Offshore Asia: Maritime Interactions in Eastern Asia before Steamships

1. Introduction: Maritime Interactions in Eastern Asia

1 INTRODUCTION: MARITIME INTERACTIONS IN EASTERN ASIA MOMOKI Shiro and Anthony REID The historical scholarship of the nationalist age in the second half of the 20th century achieved much in understanding the roots of Southeast Asian national cultures and the resilience of each of them in maintaining an autonomous dynamic despite imperial pressures. Among the models energetically rejected by that era were not only European and Japanese imperial ideas of a civilizing mission, but the “Greater India” school celebrating Indian cultural expansion in the first millennium of the Common Era,1 and Sino-centric notions of a Chinese world order extending its influence into Southeast Asia.2 The new national historians insisted on disentangling their pasts, as well as their presents, from the stories of others. Busy building new pasts to match and legitimate their new futures, they had neither time nor inclination to explore more regional themes. Comparison and connection within Asia and beyond it has only recently returned to the agenda, not before time in a globalizing world. In the West there was also much sympathy for decolonizing history and for exploring the roots of the new nationalist and radical forces transforming society. But the single-country focus was modified from the 1970s by an area studies approach to organizing knowledge, dominant in  Momoki Shiro and Anthony Reid the U.S. and to some extent English-medium scholarship more generally in this period. In the classroom, and increasingly in books that served the classroom,3 Southeast Asian history was often taught as a whole. To a lesser extent those studying China, Japan and Korea outside that region had to know something about Northeast Asia as a whole. But the more these area-focussed textbooks sought a particular character for Southeast (or Northeast)Asia, however, the more they emphasized its distinctiveness from each of the other conventional regions. The maritime and commercial character of Southeast Asia, open to external influences, was contrasted to the self-sufficient Confucian societies of the Northeast, ideologically inclined to exalt agriculture and scholarship in contrast with commerce. The fluid, plural and kinship-based political systems of the Southeast were contrasted with the relatively bureaucratic, bookish and “earthbound” states of the Confucian tradition.4 The new scholarship represented in this volume seeks to overcome this dichotomy by writing across the boundaries of area studies. By taking a long perspective it shows the extent and importance of maritime commercial linkages throughout eastern Asia from at least the 9th century of the Common Era. The attempts to introduce sternly self-reliant neoConfucian policies by the Ming in China (1368–1644) and the Tokugawa in Japan (1601–1868) could not erase the commercial interdependence of eastern Asian economies that had already become central to power structures. Rather, the new political orthodoxies drove the merchants into indirect and underground paths to maintain essential connections. The book applies two particular innovations in pursuit of these objectives. The first involves its regional scope in seeing all eastern Asia as a maritime and interdependent arena. The Chinese model, or “Chinese world order” familiar in much Chinese and Japanese, as well as Western, scholarship is thereby decentred. China and Chinese re-emerge as crucial actors, within the distinct northeastern and southeastern seas, and as the vital interface between these two dimensions. This book also pays ample attention to interactions and comparisons between Southeast Asia, the Japanese archipelago and the Korean peninsula, subjects usually subordinated to the relationships of all these areas with China. Research on these interactions is in its infancy. Comparison between the Asian “rimlands” of the Northeast and Southeast is particularly overdue for attention. The following chapter attempts it from a Japanese perspective, very aware of the weight of the middle kingdom in prior studies. While this volume was in gestation, however, two other studies made the connection in even more provocative Maritime Interactions in Eastern Asia  ways, too late for the authors in this book to utilize. Victor Lieberman developed an ambitious thesis categorizing Northeast Asia, Mainland Southeast Asia and Western Europe together as the “protected zone” of Eurasia, secure against nomadic invasions from inner Asia and therefore developing increasing coherence under indigenous leadership.5 Meanwhile Ann Kumar has argued on the basis of rice, ritual, genetics and language for an earlier connection between Japan’s Yayoi civilization and Island Southeast Asia.6 The time for such revisionism has arrived. The second innovation of this book entails a...