Takeshi Hamashita

The author of four major books and many articles (and the co-author or co-editor of four additional books), Hamashita works on topics as diverse as East Asian trade and diplomacy, the maritime world, economic development, Chinese and Japanese foreign relations, state-formation, East Asian industrialization, the Chinese diaspora (especially in the European colonies of Southeast Asia), and more. Because his work brought to light the existence and importance of mercantile and other networks that ran from present-day Singapore to Hokkaido in early modern times, he changed our notions of what was and was not new about the arrival of Europeans in East and Southeast Asia, and thus about what modernity means in the context of East Asian history.