Monsoon Asia

The maritime southern rim of Asia, from the Arabian Sea in the west to the South China Sea in the east, has been the most important axis of long-distance travel, trade, and cultural exchange in human history. As a result, the countries of South and Southeast Asia, from Pakistan to Indonesia, have important aspects of historical experience in common. Twentieth-century geopolitics, however, have led South Asia and Southeast Asia to be treated in scholarship and education as two distinct fields of study. The purpose of the present reader is to contest this conventional metageographic divide by bringing together scholars of South or/and Southeast Asia from diverse disciplines to reflect, through their own work, on the possibility and utility of conceiving the two areas as a single overarching region, referred to here as Monsoon Asia.