, while the modernizing Indian Navy potentially dominates the Indian Ocean. In fact, a focus of this work is the exemplary description of all the region’s navies, with the author noting the naval arms race that is underway, particularly in the area of submarine acquisition. Cole is careful to couch this phenomenon in the regional concerns about Chinese naval expansion and the desire to ensure a continued, massive U.S. naval presence. The current naval developments in the region evince elements of a naval arms race, but lack the coherent maritime strategies to make naval developments dangerous to regional peace and security. Most telling will be whether United States power and focus remain on the region, while adjusting to continued Chinese maritime power in a way acceptable to both nations. No other current or recent work provides such a complete description of the Indo-Pacific region’s navies and maritime strategies, while analyzing the current and future impact of those forces.