Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300_1800

Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300_1800 PDF

Author: John N. Miksic

Publisher: NUS Press

Published: 2013-09-30

Total Pages: 507

ISBN-13: 997169574X

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Beneath the modern skyscrapers of Singapore lie the remains of a much older trading port, prosperous and cosmopolitan and a key node in the maritime Silk Road. This book synthesizes 25 years of archaeological research to reconstruct the 14th-century port of Singapore in greater detail than is possible for any other early Southeast Asian city. The picture that emerges is of a port where people processed raw materials, used money, and had specialized occupations. Within its defensive wall, the city was well organized and prosperous, with a cosmopolitan population that included residents from China, other parts of Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean. Fully illustrated, with more than 300 maps and colour photos, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea presents Singapore's history in the context of Asia's long-distance maritime trade in the years between 1300 and 1800: it amounts to a dramatic new understanding of Singapore's pre-colonial past.

Imagined Geographies

Imagined Geographies PDF

Author: Geoffrey C. Gunn

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2021-09-03

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 9888528653

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Imagined Geographies is a pioneering work in the study of history and geography of the pre-1800 world. In this book, Gunn argues that different regions astride the maritime silk roads were not only interconnected but can also be construed as “imagined geographies.” Taking a grand civilizational perspective, five such geographic imaginaries are examined across respective chapters, namely Indian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and European including an imagined Great South Land. Drawing upon an array of marine and other archaeological examples, the author offers compelling evidence of the intertwining of political, cultural, and economic regions across the sea silk roads from ancient times until the seventeenth century. Through a thorough analysis of these five geographic imaginaries, the author sets aside purely national history and looks at the maritime realm from a broader spatial perspective. He challenges the Eurocentric concept of center and periphery and establishes a revisionist view on a decentered world regional history. This book will definitely interest history lovers from all around the world who wants to know more about how their forebears viewed their respective region and how their region fits into world history with local uniqueness. “Gunn takes large themes and makes them understandable. He is not afraid to make the grand statement, and to look at the sweep of history all in one arc. I admire that greatly; this is not history for the faint of heart. But it is history well-done, and history that can show the forest from the trees.” —Eric Tagliacozzo, John Stambaugh Professor of History, Cornell University “This is one of the most ambitious and insightful books that I have read on pre-Modern maritime Asia. The author offers fascinating perspectives on how this vast region was imagined, charted, and experienced over many centuries. That requires mastery of an immense range of scholarship and primary sources. His aim is to knit this watery world together into a conceptual whole. This mission is accomplished with style and discipline.” —Andrew R. Wilson, John A. van Beuren Chair of Asia-Pacific Studies, U.S. Naval War College

Earthenware in Southeast Asia

Earthenware in Southeast Asia PDF

Author: John N. Miksic

Publisher: NUS Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 9789971692711

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This volume offers a baseline of information on what is known of earthenware across Southeast Asia and aims to provide new understandings of subjects including the origins of the prehistoric tripod vessels of the Malayan Peninsula and the role of earthenware from a kiln site in southern Thailand.

Geocultural Power

Geocultural Power PDF

Author: Tim Winter

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-09-30

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 022665835X

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Launched in 2013, China's Belt and Road Initiative is forging connections in infrastructure, trade, energy, finance, tourism, and culture across Eurasia and Africa. This extraordinarily ambitious strategy places China at the center of a geography of overland and maritime connectivity stretching across more than sixty countries and incorporating almost two-thirds of the world’s population. But what does it mean to revive the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century? Geocultural Power explores this question by considering how China is couching its strategy for building trade, foreign relations, and energy and political security in an evocative topography of history. Until now Belt and Road has been discussed as a geopolitical and geoeconomic project. This book introduces geocultural power to the analysis of international affairs. Tim Winter highlights how many countries—including Iran, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and others—are revisiting their histories to find points of diplomatic and cultural connection. Through the revived Silk Roads, China becomes the new author of Eurasian history and the architect of the bridge between East and West. In a diplomatic dance of forgetting, episodes of violence, invasion, and bloodshed are left behind for a language of history and heritage that crosses borders in ways that further the trade ambitions of an increasingly networked China-driven economy.

Between the Bay of Bengal and the Java Sea

Between the Bay of Bengal and the Java Sea PDF

Author: Mariana Isa

Publisher: Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd

Published: 2020-02-15

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 9814893005

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The peoples of Southeast Asia have a long history of cultural commonalities. From Sumatra to Vietnam, the inhabitants built wooden houses on poles whether they lived in flooded coastal plains or in the highlands. Their diet consisted mainly of rice and fish. They believed in common folk deities such as the rice-spirit. They chewed betel and engaged in pastimes such as cockfighting and sepak takraw. How did such features come to spread across an area of 4.5 million square kilometres? Southeast Asia – for all its diversity of ethnicity, language, religion – can best be understood as a region that has been knit together by a network of trade routes over land and sea. This revelatory new book traces the diffusion of cultures across Southeast Asia from the last few centuries BCE, by looking at trade goods such as Indian beads, Vietnamese Dongson drums, Chinese ceramics, and spices from the Indonesian archipelago. The authors take us through a host of ancient port cities, such as Srivijaya, whose fortunes were intimately tied to these trade routes, pointing out striking similarities in architecture, writing systems, and everyday customs. Richly illustrated with maps, drawings and full-colour photographs, Between the Bay of Bengal and the Java Sea is an illuminating slice of history that reveals in beautiful detail the longstanding mercantile links and cultural kinship among the disparate peoples of Southeast Asia.

Empire of the Winds

Empire of the Winds PDF

Author: Philip Bowring

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-11-29

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1786735199

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Nusantaria – often referred to as 'Maritime Southeast Asia' – is the world's largest archipelago and has, for centuries, been a vital cultural and trading hub. Nusantara, a Sanskrit, then Malay, word referring to an island realm, is here adapted to become Nusantaria - denoting a slightly wider world but one with a single linguistic, cultural and trading base. Nusantaria encompasses the lands and shores created by the melting of the ice following the last Ice Age. These have long been primarily the domain of the Austronesian-speaking peoples and their seafaring traditions. The surrounding waters have always been uniquely important as a corridor connecting East Asia to India, the Middle East, Europe and Africa. In this book, Philip Bowring provides a history of the world's largest and most important archipelago and its adjacent coasts. He tells the story of the peoples and lands located at this crucial maritime and cultural crossroads, from its birth following the last Ice Age to today.

Aspects of the Maritime Silk Road

Aspects of the Maritime Silk Road PDF

Author: Ralph Kauz

Publisher: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9783447061032

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In the recent years, trade, cultural exchange and transfer of knowledge in the Indian Ocean have come increasingly into the scope of various scholarly disciplines. The previous perception that the exploitation of this sea did only start with the European colonial expansion at the end of the 15th century had to be abandoned: The Europeans absorbed the long existing structures rather than creating new ones. This concept of the Indian Ocean as a coherent space of transfer is also adopted in this volume. Some of the articles were presented at a conference held in Vienna, while the others were supplied independently. The contributions are arranged around the two "poles", represented by the western and the eastern part of the Indian Ocean, especially Iran and China, but also other cultures and the manifold relations with the land-based Silk Road are discussed. The time frame ranges from the 14th to the 17th century.

The Malay Peninsula

The Malay Peninsula PDF

Author: Michel Jacq-Hergoualc’h

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-12-24

Total Pages: 787

ISBN-13: 9047400682

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This book attempts to evaluate the role of the Malay Peninsula as a crossroads in the great wave of commercial relationships along the maritime Silk Road from the first centuries of the Christian era to the 14th century. Through these exchanges, representatives of all the civilizations of Asia entered into contact along its shores. They left in this place a part of themselves, as can be seen in the great stylistic diversity of the religious and commercial artefacts which have been found in the area. These artefacts have been analysed and categorized afresh in the light of more precise information provided in Chinese texts concerning the nature of the political entities developing at the time: often dynamic city states or more modest chiefdoms.

The Site of the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus in Singapore

The Site of the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus in Singapore PDF

Author: Sandra Hudd

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2016-06-17

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1498524125

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The Site of the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus in Singapore: Entwined Histories of a Colonial Convent and a Nation, 1854–2015 explores key issues and developments in colonial and postcolonial Singapore by examining one particular site in central Singapore: the former Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, established in 1854 and now a food and entertainment complex. The Convent was an early provider of social services and girls’ education—almost a mini-city within walls, including a thriving community of schools, an orphanage, and a women’s refuge. World War II and the Japanese occupation, followed by the creation of the new Republic of Singapore, presented a new set of challenges, but it was the convent’s size and prime location that made it attractive for urban redevelopment in the 1980s and led to government acquisition, demolition of some buildings, and the remainder put out to private tender. The chapel and the former nuns’ residence are classified as National Monuments but, in line with government policy of adaptive re-use of heritage sites, the complex now contains bars and restaurants, and the deconsecrated chapel is used for wedding receptions and events. Tracking the physical and usage changes of the site, this book works to make sense of that eventful journey, a paradoxical journey that moves only in time, not in space, and includes abandoned babies, French nuns, Japanese bombings, and twenty-first century dance parties. In a society that has undergone massive change economically and socially, and, above all, transitioned from a small colonial enterprise to a wealthy independent city-state, those physical changes and differing usages of the Convent site over the years track the changes in the nation. The wider ongoing tensions between heritage conservation and the modern global city are explored by examining what has been chosen for preservation, the quintessentially Singaporean hybridity of the commercial reuse of historic buildings, as well as the nostalgia for what has been lost.