Reading this book's thirty-page bibliography will be a humbling experience for all scholars, no matter how knowledgeable they are about the maritime routes connecting the East African coast, Iraq and Iran, South and Southeast Asia (including the Philippines), and East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, and the Ryukyu Islands) (pp. 243–73). Offering comprehensive coverage of the subject between 1900 and 2018, the bibliography includes only a handful of items written in 2019 and 2020—and it seems likely that COVID-related problems delayed the book's publication until now.

The best way to read Geoffrey C. Gunn's Imagined Geographies may be to toggle between the bibliography and the running text. The introduction, chapter 1, and the afterword treat the overall field; chapters 2–6 explore the geographical understandings of Greater India, the Arab world, China, Japan, and Australia; and chapters 7–10 offer more focused studies of global port cities, marine archaeology, Ryukyu trade, and Macau.

Students new to the subject may find Gunn's book difficult to understand. Oddly for a book about the history of geographic understandings, it contains just three schematic maps: Map 2.1, “Historical empires: first millennium”; Map 7.1, “Trade circuits: second millennium”; and Map 8.1, “Ceramic production sites and junk trade ports, c. sixteenth to eighteenth centuries” (pp. 49, 171, 180). The book has fourteen attractive color plates, but longer, more detailed captions would have been desirable.

The target audience for this extended bibliographic essay is professional historians hoping to expand their knowledge of maritime Silk Road studies. Such readers will note the chronological breakdown proposed by Gunn: “What is proposed here is a broad schemata corresponding to, respectively, the Roman-era Indian Ocean trade system, the Thirteenth-Century World System, the Chinese century (pending the Great Ming withdrawal), the modern world system, the Canton (Guangzhou) trade system, and the age of imperialism” (p. 18). The names of certain scholars come up again and again—Janet Abu-Lughod (the Thirteenth-Century World System is hers), Michael Flecker, Victor Lieberman, John Miksic, Hyunhee Park, Anthony Reid, and Geoff Wade—and, indeed, these are the major scholars that everyone should read first.

Gunn attaches great importance to a chronology proposed in 1990 by Ikuta Shigeru, a professor at Japan's Daito Bunka University at a conference at Hoi An: stage 1, 150 BCE to 450 CE, when China and India were each other's main maritime trading partners and China exported gold; stage 2, 450–1550 CE, when China imported precious metals; and stage 3, 1550–1681, when “the days of the great port cities were over.”Footnote ¹ While Ikuta's attention to China's metal imports and exports is insightful, shipwreck excavations and other new research since 1990 have completely upended his generalizations about the Chinese economy.

Gunn explains this chronology more fully, but the book consistently glosses over the significant changes taking place in the Chinese maritime world between 1000, when the Song dynasty export economy took off, and 1433, when the Zheng He voyages came to an end (pp. 18–22). Gunn takes a surprisingly traditional view of Chinese knowledge of the outside world, concluding that Chinese “renditions of the known world, whether cartographic or entering the dynastic record, were Sino-centric and culture bound” (p. 111). Less familiar with Chinese materials than those from the other places he writes about, Gunn makes easily avoidable errors in pinyin (which the Hong Kong University Press proofreaders should have caught). Of course, no bibliography can be all-inclusive, but one book not listed would have strengthened the book considerably: John W. Chaffee's The Muslim Merchants of Premodern China.Footnote ²

The book offers good coverage of two important topics: port cities and shipwrecks. It focuses on four port towns that boomed before the arrival of Westerners—Malacca, Palembang, Hội An, and Quanzhou—and seven colonial ports—Jakarta, Manila, Rangoon, Saigon, Penang, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Chapter 8, “The Evidence from Marine Archaeology,” does a particularly fine job of highlighting the most important shipwrecks in Indian and Pacific oceans (pp. 177–96).

Covering a huge geographical expanse, Gunn concludes that “maritime trade demonstrated remarkable continuity” between 100 and 1800 and that the ceramics trade played a key role before and after the arrival of the Western powers (p. 196). The book's contribution is crystal clear: it is a must-read for anyone wanting to learn about the maritime history of the Silk Roads.