[eChapters]Offshore Asia: Maritime Interactions in Eastern Asia before Steamships (Introduction: Maritime Interactions in Eastern Asia)

This exemplary work of international collaboration takes an integral approach to the histories of Northeast and Southeast Asia, with contributions from scholars familiar with Japanese, Chinese and Korean academic discourse as well as that of English. The new scholarship represented by this volume demonstrates that the vast and growing maritime interactions between the countries of eastern Asia have long historical roots. The so-called "opening" to Western trade in the mid-nineteenth century was not the beginning of this process, as often assumed, but rather the return to a dynamic earlier pattern which had been interrupted by a phase of defensive state consolidation in the long eighteenth century. Asia cannot be understood without its "offshore" oceanic interactions as well as the continental ones.