"Multi-dimensional networking: Fifteenth-century Indian ocean maritime diaspora in Southeast Asian perspective"

Abstract

This study addresses the different types of diasporic spread in the island world on the eve of European contact, in a shifting optic that raises issues of ethnicity and urbanism, and how the two are linked. By examining the wider patterns of sojourners moving through the Southeast Asia region this study emphasizes that developing urbanisms were predicated and dependent on shifting population flows, and not on the agglomeration of people in one place at one time to produce settlements of any size. The fifteenth century was the critical era, in which political embassies, trade missions, and emigration all intersected and interacted to create a world that had not existed previously. © 2006 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden.