Rüegg, Jonas. “Review of Tagliacozzo, Eric, In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama.” H-Water, H-Net Reviews, no. 3 (2023). https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=58318.
In Asian Waters is a big, fascinating, at times overwhelming book, with which the author Eric Tagliacozzo achieves a special feat, that of writing a global history of maritime commerce and exchange that functions largely independently of Eurocentric narratives and chronologies. It does so by redefining “Asia” not as the landmass east of the Bosporus, but as a maritime zone lined up along the shores of a vast terraqueous zone that stretches from the shores of eastern Africa to the Southeast Asian Archipelago and all the way to the icy waters of the Sea of Okhotsk. Tagliacozzo’s choice to connect the histories of places as disparate as Hormuz, Zamboanga, and Yokohama around a shared maritime geography is both provocative and powerful. The book’s unconventionally large geographical and temporal scope enables new perspectives on big processes, by surveying and connecting distant bodies of scholarship.
Its great ambition, and the sheer vastness of ground covered, however, unavoidably obfuscate the book’s many arguments at times, and they program a somewhat encyclopedic tendency. Nevertheless, In Asian Waters makes an important contribution to a fast-evolving field. As historians and anthropologists explore the oceanic dimensions of their regional fields, big pictures like the one Tagliacozzo paints play an increasingly important role in facilitating transregional and multidisciplinary conversations.
Read the full review on H-Water.
