In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama
Eric Tagliacozzo
Princeton: 2022
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Is opium trading good or bad? Is building lighthouses good or bad? For today’s historians, the answer is: it depends on who was doing it. If Europeans were responsible, then they’re acts of colonialism, if non-Europeans were doing them then they’re acts of resistance or state-building. Obviously. But what if these acts have no moral meaning at all? What if they’re just examples of ‘things that people do to survive’?

The history of maritime Southeast Asia, as described in Eric Tagliacozzo’s In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama, is the history of people and states doing what they need to do to survive. They trade, they travel, they transgress and they trigger all kinds of unintended consequences. Why did the people whom Arab chroniclers called Waq-Waqs sail west from Java and trade with Madagascar? Presumably for the same reason that, later, Arab traders sailed east and, later still, Europeans followed in their wake: the pursuit of wealth.

• Tags: Bill Hayton, Eric Tagliacozzo, Issue 29