Commerce, Conflict, and Connections in the East Asian Maritime World (UCLA, HIST96W)

Course Description:

Pirates pillaging coastal settlements and interdicting shipping. Ships ladened with silver set sail. People in bondage sent off to work on plantations in faraway islands. What you’ve read does not describe the early modern Atlantic world that you’re probably familiar with, but rather East Asia between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Popular imagination has typically portrayed East Asia during this period as “closed off” or “xenophobic” or “land-centric.” Scholarly frameworks such as the “tributary system” or “Sakoku” are often deployed to explain the international relations of East Asia. All these words and concepts seek to paint East Asia as a weak and moribund region in the face of a growing, dynamic, and innovative Western Europe. But is this really the case?

This course will focus on the various types of exchanges and interactions that took place within East Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will explore 1.) how East Asian polities engaged with each other diplomatically and commercially, 2.) how they navigated the opportunities and challenges brought about by the arrival of the Europeans, 3.) the consequences and legacy of European engagement with East Asia, and 4.) how East Asia can help us understand the “rise of the West” and the making of the global world. Heavy emphasis will be placed on China, Japan, and Korea although we will also talk about the Ryukyu Kingdom in Okinawa and, to a lesser extent, Southeast Asia. Students will engage with both primary sources in translation as well as recent revisionist secondary scholarship. With regular writing assignments and feedback, students will enhance their abilities in organizing and structuring larger projects, culminating in a final paper or related project. In sum, through reading, writing, and dialogue, this course seeks to revise students’ understanding of East Asia and how the early modern East Asian maritime world shaped the world that we live in today.

Course Outcomes:

Analyze the maritime environment of East Asia between the 16th and 17th centuries, with focus on the interactions among East Asian polities and between East Asia and Western Europe.
Situate East Asia’s role in the making of the modern world.
Identify, describe, and evaluate arguments in secondary sources. Read and use primary sources with a historian’s eye: “with-” and “against the grain.”
Plan, research, and complete an analytical writing project, including practice on how to communicate arguments to an audience through outlining and turning the outline into a written draft, how to give and receive feedback on a piece of academic writing, and assemble a Chicago-style bibliography.

Select Student Testimonials:

I only took the class because it fit into my schedule and satisfied a credit requirement, but I found myself invested in the topic the longer the class went on. The texts were informative, and it was nice to read through first hand accounts from people who lived through that time. Additionally, the films that we watched were interesting in relation to the texts, and I think it added more to the content of the class. The class discussions were helpful in gaining better understanding of the texts because some where more dense.
Mr. Ha communicated course expectations very effectively and provided materials that were always interesting and useful.
Yiming’s a very nice instructor who seems very passionate about this subject (I now know a lot more about the East Asian maritime world than I ever thought I would); he’s very knowledgeable and has a lot of good insights that help us make sense of the readings.