Cultures as Information Aggregators: An Example From South-East Asia (the Formation of Shared Navigational Knowledge, 1500-1650)

Abstract

Inter-cultural communication can be a topic worthy for examination for several reasons. It is not rare that the encounter of different cultures result in information-related “improvements”. Such improvements may have many faces (e.g. technological transfer or adoption of new customs). This, as a historical phenomenon often can be traced, for instance, near the border regions of empires, around diasporas, or along trade routes. The European expansion of the early modern era gave an especially important boost to such encounters. This chain of events created connected cultures that not at all or hardly had any communication with each other up to that time.