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.

Singapore is renowned for the delightful cuisines that can be found in its hawker centres. Travellers herald from across the globe simply to taste dishes like chicken rice, laksa, and chilli crab. In 2020, 'Hawker Culture in Singapore' was selected to be on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, a firm acknowledgement towards the impact and influence of hawking in Singapore's history. Less widely known is this—though now synonymous with Singaporean culture, the fate of hawking once hung in the balance.From Streets to Stalls traces the longue-durée history of hawking in Singapore and how it has evolved. This book highlights the challenges hawkers had to overcome before achieving their celebrated status in Singapore and around the world. It also delves into the policies implemented to enact hawker reform and regulation, and explores how hawker centres have been transformed into essential third spaces that promote social mingling and support Singapore's founding principles of multiculturalism.Taking readers through time, From Streets to Stalls investigates the origins of hawking in ninth-century Singapore and ends with a commentary on the present-day sociocultural importance that it retains.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book examines the large but neglected topic of the development of maritime power from both an historical and a contemporary point of view. Navies have never been more important than they are now, in a century becoming, as widely expected, increasingly and profoundly maritime. The growing competition between China and Russia with the United States and its allies and partners around the world is essentially sea-based. The sea is also central to the world's globalised trading system and to its environmental health. Most current crises are either sea-based or have a critical maritime element to them. What happens at sea will help shape our future. Against that background, this book uses both history and contemporary events to analyse how maritime power and naval strength has been, and is being, developed. In a reader-friendly way, it seeks to show what has worked and what has not, and to uncover the recurring patterns in maritime and naval development which explain past, present and future success - and failure. It reflects on the historical experience of all navies, but in particular it poses the question of whether China is following the same pattern of naval development illustrated by Britain at the start of the 18th century, which led to two centuries of naval dominance. This book will be of much interest to students of maritime power, naval studies, and strategic studies, as well as to naval professionals around the world.