The period of Enlightenment witnessed “the most important mutation in all of European intellectual history between the Middle Ages and the present.” How do you see this linked through all the readings? Were the discoveries the result of the scientific revolution in pre-modern Europe? Prove or disprove this assertion.
The Sea Common to All :
Maritime Frontiers, Port Cities, and
Chinese Traders in the Southeast Asian
Age of Commerce, ca. 14001750*
craig a. lockard
University of WisconsinGreen Bay
God has made the earth and the sea, and has divided the
earth among men and made the sea common to all.
Sultan of Makassar (Indonesia) to the
Dutch ambassador, 1659 1
The Early Modern Asian Maritime World and Economy
According to an expression common in Southeast Asia, the water unites
and the land divides. This expression came to mind when I visited the
old seaport of Hoi An (known to the French as Faifo), some twenty
miles south of Da Nang in central Vietnam, in 2007. The cities of Da
Nang and Hoi An are located on a narrow coastal plain created by siltladen rivers and separated from the districts to the north and south by
rugged coastal mountains that sweep down to the South China Sea.
* This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Seventeenth Annual World History Association Conference in London, England, 2529 June 2008. It is offered in memory
of Professor G. William Skinner, a pathbreaking scholar of the Chinese in Thailand and
of Chinas socioeconomic history, who passed away in November 2008; Paul Wheatley,
whose studies of Asian historical geography, especially of Melaka and other premodern cities, greatly influenced a younger generation of scholars; and Chen Chingho, the pioneering
historian of Sino-Vietnamese connections and the Chinese in Vietnam.
