In Hinterlands and Commodities: Place, Space, Time and the Political Economic Development of Asia over the Long Eighteenth Century, well-known economic and social historians examine important questions concerning temporal and spatial relationships among central places, hinterlands, commodities, and political economic developments in Asia and the Global economy over the long eighteenth century. These timely essays engage hinterlands and commodities providing novel foci on historical impacts maritime trade on political economic developments involving place, space, and time in Asia, thereby furnishing historical background for current conditions. They contribute to discourse concerning historical interactions among indigenous Asian merchant activities and European commercial counterparts. Contributors are: George Bryan Souza, Dennis O. Flynn, Marie A. Lee, Ghulam A. Nadri, Bhaswati Bhattacharya, Tsukasa Mizushima, Tomotaka Kawamura, Atushi Ota, Ryuto Shimada, and Ei Murakami.

In The Boxer Codex, the editors have transcribed, translated and annotated an illustrated late-16th century Spanish manuscript. It is a special source that provides evidence for understanding early-modern geography, ethnography and history of parts of the western Pacific, as well as major segments of maritime and continental South-east Asia and East Asia. Although portions of this gem of a manuscript have been known to specialists for nearly seven decades, this is the first complete transcription and English translation, with critical annotations and apparatus, and reproductions of all its illustrations, to appear in print.

The Commentaries is the first complete English language translation, with complete annotations, of a unique and extraordinary memoir from the pen of the erudite Spanish soldier-diplomat D. Garcia de Silva y Figueroa over the course of his embassy to Persia (1614-1624). The Commentaries transcend the travel-literature genre, emerging as a precocious European intellectual global history that is remarkable for its encyclopedic breadth, its historical depth, and its ethnographic and even artistic sensitivity. The Commentaries will be of interest to historians, ethnographers, and literary critics, or anyone with an interest in early modern European accounts of the encounter between the Portuguese and Spanish Empires and Safavid Persia during the early modern period.

This collection of 13 essays deals with a range of topics concerning Portuguese, Dutch and Chinese merchants, commodities and commerce in maritime Asia in the early modern period from c. 1585-1800. They are based on exhaustive research and careful analysis of diverse sets of archival materials found around the globe. Written by a leading authority on global maritime economic history and the history of European Expansion, each individual essay addresses a topic of fundamental importance to those interested in knowing more about what merchants did (with which resources and under what conditions) and how they did it, what were the commodities that were incorporated into local, regional, intra-regional and global economies, and what was the role and function of early modern maritime trade and commerce in economic development in general and especially in Asia in the early modern era, from c. 1585-1800. A number of them, in particular, relate the individual or collective merchant experience to specific European (Portuguese and Dutch) imperial projects and their contestation amongst themselves and their indigenous neighbours over portions of the period. Collectively, they form an exposition of a utilitarian view of human activity under a wide-ranging different set of circumstances and conditions but with similar patterns of behaviors and responses that are largely independent from ethnic, racial or religious stereotyping. The work therefore should raise new issues and avenues of research concerning these agents and objects in European Expansion, Asian and Global History.