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Piracy and smuggling are as great a problem today as they were several hundreds of years ago. The studies in Elusive Pirates, Pervasive Smugglers, for the first time, carefully describe and critically analyze piracy and smuggling in the Greater China Seas region from the sixteenth century to the present. Because piracy and smuggling involve complex historical processes that are still evolving, to fully understand contemporary problems it is important to place them in larger historical and comparative perspectives. The essays in this book add significantly to the scholarship on East and Southeast Asian history, and in particular to the maritime history of the region we call the Greater China ...
The Golden Age of Piracy in China, 1520–1810 exposes readers to the little-known history of Chinese piracy in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries through a short narrative and selection of documentary evidence. In this three-hundred-year period, Chinese piracy was unsurpassed in size and scope anywhere else in the world. The book includes a carefully selected and wide range of Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Japanese sources—some translated for the first time—to illustrate the complexity and variety of piratical activities in Asian waters. These documents include archival criminal cases and depositions of pirates and victims, government reports and proclamations, memoirs of coastal residents and pirate captives, and written and oral folklore handed down for generations. The book also illuminates the important role that pirates played in the political, economic, social, and cultural transformations of early modern China and the world. An historical perspective provides an important vantage point to understand piracy as a recurring cyclical phenomenon inseparably connected with the past.
Pirates in the Age of Sail takes a global perspective to explore the world of pirates between the early sixteenth and middle nineteenth centuries.
A compelling study of piracy in modern South China. In Outlaws of the Sea, Robert J. Antony provides a comprehensive account of the history of maritime piracy in coastal south China from the 1630s to the 1940s. He neither romanticizes nor maligns pirates, but rather analyzes them in the context of their times and the broader world in which they lived. The author demonstrates that Chinese piracy was a pervasive force shaping maritime society as it ebbed and flowed between sporadic, small-scale ventures and professional, large-scale enterprises in the modern era. This book offers important new insights into the underside of modern China's history and the interactions between pirates, foreign traders, local communities, and the state.
This comparative study of piracy and maritime violence provides a fresh understanding of European overseas expansion and colonisation in Asia. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Spanning from the Caribbean to East Asia and covering almost 3,000 years of history, from Classical Antiquity to the eve of the twenty-first century, Persistent Piracy is an important contribution to the history of the state formation as well as the history of violence at sea.
A dozen papers from the Workshop on Qing Management and the Bonds of Civil Community, 1600-1014, held in Cumberland Falls, Kentucky in October 1998 examine the strategies and institutions the Qing government used to solve practical problems and needs of a regionally diverse and culturally complex empire. Most of the contributing historians are American. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
This open access book considers a pivotal era in Chinese history from a global perspective. This book’s insight into Chinese and international history offers timely and challenging perspectives on initiatives like “Chinese characteristics”, “The New Silk Road” and “One Belt, One Road” in broad historical context. Global History with Chinese Characteristics analyses the feeble state capacity of Qing China questioning the so-called “High Qing” (shèng qīng 盛清) era’s economic prosperity as the political system was set into a “power paradox” or “supremacy dilemma”. This is a new thesis introduced by the author demonstrating that interventionist states entail weak governance. Macao and Marseille as a new case study aims to compare Mediterranean and South China markets to provide new insights into both modern eras’ rising trade networks, non-official institutions and interventionist impulses of autocratic states such as China’s Qing and Spain’s Bourbon empires.
The Manchu Qing victory over the Chinese Ming Dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century was one of the most surprising and traumatic developments in China's long history. In the last year of the Ming, the southwest region of China became the base of operations for the notorious leader Zhang Xianzhong (1605-47), a peasant rebel known as the Yellow Tiger. Zhang's systematic reign of terror allegedly resulted in the deaths of at least one-sixth of the population of the entire Sichuan province in just two years. The rich surviving source record, however, indicates that much of the destruction took place well after Zhang's death in 1647 and can be attributed to independent warlords, marauding bandit...