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Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai - Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550-1700 (Paperback)
Loot Price: R758
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Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai - Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550-1700 (Paperback)
Series: Perspectives on the Global Past
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Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai traces the roots of modern global
East Asia by focusing on the fascinating history of its seaways.
The East Asian maritime realm, from the Straits of Malacca to the
Sea of Japan, has been a core region of international trade for
millennia, but during the long seventeenth century (1550 to 1700),
the velocity and scale of commerce increased dramatically. Chinese,
Japanese, and Vietnamese smugglers and pirates forged autonomous
networks and maritime polities; they competed and cooperated with
one another and with powerful political and economic units, such as
the Manchu Qing, Tokugawa Japan, the Portuguese and Spanish crowns,
and the Dutch East India Company. Maritime East Asia was a
contested and contradictory place, subject to multiple legal,
political, and religious jurisdictions, and a dizzying diversity of
cultures and ethnicities, with dozens of major languages and
countless dialects. Informal networks based on kinship ties or
patron-client relations coexisted uneasily with formal governmental
structures and bureaucratized merchant organizations.
Subsistence-based trade and plunder by destitute fishermen
complemented the grand dreams of sea-lords, profit-maximizing
entrepreneurs, and imperial contenders. Despite their shifting
identities, East Asia's mariners sought to anchor their activities
to stable legitimacies and diplomatic traditions found outside the
system, but outsiders, even those armed with the latest military
technology, could never fully impose their values or plans on these
often mercurial agents. With its multilateral perspective of a
world in flux, this volume offers fresh, wide-ranging narratives of
the "rise of the West" or "the Great Divergence." European
mariners, who have often been considered catalysts of
globalization, were certainly not the most important actors in East
and Southeast Asia. China's maritime traders carried more in volume
and value than any other nation, and the China Seas were key to
forging the connections of early globalization-as significant as
the Atlantic World and the Indian Ocean basin. Today, as a
resurgent China begins to assert its status as a maritime power, it
is important to understand the deep history of maritime East Asia.
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