The Port (present-day Hà Tiên), situated in the Mekong River Delta and Gulf of Siam littoral, was founded and governed by the Chinese creole Mo clan during the eighteenth century and prospered as a free-trade emporium in maritime East Asia. Mo Jiu and his son, Mo Tianci, maintained an independent polity through ambiguous and simultaneous allegiances to the Cochinchinese regime of southern Vietnam, Cambodia, Siam, and the Dutch East India Company. A shared value system was forged among thei...

The Zheng family of merchants and militarists emerged from the tumultuous seventeenth century amid a severe economic depression, a harrowing dynastic transition from the ethnic Chinese Ming to the Manchu Qing, and the first wave of European expansion into East Asia. Under four generations of leaders over six decades, the Zheng had come to dominate trade across the China Seas. Their average annual earnings matched, and at times exceeded, those of their fiercest rivals: the Dutch East India ...

Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai traces the roots of modern global East Asia by focusing on the fascinating history of its seaways. The East Asian maritime realm, from the Straits of Malacca to the Sea of Japan, has been a core region of international trade for millennia, but during the long seventeenth century (1550 to 1700), the velocity and scale of commerce increased dramatically. Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese smugglers and pirates forged autonomous networks and maritime po...

This is an account of an American woman's recent travels through North Korea. Throughout her journey, she continually witnessed rundown villages, starving children with hollow eyes, haggard women crawling in the fields for single grains of rice and civilians unloading food aid at the point of bayonets.The author predicts that North Korea's economic reform, which has just started, will progress slowly, but that the country will one day be open to the outside world. It may, however, ...

Claims on the City: Situated Narratives of the Urban captures a snapshot of the events, protests, and movements that disrupt a city’s existing rhythms across cultures and nationalities and compels us to rethink our understanding of the urban. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the editors and contributors detail on-the-ground events and transformations of different cities embattled in social movements, and capture solidarities of people against the mechanisms of state and global capitali...