ABSTRACT
Past Indian Ocean scholarship focusing on the Ming era has been prejudicial to the China to South India to Middle East passageway of the Indian Ocean trade, with little substantive evidence documenting the details of the Bay of Bengal, Straits of Melaka, and Java Sea passageway between eastern India and China. O. W. Wolters cautioned that one needs to be careful using the Ming-era sources, in which there was regular embellishment of accounts that had their origin in earlier Chinese dynastic texts. Yuan and Ming court maritime initiatives may be seen as reactive not to a generalized decline of Asian maritime trade, but due to China’s concern that it was becoming a peripheral player in the maritime marketplace network. Since World War II, Western scholars have tended to think in terms of modern political entities rather than regional communication networks. The point is that historians must rethink sense of boundaries to reach a new understanding of the international maritime trade.
