In this stimulating volume, Taglliacozzo endeavors, as he puts it in the introduction, “to tie together the maritime history of Asia into a single interconnected web” (4). In six parts and fourteen chapters, he roams the Indian Ocean seeking connections that link, over the centuries, the Ocean’s varied shores. At its center, not surprisingly, is global trade. But he also includes the rise of empires—“colonial circuits” as he calls them—and the spread of religions from Buddhism to Islam and Christianity, as well as such unexpected topics as smuggling, the growth of lighthouses, and the presumed status of Zamboanga in the Philippines as “the end of the world.” In so doing, Tagliacozzo has set himself an enormous task. He succeeds in part by focusing much of his analysis on Southeast Asia, a region that he knows well, and by confining topics other than maritime trade to separate chapters.After an initial account of China’s medieval ties with Africa—most notably in the voyages of Zheng He from 1404 to 1433 during the Ming dynasty—Tagliacozzo turns, in Chapter 3, to Southeast Asia. Half of the volume’s remaining chapters focus on this region. The book’s subtitle is far too ambitious. Gujarat and Northern India, along with Burma, East Africa, Yemen, and Yokohama, receive some notice but not much. Tagliacozzo concentrates instead on the urban centers of Southeast Asia and on the island of Singapore, which looms over the other urban centers as a “central radial” (217, 277). Together, they are tied together by their ports, their cosmopolitan connections, and their diasporic trading communities. These international connections complemented the more inwardly focused “colonial circuits” of the British and Dutch on land. Although Tagliacozzo points out that the British made good in their control over India and much of Southeast Asia, he pays little attention to these “landscapes of trade and domination” other than to indicate that commerce could grow “on the wings of empire” (248–249).Several urban centers get chapters to themselves, most notably India’s southern coast, which Tagliacozzo calls “spice central.” The maritime–borne spice trade, he claims, was “the perfect vehicle in many ways to see how fluid market spaces were connected across large bodies of water” (306). He points out that in this trade, too, “commercial minorities”—most notably Jews, Chinese, and Indian Chettiar merchants—provided “the sinew of connection through their products and their migratory practices over hundreds of years,” even to the present day (288). To provide an intimate view into the workings of the trade, Tagliacozzo recounts, uncommonly for a historian, his own interviews with dock workers, Indian traders, and others. Zamboanga stands apart for him. Tagliacozzo appears to have included it so that he could discuss Muslim–Christian interaction in “a kind of religious outpost at the end of several overlapping maritime worlds” (183). He refers to Zamboanga fondly as “one of those places that lingers in the mind, and in one’s memory” (188).The volume concludes in Part VI with a fascinating discussion of “technologies of the sea.” Tagliacozzo writes not of ships and shipbuilding but of lighthouses and ocean mapping. In this context, imperial rivalries come into view at last, as the colonial powers, especially the British and the Dutch, squabbled for predominance over the maritime pathways, above all the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea islands, that “needed to be lit and mapped” (319). In these competitions, lighthouses “took on the symbolism of state power” (325). Tagliacozzo argues that the cosmopolitan spice trade that shaped the maritime world for so many centuries was eventually to be supplanted by goods produced within the nation-states of the region, and by shipping routes dominated by oil tankers and bulk carriers. He leaves open the question of whether China is now set to rule the waves.As “a peek through different kinds of windows,” Tagliacozzo’s view of the life of Asia’s maritime pathways throughout the last five centuries is unexcelled (380). Although much has been written about this subject over the years, this volume should find a prominent place within the scholarship of Asia and of oceanic worlds everywhere.
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Aug 2, 2024
Irna Arlianti + 2
Open Access