Asia Inside Out

"Asia Inside Out : Connected Places reveals the dynamic forces that have historically linked regions of the world's largest continent, stretching from Japan and Korea to the South China Sea, Indian Ocean, and the Middle East. This volume highlights the transregional flows of goods, ideas, and people across natural and political boundaries--sea routes, delta ecologies, and mountain passes, ports and oasis towns, imperial capitals and postmodern cities. It challenges the conventional idea that defined geopolitical regions as land-based, state-centered, and possessing linear histories. Exploring themes of maritime connections, mobile landscapes, and spatial movements, the authors examine significant sites of linkage and disjuncture from the early modern period to the present. The chapters reveal how eighteenth-century pirates shaped the interregional networks of Vietnam's Tonkin Gulf, how Kashmiri merchants provided intelligence of remote Himalayan territories to competing empires, and how for centuries a vibrant trade in horses and elephants fueled the Indian Ocean economy. Other topics investigated include cultural formations in the Pearl River delta, global trade in Chittagong's tr