In this stimulating volume, Taglliacozzo endeavors, as he puts it in the introduction, “to tie together the maritime history of Asia into a single interconnected web” (4). In six parts and fourteen chapters, he roams the Indian Ocean seeking connections that link, over the centuries, the Ocean’s varied shores. At its center, not surprisingly, is global trade. But he also includes the rise of empires—“colonial circuits” as he calls them—and the spread of religions from Buddhism to Islam and Christianity, as well as such unexpected topics as smuggling, the growth of lighthouses, and the presumed status of Zamboanga in the Philippines as “the end of the world.” In so doing, Tagliacozzo has set himself an enormous task. He succeeds in part by focusing much of his analysis on Southeast Asia, a region that he knows well, and by confining topics other than maritime trade to separate chapters.
After an initial...