This sweeping survey of maritime trading networks connecting China, North-East Asia and South-East Asia carries the reader from the 13th century to the present. As a French economist writing a book on history, the author's approach to the region and its economic history invokes Fernand Braudel and his classic study of the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II. But unlike Braudel, for whom the Mediterranean was a historically coherent and significant space for a particular period of time, Gipouloux views his far larger regional space as the site of different historical configurations over nearly a millennium. He begins with a set of chapters contrasting different ways in which pre-industrial trade networks have been structured. Part two examines different forms of trade in Asia, of which Chinese tributary trade looms large as the organizing framework for much visible Asian exchange between the 7th and 17th centuries. He moves on in part three to consider an era he characterizes through overlapping and competing Asian and Western trading networks between the 16th and late 19th centuries. His fourth era, which begins after the Second World War, is marked by the growth of industrial manufacturing through the region. His fifth and final period begins in the 1980s and considers the growing salience of Chinese economic and political power in the region.

Cities figure prominently in this account of Asian maritime trade. They, far more than larger territorial states – at least before the 20th century – figure as the main political spaces that are competing with each other at the same time as they are mutually dependent on effective institutions to promote exchange between them and with points beyond the region. This volume does a persuasive job of demonstrating the vibrant commerce in the region that specialists have reconstructed. By discussing early Asian commerce after a brief discussion of trade in Europe, the reader is able to appreciate the degree to which Asian commercial networks achieved the scales and sophistication that earlier generations of historians, who were focused on Europe's exploration and expansion to other world regions, never took seriously.

For China, the author makes a distinction between the coastal cities participating in maritime trade and those oriented inland. His division of the agrarian empire into two large regions is a simplification to be sure. Such a dichotomy can lead us away from recognizing the ways in which coastal trading centres can be connected to riverine ones and thus into the agrarian hinterlands that through well-developed marketing networks within the empire could connect local agrarian economies and their products to maritime trade. The pottery, silks and teas that made their way into maritime exchange often came from sites well inland from the coastal ports. The foreign commodities entering the agrarian empire in the early modern era, including silver, medicines and spices certainly entered commercial circuits well beyond the coastal trading centres themselves. Nevertheless, the author's stress on maritime ports reminds us of a world in which the Chinese participated that reached deeply into areas far from the agrarian empire.

The coverage of the post-war era highlights the competition among production centres and raises the question of where the region's financial centre will be in the coming years. Both of these important issues are framed largely in regional terms that are infrequently stressed by other observers. This is both welcome and limiting, since the possibilities and significance of regional sites of production and finance both depend significantly on the larger global economy. Overall, the author's focus helps to balance the more typical stress on globalization. Together, this work and more globally centred work promise a different kind of synthesis about the relationships among regional and trans-regional spaces.

Finally, the book considers a number of China-centred issues, including market fragmentation within the country and the importance of the maritime parts of China to its projection of political power. The issues are both timely and evolving. The challenge for readers is how to incorporate the author's sense of the maritime region's importance to the state amidst issues of market integration domestically with either other assessments of contemporary political and economic challenges or the opportunities that the country entertains; there is in addition the vast sweep of history in which neither the Chinese state nor issues of domestic market integration figure much at all. In sum, the book's reach extends into many areas and touches upon a wide range of connected subjects, for which some readers may be left wishing that the author had achieved greater integration.