A Maritime History of East Asia takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the history of a region from the perspective of the interactions that occurred on and were facilitated by the sea. The book is divided into three parts that each focus on a different hundred-year period between 1250 and 1800, characterized by ‘openness’, ‘competition’ and ‘compartmentalization’ respectively. The chapters in each part examine the people, goods and information, that flowed across the seas of the East Asian maritime world, facilitating cultural exchange and hybridity. The intricate and often fraught relations between China, Japan and Korea feature throughout, as well as those between these polities and the waves of outsiders that sought to trade with them and to conquer them. Regional diplomacy, ship-building technology, weaponry, Wokou pirate bands, the fates of castaways and the development of international trade networks are just some of the topics that paint a vivid picture of the interconnected world of the East Asian maritime region during this period.

Masashi Haneda is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia and vice- president in charge of global engagement of the University of Tokyo. He specializes in the field of world/global history and has published a number of academic works not only in Japanese, but also in English, French and Chinese, including Toward the Creation of a New World History (Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture, 2018), and Gurobaru hisutorii-to higashi-ajia-shi (Global History and the History of East Asia) (University of Tokyo Press, 2016).

Mihoko Oka is an associate professor of the Historiographical Institute, the University of Tokyo. Her interests are broadly in the area of the maritime and economic history of East Asia in relation to European countries during the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. She won the “17th Tçuzu Rodrigues Prize” (Prémio Literário “Rodrigues, o Intérprete”) for her monograph The Namban Trade: Merchants and Missionaries (University of Tokyo Press, 2010, in Japanese), and has also published numerous academic articles on Kirishitan history in Japan.

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