Source: Admiral Yi Sun-shin, Hero of the Korean People by Justin Lee at http://tinyurl.com/l9fx7h5.
Feature Articles
Author: John E. Wills Jr.
Keywords: China, China and Inner Asia, World History
How to Cite: E. Wills Jr., J. (2014) “Back Out to Sea After the End of Empire: Studies of Maritime Asia Since the 1960s”, Education About Asia. 19(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.65959/eaa.1257
I was brought up amid the cornfields of Illinois, a thousand miles from salt water. I may have spent as much as a month of my life on saltwater, but only if I count the Hong Kong-Macao hydrofoil. I listen with clueless fascination as colleagues in the field who are always sailing, such as Leonard Blussé of Leiden University and Stephen Davies of the Hong Kong Maritime Museum, describe the challenges of getting the winds behind you, watching for shoals, and watching coastal peaks appear above a watery horizon. So how did it turn out that twice I ran the “maritime” flag up the mast, and eventually a few colleagues saluted?1 I began with a vague interest, to which I keep coming back, in the big question of “Why is China so big?”2 In particular, how did it happen that the big and diverse pieces of China, as big and diverse as the nation-states of Western Europe, were for long periods stable and functional as provinces of a huge empire? Part of the answer, perhaps visible in my Mountain of Fame, was the long history of a protean strand of Chinese political culture in which the elite individual esteemed human relations, guanxi, often asymmetrical, and could find self-respect in a dependent position.3 The rulers of a province as large and defensible as a major European kingdom might find positions as imperial ministers and administrators of subordinate provinces materially rewarding and full of moral integrity. Many of the provinces of late imperial China had borders with foreign peoples or seacoasts. How did that change the nature of the provincial position? Fujian turned out to be especially instructive.4 Scholarship on maritime Asia was not flourishing when I got involved in the early 1960s. There had been a great deal of archive organizing, source publishing, and scholarly writing that was closely connected to the European empires in Asia that hit the skids pretty quickly as the Asian colonies won their independence after World War II. The imperialist literature was more likely to produce a detailed biography of a colonial governor or general than anything that took seriously the ways dominated Asian peoples continued to shape their relations with their rulers and their futures. But many of the writers had rich personal experiences in imperial areas, and you could learn a lot from their books if you ignored the biases. The very name of the field in American academe, “history of European expansion,” denied the agency of the colonized. A few excellent scholars, such as John H. Parry, moved away from imperialist attitudes and sometimes taught in ex-colonies. For studies of maritime Asia, the amazing erudition and productivity of Charles R. Boxer was of immense importance. Boxer was no apologist for empires, but it’s still the Europeans who are front and center in most of his work. I caught a bit of the turning of the tide in 1963 when I started doing archival research in the records of the Dutch East India Company in the old Algemeen Rijksarchief in The Hague. I had as my strong coffee and eyestrain companions Om Prakash, on his way to being the doyen of the Delhi school of maritime studies, and two fine scholars from Ghana, Kwame Daaku and John Fynn. From my first year of teaching in 1964–65, I often taught, in addition to courses in Chinese history, a course that at first was called the History of European Expansion and later went through a variety of less Eurocentric titles, such as Europe, Africa, and Asia: Maritime Relations, 1415–1789. The new scholarship on which I could draw expanded after about 1980. Much of it was the work of scholars focused on one part of Asia or another, many of them Asian, and I was pretty sure that not many of them, as well as fewer students of early modern Europe and the Americas, would be aware of all of them. I began to work on a review article. Before I finished it, publishing in the field had exploded, and I had to limit the list at the head of my article to important books published between 1987 and 1993—twenty-four of them—citing earlier work in footnotes.5 A major conference organized by James Tracy did a lot of bridge-building between European studies and the emerging global maritime history. Historians of Indian origin—Chaudhuri, Goonewardena, Prakash, Das Gupta, Rayachaudhuri, Arasaratnam, Subrahmanyam, and more—gave us more to read about the maritime histories of South Asia, including Sri Lanka, than any other maritime area. Scholarship on East Asian maritime connections, hostage to the three great national/civilizational narratives of China, Japan, and Korea, was slower to become maritime and interactive. Work on Southeast Asia, one of the early modern world’s most important, complex, and instructive zones of maritime interaction, got some big boosts from the summarizing work and continuing conference activity of Anthony Reid, but had no boost from local-origin historians comparable to the Indian. From Nagasaki to Mocha in present-day Yemen, this new scholarship was making it clear that, while the end point around 1800 was growing European domination, that shift had been slow, contingent, and interactively shaped by the actions of Asian coastal peoples and of two great non-European maritime networks: a Muslim one reaching from the Red Sea to Maluku in eastern Indonesia and Mindanao (Philippines), and a Chinese one from Japan to Java, Sumatra, and occasionally South India. Starting in 1977, the Leiden-based journal Itinerario was another source of a new sense of community in an emerging field, enhanced by its later connection with the North America-centered and not always Atlantic- centric Forum on European Expansion and Global Integration. Occasional conferences turned into geography lessons. In 1997, our friends in Australia invited us to take some notice of the quincentennial anniversary of the voyage of Vasco da Gama. In the Perth area, we attended the dedication of a monument to da Gama, with the enthusiastic cooperation of the Portuguese community of western Australia, descendants of fishermen from Madeira who in the late 1940s sailed their craft straight across the southern Indian Ocean without benefit of modern guidance systems, a far more dangerous voyage than Dom Vasco’s 500 years before.6 Leiden worked up a very smart doctoral program for students from around the Indian Ocean called TANAP (To Assure A New Partnership). Several of these young scholars have published excellent books, and I hope they are staying in touch and giving these studies the interactive coherence that has been so fragile in it as they build careers in their homelands.7 I met with them occasionally when I was a visiting scholar at Leiden in 2005–2006 and was fascinated listening as one of them described the roles of a coastal fort, a mouth-of-river anchorage, and an upriver capital in Việt Nam; and at once others saw the similarity to the river-mouth trades they were studying, from Guangdong to Gujerat.Many of the major ports of early modern maritime Asia remain major centers of commerce and politics today, with good airline service, tourist amenities, and major relics of past centuries.
Many of the major ports of early modern maritime Asia remain major centers of commerce and politics today, with good airline service, tourist amenities, and major relics of past centuries. I can imagine a visit to several of them that would make early modern maritime Asia unforgettably vivid, and you could bring back digital images for your classes. From the outlines of the Dutch quarantine island of Deshima in Nagasaki Harbor, you might move on to the ruins of the Dutch Casteel Zeelandia on the outskirts of Tainan, Taiwan, or the older, noncasino areas of Macao. You could also move to the Portuguese fort gate, Dutch town hall, and the Chinese cemetery of Melaka (old spelling Malacca, in Malaysia), which is a short flight or day’s drive from Singapore; the old English fort and church at Chennai (formerly Madras); the wonderful old churches of Goa; and even the Portuguese fortress at Mombasa. You could try to read old tombstones in more than one European or Chinese cemetery. For me, one of the most stunning evocations of the multilayered interactive emergence of this maritime world is the Chinese cemetery at Manila, which seems not to have been well-studied and in which the central chapel among the fine family tomb complexes makes room for several Boddhisattvas and for the Crucified Savior.I would like to some day see the sites of one of the most complex and dramatic confrontations of vigorous, state-building Asian power against the rising power of the British, that of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of the South Indian kingdom of Mysore.
