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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
      This approach is at odds with the textbook account of East Asian maritime history during these nine centuries. Most scholars divide these centuries into three periods: from the late ninth century to the early fifteenth century is considered the age of expansion, thereafter to the mid-sixteenth century is one of closure, and from then to the mid-seventeenth is one of a great revival. This pattern, supposedly based upon the Chinese experience, ill fits the rest of East Asia. Korean fleets had been the principal rival of the Chinese boasts (*) in northeast Asia since at least the time of the state of Silla in the sixth century. Their demise began with the Mongol conquest of its fleet, and the succeeding Yi dynasty did little to reverse that course. The case of Japan fits this scheme even less, since the number and significance of the Japanese ships, both military and commercial, in East Asian waters generally expanded throughout these nine centuries, but for a withdrawal from the tenth to the twelfth centuries.

      But my main disagreement with the traditional periodisation concerns its inappropriateness for even the Chinese case. It treats commercial and naval fleets as one. It ignores the fact that an intimate and complex relationship between the two maritime activities of trade and war had lain at the heart of the East Asian coastal economy and political order since at least the ninth century and that this close link was broken from the late fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries to the detriment of China's foreign relations. Japanese and Chinese historians have usually focused on the relation between the peasantry and an army, forgetting the navy's relation with merchants, peasants, and piracy.

      Let me start with the section of this cycle that arouses the least disagreement, the first five centuries from the late Tang to the early Ming. Scholars have long commented on the rise of maritime trade at this time, as the increased concentration of the population in the southeastern coastal region is widely recognized to have stimulated much maritime trade, much of it to southeast Asia. New ports were opened, and old harbours dredged. Essential aids for long distance navigation like the mariner's compass and star and sea charts were discovered. Special books were published on tides and currents, along with maps of foreign countries and lists of their products. Most remarkable was the progress in boat construction. By the eleventh century, Chinese had replace the flimsy Arab crafts often lashed together by rope with bigger, sturdier, and more seaworthy boats of their own. These large boats often boasted staterooms and drinking areas, had several decks for their passengers, and even carried lifeboats.

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