Blue-Water Horizon: One Thousand Years of the Sino–Southeast Asian Embrace

Description

Eric Tagliacozzo, a professor of history at Cornell University, will give a talk entitled "Blue-Water Horizon: One Thousand Years of the Sino–Southeast Asian Embrace" for an event co-hosted by the International Studies and East Asian Studies programs as part of the Social Science Research Council's Chinese Diasporas and Transnational Public Spheres in the Long Twentieth Century grant.

This presentation takes a macro-historical look at how diasporas, trade, and networks developed in the "adolescence" of Sino–Southeast Asian contact, in the time period roughly covered by the thousand years between 600 and 1600 CE. We know very little about the "infancy" of these dealings, in the years before the T'ang. But by that dynasty, patterns of contact slowly began to develop on a more systemic basis, particularly with some of the coastal landscapes of Monsoon Asia, into and including the Indian Ocean. By focusing on export ceramics heading south and marine biota heading north, we can learn much about how networks actually worked on the oceanic pathways of Asia. Southeast Asia was the pivot between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean: two vast "blue-water horizons."

Eric Tagliacozzo is the author of Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier (Yale, 2005), which won the Harry Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies, and more recently of The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford, 2013). He is also the editor or co-editor of ten other books, including the Asia Inside Out trilogy from Harvard University Press. He is the director of Cornell's Comparative Muslim Societies Program and Modern Indonesia Project, and he serves as editor of the journal Indonesia.

Please attend the event by using the Zoom link.