Team 3 - East Asian Mediterranean

This team will research general themes with regard to the ‘East Asian Mediterranean’ focusing on three aspects of human-environment interaction: (i) East Asian nation states or ‘territorial’ areas versus the East Asian world, (ii) the nature of exchange relations in the Asian world with a particular emphasis on the roles played by the official Chinese state and private Chinese and foreign merchants trading in the East Asian world, and (iii) the extent of military/political or religious influence on the development of early maritime trade.

Latest Team Publications

TEAM LEADER

Angela Schottenhammer, Ghent University

Dr. Angela Schottenhammer is a Professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures of South and East Asia at Ghent University, Belgium. She has also been a Professor of Pre–modern Chinese History at the Centre of Asian and African Studies (CEAA), El Colegio de México, México; an unscheduled Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department for Asian Studies, Ludwig Maximilians University, Germany; and a Professor (Lehrstuhlvertretung) of Chinese History at the Sinological Department, Marburg University, Germany. She has been teaching at Würzburg, Leiden, Hamburg, Munich, Marburg, México and now Ghent.

Professor Schottenhammer was the Project Supervisor of "The East Asian Mediterranean, c. 1500–1850," an international research project sponsored by the VW–Foundation (05/2002–07/2009) (EAMH), and is currently establishing an internationally operating Research Centre on Exchange Relations in the East Asian World. The geographical focus of the Centre's research will be the East China Sea bordered by the three countries China, Japan and Korea, but it will also go beyond, reaching out to Southeast Asia as well as to Central Asia and Russia (notably encompassing the regions along the former "Silk Road"). This project is aimed at exploring both continental and maritime "silk routes" in the macro region of East Asia in their historical dimensions, focusing on the interconnectedness of the various regions along these two "silk routes" and investigating a wide range of sources, from linguistic evidence and archaeological findings to texts, documents and pictorial material.

Crossroads - Studies on the History of Exchange Relations in the East Asian World

COLLABORATORS

Akifumi Iwabuchi, Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology

Dr. Iwabuchi is the Professor of Marine Culturology at the Tokyo University of Marine Science & Technology (National University Corporation). He obtained his MA from the University of Tokyo in 1985 and received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 1990. Some of his recent publications include:

"Mud-Sledge Culture around the China Sea: A New Perspective on Marine Culturology." International Academic Essays on Marine Culture 2009: 5-12. Kaohsiung: Marine Technological Institute.

"Disappearing Traditional Gears: From Sustainable Fishing to Heavy Exploitation in Southern Vietnam." Proceedings of the 5th Mare Conference, "People & the Sea V." Univeristy of Amsterdam.

Tansen Sen, University of New York

Tansen Sen is Associate Professor of Asian history and religions at Baruch College, The City University of New York. Currently he is visiting senior research fellow at the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore. He received his MA from Peking University and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He has special scholarly interests in Buddhism, Sino-Indian relations, Indian Ocean trade, and Silk Road archeology. He has done extensive research in India, China, and Japan with grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Japan Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

He is the author of Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600-1400 (University of Hawai’i Press, 2003). He has co-edited China at the Crossroads: A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Victor H. Mair (special volume of Asia Major, vol. 19, issues 1-2, 2006) and guest edited a special issue of China Report (December 2007) on the connections between Kolkata (India) and China. He is currently working on a monograph that examines cross-cultural trade in Asia during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a collaborative project on the Southern Silk Road, and creating a Web site to archive the history and experiences of the Chinese community in India.

Geoffrey Wade, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Geoff Wade is an historian with interests in Sino-Southeast Asian historical interactions and comparative historiography. Currently a Senior Research Fellow in the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, he was formerly engaged with the Southeast Asia-China Interactions cluster of the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (2002–09) and, before that, with the China-ASEAN Project at the Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong (1996–2002). His online database, Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu: An Open Access Resource, provides in English translation 3,000+ references to Southeast Asia as extracted from the Ming imperial annals, while his most recent edited work China and Southeast Asia (Routledge 2009) comprises a six-volume survey of seminal works on Southeast Asia-China interactions over time. His most recent work examined Islamic networks across the Indian Ocean to 1500.

STAFF

Mathieu Torck, Ghent University

Mathieu Torck, PhD (2006), teaches and assists with research in the Department of Chinese Language and Culture at Ghent University. He deals with research themes within the discipline of social anthropology, combining perspectives from areas such as maritime, military, medical and nutritional history from Song through Qing times. He has written an extensive study on the history of scurvy in East Asia (Avoiding the Dire Straits) and recently finished a book with Ann Heirman on material culture in the Buddhist monasteries of India and China (A Pure Mind in a Clean Body). He is particularly interested in the cross-cultural transfer of technical and scientific knowledge in East Asia and beyond, and also looks at developments and changes in material culture over a wider area.

He is currently investigating the occurrence of epidemic outbreaks in China and their interconnection with climatic change from Song through Qing times. Furthermore, he aims at highlighting human interaction with epidemics and the emergence and development of specific medical knowledge that resulted from this encounter. Such themes as the significance of military medicine and the impact of military supplying on the environment will be assessed.

STUDENTS

Guang Ma, Ghent University

Ma Guang is a PhD student in the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at Ghent University. He received his MA degree in Chinese History from the University of Macau, where he focused on the opium trade and smuggling in South China in the Late Qing Dynasty. He has published several papers on the history of the opium trade and smuggling, Chinese imperials maritime customs, and Macau’s industry in the Late Qing Dynasty.

He is currently focusing on the history of maritime commerce and naval activities in Northeast Asia during the Yuan-Ming rupture by studying official documents, local gazetteers, private writings, archaeological evidence and other historical materials, especially in China, Korea and Japan (see also http://schottenhammer.net/projects/).

Wim De Winter, Ghent University

Wim De Winter has an MA in History (greatest distinction) from Ghent University, where he focused on Japanese-European exchange relations as performative elements of "intercultural connections" in the seventeenth century. He is now working towards a PhD by comparatively expanding this research into an Indian Ocean framework. His broader research interests include connected histories, methodologies of historical anthropology, and the cultural histories of Japan and North India.