Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550–1700

Perspectives on the Global Past

by Tonio Andrade (Editor), Xing Hang (Editor)

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, China

396 pages, Hardcover

First published February 29, 2016

Reviews

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sixteen chapters on the trade and exploration of the three centuries as covered in the introduction-- "The East Asian Maritime Realm in Global History, 1500-1700". I read this book in anticipation of a 'Manila Galleon' exhibition I was going to be guiding at our asian civilisations museum, but found individual chapters by a range of scholars covering everything from Japanese history (from "Koxinga's Japanese Pirate Ancestors" to "Japan in the Chinese Tribute System") to "Fujian and its Coastal Depopulation". As in any anthology, the chapters cover a broad range of topics and vary in relevance, but here are pickings for anyone interested in this time period.

The Index helps you find the relevant pages for the topics of interest to you in the various chapters, for example 'Manila' led me to sources covering: Japanese interest in, massacres of Chinese settlers by Spanish, the Selden Map, Zheng Jing, etc. A key find was Anna Busquet's *****-chapter on "Koxinga's attempt to intimidate the Spanish rulers of the Philippines through the eyes of his hapless emissary to the islands, the Dominican friar Victorio Riccio (1621-1685)", pp. 202-225.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with so many of these sorts of collectively authored books, some of the essays were fascinating and illuminating and others were skippable. I'd imagine that which ones are valuable to you depends on your particular interests going in; in my case, being interested mostly in Manila, the essays that stuck out were those by Shapinsky, Tremml-Werner, Lu, Busquets, Xing Hang, and Ho.

This volume ends up focusing on the Zheng family and on diplomatic history, so don't go into it expecting a particularly clear structural overview or overarching theoretical framework, but the introduction and first article do a good job laying the groundwork for the rest of the book.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book came up in my Amazon recommendations and looked interesting. I just recently watched the series "Black Sails" and read "Treasure Island", so this book seemed like a natural continuation of the theme.

Although a collection of academic papers, each essay is written in clear and easily digestible styles which make them interesting to read, even for those with a casual interest in the topic.