Podcast with Eric Tagliacozzo, author of “In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama”

Eric Tagliacozzo

In the 19th century, one group of American merchants reported an odd request from the Vietnamese emperor. An envoy asked if the traders could help procure a commodity brought by a previous delegation: a precious good that turned out to be a bottle of Best Durham bottled mustard.

 

 

 In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama, Eric Tagliacozzo (Princeton University Press, July 2022)
In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama, Eric Tagliacozzo (Princeton University Press, July 2022)

That’s one small anecdote in Eric Tagliacozzo’s latest book, In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama, which charts hundreds of years of history across Asia’s waters, from the South China Sea through the Persian Gulf. Eric weaves together historical research and on-the-ground fieldwork to show how Asia’s oceans can be a better way to understand the region than its land borders.

In this interview, Eric and I talk about these Asian waters, stretching from the Middle East to East Asia, and the history and fieldwork that went into Eric’s book.

Eric Tagliacozzo is the John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University. His many books include Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (Yale University Press, 2009) and The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford University Press, 2013).


Nicholas Gordon has an MPhil from Oxford in International Relations and a BA from Harvard. He is a writer, editor and occasional radio host based in Hong Kong.