There are a number of studies that treat the history of the South China Sea through interesting windows. Andre Gunder Frank’s ReOrient: Global economy in the Asian age (Berkeley, CA, 1998) gives a nice global take on this regional place; Takeshi Hamashita’s China, East Asia, and the global economy: Regional and historical perspectives (New York, 2008) then does so via an East Asian angle, while Kenneth Hall’s A history of early Southeast Asia (Lanham, MD, 2011) complements this from the Southeast Asian side of things.

For the early period, the great classic from China’s vantage is arguably Edward Schafer’s The vermilion bird: T'ang images of the south (Berkeley, CA, 1967), while the annotated translation of Frederick Hirth and W. W. Rockhill, entitled Chau Ju Kua: His work on the Chinese and Arab trade in the 12th and 13th Centuries (Taipei, 1967, reprint of the 1911 original) tells us what the South China Sea polities looked like from the locus of China’s thirteenth-century coasts. To get onto the water itself, see Wang Gungwu’s classic The Nanhai trade: Early Chinese trade in the South China Sea (Singapore, reprint 2003), and O. W. Wolters’s seminal Early Indonesian commerce: A study of the origins of Srivijaya (Ithaca, NY, 1974), which provides the Southeast Asian point of view. For medieval times, Roderich Ptak, ed., China's seaborne trade with South and Southeast Asia (Abingdon, 1999) is very good in sketching out the broad parameters; an eminent authority on the ships themselves is Pierre Yves Manguin; see his ‘The Southeast Asian ship: An historical approach’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2 (1980): 266-76; and Pierre Yves Manguin, ‘Relationship and cross-influence between Southeast Asian and Chinese ship-building tradition’, IAHA Conference, Manila, 21-25 November 1983. The great, well-known debate about the nature and outlines of Early Modern Southeast Asia and the South China Sea as a region can be found in Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the age of commerce, 2 vols.

(New Haven, CT, 1988 and 1993), and Victor Lieberman, Strange parallels: Southeast Asia in global context, 800-1830, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2003-9). Looking south from China to complement these works is John Wills, China and maritime Europe, 1500-1800: Trade, settlement, diplomacy and missions (New York, 2010); looking more broadly across the entire seascape of Asia at this time is Frank Broeze, ed., Brides of the sea: Port cities of Asia from the 16-20th centuries (Kensington, NSW, 1989). A ‘frontier approach’ is adopted in C. Patterson Giersch, Asian borderlands: The transformation of Qing China's frontier (Cambridge, MA, 2006); for the Taiwanese angle on things, see both Shih-Shan Henry Tsai, Maritime Taiwan: Historical encounters with the East and the West (Armonk, NY, 2009); and also Johanna Menzel Meskill, A Chinese pioneer family: The Lins of Wu-feng,Taiwan, 1729-1895 (Princeton, NJ, 1979). Exciting scholarship has been done on the trade systems of the South China coasts in Paul van Dyke, The Canton trade: Life and enterprise on the China coast, 1700-1845 (Hong Kong, 2007), and also in his Merchants of Canton and Macao: Success and failure in eighteenth century Chinese trade (Hong Kong, 2016). From Southeast Asia, the Philippine world is very well covered in both James Francis Warren’s The Sulu zone, 1768-1898: The dynamics of external trade, slavery, and ethnicity in the transformation of a Southeast Asian maritime state (Singapore, 1981), and in Laura Lee Junker’s Raiding, trading, and feasting: The political economy of Philippine chiefdoms (Honolulu, HI, 1999). Vietnam and Cambodia’s mainland coasts are well-described in Li Tana, Nguyen Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Ithaca, NY, 1998); Nola Cooke, Li Tana and James Anderson, The Tongking Gulf through history (Philadelphia, PA, 2011); and in Dian Murray’s excellent Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790-1810 (Palo Alto, CA, 1987). Still standing alone in its broad insights is Kenneth Pomeranz’s The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy (Princeton, NJ, 2001). A feel for the connections forged by the commodities themselves can be found in Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang, eds., Chinese circulations: Capital, commodities and networks in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC, 2011). Eric Tagliacozzo also describes the arrival of coercion into the ‘linking seas’ in Secret trades, porous borders: Smuggling and states along a Southeast Asian frontier, 18651915 (New Haven, CT, 2005). Finally, the end of old systems is laid out very well in Anthony Reid, ed., The last stand of Asian autonomies: Responses to modernity in the diverse states of Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750-1900 (London, 1997).

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Source: Armitage David, Bashford Alison et al. (eds.). Oceanic Histories. Cambridge University Press,2018. — 338 p.. 2018

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