divergent worlds

This page intentionally left blank

DIVERGENT
WORLDS
What the Ancient Mediterranean
and Indian Ocean Can Tell Us about
the Future of International Order

A M I TAV A C H A RYA A N D
M A N J E E T S . PA R D E S I

New Haven and London

 Published with assistance from the foundation established
in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the
Class of 1894, Yale College.

Copyright © 2025 by Amitav Acharya and Manjeet S. Pardesi.

All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including
illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by
Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except
by reviewers for the public press), without written permission
from the publishers.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for

educational, business, or promotional use. For information,
please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or
[email protected] (U.K. office).

Set in Janson type by IDS Infotech, Ltd.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024934521

ISBN 978-0-300-21498-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

A catalogue record for this book is available from

the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992

(Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

List of Abbreviations vii

introduction Contrasting Hegemonic and Multiplex Orders 1

1. Power, Ideas, and International Systems/Orders 19
2. The International Order of the Roman Mediterranean
(~Sixth Century b.c.e.–Third Century c.e.) 40
3. The International Order of the Classical Indian Ocean
(~First–Fifteenth Centuries c.e.) 73
4. The Rise of the Indo-Pacific and the Return of Geopolitics 109
conclusion The Past as Prelude: An Emerging
Indo-Pacific Multiplex 139

Acknowledgments 163
Notes 165
Index 227
This page intentionally left blank
 Abbreviations

A2/AD anti-access and area denial (strategies or

capabilities)
ADMM-Plus ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus
AOIP ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific
APEC Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
ARF ASEAN Regional Forum
ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations
b.c.e. Before the Common Era
BRI Belt and Road Initiative
c.e. Common Era
EAS East Asia Summit
ECRL East Coast Rail Link
EU European Union
FPDA Five Power Defence Arrangements
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
Global IR Global International Relations
HADR humanitarian and disaster relief
HST Hegemonic Stability Theory
IMF International Monetary Fund
IPE International Political Economy
IR International Relations
IRT International Relations Theory
LHO Liberal Hegemonic Order
LIO Liberal International Order

vii
viii Abbreviations

LMC Lancang-Mekong Cooperation mechanism

MSP Malacca Straits Patrol
MSR Maritime Silk Road
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NHIO Nonhegemonic International Order
(Multiplex Order)
RCEP Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership
SKRL Singapore–Kunming Rail Link
SSSP Sulu-Sulawesi Seas Patrols
TAC Treaty of Amity and Cooperation
(in Southeast Asia)
UN United Nations
divergent worlds
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction
Contrasting Hegemonic and
Multiplex Orders

Our Argument
Soon after Donald J. Trump’s election as U.S. president in Novem-
ber 2016, Foreign Affairs, one of America’s most influential policy
magazines, published a special issue under the title “Out of Order?
The Future of the International System.” It then released a book
under the title What Was the Liberal Order? The World We May Be
Losing.1 The “liberal order” it was referring to is better known as
the Liberal International Order (LIO), or, to use a variety of other
terms coined especially by G. John Ikenberry, one of the most in-
fluential analysts of that concept, American-led Liberal Interna-
tional Order or “American-led liberal hegemonic order.”2 By this,
what is usually meant is the end of the order that has existed since
at least 1945, when World War II ended. This order had been es-
tablished under U.S. hegemony, or the huge U.S. dominance of the
world at large in economic and military terms.
But a longer underlying dynamic behind that order is rooted in
the brilliance of the Greco-Roman civilization and then the rise of
“the West,” starting with the European “voyages of discovery,”
leading to Europe’s colonization of much of the world, and then to
the rise of the United States since the late nineteenth century, and

1
2 Introduction

its final emergence as the world’s strongest military and economic

power after the Second World War. The LIO also directs attention
to the rules and institutions with which the Europeans and the
Americans have organized the world, such as sovereignty, the na-
tion-state, capitalist economy and its globalization; multilateral
groups including the UN, NATO, and the EU; and Western values
such as human rights, democracy, freedom of the seas, humanitari-
anism, and international cooperation. Furthermore, the LIO’s pro-
ponents claimed that its dominance and success were due not to
the coercive power of the United States and its allies, but to con-
sent of the followers or their voluntary acceptance of the order
that offered them major economic and security benefits.
We discuss the merits and limits of these arguments and claims
about the benefits of the U.S.-led LIO in Chapter 1. What is im-
portant to note here is that these concerns about the fate of the
LIO, which would reverberate around the West, reflected the dark
and deep fears in the West about its fading dominance over the
Rest, a dominance in ideas, institutions, and innovations. Above all,
these fears reflected challenges to the West’s claim to be a superior
civilization, and the creator of the most advanced and inclusive in-
ternational order in history.
Related to the above, underlying the concern about the fading
LIO is a fear about what comes next. A variety of warnings under
different labels have been issued: the end of the nation-state and
the rise of the “civilization state,” “the return of anarchy,” or simply
“the end of world order.”3 For Ikenberry, the alternative to the
U.S.-led hegemonic order would be “less desirable alternatives,”
such as “great-power-balancing orders, regional blocs, or bipolar
rivalries.”4 Putting it more specifically, columnist Charles Kraut-
hammer, who coined the term “unipolar moment” after the Cold
War, contended that decline of U.S. leadership would mean
“[i]nsecure sea lanes, impoverished trading partners, exorbitant oil
prices, explosive regional instability”5 In a similar vein, Richard
Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations
who was also the head of the Policy Planning Bureau of the U.S.
State Department in George W. Bush’s first presidential term,
flatly asserts: “With US hegemony waning, the likeliest future is a
disorderly one.”6
 Introduction 3

Part of the reason for such dark views of the post-LIO world is
that it is discussed with little attention to history, especially the his-
tory of non-Western civilizations. Such claims marginalize the his-
tory of other polities and civilizations, including those of India,
China, and Islam, and their efforts to build international orders in
the past. Or more accurately, when these “other histories” are in-
voked, it is done with dismay and even dread. This is because the
dominant history of world order casts the Western civilizations as
the inventors or standard-bearers of progress, while the political
ideas and organizations of others are seen as dark and forbidding.
If the West’s world is gone, then those of others might return, and
that outcome would mean a triumph of chaos over stability and
progress: a perennial struggle in the history of civilization.
A related reason for the misgivings about a post-LIO world is
the close association between hegemony and international order. To
varying degrees, as will be discussed in Chapter 1, Western scholars
of international relations have traditionally privileged preponderant
power in the making of international (including regional) orders.7
In this book, we seek to move the study of international order away
from an overriding concern with hegemony. We argue that interna-
tional order is not simply a function of the power and preferences
of hegemonic actors (or powerful states). Instead, we posit the pos-
sibility of an alternative conception of international order—a multi-
plex order—which may be defined as a relatively stable pattern of
interactions among a group of states without the individual or col-
lective hegemony of the great powers. Unlike hegemon-centered
orders, multiplex orders are “decentered” orders without permanent
or fixed power, political, and ideational centers across time and
space. Furthermore, while hegemon-centered orders tend to be
bounded and closed to rival and recalcitrant states, multiplex orders
are “open” patchworks of partially and unevenly overlapping layers
of governance in deeply interconnected systems.
One such multiplex international order existed in the eastern
Indian Ocean before the arrival of European powers in the six-
teenth century c.e. This was a nonhegemonic international order,
in the sense that it was decentered and pluralistic. No single power
or culture dominated the eastern Indian Ocean in which states and
societies remained deeply interconnected so as to generate political
4 Introduction

stability and economic openness, including commerce and cultural

diffusion.
Yet, as we will show below, the international order of the In-
dian Ocean has received far less attention than the hierarchic and
anarchic orders such as those in the classical Mediterranean and in
early modern and modern Europe. In this book, to bring out the
contours of the Indian Ocean as an international system and order,
we compare it to and contrast it with the international system/
order of the classical Mediterranean, especially during the heydays
of the Greco-Roman civilization. These two cases—the classical
Mediterranean and the pre-European Indian Ocean—offer con-
trasting examples of the interplay between power and ideas in the
making and functioning of international orders. To elaborate, ap-
proaching international systems and orders as material and ide-
ational constructs, we compare the ideational influence of Greece
and geopolitical control of Rome in the Mediterranean (~sixth
century b.c.e.–third century c.e.) with the ideational influence of
India and geopolitical role of China in the eastern Indian Ocean
centering on modern Southeast Asia (~first–fifteenth centuries
c.e.). Despite apparent similarities, there are striking differences.
First, these systems/orders displayed different approaches to the
provision of collective goods by the leading power. Rome built a
powerful empire and promoted trade by directly controlling the
trade routes, with itself as the major beneficiary. The trading system
in the eastern Indian Ocean was less coercive and more open, with
more equitable benefits. Second, the two regions displayed different
ideational dynamics. While the “Indianization” of Southeast Asia
and the “Hellenization” of the Mediterranean show some similari-
ties, the former was substantially more peaceful, and a two-way
process. We explain these differences and conclude that the two re-
gions offer powerfully contrasting images of international systems/
orders. The Mediterranean conforms to the dominant theories of
hegemony which stress how hegemons create/shape international
orders, while the Indian Ocean suggests how “local initiative” can
be a central basis of international systems/orders. Simply put, it
is the Indian Ocean that offers a powerful classical precedent for
open, nonhegemonic multiplex international orders compared to
the closed and hegemonic Greco-Roman Mediterranean.
 Introduction 5

We believe that a comparative study of the two international or-

ders provides important clues to the future of international order in
the emerging Indo-Pacific. To be sure, we do not believe that history
repeats itself. But this does not make history irrelevant to the under-
standing of the present and the future. We engage in this compara-
tive historical exercise because this is a research approach that aims
“to understand real-world transformations” after providing contex-
tualized theoretical generalizations that emerge from such a macro-
historical analysis.8 We show that based on the Mediterranean
precedent, scholars associate order with hegemony. However, our
research exercise that analyzes the Mediterranean in comparison
with the classical Indian Ocean “may force us to change our views
in important ways” because these two systems were configured
differently.9
Comparative macrohistory provides us with new insights that
may be extrapolated to the present. First, history allows us to chal-
lenge the supposedly universal claims of Mediterranean and Euro-
pean international orders. According to Wang Gungwu, history
contextualizes, qualifies, and challenges the universal.10 We do not
think that Mediterranean history offers universal models for un-
derstanding the interplay of power and ideas in making interna-
tional orders, neither the model of hegemony derived from the
Roman Empire nor that of politico-cultural transformation from
the ideational influence of Hellenization. Similarly, the modern
European Westphalian model of international anarchy and order is
also not a universal model. While these concepts are important,
they should not blind us to other forms of statecraft and order
building through history, such as empires, different forms of hier-
archy, or indeed pluralist and decentered orders of the type that
existed in the classical Indian Ocean. Without history, we remain
stuck in the prison of Eurocentrism, taking the Eurocentric pres-
ent as eternal and universal.
Second, the study of the past can be useful for understanding the
present and anticipating the future. “There is no history that does not
relate to the present.”11 History allows us to identify a wider range of
possibilities in politics and world affairs, including norms, institu-
tions, and types of international orders, and anarchic systems and em-
pires. As Iver Neumann puts it, “memories of previous [international]
6 Introduction

systems are by necessity relevant for any entry into a new one. For-
mer experience and present actions are tied together.”12 In a similar
vein, Raymond Cohen and Raymond Westbrook argue that:

True, ancient history lacks “immediate relevance,” narrowly

defined. But this remoteness from contemporary concerns
is educative about such fundamental features of the con-
temporary international system as states, national identi-
ties, borders, sovereignty, government, international law,
the balance of power, diplomacy, and so on. Are these
permanent or transitory features of international life? How
have these concepts been understood in times past? Have
functional equivalents to them existed?13

Studying classical civilizations does not mean accepting a cyclical

view of history. Rather, it teaches us a wider range of possibilities
of cultural and political formations and practices that more accu-
rately reflects how we got to the present stage of world order. Such
an exercise, as Kurt Raaflaub notes, helps to “throw light not only
on common patterns and marked differences but also illustrate the
remarkable variety of responses humankind developed to meet
common challenges.”14 And to quote Wang Gungwu again, while
“[h]istory never really repeats itself and every event when closely
examined is different,” “history can teach us about [an] important
kind of reality. . . . When enough of the historical is knowable, that
might go some way in preparing ourselves for what individuals and
societies might do in the future.”15
We hold that the future world order will be a decentered or
pluralistic one, more akin to the Indian Ocean pattern than to the
Mediterranean one under Roman hegemony.
In particular, the eastern Indian Ocean provides a classical
model of nonhegemonic multiplex international system in which
the initiative of local actors helps make and shape the international
order. Our aim is not to replace the “universalism” of the West
(Greco-Roman/Euro-American) with that of the Rest (the East/
Asia). Instead, we argue that different interactionist dynamics,
both material and ideational, point toward different configurations
of power and ideas. Consequently, we challenge the theorization
 Introduction 7

that aims for universalization after studying only Western histori-

cal experiences.

Why Compare the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean?

International relations scholars in search of the origins of their
theories and concepts often begin their journey with the Mediter-
ranean worlds of Greece and Rome. As Daniel Deudney writes in
his Bounding Power: “The origin and early development of Western
political theory and republicanism in particular are intimately con-
nected with the city-states that flourished around the Mediterra-
nean prior to the Roman Imperial ascendancy.”16 Moreover, many
later philosophers whose work is regarded as foundational for
modern political theory, including IR theory, have themselves
drawn from Greek and Roman writers. To quote Deudney further:

Action and words from classical Greece and republican

Rome stand enshrined as foundational in the modern con-
ception of the West as a distinct civilization, and ancient
writers and events have exercised a startlingly powerful
presence in all aspects of Western thought, particularly
about politics. . . . For two millennia Western thinking
about politics and history has been a long dialogue with the
ancient figures of Herodotus, Hippocrates, Socrates, Plato,
Thucydides, Aristotle, Livy, Polybius, Cicero, Tacitus, and
others. The works of major modern political theorists such
as Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, are as much
about ancient writers and experiences as modern ones.17

The overall Mediterranean influence on politics, including interna-

tional politics and its theory, has taken both indirect and direct forms.
Scholars have developed theories from ideas and processes found in
the Greco-Roman worlds and extended them all the way to the mod-
ern period. In this category one might start with Thucydides’ Pelopon-
nesian War, almost universally acknowledged as the foundational text
of realism. Aside from the Roman Republic, imperial Rome has
emerged as the paradigmatic case of empires in IR literature and pol-
icy discourse. In theoretical debates or policy discourses, Rome has
8 Introduction

been “seen as . . . the archetypal empire, the epitome and supreme ex-
pression of imperial power. . . . As well as providing the template for
how an empire ought to present itself, Rome was central to modern
debates about the nature, dynamics and morality of imperialism.”18
And both as a republic and as an empire, Rome figures prominently
as the source of modern international law, and dominates debates
over the rise and fall of great powers.19
The Greek city-states and Rome figure prominently in the for-
mulation of theories of hegemony, balance of power, and literature
about the causes of war.20 The politics of Greek city-states is also
an important starting point of the liberal theory, especially as it
pertains to democracy. Constructivists have looked to the Greek
ideas of honor and hegemony and Roman ideas of law and justice
to develop cultural and normative theories of international rela-
tions. Examples include Richard Ned Lebow’s reinterpretations
of Thucydides and his cultural theory of IR, and Christian Reus-
Smit’s analysis of fundamental institutions.21 Even attempts to go
beyond existing paradigms of IR, such as the realist–liberal divide,
take off from the Mediterranean world, a key example being Dan-
iel Deudney’s republican security theory, which focuses on the re-
publican restraints on power to avoid the extremes of anarchy and
hierarchy and claims to subsume both realism and liberalism.22 In
the policy realm, analysts have compared the recent foreign policy
behavior of the United States with that of the Roman Empire.23
The Mediterranean has also influenced contemporary interna-
tional relations theory indirectly, via some of the European contri-
butions to international relations and politics. One might include
here Hobbes, who translated Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, and
Machiavelli, who borrowed heavily from the Roman historian
Livy’s Discourses to generate his own ideas about power and hege-
mony. As Barry Buzan and Richard Little argue, “Since Græco-
Roman civilization and feudalism were the antecedents of what
became all-conquering European power, they easily slip into the
position of seeming also to be the antecedents of the modern inter-
national system.”24
In fact, the influence of the classical Mediterranean is particu-
larly strong when it comes to maritime international systems. De-
cades ago, George Modelski and William Thompson observed that
 Introduction 9

our modern international system is “characteristically and impor-

tantly, an oceanic system.”25 In spite of this, the discipline of interna-
tional relations “has been a pathologically ‘landlubber discipline.’ ”26
When occasionally analyzed, international relations analyses of mar-
itime systems look toward the Greco-Roman past. According to
Modelski and Thompson, the “modern understanding of seapower
is in part a process of practical learning handed down from the
Greeks.”27 For Carla Norrlof, Pax Romana was “the first Pax,” and
Pax Britannica and Pax Americana “secured sea passages to promote
long-distance trade” analogous to Pax Romana.28
More recently, Ali Parchami has shown that Pax Britannica has
been understood “both [as] a modern incarnation of the ‘Roman
Peace’ as well as its natural successor.”29 Furthermore, this Pax re-
gime, with its “mastery of the seas” that envisaged the dominant
navy securing the global maritime commons for the world econ-
omy, “form[s] the basis of a theoretical paradigm called hegemonic
stability.”30 In fact, the importance of a hegemonic navy to secure
maritime trading systems has also entered the textbook-level un-
derstanding of international relations. After invoking Pax Romana
as “one of the earliest examples” of “hegemonic stability,” Joseph
Grieco, G. John Ikenberry, and Michael Mastanduno claimed in a
recent textbook that hegemonic peace in the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries was maintained by Britain and the United States.31
When dominant states are unable to provide protection against pi-
racy, and when the great powers struggle, “or if their presence dis-
appears from regions with active commercial maritime traffic, the
‘rule of the sea’ declines or disappears.”32 In fact, they also asserted
that “[h]egemonic peace here was not derived through direct impe-
rial control but through leadership. States within British and
American hegemonic orders became willing partners, as these
leading states used their economic, political, and military capabili-
ties to establish and maintain order—and ensure the peace.”33
However, such an understanding of maritime international sys-
tems is deeply problematic. According to Andrew Lambert, Rome
“wiped out every other navy in the Mediterranean, by conquering
the countries that owned them. . . . This was the ultimate negative
form of sea control.”34 Similarly, the denial of “imperial control,”
especially in the case of nineteenth-century Britain with its large
10 Introduction

formal empire, is also troubling. Likewise, as shown in Chapter 4,

American naval dominance was also associated with rivalries, wars,
and coercion. But perhaps the most serious issue here is the uni-
versalization of the Roman precedent—that a hegemonic navy is
required to create and maintain a maritime trading system—as a
timeless axiom of international relations after removing the histor-
ical context within which the Roman (or British/American) navy
emerged.
What if our understanding of IR theory in general, and of mar-
itime international systems in particular, was developed out of re-
gions other than the Mediterranean and by extension, Europe (the
latter as an offshoot of the former, and claiming much heritage
from the former)? Sadly, we do not know the answer to this ques-
tion, because other regions of the world have not fared as well as a
springboard for IR theory. The answer might have come from
comparing classical international systems. But this enterprise re-
mains seriously underdeveloped. Raaflaub points out that “the ap-
plication of the comparative approach to the ancient world at large
has been rare.”35 Comparative work on classical international sys-
tems is rarer still. Contemporary textbooks on IR may include a
section or two on the Chinese Warring States Period or the Maur-
yan-Indian empire in the chapters on the “history” of international
systems. But with few exceptions, these efforts scarcely amount to
a systematic and conscious effort at theory building.36 Moreover,
even in these efforts, the focus has been on land empires and conti-
nental systems created by the usual sets of great powers: Sumeria,
Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, India, and China. They have left
out other possible international systems and regional worlds, like
the maritime world of the Indian Ocean, or its segments like
Southeast Asia, where local states (or the nongreat powers) exer-
cised their agency in nonimperial and nonhegemonic international
orders.
This neglect of classical, especially maritime, international sys-
tems has unfortunate consequences. Among other things, it rein-
forces the dominant assumption among IR theorists that the very
idea of an international system represents an extension of the Eu-
ropean state system (or “Westphalia writ large”). As Buzan and Lit-
tle put it, “such conceptions of international system as we do have
 Introduction 11

are overwhelmingly biased by the structural characteristics of the

European experience.”37 The result, they argue elsewhere, is that
“Westphalia-based IR theory is not only incapable of understand-
ing premodern international systems, but also . . . its lack of histor-
ical perspective makes it unable to answer, in many instances
address, the most important questions about the modern interna-
tional system.”38
Recent scholarship has offered a broader conception of “inter-
national system” than the narrow Westphalian view that has domi-
nated the traditional IR literature. There are several aspects of this
broader conception which are especially relevant to the analytic
framework of this book (and are discussed in detail in Chapter 1).
First, the label “international system” should be applied not just to
“anarchic” systems, but also to hierarchic ones that were more
commonplace in ancient periods. Hence, empires and other types
of hegemonic/hierarchic systems are also to be regarded as inter-
national systems.39 Second, international systems are not to be seen
exclusively in military-political terms, but also by their economic
and socio-cultural characteristics. In fact, through history, eco-
nomic systems have been more “extensive” than international po-
litical systems.40 Third, the creation and operation of international
systems depends not just on material forces, but also on ideational
ones.41
In other words, international systems are constituted as much
by the flow and distribution of ideas as by the distribution of mili-
tary and economic power.42 Even in empires and hegemonic inter-
national systems, ideas can be central to their legitimation.43
Finally, international systems can be “less than global in extent.”44
This bridges the artificial intellectual gulf between the study of in-
ternational systems (favored by discipline-based IR scholars) and
those of regional systems (favored by area specialists), and allows
IR scholars to draw upon the insights of regional specialists who
tend to have a much greater historical perspective and a multidisci-
plinary approach. Hence the study of regional orders becomes an
important complement to the study of international systems. Con-
sequently, with a growing awareness and demand in the field that
IRT should broaden itself by taking note of non-Western experi-
ences, the question arises, if the history of international systems
12 Introduction

and IRT more generally were written from the backdrop of other
regions and international systems, what might it look like? Would
it be all that different?
In this book we address this question by comparing two classi-
cal international/maritime systems located within the Mediterra-
nean and the Indian Ocean (especially the eastern part roughly
comprising today’s Southeast Asia), respectively. The time frame of
the comparison is roughly the Mediterranean between the sixth
century b.c.e. and the third century c.e., and the Southeast Asia/
Indian Ocean between the first and fifteenth centuries c.e.45 We
will discuss the comparability of the two systems shortly. But the
point of departure has to do with the fact that both were essentially
maritime international systems, which, despite some obvious simi-
larities, also constituted two different paradigms of international
order. Just as the Mediterranean provided the stage for the exercise
of the power and influence of its two greatest classical powers,
Greece and Rome, Southeast Asia was one of the crucial stages for
the “international” role of classical Asia’s greatest powers, India and
China.46 It has been said that while the Greek role in the Mediter-
ranean, coming first, was “essentially mental and spiritual,” the
Roman role that followed was “structural and practical, its essence
was empire itself.”47 In a similar vein, in the eastern Indian Ocean,
India and China both played major roles in shaping Southeast
Asia’s cultural, political, and strategic environment. But while the
Indian influence was mainly economic, cultural, and ideational (in-
cluding ideas about politics), China’s was mainly a geopolitical, if
not outright imperial, influence (although it also contained impor-
tant economic, cultural, and ideational elements).
There is now a considerable body of evidence that makes the
eastern Indian Ocean a natural candidate for a classical international
system, and paves the way for a meaningful comparison between the
Mediterranean and the eastern Indian Ocean. Inspired by the work
of Fernand Braudel, scholars studying Southeast Asia have already
found that the Mediterranean offers a useful point of reference for
organizing their own thinking and analysis.48 While we make the
case for approaching the Mediterranean and the eastern Indian
Ocean (centered on modern Southeast Asia) as international sys-
tems in Chapters 2 and 3, the “Mediterranean analogy” discourse
 Introduction 13

has been used to debate whether physical coherence or social con-

struction, and external influence or indigenous initiative, has been
more crucial for the making of these worlds.49 International rela-
tions scholars, including those paying attention to classical interna-
tional systems, have not been as creative, but they can learn much
from the lead provided by Southeast Asian historiography. Never-
theless, it is noteworthy that Philip Steinberg’s pioneering study of
the social construction of oceans used the classical Indian Ocean as
a typology of an oceanic space on a par with the Mediterranean.50
Although deep maritime interactions across vast spaces by dy-
namic and culturally pluralist polities make the Mediterranean and
eastern Indian Ocean systems comparable, the two international sys-
tems also differed markedly in material and ideational terms. In this
context, Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers’s distinction between
“contrast oriented comparative history” and “parallel comparative
history” assumes importance. In highlighting the differences be-
tween the two approaches, they argue:

The Parallel comparativists seek above all to demonstrate

that a theory similarly holds good from case to case; for
them differences among the cases are primarily contextual
particularities against which to highlight the generality of
the processes with which their theories are basically con-
cerned. But scholars such as Clifford Geertz in Islam Ob-
served, James Lang in Conquest and Commerce, and Reinhard
Bendix in Nation-Building and Citizenship and Kings or Peo-
ple make use of comparative history to bring out the unique
features of each particular case included in their discus-
sions, and to show how these unique features affect the
working-out of putatively general social processes.51

Instead of negating the uniqueness of each case, contrast-

oriented comparative history acknowledges it, and might even
enhance it. According to Kenneth Pomeranz, a leading global
historian, avoiding such comparison “makes it impossible even to
approach many of the most important questions in history (and in
contemporary life).”52 The aim of research then is not “the same as
seeking general laws independent of historical context. . . . [T]he
14 Introduction

test of the worth of a work of comparative history is whether it

identifies and illuminates relationships heretofore unrecognized or
misunderstood in particular sequences of historical events that have
occurred.”53 Doing so allows for “less ethnocentric appreciations of
the manifold achievements of more peoples, communities, and cul-
tures over long spans of human history.”54 The context-specific
generalizations that emerge through this contrast-oriented histori-
cal approach may then be extrapolated to other cases instead of
treating such generalizations as timeless, universal truths. In other
words, such findings are sensitive to the nature of interactions be-
tween the different political groups.
We show that the classical Mediterranean and the eastern
Indian Ocean present two entirely different images of the role of
power and ideas in international orders—a central issue for inter-
national relations theory. First, they displayed very different ap-
proaches to provision of collective goods by the leading powers,
Rome and China. The Roman Empire promoted trade by con-
quering all littoral states and directly controlling the trade routes,
with Rome as the major beneficiary in a core–periphery interna-
tional order. By contrast, the Chinese tributary system operating in
Southeast Asia was just one part of a larger interconnected network
of polities where the commercial benefits were more equitable.
While Rome exercised sea control, maritime Asia lacked such a heg-
emonic actor as it was a system where the multitudes of large and
small polities controlled only local waters at best. Second, the two
regions displayed very different modalities when it came to the
flow of ideas. Despite some similarities between the politico-
cultural processes entailed in the “Indianization” of Southeast Asia
and the “Hellenization” of the Mediterranean, the former was sub-
stantially a more peaceful and self-legitimizing phenomenon than
the latter. Moreover, while both flows had transformative conse-
quences for the local societies, the flow of ideas from India to
Southeast Asia was marked by a substantial degree of local initia-
tive and localization at the receiving end, whereas the ideational
process of Hellenization was a substantially outside-in project that
left relatively little agency for the local actors.
Hence, in the Mediterranean international system, order de-
pended mainly on superior material power and ultimately on the
 Introduction 15

coercive capacity of the hegemon. Here, order is a top-down con-

struct, a one-way street. The Indian Ocean example suggests a
more ideational and interactionist understanding of power and its
legitimation in international systems/orders. In contrast to the
core–periphery Roman Mediterranean, the eastern Indian Ocean
represents an open, decentered, and pluralist multiplex order.
In this book, our focus is not so much on which system was
more peaceful (although that can be the subject of a follow-up
study), but on whether the two systems displayed discernibly dis-
tinct features over a reasonably long period, and on the different
ways in which they established and managed order and provided
public goods of security and trade. Briefly put, we investigate two
main questions. First, what were the key differences in characteris-
tics and structure between the Mediterranean and the Indian
Ocean, especially when it came to the exercise of power and provi-
sion of public goods? A second question to be addressed relates to
the spread of political ideas. Do the materially powerful or hege-
monic actors seek to spread their ideas in the system? How does
local agency influence the spread of ideas? Addressing these ques-
tions is key to understanding whether and to what extent the two
systems represented two alternative models of international order,
and which one might bear greater relevance to the post-Western
world order which is now emerging. We undertake this extrapola-
tive exercise in Chapter 4.55

Contributions of the Book

Divergent Worlds makes a number of contributions to the study
of international relations in general and international orders in
particular.
First, it advances the comparative study of systems and regions
from a long-term historical perspective on the evolution of world
order. Few available books provide such a broadly sweeping perspec-
tive on world order, comparable to what Francis Fukuyama’s Origins
of Political Order does for domestic political systems. For example,
Henry Kissinger’s 2014 book World Order, while valuable (see Chap-
ter 1), is of limited historical depth and is rather American-centric.
Indeed, available books on the comparative history of international
16 Introduction

systems/orders with implications for world order are usually written

by Western writers and tend to be Western-centric. They highlight
the contributions of Western cultures and civilization and downplay
those of non-Western civilizations as noted at the beginning of this
introductory chapter. In some cases, these texts accentuate the nega-
tive features of non-Western civilizations, presenting them as back-
ward and static. A good example is Niall Ferguson’s Civilization.
While a few works by Western scholars, such as John Hobson’s East-
ern Origins of Western Civilizations, acknowledge the contribution of
non-Western civilizations, there is no such work on world order
written from the vantage point of regions outside of the West.56
A second contribution is to the comparative study of interna-
tional systems. While itself a rarity, mostly undertaken by scholars
from the English School of IR theory, there has been no compara-
tive study of international systems featuring maritime international
orders, especially one that treats the Indian Ocean and Southeast
Asia as an international system. Interestingly enough, however,
there is a body of work by historians that compares the Mediterra-
nean with Southeast Asia to study the concept of “region-ness.” Al-
though political scientists and IR scholars have played no part in
this debate, it is very relevant to the study of international systems,
because it deals with the very issues which are central to interna-
tional systems, including interaction capacity and outcomes (hege-
mony, anarchy, etc.). In this book, we offer the first comparative
study between the Mediterranean and Southeast Asia as interna-
tional systems from an IR theoretical perspective.
A third contribution of this book is to the literature on the
spread of ideas, both rationalist and constructivist. Our explanation
combines both material and ideational factors, but unlike the ma-
jority of work on individual international systems, we focus more
on the role of ideas than of material forces. We agree with Judith
Goldstein and Robert Keohane that “[u]nderstanding the impact
of world views on general politics or foreign policy would require a
broader comparative study of cultures.”57 While much work has
been done on the role of ideas, most of it concerns contemporary
cases. Historical investigations into the diffusion of ideas have been
rare, those of non-Western cases of diffusion rarer still. Studies of
ancient systems focus on the balance of power, leading to a focus
 Introduction 17

on material forces such as military and economic power, and ad-

ministrative capacity and organization.
In comparing historical international systems and orders, Stuart
Kaufman, Richard Little, and William Wohlforth acknowledge the
role of “intersubjectively agreed norms of international behavior”58
in constraining hegemony and ensuring diversity and stability in an
international system. But the primary focus of their volume is on
the distribution (balance) of power—as they put it, “time’s pendu-
lum swinging between balanced and unbalanced distributions of
power”—rather than on the distribution of ideas.59 It is this “swing-
ing” which is “the basic starting point of any theory of international
relations.”60 Moreover, to the extent they focus on norms of inter-
national behavior, it is not to study how these norms come about or
how they spread. By contrast, we focus on important questions
about ideas: What role did ideas play relative to material forces?
Relatedly, what was the impact of material versus ideational forces
in shaping the international system? Whose ideas mattered?
Finally, this book contributes to international relations theory
and more generally to redefining the discipline, or its progress into
the field of Global International Relations (Global IR). A key as-
pect of Global IR is to broaden its sources beyond the Western
world and its classical philosophical traditions. It highlights the In-
dian Ocean and Southeast Asia as a classical international system,
which has been neglected by IR theorists, including those of the
English School. This book thus enriches our understanding of the
precursors to the modern Westphalian system at a time when de-
mand for such investigations is growing. Such an effort is also im-
portant at a time when China and India are reemerging as major
powers in the Indian Ocean and the world at large, because it is in
this region that the contrasting “international” roles and influences
of Asia’s two major classical powers were fully demonstrated. As the
pivotal region between them, Southeast Asia was a natural ground
for their interaction then, as it might be now again.

Structure of the Book

While Divergent Worlds compares the Mediterranean and the In-
dian Ocean, the greater focus of the book is on the Indian Ocean,
18 Introduction

especially its eastern part. We use the classical Mediterranean as a

point of comparison or contrast, because, as discussed earlier, this
region has been extensively used as an ideal type of international
order by scholars, especially of IR. Hence, discussing the nature of
this idea type sets the stage for the rest of the book. But our major
focus is on the eastern Indian Ocean. The remaining chapters of
the book proceed as follows. Chapter 1 lays out the theoretical
framework of the book, which not only covers conceptual clarifica-
tions about “hegemony,” “empire,” “hierarchy,” and “primacy” but
also discusses the theoretical explanations about the relationship
between hegemony and international order and provision of public
goods. In Chapter 2, we lay out the key features of the classical
Mediterranean order (~sixth century b.c.e.–third century c.e.) in
terms of its structure or power and authority, especially the Roman
imperium as it operated in relation to its constituents or tributary
states. We also discuss the dominant flow of ideas in that order, in
this case led by classical Greece, or what is known as Hellenization.
In Chapter 3, we provide a similar analysis of the classical In-
dian Ocean (~first–fifteenth centuries c.e.), examining the structure
of authority and the flow of ideas led by China and India, respec-
tively, as well as the crucial role played by the Southeast Asian
players in shaping these interactions. In Chapter 4, we briefly dis-
cuss the more contemporary history in the Indian Ocean. After
providing a short overview of the entry of the European powers
into the Indian Ocean (toward the end of the fifteenth century)
and the period of Anglo-American ascendancy (after the nine-
teenth century), we focus on more recent developments. We draw
in sharper detail the idea of a pluralistic and decentered interna-
tional system and order which challenges not only the idea of heg-
emonic stability theory or liberal hegemony, but also the current
dominant ideas about how to organize the “Indo-Pacific” region.
Finally, the concluding chapter revisits the major theoretical argu-
ments and empirical findings of the book.
 chapter one
Power, Ideas, and International
Systems/Orders

A
central question about international order and stabil-
ity is who creates and maintains it. In international rela-
tions literature, there is a fair amount of debate over this
question. The noted scholar-journalist Fareed Zakaria
writes that “[a]mong scholars and practitioners of international re-
lations, there is one predominant theory about how and why inter-
national peace endures. It holds that the most stable system is one
with a single dominant power that maintains order.”1 But Robert
Keohane, one of the most influential scholars of international co-
operation, offers a different, although not wholly opposite, view of
a vital ingredient of international order: “The dominance of a sin-
gle great power can contribute to order in world politics, in partic-
ular circumstances, but it is not a sufficient condition and there is
little reason to believe that it is necessary.”2 Keohane argued that
international cooperation forged through multilateral institutions
among nations can continue after the decline of the hegemon that
was initially res ponsible for creating it, because once created, insti-
tutions tend to be self-sustaining.
In this chapter, we present a more radically different view. We
argue that stability and cooperation, and the provision of public

19
20 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders

goods in the international system, neither begin nor continue with

hegemony. Our goal is to construct a theoretical framework for
studying the role of power and ideas in the provision of public
goods in international systems and orders. First, we define the con-
cepts of international system, international order, hegemony, em-
pire, primacy, and hierarchy (suzerainty). Second, we discuss IR
theories, especially the Hegemonic Stability Theory (HST), that
link hegemony with the provision of public goods, especially trade
and security. Third, we discuss the concept of hegemony in con-
temporary discussions of the LIO and the limitations of that order
in explaining change, especially toward a post-Western world. Fi-
nally, we present our alternative conceptual framework, arguing for
security and trade in nonhegemonic systems, or in the absence of a
hegemon.

International System and International Order

At the outset, we need some clarification about the meaning of
the terms international system and international order. The definition
of international system follows that of the world system. F. S.
Northedge defines a system as a “regulated and orderly set of rela-
tionships between the parts such that they form a coherent but
complex whole.”3 Hedley Bull and Adam Watson view an “interna-
tional system” as a “group of independent political communities”
in which “the behaviour of each is a necessary factor in the calcula-
tions of others,” and differentiate it from an “international society,”
in which a group of states “not merely form a system . . . but
also have established by dialogue and consent common rules and
institutions for the conduct of their relations, and recognize their
common interest in maintaining these arrangements.”4 But the dis-
tinction between system and society can be blurry.5 Most interna-
tional systems feature some element of dialogue, rules, institutions,
and common interest. The difference is a matter of the degree to
which the frequency of the dialogues, thickness of the rules, ro-
bustness of the institutions, and depth and durability of the com-
mon interests vary.
Buzan and Little propose identifying international systems in
terms of three sources: interaction capacity, process, and structure.6
 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders 21

Interaction capacity “focuses on the system-wide capability of units

to maintain contact with each other by moving goods, people, and
information around the system.” It concerns the movement not
just of physical systems such as caravans and ships but also of social
systems such as “norms, rules, and institutions.” Process refers to
“the types of interaction that actually take place (e.g., fighting,
political recognition, trade, identity formation, transplantation of
flora and fauna).”7 In other words, there are different types of
interunit interactions in a system—politico-military, politico-
economic, and politico-cultural. For Buzan and Little, a “full”
international system includes all three types of interactions.8 Fi-
nally, structure “concerns the principles by which the units in a sys-
tem are arranged, and the effects of those arrangements on the
behavior of the units (e.g., anarchy, market, international society).”9
Another key concept for this book is international order. In a
well-known formulation, Bull defines international order as “a pat-
tern of activity that sustains the elementary or primary goals of the
society of states, or international society.”10 The goals toward
which the pattern of activity is geared were identified by Bull to in-
clude preserving the state system, maintaining the sovereignty or
independence of states, establishing relative peace or absence of
war as the normal condition among states, limiting violence, keep-
ing promises, and protecting property rights.11
The term international order is often conflated with the related
concepts of “world order” and “global order.” Bull argues that
while “international order” refers to relations among states only,
“world order” also brings nonstate actors into the picture and cov-
ers “social life among mankind as a whole.”12 The term world order
is also sometimes applied to a single civilization’s cultural attri-
butes, worldviews, and distinctive modes of managing interstate re-
lationships: hence the term Chinese World Order.13 Then there is
also the term global order, which Andrew Hurrell defines (using the
term global political order) as a “world made up of separate, sover-
eign states which are, in turn, linked through various kinds of po-
litical practices and institutionalized structures.”14 But this seems
rather similar to the term world order, albeit underscoring the in-
creasingly “global” nature of interactions and interdependence
among states.
22 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders

Moreover, the distinction among “international,” “world,” and

“global” orders is not sharp and clear-cut in theory and practice.
Many conceptions of international order also include nonstate ac-
tors (Bull’s criteria for how an international order becomes a world
order). And the terms international and world are easily mixed up.
For example, the term widely used to describe the post–World War
II international order, the Liberal International Order, is often used
interchangeably with the Liberal World Order. As Amitav Acharya
has argued, however, the Liberal Order was never really worldwide
in scope. Rather, it functioned mostly as a transatlantic club, with
the limited participation of a few other nations like Australia, while
the majority of nations, including China and India, stayed out of it
for large parts of the Cold War.15 And the term global order remains
aspirational.
Kissinger’s observation that “[n]o truly global ‘world order’ has
ever existed” is especially pertinent here, although the British em-
pire and American-led order came close.16 In Acharya’s view, creat-
ing a truly global order requires overcoming identity divides
between the “West” and the “Rest,” and the former’s recognition
and respect for the agency of the latter in building the current inter-
national order (as well as historical orders, the theme of this book).17
Yet, the West–Rest divide, while blurring in economic and military
terms, remains alive in political, ideological, and policy terms, as
shown by Western rhetoric and the non-Western response to the
Russia–Ukraine war.18
We do, however, differentiate between international systems
and international order. While international system is a broad
framework or arrangement of political, economic, and cultural re-
lationships among states, an international order refers to the out-
come of those relationships viewed in terms of stability and other
goals desired by actors, such as trade, political legitimation, and
cultural and religious learning. In other words, a system refers to
units—states or empires—in a connected or interdependent rela-
tionship, but it does not necessarily tell us about the outcome of
that relationship, that is, whether it produces greater predictability,
stability, peace, and other desirable outcomes. In contrast, order is
not just about a structure but also has some function and purpose.
Scholars have associated order with a security purpose, or “domi-
 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders 23

nant patterns of security management.”19 Order is also about sta-

bility. The Oxford English Dictionary defines world order (which can
easily apply to international order) as “an international set of ar-
rangements for preserving global political stability.”20
Whatever term one may use, order is something more than sys-
tem. It is important to stress the functions of order, not just its
structure. This can be confusing, as order can also simply mean a
given situation or configuration of institutions and arrangements in
a large part of the world at a given period of history. Order in this
sense is “a description of a particular status quo.”21 According to the
Macmillan English Dictionary, world order means “the political, eco-
nomic, or social situation in the world at any particular time and
the effect this has on relationships between different countries.”22
But this tells us little about the functions or outcome of these ar-
rangements, or to what end they were created and maintained.23
To put it differently, the notion of an international system refers
to a structure in which the units are fairly interdependent, whereas
international order relates to the goals or functions of that structure
in achieving some desired outcomes. But the two are linked: some
features of a system are closely related to the type and quality of the
order; one which is especially important to this book is the reliance
on coercion to provide public goods or the transmission of ideas
and culture. Although a Rome-centered core–periphery hegemonic
order existed in the Mediterranean for the benefit of Rome (and
Italy), the decentered and multiplex order of the classical Indian
Ocean provided more equitable benefits to the actors that main-
tained their politico-cultural diversity while obtaining simultaneous
advantages from maritime trade.
But order is not the same as peace. Rather, it refers to stability.
Karl Deutsch and David Singer define it as the “the probability that
the system retains all of its essential characteristics; that no single
nation becomes dominant; that most of its members continue to
survive; and that large-scale war does not occur. And from the more
limited perspective of the individual nations, stability would refer to
the probability of their continued political independence and terri-
torial integrity without any significant probability of becoming en-
gaged in a ‘war for survival.’ ”24 As we have seen, Bull’s definition of
international order also speaks to the relative peace or “the absence
24 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders

of war . . . as the normal condition” among states as well as “limita-

tion of violence.” But the key word is “relative.”
But we offer an expanded notion of international order. While
it refers to the absence or relative paucity of “large-scale war,” it
also goes beyond survival to other elements, including rules. We
accept Muthiah Alagappa’s notion of international order as “rule
governed interaction,” “whether interstate interactions conform to
accepted rules.”25 Moreover, we include in order economic open-
ness including freedom of commerce, acceptance of religious and
cultural diversity, and nonviolent ways of achieving political legiti-
mation, especially legitimation through ideas and norms. Indeed,
this book gives more play to the role of ideas and norms that shape
international order, including practices and institutions of stability
management. Hence our understanding of international order fol-
lows recent constructivist scholarship in giving emphasis to ideas,
norms, and legitimacy in conceptualizing international order.26
To sum up, in this book we use the term international order to
describe the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean areas. These were
certainly not “global” in scope. In recent centuries, with the expan-
sion of Europe through imperialism and colonization, both regions
acquired global importance and are more connected with each other
than ever before. But we do not think either area represents the “so-
cial life of mankind as a whole,” that is, all of the globe. Similarly,
neither area was of a global scope, especially in the precolonial pe-
riod. And while mindful of the overlap between “international” and
“world,” we focus on regionwide cultural and political practices and
interactions, rather than individual civilizations. Hence international
order seems more appropriate than global order for the purposes of
this book.
We are conscious that the term international may be inappro-
priate for both regions, since it describes structures and interac-
tions that prevailed before the rise of the sovereign nation-state.
But this has not prevented scholars from using “international” to
describe systems and orders in the premodern period.27 While we
acknowledge that the modern Westphalian sovereignty is much
more legalistic and institutionalized than pre-Westphalian ones,
whether in Europe or elsewhere, this did not mean classical states
did not have any sense of sovereignty.28
 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders 25

In the following two chapters we show that both the classical

Mediterranean and the classical Indian Ocean were “full” interna-
tional systems, as interunit interactions included politico-military,
politico-economic, and politico-cultural processes. However, these
interactions produced very different outcomes: a hegemonic order
in the Mediterranean and a nonhegemonic and decentered order
in the Indian Ocean. To make this point, we now turn to the term
hegemony.

Hegemony
Hegemony is one of the most commonly used but contested ap-
proaches to understanding the role of power in the making of in-
ternational order. Most debates about hegemony revolve around
two key questions: (1) Is it material and/or ideological, or both?
And (2) what are the functions of hegemony and how does a hege-
mon provide collective goods, through force/caprice or sacrifice/
benevolence?
It is necessary to clarify some key concepts. The first and most
important one is hegemony. In international relations literature,
the concept of hegemony is imprecise and contested. Part of the
reason is that it is conflated with “hierarchy,” “empire,” and “pri-
macy.” According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, hegemony
refers to the “preponderant influence or authority over others”
and the “social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted
by a dominant group.”29 For John Mearsheimer, “a hegemon is a
state that is so powerful that it dominates all other states in the
system.”30
Later conceptions of hegemony moved it beyond material ca-
pabilities. The most important reformulation relies on the Gram-
scian notion, which rejected traditional Marxism’s emphasis on
coercion while focusing on consent and went beyond economic fac-
tors to ideological ones. Hegemony is achieved through both coer-
cion and consent, but consent is more important. For Robert Cox,
hegemony implies “dominance of a particular kind” in which a
“dominant state creates an order based ideologically on a broad
measure of consent, functioning according to general principles
that in fact ensure the continuing supremacy of the leading state . . .
26 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders

but at the same time offer some measure or prospect of satisfaction

to the less powerful.”31 Consent is achieved through ideological
consensus.
International institutions play an important role in achieving
consensus and legitimizing hegemony. For Cox, global and regional
institutions both reflect and consolidate hegemonic power.32
Weaker actors remain passive and accept the hegemon’s prefer-
ences due to the benefits they receive. Furthermore, a hegemonic
order appears universal, or is presented as universal. “To become
hegemonic, a state would have to found and protect a world order
which was universal in conception . . . an order which most other
states . . . could find compatible with their interests.”33 As will be
discussed in the next section, the liberal institutionalist view of Lib-
eral Hegemonic Order, developed by G. John Ikenberry, applies
this Gramscian and Coxian notion of hegemony to LIO, but leaves
out coercion altogether.
The notion that hegemony is based on consent calls attention
to the role of ideas, since ideas play a crucial role in legitimizing
hegemony so as to make it consensual. But while many scholars ac-
cept that hegemony is both material and ideational, ideational fac-
tors are less emphasized or used to a limited degree. Although Cox
argued that “material relations and ideas are inextricably inter-
twined to co-produce world orders,” his own position is deeply
conditioned by historical materialism, with transnational produc-
tion conditioning political, ideological, and military relations.34
Hence his redefinition and broadening of hegemony offers a lim-
ited and conditional view of autonomy to ideational forces.
Moreover, such an ideational conception of hegemony is
really about ideology. Ideology is a key instrument of legitimation.
Ideational hegemony is not the same as ideological hegemony. Ide-
ological hegemony is closely related to power, or material hege-
mony, even soft power. It also connotes harm. Thus, “[i]deological
hegemony occurs when an individual takes part in reinforcing
power structures and societal ideas willingly, even when these struc-
tures and ideas are harmful or silencing for those without access to
power.”35 “Ideology” is not the same as “ideational.” Ideology is al-
ways an adjunct of power. All ideologies are ideational, but not ev-
erything ideational is ideological. Ideational influence or even
 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders 27

dominance does not imply harm, and is more voluntary. And it is

not linked to material power. It can occur without imperialism/
hegemony (classical Indian versus classical Chinese influence in
Southeast Asia). Sometimes, materially weaker states can have ide-
ational influence over stronger ones (classical Greece over Rome).
The term hegemony is often conflated with a variety of interna-
tional orders. Empire is a more commonly used term.36 But there
are differences between hegemony and empire. The former can
exist without the latter. The United States today is not an empire,
but is often referred to as a hegemon. Moreover, empires have ter-
ritorial boundaries, even if they are not strictly defined or en-
forced. Hegemony is more fluid and indeterminate. One popular
perspective is that while empire involves direct control or domi-
nance, hegemony implies indirect dominance. Another perspective,
offered by Michael Doyle, holds that in an empire, the leading
power shapes both the domestic and foreign policy of another
state, while in a hegemony, it controls only the latter.37 But this
view is not accepted by everyone who uses the term hegemony to
study international orders.
Empire has contemporary relevance to IR. Some scholars hold
that empire is not only more common through history than West-
phalian “anarchical” systems, but also that imperial systems con-
tinue to have resonance in the current international order. As Tarak
Barkawi and Mark Laffey put it, the “Westphalian models of the
international obscure the role of imperial relations in world poli-
tics.” If one views international relations “as a ‘thick’ set of social
relations, consisting of social and cultural flows as well as political-
military and economic interactions,” then such relations “often
take place in a context of imperial hierarchy.” Hence “retrieving”
the idea of empire as an analytic category “offers a way out of the
‘territorial trap’ set by Westphalia and alerts us to a range of phe-
nomena occluded by IR’s central categories.”38
Another relevant concept here is hierarchy. Kenneth Waltz
defines a hierarchical order as a system in which “political actors
are formally differentiated according to degrees of their author-
ity.”39 Barry Buzan and Richard Little offer more clarity by defin-
ing hierarchy as a “political structure in which units relate in a
subordinate-superordinate relationship [emphasis added].”40 But this
28 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders

is too general. Indeed, some conceptions of hierarchy are too

all-encompassing. David Lake, for example, distinguishes among
four types of hierarchical institutions: spheres of influence, protec-
torates, informal empires, and empires.41 While this differentiates
hierarchy from Westphalian “anarchy,” it becomes too broad a cat-
egory to have much analytical usage. The real indicator of hierar-
chy is the absence of direct control or the preservation of the
relative autonomy of the weaker or subordinate actors, which is the
case with empires. In the end, it comes down to the degree of con-
trol/autonomy.42 David Kang holds that “hegemony is overarching
and more intrusive” than hierarchy. He adds that while hegemony
“focuses the bulk of its attention to the largest power,” “hierarchy
is more concerned with the interaction of states up and down the
hierarchy. . . . In hierarchy, independent sovereign states accept the
central position of the largest in the system but are fully functional
on their own terms.”43
Sometimes hierarchical orders are conflated with suzerainty.
Suzerainty, defined literally as “the right of a country to partly con-
trol another,” may imply widely varying degrees of control through
a variety of means.44 Like hierarchy, suzerainty refers to the rela-
tionship between a superior power and a weaker state. Although
the word vassal is often used to describe the position of the weaker
state in a suzerain system, the weaker state maintains its sover-
eignty. However, it is limited in being able to take independent ac-
tion in foreign policy, and sometimes in the domestic sphere,
without the consent of the superior power. The notion of superior-
ity in a suzerain system can be in terms of material power or cul-
tural prestige or both. While suzerain systems are different from
empire, since no direct political control is involved, the superior
state may offer protection to the weaker state and confer legiti-
macy on its ruler. While this may also be true of a hierarchy, suzer-
ainty is much more limiting of the domestic and foreign policy
autonomy of the weaker state.45 In other words, suzerainty is much
more intrusive for the weaker state than hierarchy but less intru-
sive than empire, although the degree of autonomy of the weaker
state can vary from case to case. Furthermore, hierarchy is mainly
symbolic and mostly reliant on cultural prestige, as well as being
driven by a desire on the part of the weaker state to emulate the
 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders 29

political and economic system of the superior state, while obtain-

ing economic and diplomatic privileges such as in trade and diplo-
matic recognition.
Although hierarchical systems are found in all civilizations, one
of the most well studied examples is the Chinese tributary system
that is believed to have lasted for centuries, most notably from the
Tang to early Qing dynasties.46 This order was underpinned by a be-
lief that “China was the superior centre and its ruler had duties to-
ward all other rulers as his inferiors.”47 However, as has been argued
recently, this idea of hierarchy did not imply Chinese “centrality.”48
This notion of hierarchy was in marked contrast to the European
system of nation-states that were “equal in sovereignty and mutually
independent within the cultural area of Christendom.”49
Hierarchical orders like the Chinese tributary system are
sometimes presented as more benign than empires. This might
seem so, but it is not necessarily always the case. As Acharya has ar-
gued in response to Kang’s depiction of East Asia’s hierarchical
order: while the Chinese order contained benevolent ideas such as
the “impartiality” of the emperor (that China did not “discriminate
among foreign countries and treated everyone equally”), this did
not mean that everyone was “equal to the emperor, but [only that]
they were equal in the eyes of the emperor.”50 Moreover, despite
claims about its inclusiveness and peacefulness, the “Chinese world
order actually operated on the basis of a pragmatic realpolitik, with
power and security being major considerations and force being an
important instrument.”51
Hence, sometimes the Chinese accepted the equal status of
neighbors that they could not conquer or control by force, as was
the case with the Han dynasty’s relationship with the Xiongnu fed-
eration, the Tang’s relationship with Tibet, and the Song’s relation-
ship with the Mongols, who would ultimately defeat the Chinese.
When the power gap was large, the Chinese did resort to the use
or threat of force. The Ming emperor Yongle invaded northern
Vietnam, and the Ming also maintained an “aggressive policy to-
wards China’s neighbours overseas” as explained in Chapter 3.52
The famed voyages of Ming admiral Zheng He included show of
force and military intervention in conflicts in Sumatra and Sri
Lanka.53 Although the Chinese order did not create an empire as
30 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders

vast as the later empire of the European powers, under both Han
and later rulers (Yuan and Qing) China did incorporate formerly
independent Xinjiang and Yunnan into the Chinese empire. Hence
Andrew Nathan and Robert Ross aptly note that “[t]he Chinese are
capable of peace as well as war.”54
Finally, there is the more contemporary notion of primacy. But
sometimes, hegemony and primacy are not distinguishable. Barry
Posen views “primacy” as “essentially hegemony.”55 Like hege-
mony, primacy requires a preponderance of material power.56 Jo-
seph Nye, one of the main believers in American primacy, carefully
distinguishes primacy from hegemony and defines the former as
the “disproportionate (and measurable) share of all three kinds of
power resources: military, economic, and soft.”57 But how much
does soft power matter in this equation? Can a nation establish pri-
macy only or mainly through soft power? While one can find some
important differences among concepts such as hegemony, empire,
hierarchy, and primacy that link power, ideas, and international or-
ders, from the preceding discussion one thing stands out. As Mark
Beeson notes, “All of these approaches are united by their efforts to
explain the pivotal role played by the most powerful state of a spe-
cific era in underpinning particular international orders.58
After highlighting this, we now move to discussing some of the
theories of international order that see hegemony as an important
and even essential condition of international order, with order
viewed in terms of security/stability. But our notion of stability, as
discussed above, covers not only the physical security of states, but
also the stability of commerce, and associated rules and norms, that
supports the maintenance of an international system and order.
Here two theoretical perspectives are especially important: Hege-
monic Stability Theory (HST), and Liberal Hegemony or Liberal
Hegemonic Order (LHO). Although developed at different stages
by different scholars, these two are closely related: both take “he-
gemony as the most likely condition for international stability.”59
Zakaria, as cited above, merely restates the views of many others,
such as A. F. K. Organski, for whom “[a]t any given moment the
single most powerful nation on earth heads an international
order.”60 He adds, “the periods of known preponderance are peri-
ods of peace.”61 Both theories link a preponderant power and the
 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders 31

provision of international public goods, including but going be-

yond security and commerce.

From Hegemonic Stability to Liberal Hegemony

While HST is often presented as a general theory of international
order, its specific focus is to link hegemony with public goods. The
theory is originally traced to American economist Charles P.
Kindleberger in his 1973 book The World in Depression: 1929–
1939.62 Kindleberger argued that the economic chaos that afflicted
the world during the early-to-mid-twentieth century could be
blamed in part on the fact that no nation had a globally dominant
economy. It is often forgotten that Kindleberger neither advocated
hegemony as a desirable international order, nor viewed it as some-
thing that is possible to create. Quite the contrary.63 But his expla-
nation of why the Great Depression might have occurred was
raised by IR/IPE scholars to the status of a macro-theory or meta-
narrative linking international stability with a preponderance of
power by a single nation. Moreover, while Kindleberger was con-
cerned mainly with economic order, his view was transformed to
associate hegemony with all sorts of things, including peace and
stability, economic welfare, and institutional efficacy.
At its core, HST holds that “cooperation and a well-function-
ing world economy are dependent on a certain kind of political
structure, a structure characterized by the dominance of a single
actor. . . . Both Great Britain in the nineteenth century and the
United States after World War II helped bring about an interde-
pendent and overall peaceful world.”64 Like Britain, the United
States benefited from free trade, while offering incentives to lesser
states which in turn benefited from access to the U.S. market and
security protection under the American security umbrella. How-
ever, to a far greater extent than British hegemony, HST became a
narrative about the emergence and consequences of American
hegemony. It served as a principal focal point for legitimizing U.S.
hegemony, and though initially a theory of political economy, ex-
tended to all aspects of the U.S.-led international order.65
HST has been a major influence on American discourses about
emergence, persistence, and change in the contemporary international
32 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders

order.66 Isabelle Grunberg suggests that the endurance of HST had to

do with the fact that it is “comprehensive” or “so elegant while at the
same time encompassing so much.”67 She likens HST to a “fantasy”
that captured the “American political imagination” and that “lingers in
the mind long after it has proved fallacious.”68 But the theory was
“updated” from the British era to capture the much larger role of in-
ternational institutions that emerged in the post–World War II period.
It has been used to explain the U.S. role in the creation of new eco-
nomic and security institutions like the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade (GATT), and the UN after World War II. Indeed, the
overall theory of international institutions and the concept of multilat-
eralism were regarded as a unique product of U.S. hegemony. Multi-
lateralism, as John Ruggie put it, is not an American institution, but an
American institution.69
The criticisms of HST are too well known to bear repeating
here. Some of its major criticisms cast it as a self-serving American
concept, one that at worst ignores, and at best legitimizes, the un-
savory or evil ideas and practices of British and U.S. hegemony, in-
cluding colonialism, racism, economic exploitation, and rampant
use of force, everywhere (before World War II), but especially in
the non-Western world both before and after World War II.70 An-
other major point of criticism is its limited ability to explain order
and change in world politics, which requires an understanding of
the contribution of other actors and forces such as decolonization.
Duncan Snidal argues that HST should be “viewed as a beginning
rather than a reliable conclusion to international politics.”71 Our
position in this book is that HST (or the dominance of a single
power) provides a very limited window to understanding the be-
ginning, continuation, and conclusion of international orders,
whether of the past, the present, or the future.
This is because HST is underpinned by a tendency to view
certain contemporary Western ideas and practices as a timeless and
universal standard, while ignoring or dismissing non-Western
principles and practices as aberrations or inferior in providing sta-
bility and facilitating trade. In other words, HST legitimizes the
denial of non-Western agency in past and present international or-
ders, including rule-governed interactions in areas such as freedom
 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders 33

of the seas, great-power accommodation, and commitment to

shared prosperity. Non-Western polities are cast as passive recipi-
ents rather than active creators of international orders.72 Yet this is
far from true, and making this point in the case of the Indian
Ocean is a major rationale for this book.
Yet HST has left enduring legacies for international relations
theory and practice. Indeed, it has consistently resurfaced through
the past decades to make the same or similar explanations about the
necessity of hegemonic power to create and sustain international
stability and provide public goods. This has been especially the case
with liberal internationalists such as G. John Ikenberry.73 Ikenberry
sees the post–World War II order as a “liberal hegemonic order”
with “the acquiescence and support of other states.”74 He defines
this order rather vaguely as an “order that is open and loosely rule-
based,” but sees it as a distinct product of U.S. hegemony, hence his
terms “American-led liberal world order” and “American-led liberal
hegemony.”75 Although Ikenberry seldom makes the link, and al-
though his theory focuses on the multilateral institutions needed to
manage and maintain it, his LHO is clearly built upon the old idea
of hegemonic stability.
Like HST, the LHO is a deeply hierarchical system built on
both American power dominance and liberal principles of gover-
nance. “The United States was the dominant state, but its power
advantages were muted and mediated by an array of post-war rules,
institutions, and reciprocal political processes—backed up by
shared strategic interests and political bargains. Weaker and sec-
ondary states were given institutionalized access to the exercise of
American power. The United States provided public goods and op-
erated within a loose system of multilateral rules and institutions.
American hegemonic power and liberal international order were
fused—indeed they each were dependent on the other.”76
Although Ikenberry conceded that the U.S.-led liberal hege-
monic order was being challenged by the rise of unipolarity (at the
time his book was being written), erosion of state sovereignty (due,
for example, to globalization and emerging norms of humanitarian
intervention), and shifting sources of violence from states to non-
state actors (e.g., terrorists), he insisted that there are no alternatives
to the order and that in the end it will become more inclusive and
34 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders

universal.77 As he put it, “the rise of non-Western powers and the

growth of economic and security interdependence are creating new
constituencies and pressures for liberal international order.”78 To
him, there are enough “constituencies that support a continued—if
renegotiated—American hegemonic role.”79
The concepts of LIO and LHO have attracted a great deal of
attention. (In this book, we use the terms interchangeably, but pre-
fer to characterize this understanding of order as LHO.) This de-
bate has been too well covered in the literature to require further
discussion here.80 A few points will suffice, some of which reflect
criticisms of HST.
To begin with, the LHO was never a truly “open” order, easy
to enter and inclusive. For much of its history, it has been a selec-
tive club of Western nations.81 Socialist and many non-Western
countries either stayed out of it of their own volition or were kept
out of it by Western leaders for their own instrumental and iden-
tity reasons. China and Russia were not part of the World Trade
Organization; while India, despite being a member, was not an
open economy. Politically, human rights and democracy posed an-
other barrier to entry to the club by non-Western nations. During
the Cold War the Soviet Union created its own politico-economic
sphere which operated apart from the U.S.-led LHO. Further-
more, nations and groups of nations in various world regions re-
lated to the Soviet sphere with varieties of intensity, and some even
created their own regional spheres of influence.
In addition, the LIO’s claim that “[t]he British and American-led
liberal orders have been built in critical respects around consent”—
which reflects a palpable Gramscian understanding, as mentioned
earlier—sidelines plenty of challenges to that order from actors who
have not found it attractive or just, including many from the non-
West.82 The legitimacy of the LHO was further challenged and un-
dermined by the Western liberal powers’ colonial past, their military
interventions in the developing world, the uneven spread of the ben-
efits of free trade, and the negative impacts of neoclassical economic
conditionalities imposed by multilateral economic institutions on
debt-ridden developing nations. The LHO’s legitimacy deficit
meant that other nations were reluctant and not enthusiastic part-
ners of the Western liberal powers.
 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders 35

Against this backdrop, the LHO did not perform according to

the expectations of its proponents. The presumed beneficiaries of
the LHO in the non-Western world had major grievances against it.
Among these were their concerns about the imbalance of leadership
in multilateral institutions, the critical core element of the LHO.
Emerging powers such as China, India, and Brazil viewed its institu-
tions, crafted as they were in the 1940s, as reflecting an outdated dis-
tribution of power and influence in the context of the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries. The expectation that such powers,
especially China and India, could be coopted into the LHO was per-
haps too optimistic. This belief proved unfounded and unrealistic.
While Ikenberry saw the LHO as adaptable and lasting, he did
not anticipate the possibility of a leadership retreat by the United
States such as that initiated by the Trump administration. The lat-
ter, as well as Brexit, showed that the challenge to the LHO comes
not just from other aspiring powers like China and India, but also
from within the Western nations, specifically the leading members
of the LHO.83

Beyond Hegemony: Alternative Conceptions of

International Order
There have been various attempts and ways to redefine and
broaden hegemony beyond material power or the ideological dom-
inance of a single state. One attempt is to rethink the association
between power, cooperation, and public goods by Keohane, who, as
noted earlier, argued that once established under a hegemony, in-
ternational institutions can continue to provide public goods under
posthegemonic conditions. Duncan Snidal argued that a group of
rising powers, however small, can take over the burden of main-
taining international cooperation once a hegemon disappears.84 An-
other important body of work focuses less on structural power and
more on different types of leadership. One example is Oran Young’s
theoretical differentiation between different kinds of leadership.85
In particular, Young’s distinction between structural, intellectual,
and entrepreneurial leadership has opened the door for a number
of scholars to argue that nonhegemonic actors can indeed make a
significant difference to the prospects for cooperation.
36 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders

As David Rapkin contends, “states lacking structural power can

exercise entrepreneurial and/or intellectual leadership to activate
[or induce] . . . the structural leadership of those that possess it” by
“establishing settings, framing issues and forming coalitions.”86
Similarly, pointing to important changes in the global order, espe-
cially the decline of the United States and the emergence of new
issue areas, Andrew Cooper, Richard Higgott, and Kim Nossal
look at “alternative potential sources of initiative and innovation in
international politics.”87 While conceding that the structural lead-
ership of the great powers is still significant, they argue that “other
categories of leadership can be significant in catalyzing the pro-
cesses of reform and change—especially those requiring consider-
able cooperation and collaboration—in a variety of issue areas on
the international agenda for the 1990s. Such a role may be per-
formed by appropriately qualified secondary powers in a way that
may not have been the case in the past.”88
Yet, for the most part, the effort to study what Rapkin calls the
“pluralization of leadership” stops at the level of the middle pow-
ers.89 The conceptual shift from power to leadership still assumes a
hierarchical agency led by Western nations. Indeed, while criti-
cisms of HST and the LHO proliferated, few provided an alterna-
tive framework for world order. Conventionally, when discussing
the future of world order, scholars and policymakers use the lan-
guage of polarity, the most commonly used expression being “mul-
tipolarity.” We argue that polarity is not a very helpful concept for
analyzing world order—both future world order and past world
orders. As Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth argue, “The
very qualities that make the concept of polarity helpful for captur-
ing some key differences in how international systems work render
it unhelpful for assessing complexity and also changes within a
given system. Use of the concept helps analysts understand why a
world with one superpower is different in important ways from
one with two superpowers or none, but it is too blunt an instru-
ment to track change from one kind of system to another.”90 More-
over, the “use of the concept of polarity encourages dichotomous
thinking—the world is either unipolar or multipolar (or bipolar)—
and thereby feeds an artificial debate about whether everything is
changing or nothing is changing.”91
 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders 37

We accept these criticisms of polarity made by Brooks and

Wohlforth, but further argue that, while polarity may be somewhat
useful to describe the distribution of material power, it does not tell
us much about other variables that are crucial to world order, such
as the role of ideas and interaction patterns. In other words, the dis-
tribution of power alone is not a sufficient indicator of world order;
the latter is a product of many other forces, including ideas, institu-
tions, and interaction capacity. Moreover, polarity and hegemony are
not mutually exclusive. As liberal theorists would themselves con-
cede, the Cold War bipolarity was also a period of U.S. hegemony.
To this one might add reservations about the specific concept
of multipolarity. Traditionally, according to Barry Posen, multipo-
larity refers to the “relatively equal distribution of capabilities . . .
with three or more consequential powers.”92 Similarly, Zaki Laidi
defines multipolarity as “a system in which power is distributed at
least among 3 significant poles concentrating wealth and/or mili-
tary capabilities and able to block or disrupt major political ar-
rangements threatening their major interests,” and where “a pole is
an actor capable of producing order or generating disorder . . .
which has influence on global outcomes beyond its own borders.”93
Yet we live in a world in which the ability of “producing order
or generating disorder . . . which has influence on global outcomes”
lies not just with great powers (even among these, power distribu-
tion remains asymmetric rather than equal), but also with nonstate
actors such as institutions, corporations, extremists, and social
movements using material (wealth and military), nonmilitary (espe-
cially new technologies such as artificial intelligence and others
which have at least a dual use), and ideational resources. Moreover,
whereas past multipolarity was managed by the great powers
through a balance-of-power system, including the nineteenth-cen-
tury Concert of Europe, colonialism, and a few multilateral institu-
tions, the contemporary world order has a multitude of global and
regional institutions wedded to collective and cooperative security.
An alternative concept to polarity and multipolarity in concep-
tualizing the world order, one which is also radically different from
the HST and LHO, is the notion of “multiplexity”—the multiplex
world and the conditions that shape it.94 Briefly stated, this concept
describes a nonhegemonic world in which a variety of consequential
38 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders

actors or leaders (rather than powers) provide public goods in a

growing number of issue areas through individual, bilateral, re-
gional, and multilateral means. Multiplexity does not mean that
asymmetries of power are absent. Hence it is not an “apolar” (Niall
Ferguson) or “nonpolar” (Richard Haass) world.95
Multiplexity does not mean that distribution of power is unim-
portant. But it has some distinctive features, especially in relation
to the traditional conception of multipolarity, which was derived
from Europe before World War I. Hence, the consequential actors
in a multiplex world are not just materially strong powers or great
powers, as in the case of multipolarity or any type of world order
defined in terms of “poles,” but also others, including regional
powers, international institutions, nongovernmental organizations,
multinational corporations, and transnational networks.96 At the
same time, a multiplex world is highly interconnected, not only
through trade but also through the flow of ideas and people (mi-
grations), religious exchange, and cultural flows, although cultural
diversity does not disappear. A multiplex world is

[a]n international or world order in which no single nation

or civilization dominates, which is culturally and politically
diverse yet deeply interconnected through trade, migration, and
religious and cultural exchanges.

In sum, a multiplex world has the following attributes:

• It is neither an empire, nor a hegemony of a single power,

although power inequalities and hierarchies remain.
• It is not just the great powers that shape and dominate
it, as in a multipolar system, but also regional powers,
smaller polities (such as trading states or emporiums),
international bodies, as well as people: preachers, mer-
chants, and social networks.
• It is interconnected not only by extensive economic
exchange as well as migration, but also by religious,
linguistic, and cultural flows.
• Cultural, ideological, and political diversity do not disap-
pear, but are respected.
 Power, Ideas, and Systems/Orders 39

• There are multiple local and subregional centers of

power and culture.
• The spread of ideas and institutions occurs through lo-
calization, rather than outright imposition or wholescale
adoption of foreign ideas. Foreign ideas and institutions
do not displace or extinguish local identities, but may le-
gitimize and enhance them.

Taken together, the multiplex system is a form of nonhege-

monic international system and order. This is conceived broadly as
a pattern of activity such as international rule making, institution
building, and conflict management devised and carried out without
the enduring leadership and controlling influence of the strongest
power/s in a given international or regional system. NHIOs are not
necessarily bereft of strong power/s. Disparities of power do not
disappear. But the power and influence of the major actors either
dissipates, is voluntarily abandoned, or is neutralized or socialized
with the help of norms and institutions, often through the involve-
ment and leadership of the so-called lesser actors. In essence, the
notion of NHIO speaks to the agency of nonhegemonic actors, in-
cluding states, civil society groups, and international organizations.97
Such a system is decentered by definition in the sense that interna-
tional authority does not emanate from a fixed center. At the same
time, such decentered systems lack a central axis of hierarchy.98
The idea of a multiplex world draws on attempts to challenge
traditional notions of hegemony. This idea directs attention to the
possibility of a nonhegemonic international order, which not only
existed in history but might well come about as the U.S.-led hege-
monic order declines. Such an order may retain some features of
the LHO, but would be different in many critical respects. It will
be multicivilizational, decentered, and pluralistic, not only in the
sense of a post-American but also a post-Western world. The his-
torical comparative study of the Indian Ocean provides one of the
most striking examples of such an order, in sharp contrast to the
classical Mediterranean order. Moreover, the multiplex notion de-
scribes not only a historical order of the Indian Ocean but also a
futuristic one for the Indo-Pacific, a term that subsumes the Indian
Ocean and which is currently much in vogue.
 chapter two
The International Order
of the Roman Mediterranean
(~Sixth Century b.c.e.–
Third Century c.e.)

T
he roman mediterranean corresponds with the para-
digmatic hegemonic orders of IR theory discussed in
Chapter 1. This chapter provides a theoretical account
of the international history of the ancient Mediterra-
nean. The association between hegemony and international order
that characterizes much theorization in international relations is a
universalization that draws from the Roman precedent. This ac-
count privileges material power and the materially powerful with
the making and shaping of international orders. To put it differ-
ently, ordering is a top-down process in this account as the hege-
mon establishes the practices governing social relations. In the
classical Mediterranean, it was Roman power—especially naval
power and the practice of sea control—that underwrote the secu-
rity of the trading system. Even the flow of ideas in this system, the
twin processes of Hellenization and Romanization, reflected the
imperial power of Rome. The hegemonic Roman Mediterranean

40
 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean 41

was a core–periphery tributary system with Rome at the center,

and Pax Romana was an outcome of military conquest.

Introduction
Early Rome (~500–200 b.c.e.) is best characterized as a “conquest
state” that relied on booty and exercised “hegemony in an alliance
system.”1 Rome gradually transformed into a “tributary empire” by
the end of the Punic Wars.2 Rome’s destruction of Carthage and the
subordination of the Hellenistic monarchies led to the establish-
ment of its “effective hegemony” over the Mediterranean by the
mid-second century b.c.e.3 This imperial Republic (until 31 b.c.e.)
has been likened to “a rentier state” because the burden of taxes
shifted from Rome and Italy as “[w]ealth was looted and taxed by
the state from the conquered peoples,” even as “Italy as a whole
grew richer.”4 The taxation system under the Principate (31 b.c.e.–
284 c.e.) was similar to that under the imperial Republic although
the subordinate polities transformed into imperial provinces.5 This
transition from imperial Republic to Empire transformed Rome’s
effective hegemony into “universal hegemony,” and “tribute” con-
tinued “to be lifted out of local communities at the threat of use of
force.”6 In other words, Rome was “an empire of domination.”7 In
fact, it is the archetype that forms “a cognitive model” for the coer-
cive exercise of power (see Fig. 1).8
However, “control could not depend upon coercion alone.”9
The Roman path from a city-state to a Mediterranean-wide em-
pire went “hand in hand with” its Hellenization despite “changing
views on the Roman ways of appropriating, translating, and diffus-
ing Greek culture.”10 In other words, the Roman Mediterranean
“had a high degree of cultural integration among the elites”
through the process of Hellenization in which Greek culture
served as a point of reference for all things Roman.11 After all, Hel-
lenization and Romanization were the “interrelated aspects of the
same phenomenon,” and Romanization or the development of
Roman socio-cultural and political identity had a “Greek founda-
tion.”12 Nevertheless, it was clear that Greek culture “was to be in
the service of” the imperial power of Rome.13 So even as the Ro-
mans enthusiastically Hellenized (and consequently Romanized),
42 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean

Figure 1. Map of the classical Mediterranean (~sixth century b.c.e.–third

century c.e.). (Produced for the authors by Oxford Cartographers)

they were also declaring, “We are not Greeks,” from “as early as we
can hear their voices.”14
The aim of this chapter is to explain the role of power and ideas
in the making and shaping of these two aspects of the international
order of the Roman Mediterranean: its coercive tributary system and
the Hellenization of Rome. Rome’s emergence as a hegemonic power
after the defeat of Carthage (~200 b.c.e.) saw “a steep rise (more than
threefold) in seaborne trade.”15 The following four centuries wit-
nessed “an intensity of traffic by sea that was not to be matched again
for a thousand years.”16 Rome’s domination over and expansion in the
Hellenistic East recast the Mediterranean into “a Roman lake” (mare
nostrum, “our sea”) after the conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt in 31 b.c.e.,
as Rome came to control all the lands surrounding the Mediterra-
nean.17 Over the next two centuries, the Roman Empire and navy
 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean 43

“guaranteed the safety of the seas from the Straits of Gibraltar to the
coasts of Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor.”18 Thus constituted, Pax Ro-
mana generated a hegemonic core–periphery world order in the
Mediterranean with the city of Rome (and Italy) at the center of an
imperial polity that saw the “transfer of revenue” from the provinces
and clients to the imperial center in Rome (and Italy).19 In addition to
material wealth, Hellenization also meant the “wholesale transfer of
[Greek cultural and human] resources” into the Roman center, and
then on to other parts of the empire, given the twin and parallel pro-
cess of Romanization.20
This chapter emphasizes two factors in the making of this heg-
emonic core–periphery order with Rome at its center. First, the
practice of sea control was at the heart of the geopolitics of the an-
cient Mediterranean. Given that “the movement of resources,” in-
cluding trade, revenue, and food, “has always been an essential
aspect of Mediterranean power,” what was truly at stake for these
polities was “the control of the integrating medium across whole
tracts of sea.”21 Notably, this struggle over maritime trade routes in
the Mediterranean can be traced all the way back to the archaic age
(eighth–sixth centuries b.c.e.). Even the rise of the ancient Greek
city-states in the eighth century b.c.e. “was intimately tied to the
Phoenician expansion and to competition for trade routes.”22
When viewed thus, “Rome’s success” appears “spectacular only in
its completeness and duration,” as observed by Peregrine Horden
and Nicholas Purcell.23
Second and relatedly, such competition generated wars and
large-scale movements of people. The consequent colonization and
migration, and the coercion associated with these processes, did
lead to cultural transformation shaped by the power asymmetries
entailed in such contacts. The Hellenization of Rome should then
be understood as the appropriation by an imperial power not just of
the material spoils of its conquest, but also of the culture of the
conquered to the degree that it augmented Rome’s imperial power
itself. After all, “appropriation does not happen incidentally, with-
out conscious effort, but rather results from deliberate and pur-
poseful actions on the part of identifiable actors or cultural
forces.”24 It is also noteworthy that the Hellenization of Rome “had
its reverse counterpart: an aversion to and contempt for Greeks.”25
44 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean

The rest of this chapter is divided into four sections. The first sec-
tion explains why the ancient Mediterranean (~sixth century b.c.e.–
third century c.e.) should be treated as an international system. More
specifically, this section elucidates the structure of this system: its hier-
archic/hegemonic and core–periphery arrangement. The next section
explains the structure of power and authority in the classical Mediter-
ranean and focuses on political-strategic and political-economic inter-
actions. The emphasis here is on the practice of sea control and its
interaction with the material and strategic factors in the making of the
Mediterranean trading system. The third section explains the trans-
mission of ideas or the process of Hellenization of Rome through the
appropriation of Greek ideas. The fourth and final section concludes
with the provision of public goods by the Roman hegemon in the
Rome-centric core–periphery Mediterranean world.
Before proceeding, a brief explanation of the long temporal
scope of this chapter is in order. To begin with, the Roman polity
itself was particularly long-lived.26 Importantly, the end of the Re-
public (509–31 b.c.e.) and the beginning of the Principate (31
b.c.e.–284 c.e.) “was not something objectively and explicitly
marked by some public fact in our evidence . . . but something that
we must infer circumstantially from a variety of facts and factual
changes over the course of several decades.”27 Furthermore, given
similar processes of economic expansion, J. G. Manning has argued
that “there is little need to make a hard break between the ‘Helle-
nistic’ and ‘Roman’ in the 4th and early 3d [sic] century BCE.”28
While the maritime trading order certainly transformed from a
polycentric system before the Punic Wars to one that was increas-
ingly Rome-centric over time, we are simply trying to explain the
impact of the interplay of material and ideational factors in the
making of world orders, especially those related to the practice of
sea control, for the ancient Mediterranean.
Similarly, in terms of cultural transformation, Angelos Chaniotis
has referred to the period from Alexander the Great (336–323 b.c.e.)
to the reign of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (161–180 c.e.)
as “one single historical period.” According to him, it would be “mis-
leading . . . [t]o call these processes of cultural convergence ‘Helleni-
sation’ for the Hellenistic and ‘Romanisation’ for the Imperial
periods, as has been traditional,” for the emergence of a “cultural
 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean 45

koine” in the Mediterranean was a singular process in this “long Hel-

lenistic Age.”29 In turn, Kostas Vlassopoulos sees the emergence of
“a Mediterranean-wide global koine based primarily on Greek cul-
ture” as a continuous process spanning the archaic, classical, and
Hellenistic periods during which Greek culture was globalized and
glocalized.30 Indeed, Arnold Toynbee has even described the Roman
Empire as “the universal state of the Hellenic civilization.”31 Conse-
quently, even as there were significant differences in the processes of
cultural transformation over time in the Mediterranean as explained
subsequently, the Hellenization of the Mediterranean under Rome
was the culmination of these actions that began in the archaic period
and must be viewed in the longue durée.

The Ancient Mediterranean as an International System

Given the “full” range of Barry Buzan and Richard Little’s interunit
interactions discussed in Chapter 1—politico-military, politico-
economic, and politico-cultural/ideational interactions—the Medi-
terranean easily qualifies as an international system. It is perhaps
the most important one of the classical period, and has received
more than its fair share of recognition by IR scholars. For example,
Adam Watson discussed Rome in his survey of ancient states sys-
tems to show that its Mediterranean world eventually moved to-
ward the imperial end of his pendulum of systems.32 Similarly,
Daniel Deudney has argued that Roman legacies are “deeply woven
into the fabric of balance-of-power theory,” while Michael Doyle
drew attention to Rome as an empire that brought “peace and ma-
terial progress . . . borne by the chariot of imperial domination.”33
In fact, some classical scholars have also used IR paradigms (from
the realist toolkit) to study the classical Mediterranean to explain the
rise of Rome. For Arthur Eckstein, republican Rome created “a sys-
tem of unipolarity” by replacing “the long-standing multipolar anar-
chy” of the Mediterranean.34 While Eckstein questioned whether the
entire Mediterranean was “a single system” or a series of intercon-
nected systems, Deudney considered the anti-Roman alliance be-
tween Carthage and Macedonia that was forged during the Second
Punic War (218–202 b.c.e.) as marking “the full joining of the sub-
systems of the Western and Eastern Mediterranean.”35
46 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean

Buzan and Little have argued that “the idea of system is an an-
alytical concept, [and therefore] analysts have the right to set the
criteria for it with greater or lesser degree of stringency.”36 Since
“[d]ense fragmentation complemented by a striving towards con-
trol of communications may be an apt summary of the Mediterra-
nean past,” according to Horden and Purcell, we consider the
Mediterranean before the Carthaginian-Macedonian treaty (~200
b.c.e.) as a series of interconnected and interacting subsystems.37
Prior to the rise of Rome as a naval power during the First Punic
War (264–241 b.c.e.), the Mediterranean was divided into the
spheres of influence of multiple competing powers. The Phoeni-
cians controlled the western Mediterranean, the Etruscans domi-
nated the north-central regions, while the Hellenistic empires
competed in the east.38 However, after Rome’s emergence as a
naval power and with its victory over Carthage in the Second
Punic War, the Mediterranean eventually began moving toward a
single system along with Rome’s trajectory toward the imperial end
of Watson’s pendulum.39
Even after the creation of the Principate, Rome’s universal he-
gemony was “composite” and “heterogeneous” because “universal
empires did not require a uniform, generalized form of power.”40
Indeed, a “Roman emperor could be a Princeps in the senate, a pha-
raoh to Egyptian provincials or even Olympian Panhellenic Zeus
to a league of Greek speaking elites in the Eastern part of the em-
pire.”41 Similarly, Rome also took over the diverse fiscal systems of
its subject polities instead of homogenizing revenue collection.
Syracuse, Spain, Pergamum, and Egypt maintained their preexist-
ing systems, although the revenue now began to flow toward
Rome.42 The universal empire was nevertheless extremely central-
ized and has been characterized as a patrimonial-bureaucratic em-
pire because of the central role played by the monarch (and other
elites).43 Given its small bureaucracy of 150 civil servants and 150
senatorial and equestrian administrators, Michael Mann has even
argued that the Roman “state was largely an army” given the cru-
cial role played by coercion in the extraction of revenue.44 Al-
though the imperial government “was spread thinly,” it “could be
concentrated and applied with great intensity” given the state’s co-
ercive power.45
 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean 47

In other words, politico-military processes (including warfare

and coercion) as well as politico-economic processes (including
taxation and commerce) were crucial to the Mediterranean inter-
national system. However, the politico-cultural dimension was just
as important, and it too pointed toward extreme centralization.
Hellenization provided the ideational glue in the Roman Mediter-
ranean. Elite unity in the Roman world was partly an outcome of
this cultural transformation and identity formation. As observed by
Mann, Rome’s hegemony was “uncontested” in part due to elite
cultural integration. Despite the violence of civil wars and succes-
sion crises, “[n]o contender seems to have been a provincial ‘na-
tional’ leader, attempting either provincial secession or conquest
that would have involved establishing the hegemony of a province
over the whole empire.”46
Consequently, the structure of the Roman Mediterranean was
hierarchic and pointed toward the formation of a core–periphery
order ever since the city-state began to expand. As shown subse-
quently, the early city-state, embedded though it was in a polycen-
tric Mediterranean, expanded through the formation of hegemonic
alliances through which its allies contributed troops for whom they
themselves paid.47 Additionally, Rome expanded through coloniza-
tion, wars of conquest, and the creation of client states. While
Mediterranean trade (and taxation on it) was crucial for the Roman
economy, the collection of booty, plunder, slaves, and tribute from
the defeated and vanquished polities was also important.
Even as this tribute transformed into tax after the creation of
the Principate, Peter Fibiger Bang prefers to use the language of
tribute because it did not imply “negotiation and collaboration.”
For the Romans, “tribute became the mark of imperial subjection,
whether made manifest by the imposition of regular (land) taxes or
articulated in ceremonies of defeated foes offering the resources of
their territories as gifts of submission to the imperial lords.”48 This
tribute collection was “massively redistributive,” both under the
imperial Republic and the Principate, because Rome and Italy were
exempt from land taxes after 167 b.c.e. and were not taxed again
until the fourth century c.e.49 According to Fernand Braudel,
Rome was the “centre” of the Mediterranean world economy.50
In addition to these material resources, Rome also appropriated
48 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean

the culture of the Greeks, as mentioned earlier. However, this pro-

cess was imperial as opposed to cosmopolitan because Rome also
destroyed the culture of others (such as Carthage) for imperial
ends.
Under Rome, the Mediterranean became a coercively hege-
monic international order. Although the term hegemony is Greek
in origin (heˉgemonia), and “there was a conceptual continuity, rather
than any clear-cut contrast, between the ideas of hegemony and
empire in classical Greece,” it was the Roman practices of hege-
mony and empire that have served as models for others, especially
in Europe, and have become the benchmarks for IR theory, as ex-
plained earlier.51 While “Rome continued the inheritance of classi-
cal Hellenism,” it was Rome that became the “inescapable example
to reflect on.”52
The geopolitical “integration” of the Mediterranean “reached
its zenith under the Roman Empire, when it experienced political
unification for the first and last time.”53 Furthermore, it was during
“the centuries of Roman rule” that “safe and reliable transportation
helped to integrate the entire Mediterranean into a single cultural
and economic space.”54 The violence and protection offered to
other polities by Rome (before their formal annexation), the eradi-
cation of piracy, and the safe transit for maritime trade through sea
control were the major public goods offered by Roman hegemony.
Rome’s dominance culminated in the imperial peace of Pax Romana
in the form of the “tight” control of mare nostrum after Rome’s
Mediterranean-wide conquest.55
It is well established in historical scholarship, in Gilpinian real-
ism, and in the work of leadership long-cycle theorists that “trade is
conducted within a geopolitical framework.”56 However, the anthro-
pologist and historian Philippe Beaujard has argued that in addition
to these strategic and economic factors, trading systems are also
shaped by the “systems of ideas” governing such exchange.57 Sociol-
ogists, economists, and historians have also stressed the crucial role
of ideas in the making and shaping of social, political, and economic
systems. According to Jack Goldstone and John Haldon, “the psy-
chological-ideological systems that underpin forms of political and
social power” play an “important and causal role” in socio-political
systems.58 Similarly, Douglas Irwin and Kevin O’Rourke have noted
 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean 49

that “ideas sometimes matter in history,” even as “many economists

dislike the notion.”59
Since “material and ideational relations” are “generative of
both actors and the ways in which power is exercised,” the eco-
nomic and military factors interact with ideas to create and main-
tain the trading system.60 Notably, the ideas that underpin such
interactions influence the degree of coerciveness in the creation
and maintenance of the international order.61 The Roman Medi-
terranean, then, emerged out of the military and economic interac-
tions that provided security to Rome (and its expanding empire),
enriched the Roman (and Italian) core, and was underpinned
by the Hellenization (and Romanization) of the empire’s elites.
Hegemony, hierarchy, and imperium should then be seen as “a
type of interaction or relationship,” as opposed to “a trait” of the
system.62
A brief note on the impact of geography is important before
we look at the interplay of these processes. The Mediterranean is
sometimes viewed as a “closed” sea. Indeed, the word Mediterra-
nean itself “means that which is between the surrounding lands.”63
Some strands of IR scholarship argue that “open” regions tend to-
ward balances (or system fragmentation), while hegemonies are
possible in “closed” regions.64 However, Greg Woolf has argued
that “the Mediterranean was never a closed system” and that both
“Jugurtha and Mithridates challenged Rome with resources drawn
from outside the Mediterranean world.”65
Even as the Mediterranean was somewhat “open” around its
edges, the Romans successfully conquered all the surrounding
lands. Notably, the “stopping power of water” did not work in the
Mediterranean under the Romans.66 The “complete political domi-
nance” of the entire Mediterranean by Rome notwithstanding,
such a political outcome had never occurred before the rise of
Rome, “nor has it happened—in quite the same way—since.”67 In
other words, geography was hardly decisive in generating Roman
hegemony, either in the form of closing the Mediterranean or by
limiting Rome’s ability to project power over what became mare
nostrum. How was the Mediterranean system actually created, and
how was international order maintained in this world?
50 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean

Power and Authority: Structure and Interaction

Political-Military
The early Republic found itself in the highly competitive and
interconnected city-state network of the Italian peninsula that
included the Campanians, the Samnites, the Etruscans, and the
Italiote Greeks, in addition to Rome’s immediate Latin neighbors.
After the First Rome-Latin War of 493 b.c.e., Rome came to lead
the Latin League of approximately thirty towns.68 However, as late
as 396 b.c.e., Rome had only managed to capture its Etruscan rival
Veii, which was barely twelve miles away.69 In the meanwhile,
Rome was already engaged in a commercial rivalry with Carthage.
It is noteworthy that the earliest two treaties between Rome and
Carthage (signed around 509 and 348 b.c.e.) were concerned with
commerce raiding, and even “defined . . . where Roman ships might
and might not go.”70 While there is some evidence of a small Roman
navy in the fourth century b.c.e., Rome’s “preferred” mode of defense
against enemies from the seas, “whether state enemies or pirates, was
the establishment of coloniae maritime (maritime colonies).”71 Rome
established “five or six citizen colonies and some nineteen ‘Latin’ col-
onies” in Italy between 338 and 263 b.c.e., in addition to thirty-five
more by the end of the second century b.c.e.72 The colonization of
the island of Ponza in 313 b.c.e. shows that early Rome did have
some trappings of a naval power.73 Rome had established several
more colonies by 180 b.c.e., including in the territories of its Samnite
rivals.74
However, it was the First Punic War that marked the emer-
gence of Rome as a major naval power. The war was an outcome of
the geopolitical contest between Carthage and Rome over develop-
ments in Syracuse and Sicily that had implications for the control
of “the straits between Italy and Sicily.”75 During the war, the Car-
thaginians launched seaborne raids against Italy from bases in Sic-
ily, Sardinia, and Corsica. In addition to Rome itself, the security of
Rome’s allies in southern Italy was also at stake, especially because
they had only “recently come under Roman hegemony (in the 280s
and 270s).”76 While Rome took the war to Sardinia and North Af-
rica itself, it was Rome’s naval victory in 241 b.c.e. that granted it
control over Sicily. In addition to paying a large war indemnity,
 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean 51

Carthage agreed to “refrain from sending ships to Italian waters,”

and both sides agreed “not to attack the other’s allies.”77
The First Punic War “broadened the Roman horizon consider-
ably.”78 Not only had Rome stepped out of the Italian peninsula
into Sicily, but it also soon came to control Sardinia (238 b.c.e.) and
Corsica (236 b.c.e.), partly driven by the desire to prevent Carthage
from using these islands as bases to attack Rome in the future. In
the meantime, Roman expansion into the Greek city-states of
southern Italy, especially Tarentum in 281 b.c.e., had also brought
Rome into contact with the Greek world to its east, as Tarentum
sought help from Pyrrhus of Epirus.79 The Romans were also look-
ing east toward Illyria and the Adriatic at a time when Carthage
was building its base in the west in the Iberian Peninsula. Iberia had
“rich gold and silver deposits” and provided Carthage with soldiers
for its army.80 During the Second Punic War, Carthage came close
to destroying Rome itself under the leadership of Hannibal, who
pushed into Italy after crossing the Alps (over land from his base in
Spain). “In the peace, Carthage retained its civic existence and a re-
stricted territory in Africa and paid a large indemnity, but it was no
longer a major power.”81
What is noteworthy is that after Hannibal, Rome’s “existence as
a state” was never threatened.82 The anti-Roman Carthaginian-
Macedonian alliance has been referred to as a “jackal alliance” as
Macedonia did not extend any help to Hannibal.83 Nevertheless,
Rome turned east and, with some exceptions, “made war every
year” until 16 c.e.84 Not surprisingly, the dominant view of Roman
expansion as “defensive imperialism,” first articulated by Theodor
Mommsen in the nineteenth century, has now been “comprehen-
sively demolished.”85 As Rome expanded into the Greek East, it was
now more interested in “plunder, disrupt[ing] local hegemonies,”
and leaving “the region in control of its allies.”86 After Roman vic-
tories over the Seleucids and the Peace of Apamea (188 b.c.e.), the
Seleucids were no longer a significant naval power in the eastern
Mediterranean.87 By 168 b.c.e., Rome had also defeated Macedonia
and divided its territory into “four republics.”88
Meanwhile, the Ptolemies of Egypt had continued to maintain
friendly relations with Rome since 273 b.c.e., and remained neutral
throughout the Roman wars in the Greek East.89 In 168 b.c.e.,
52 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean

the Romans also forbade the Seleucids from invading Egypt.90

With the final destruction of Carthage after the Third Punic War
(149–146 b.c.e.), Rome had “no potential adversary anywhere in
the Mediterranean basin that could constitute a first rate threat
to Roman power.”91 Nevertheless, Augustus (31 b.c.e.–14 c.e.)
“added more territory to Roman rule than any other figure in
Roman history.”92 As a consequence of Roman expansion, all the
remaining naval powers of the Mediterranean were eventually
destroyed and subordinated (or annexed)—Corinth (146 b.c.e.),
Rhodes (88 b.c.e.), and finally Egypt (31 b.c.e.)—thereby trans-
forming the Mediterranean into a Roman lake.
While Roman “militarism and aggressive decision making” did
play a role in Roman expansion, these factors cannot explain the
Roman quest to coercively dominate the Mediterranean after
the elimination of Carthage as a major power in the aftermath of the
Second Punic War.93 After all, such militarism was characteristic not
just of Rome but of all Mediterranean polities. Even more perplex-
ingly, Rome created a “permanent navy” only with the establishment
of the Principate in 31 b.c.e.94 Not only did Rome not have a per-
manent navy in the centuries of its relentless expansion, as fleets
were then “commissioned for particular needs,” but it was Rome’s
naval allies, “primarily Greek polities and a few Etruscan polities of
Italy,” that had played a major role during the Punic Wars.95 Simi-
larly, Rome’s Rhodian allies had also contributed significantly to
Rome’s victory against the Seleucids.96 Even the permanent fleets of
the Principate under Augustus “were manned primarily by non-
Romans who came from cultures with a strong naval heritage.”97
While the permanent naval fleets did support expansion under the
Principate—Mauretania (41–42 c.e.), Lycia (43 c.e.), and Thrace
(46 c.e.)—thereby “giving Rome control of the whole Mediterra-
nean seaboard,” “large-scale naval warfare” in the Mediterranean
had become “obsolete, at least for the next couple of centuries.”98
While Rome’s aggressiveness was partly rooted in economic factors
as discussed subsequently, Rome’s political-strategic interactions did
entail a crucial practice: sea control.
In the case of Rome, conquest, colonization (through settlers)
and sea control were deeply intertwined from the very beginning
of the Republic. It was “the need to control the seaways and the af-
 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean 53

filiated Italian trade routes that induced the Romans” to pursue

colonies through settlers.99 Early Rome was already in competition
with Carthage for maritime trade, as noted earlier, and the first
Roman colonies also began to appear in the fourth century b.c.e.
As such, these settler colonial networks also performed a security
function as they reduced the need to permanently station troops in
the colonies. At the same time, they boosted commerce with Rome.
However, there was nothing inevitable about this practice of
sea control as other options were certainly available, at least in
theory, especially after the elimination of Carthage as a major
power. At least one such alternative involved strategies to improve
economic performance instead of relying on conquest.100 There is
some evidence that Ptolemaic Egypt may have pursued the path of
state-backed agricultural expansion (including through the intro-
duction of cash crops), in addition to pursuing technological inno-
vations such as the use of water-lifting devices.101
A second alternative included commercial networks not backed
by naval power. Notably, Roman trade with the western Indian
Ocean world was not backed by the coercive naval power of any
state. This is important simply because Rome suffered a massive
trade deficit with the Indian Ocean region.102 Instead of being
backed by naval power, the management of the Rome–India trade
saw several organizational, financial, and legal innovations.103 (By
contrast, “targeted projection of armed force and the maintenance
of a thin security apparatus in strategic locations on land and on
the water” did promote the economic integration of the Atlantic
“rim” with the Roman Mediterranean, and “eventually squadrons
of Roman warships even patrolled the Atlantic coasts of Spain,
Gaul [France], and Britain—‘The Outer Sea.’”)104
As a third alternative, it was also possible to be a sea power and
not pursue an empire or a hegemonic role. Hellenistic Rhodes
“provides an example of a state” with a maritime commercial
orientation and naval power but one with the notable absence of
“an empire.”105 However, even as Rome “had no ambition to be-
come a naval power” until 300 b.c.e., a possible fourth alternative,
it went down the path of naval “dominance.”106 The Romans even
pursued “preventive and indeed provocative action against states
they perceived as possible threats” after the First Punic War.107 So
54 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean

even as Rome “met no rival that threatened its own immediate se-
curity” after the destruction of Carthage, Rhodes, Egypt, and oth-
ers were eventually conquered.108
Rome was certainly socialized during its encounter with Car-
thage, as “the Phoenicians represented a powerful model for the
conduct of trade.”109 Consequently, competing centers of maritime
trade were destroyed and “refounded by the Romans themselves.”110
Notably, Cato specifically opined that “Carthage must be de-
stroyed,” a fate that also befell Corinth among others.111 Such de-
struction was followed by a form of “social engineering” by Rome
through “the dispatch of colonies” to occupy such lands.112 Accord-
ing to Bang, Rome effected economic change in the Mediterranean
through exceptional brutality and a ruthlessness that is “difficult to
exaggerate.”113
Given that the social structure of the Mediterranean was in-
formed by the practice of sea control, ambitious polities like Rome
aspired to nothing less than “the control of seaborne mobility” it-
self.114 The expanding Roman Republic sought to control “all land-
ing spaces” in and around the Mediterranean, as opposed to
controlling the seas per se “through engagement between ships at
sea.”115 Even after the conquest of the entire Mediterranean, Rome
kept a watchful eye through the creation of a permanent navy that
included two fleets in Italy (at Misenum and Ravenna) and three
provincial fleets in Syria, Alexandria, and Pontus (while creating
other provincial and local fleets as needed). The presence of the
Roman navy at both ends, in Egypt (Alexandria) and at Rome
(Misenum), ensured the safety of the all-important grain trade.116
Importantly, “the modern notion of control of the sea, or even of
the so-called sea lanes, should not be “simply transposed to the an-
cient world.”117 After all, the “idea of ‘patrolling’ in the western
Mediterranean and the Adriatic from these ports which is often en-
countered in modern scholarship, is simply anachronistic and im-
practicable for oared warships.”118 Given the “limited range of these
oared warships,” long-distance warfare was not possible in and of it-
self.119 “The best situation was to establish bases that were only a
day’s voyage from one another.”120 Consequently, the practice of sea
control in the Mediterranean was about controlling the nodes of
connectivity on the northern and southern shores, and on the islands
 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean 55

separating them. This form of control was very crucial in a region

where major polities depended on trade for staples such as food.
The ancient Mediterranean practice of sea control was then
about control over oceanic activity, as opposed to seeking owner-
ship of the ocean itself.121 While the Mediterranean was “a realm to
be conquered and controlled,” the sea itself was “beyond . . . owner-
ship,” even as “the things that were separated from it could become
objects of rights.”122 It is in this sense that Rome sought to control
the Mediterranean, and the “very unity of the Empire rested on the
control of the Mediterranean” by a single power.123 Although “low
level coastal piracy” continued in the Mediterranean, the Roman
conquest of all of the surrounding lands ensured that maritime
trade remained undisturbed until the Goth and Scythian naval at-
tacks after the mid-third century c.e.124
Since “trade and commerce can be regulated, limited, pro-
moted, or disrupted,” the social practices associated with trade mat-
ter and can have dramatic consequences “on the configuration of
social and political relations” of a trading order.125 The practices
embodied in the “norms” and the “deep rules” of world politics are
generally seen as “a secondary aspect” in “the Western tradition”
due to “the dominance of military institutions and coercion in the
political history of the western Eurasian world.”126 This is problem-
atic because the practices related to sea control, conquest, and colo-
nization were a part of the “social fabric” of the trading world of the
Mediterranean.127

Political-Economic
According to David Abulafia, the “question of whether trade comes
before the exercise of naval power is perhaps a chicken and egg prob-
lem” for the ancient Mediterranean.128 Indeed, “mercantile contact
and colonial settlement” were the core features of “the Mediterra-
nean throughout the pre-Roman age” going back to the Mycenaean
civilization from a millennium before the rise of Rome.129 After the
First Punic War, Rome “consciously” developed a strategy of sea con-
trol and “decidedly” pursued conquest.130
Trade was crucial for wealth generation and for the political
survival of the Roman polity, under both the expanding imperial
56 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean

Republic as well as the Principate, as it was linked to booty, slaves,

and resources (especially food and mineral wealth). Control of the
trading zones in the central and western Mediterranean was an im-
portant cause of the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage.131
Roman expansion into Sicily after the Punic Wars was also linked
to Sicily’s importance in the grain trade at that time. Rome also re-
structured the political economy of the wider region. The forced
appropriation of agricultural regions in the vanquished polities,
and the resettlement of Romans (and Italians) in these regions,
were widely practiced. Approximately 1–2 million slaves were “im-
ported” from the conquered regions into Italy from 225 to 30
b.c.e., and “tens of thousands of Italian peasants” were moved
overseas, where they were given “bigger individual plots.”132
The immense scale of the slave trade—which may have
reached 4 million by 200 c.e.—converted parts of “Italy and
Sicily into veritable slave societies.”133 Notably, “slavery may not
have dominated production outside Italy” in the Principate.134
However, slavery was linked to Roman warfare and political econ-
omy: “successful warfare produced slaves who could work the land,
and slave labour on the land freed farmers to go to war.”135 Not
surprisingly, the defeat of Veii in 396 b.c.e. “was remembered as an
event accompanied by the mass enslavement of the defeated.”136
Later, when Rome “enslaved some 150,000 people from Epirus in
northern Greece in 167 BC, its own official citizen numbers were
only 313,000.”137 Natural reproduction, along with the politics of
citizenship and manumission, continued to ensure a steady supply
of slaves even after the wars of expansion had slowed down under
the Principate.
Rome was “enriched” by its incessant wars.138 Not only were
plunder and raiding common, but Rome’s extraordinary expansion
across the Mediterranean meant that “a steady stream of movable
wealth began to flow into Rome and Italy.”139 The First and Second
Punic Wars had nearly depleted the Roman treasury, and large in-
demnities were therefore imposed upon Carthage. The Romans
received 3,200 talents from Carthage after the First Punic War and
an additional 1,200 talents when they came to control Sardinia in
238 b.c.e. After the Second Punic War, Carthage was made to pay
10,000 talents over fifty years.140 Since it is “difficult for modern
 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean 57

readers to grasp the enormous amount of this transfer of wealth”

expressed in talents, it is noteworthy that 3,002 talents “could have
paid for twenty-five legions in 150 BC.”141 At this time, a legion in-
cluded 4,000 legionaries and 200 cavalry, but it could be expanded
to 5,000 legionaries and 300 cavalry during crises and wars.142
The expanding Republic also extracted economic rents from
subordinate polities as a form of protection money from rival
claimants (including Rome itself). Bang has referred to this “eco-
nomic force” as “predatory imperialism” under the Republic,
which gave way to a more “routinized” form of extraction through
tax collection after the establishment of the Principate (as the sub-
ordinate polities were transformed into Roman provinces).143 What
is noteworthy is that these “rents” and later “taxes” were high
enough that this burden was levied entirely on the “defeated sub-
jects,” as Rome and Italy were exempt from land taxes for almost
four centuries after 167 b.c.e.144
To put it differently, war and the extraction of material re-
sources (trade, food, slaves, rent, and taxes) were interactive pro-
cesses. “As it was the Romans who usually started the wars . . . we
find a circular process that contributed to the permanency of war-
fare.”145 Furthermore, “Rome’s military victories during this period
became nearly costless, in an economic sense, as conquered nations
footed the bill for further expansion” through “booty, slaves, and in-
demnity.”146 For example, Rome was enriched through the mining
revenues from the Spanish and Macedonian gold and silver mines.
While exact figures are hard to come by, Carthago Nova in Spain,
which was captured by the Romans in 209 b.c.e., produced 35 tons
of silver per annum, or approximately 1,500 talents.147 Similarly, the
“reopening of Macedonian bullion mines” in 158 b.c.e. “was a very
significant occurrence.”148 The consequent “increase in production
of Roman denarii” resulted in an “expansion of monetary liquidity
in Italy” and further boosted the economy.149
The conquest of Carthage, Sicily, and Sardinia had meant that
grain cultivation in Italy was already declining even before the
conquest of Egypt in 31 b.c.e.150 Later, its status as the granary to
supply free grain to 200,000–250,000 Romans was so important
that “Egypt, though a Roman province, always remained peculiarly
bound to the personal control of the Emperor.”151 Approximately
58 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean

15 percent of the state’s revenues were spent in supplying this

wheat to Rome.152 This grain trade was the economic motor of the
long-distance trade in the Mediterranean that “allowed the econ-
omy to lift off the ground.”153 Many other major cities also de-
pended on imported grain. Tariffs on this trade in grain, which also
boosted the exchange of other commodities, including olive oil,
metals, and wine, “yielded the treasury more than any other source
save the tribute of conquered provinces.”154 Not surprisingly,
“Rome perceived the empire as existing for the benefit of Rome
[the city] and perhaps Italy.”155 Along with the flow of material re-
sources, Greek culture was also “transferred” to Rome. How was
the flow of Greek culture patterned in the ancient Mediterranean?

The Transmission of Ideas in the Mediterranean:

Hellenization and Romanization
The wholesale importation of Greek culture by the Romans “cre-
ates the formidable problem of the inverse flow of culture and
power,” since it was the imperial power that adopted the culture of
the conquered.156 It was the Romans who appropriated most as-
pects of Greek culture, including literature, philosophy, religion,
art, architecture, and aspects of law and politics.157 This “total pene-
tration of Greek into Roman culture” meant that “well-educated
Romans could be counted on to be bilingual in Greek” for “the
next five hundred years” from the second century b.c.e. onwards.158
This change in the Roman approach toward the Greeks in the third
century b.c.e. is a puzzle because the Roman interest in Greek cul-
ture “was intermittent and often of secondary importance” until
then and “Roman attitudes towards Hellas lacked continuity or sys-
tematic formulation.”159 This is not insignificant because Rome had
been in commercial contact with the Greek world since the Bronze
Age, as noted above, in addition to being in indirect contact via the
Etruscans.160
How are we to understand this process of Hellenization, which
is traditionally defined as “the spread of Greek culture and its
adoption by non-Greek peoples”?161 Moreover, the process of Hel-
lenization is “usually seen as active.”162 However, this “Hellenocen-
tric approach” that assumes the “superiority of Greek culture over
 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean 59

Roman” is no longer acceptable “as it has little to do with the

historical attitude of Romans towards the Greeks.”163 Recent schol-
arship has emphasized that the “transfer of ideas” is not about
“cultural influence operating arbitrarily.”164 Since the “zones of
contact” are “sociopolitical spaces,” we cannot explain the spread of
culture without paying attention to the power and agency of the
actors involved.165
It was only with Rome’s imperial expansion into southern Italy
(home of the Italiote Greeks), Sicily (home to Greek city-states
like Syracuse), and the Hellenistic world that Rome became enam-
ored with Greek culture. However, the expansion of the imperial
Roman Republic was temporally synchronous with the Helleniza-
tion of the eastern Mediterranean under the Hellenistic kingdoms.
In turn, these processes can themselves be seen as a continuation of
the Hellenization of the Mediterranean during the archaic and
classical periods, especially as they relate to the developments in
southern Italy and Sicily. Since Rome entered an already Helle-
nized Mediterranean as it stepped out of Italy before appropriating
this culture, it is important to understand the Hellenization of
Rome in the longue durée, as mentioned at the beginning of this
chapter. Therefore, this section explains the Hellenization of the
ancient Mediterranean through three interconnected processes be-
ginning with colonization during the archaic and classical periods,
followed by hegemonic socialization during the Hellenistic period.166
The Hellenization of Rome was, then, the culmination of these
prior trends that led to the appropriation of Greek culture by the
all-conquering Romans.

Greek Colonization in the Archaic and Classical Periods

The spread of Greek civilization throughout the Mediterranean
is one of the central features of the history of the archaic period.
According to Mogens Hansen, approximately 279 Greek “colo-
nies” and 129 “Hellenized communities” were founded between
the eighth and fourth centuries b.c.e. (of which 72 colonies were
founded during the classical age, during the fifth and fourth centu-
ries b.c.e.).167 This was a period of constant movement of the
Greek communities, and city-states or poleis were appearing and
60 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean

disappearing all the time along the coasts of the Mediterranean

and the Black Seas. While this phenomenon is often called “coloni-
zation,” it refers to the migration of the Greeks and the cultural
Hellenization of the indigenous communities. Indeed, by the
fourth century b.c.e., approximately “40 per cent of all ancient
Greeks” lived “outside Greece” as a result of these processes.168
Not surprisingly, according to Plato in the fourth century b.c.e.,
“we [Greeks] live between the River Phasis [around the Black Sea
region] and the Pillars of Hercules [or the Strait of Gibraltar] . . .
making our homes around the sea just as ants or frogs do around a
pond.”169
Given the vast number of such poleis during the archaic age, it
is “practically impossible to make watertight generalizations” for
their establishment.170 There were multiple causes for the spread of
Greek communities around the Mediterranean and the Black Seas
in the archaic age; the traditionally emphasized reasons include
overpopulation and land shortage in Greece, along with the com-
mercial ambitions of the Greeks. However, recent scholarship has
also emphasized intra-Greek rivalries, warfare, and expulsion lead-
ing to emigration.171
Since the Phoenicians “dominated” Mediterranean trade prior
to the archaic age and had established their own “colonies” in this
wider region, it has been suggested that “the most important fac-
tor” in this “expansion” of the Greeks was related to commercial
competition with the Phoenicians, which was ultimately linked with
“who had effective control of the sea.”172 Tamar Hodos has empha-
sized this competitive dimension with the Phoenicians in the Greek
colonization of Sicily, North Africa, and northern Syria.173 By 600
b.c.e., the Greeks “massively outnumbered the Phoenicians in the
west Mediterranean and Greek urban forms were having a much
bigger impact on west Mediterranean populations.”174
However, Greek colonization and the formation of new poleis
were not tantamount to imperialism. Most colonial poleis were “po-
litically independent,” although many maintained strong cultural
links with the metropolis or mother city.175 The emigrant Greeks in
the colonies “reproduced the same cults, calendars, dialects, scripts,
state offices and social and political divisions as in their mother cit-
ies,” at least initially.176 Notably, this colonization was not necessar-
 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean 61

ily state-led or state-backed, and “reinforcements” often came from

multiple poleis.177 Many scholars prefer to use the original Greek
word—apoikiai—for such settlements, given the modern baggage
associated with the term colonization. Apoikiai means “a home away
from home” or “emigrant community,” and these population
movements and migrations were permanent.178
Cultural feedback from the colonies to the metropolis also ex-
isted. For example, certain forms of urbanism were “developed first
in the colonial world and then influenced developments back
home.”179 In fact, the emergence of the polis in “its Classical sense
of ‘city-state’ can be traced back to c.734, when Syracuse was
founded [in Sicily] by some Corinthians.”180 However, the colonial
poleis were not politically subordinate to the metropolis. In fact,
some colonial poleis even fought wars with the metropolis, as dem-
onstrated by the battle between Corcyra (colony) and Corinth (me-
tropolis) in the seventh century.181
Nevertheless, the colonial poleis were not established in empty
lands. “Lands often described as ‘empty’ were empty only in the
eye of the beholder, or authors legitimizing the Greeks’ claim, in
particular, to territory or foreign shores.”182 For example, the native
Sikels of Sicily were “expelled to make room for the Greeks” dur-
ing the foundation of Syracuse.183 Other colonial poleis in Sicily
(Himera, Gela, and Camarina) were also founded after the expul-
sion of the locals, as were colonial poleis elsewhere, like the one on
the island of Naxos.184 In other parts of Sicily (and around the
Mediterranean), many poleis were in fact Hellenized communities
of the locals who were acculturated “over a long period through
immigration of individual Greek settlers and through interaction
with neighbouring Hellenic communities,” thereby making strategic
interaction a parallel process of Hellenization during this period in
addition to colonization.185 It was the Phoenicians and Etruscans,
“rival settlers, rather than native populations of each hinterland,
that for several centuries would prove to be the Greeks’ strongest
competitors.”186
While it is true the “cultural ‘Hellenization of the barbarians’
was at no time consciously planned,” “the Greek apoikiai were
highly conscious of being Greek communities and of being part of
the Panhellenic world.”187 Earlier understandings of Hellenization
62 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean

viewed the role of the recipients as passive, especially in the western

Mediterranean. According to John Boardman, “[i]n the west the
Greeks had nothing to learn, much to teach.”188 However, recent
scholarship has been critical of such views. For Hodos, Boardman’s
“essentialist view” implies that “Greek culture (itself viewed as
somewhat static) overwhelmed others . . . with no consideration of
agency, nor of reciprocity.”189 Similarly, Sara Owen is critical of this
“one-way influence” that is ultimately rooted in notions of Greek
“cultural superiority.”190
Emphasizing the agency of the local/indigenous populations,
newer theories of Hellenization emphasize “hybridity,” “middle
ground,” and “communication and negotiation” between the immi-
grant Greeks and the locals.191 In Sicily, different indigenous com-
munities adopted different material, social, and political strategies
to deal with the immigrants, and acculturation included elements
of competition, emulation, and even mythological integration.192
Similarly, it was local socio-political changes at Thasos in Thrace
that initiated contacts with foreign cultures prior to the migration
of the Greeks. Furthermore, “there was at least some Greek inte-
gration into the existing ritual landscapes” in Thasos.193
Although the recognition of local agency is an important con-
tribution in understanding the processes related to transculturation,
Hansen has argued that “confrontation between the local inhabi-
tants and the Greek colonists” occurred in almost “every single
case” of Greek colonization and the founding of poleis.194 Further-
more, relations with the locals could change over time, and at Meg-
ara Hyblaia, “Greeks came into conflict with non-Greeks after
an initial phase of peaceful coexistence.”195 Nicholas Purcell has
explained this “aggression” between the migrants and the locals by
noting that Greek colonization was “the continuation of agrarian
domination by elite groups in new environments” (as opposed to the
“political hegemony” of the metropolis).196 For example, Greek colo-
nists “did not crop plants known to the locals” in the Pontic region;
“instead they brought with them and planted familiar crops.”197 Con-
sequently, the contest for this “land for settlement and agriculture”
with the locals was an important feature of Greek colonization.198
This emphasis on the territorial dimension of Greek coloniza-
tion is best understood in contrast with the parallel process
 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean 63

of Phoenician colonization. Phoenician communities “did not

dominate—culturally, politically, or economically—the societies in
which they cohabited and with whom they interacted, and this is
perhaps the most fundamental difference between the Phoenician
and Greek overseas settlements.”199 As noted by Johann Arnason,
“Carthaginian domination does not seem to have resulted in a ‘Pu-
nicization’ of North Africa or the Iberian peninsula.”200 Since the
Phoenicians were ultimately interested in dominating commerce
and commercial networks, their colonies were in fact established
on the margins of the lands already settled by local communities.
Not surprisingly, the Phoenician communities “disappeared over
time, probably absorbed by the locals.”201
By contrast, “the whole colonial world” had become a part of
Hellas or the realm of Greek culture.202 It was the non-Greeks who
were incorporated into the Greek civilization. “[T]here are very
few known cases where Greek colonists adapted themselves to the
local language and culture and finally stopped speaking Greek or
feeling themselves to be Greek.”203 Even in places like Iberia,
where the agency of the locals has been emphasized and where
“middle ground” was sought, the indigenous people “experienced
the Greek approach as a use of power,” and these parts of Iberia
became a part of Hellas.204 Elsewhere, power asymmetries were ex-
ercised in their gendered form through intermarriage with native
women in places like Massalia (southern France) that resulted in
the Hellenization of local communities.205

The Eastern Mediterranean: Hegemonic Socialization and

Hellenization after Alexander’s Conquests
Unlike the western Mediterranean, the eastern Mediterranean was
not Hellenized in the archaic age except along specific coastal
stretches, as the Greeks encountered equally powerful but older
civilizations in that region. For example, Greek mercenaries had
been employed by the Egyptian pharaohs since the seventh century
b.c.e. However, Greek settlements there were “under strict Egyp-
tian control,” and intermarriage between the Greeks and locals
was forbidden.206 The eastern Mediterranean was Hellenized
after its conquest by Alexander the Great (336–323 b.c.e.) through
64 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean

hegemonic socialization, or the imposition of Greek culture on

local societies by the conquest states of his successors: the Seleucids
and the Ptolemies. The Macedonian case itself is slightly different,
for the process of Hellenization there had begun before Alexander.
However, hegemonic socialization was at work in Macedonia too.
Whether or not the Macedonians were Greeks has been a long-
running question in scholarship. While it is now recognized that
“Macedonian was a Greek dialect,” it is also known that the other
population groups speaking different languages predated the Mace-
donian speakers in that region, and that they were “either expelled
or reduced to a subordinate position and eventually assimilated by
the conquering Macedonians.”207 From the fifth century b.c.e. on-
wards, the Macedonian kings (not the people) tried to import
Greek culture. Under Philip II (359–336 b.c.e.), Attic, the Athenian
dialect of Greek as opposed to the Macedonian dialect, was used
for written documents and public inscriptions in Macedonia.208
This semi-Hellenized polity at the frontier of the classical Greek
world eventually took over the culture of Greece under Philip and
his son Alexander the Great “by diplomacy and conquest.”209
Beyond Greece, Alexander’s conquest of Persia and Egypt has
been referred to as the “ ‘big bang’ of Hellenistic ‘globalisation.’ ”210
Importantly, Alexander’s campaigns were followed by the setting up
of garrisons in these conquered territories, where “a Greek-speak-
ing population” also continued to live.211 In other words, “Alexan-
der’s conquest opened . . . [these lands] to Greek immigration,” and
the Seleucids wanted “to create Greek colonies and to install citi-
zens of Greek cities in Phrygia, in Pisidia, and even in the Persian
Gulf region.”212 With the promotion of Greek culture by the ruling
elite of the Hellenistic monarchies, many non-Greek locals “had
strong incentives to attain power and wealth through acquiring the
Greek language, Greek names, Greek education or Greek cultural
practices” through the process of hegemonic socialization.213 While
some non-Greeks became “completely Hellenised,” the Seleucid
domains experienced a “more or less stable diglossia” of Greek and
local languages like Aramaic with “people using different languages
in different communities for different purposes.”214
Meanwhile, “the Ptolemies created a basic distinction between
Greeks and Egyptians,” with different legal, judicial, and taxation
 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean 65

systems, even as some Egyptians and other non-Greeks could at

times be classified as Greeks for administrative purposes.215 How-
ever, in their “brand new, purpose-built capital-city” Alexandria,
“native Egyptians, like the Jews, had their own quarters and were
clearly a minority.”216 While the Ptolemies came to rule a two-mil-
lennia-old wealthy polity in Egypt and “were treated as both Egyp-
tian pharaohs and Hellenistic monarchs,” Cleopatra was probably
the first Ptolemy to have known Egyptian, and she became the ruler
of this kingdom after two and a half centuries of Hellenistic rule.217
Greek remained the language of the political elite and of edu-
cation in Egypt until its conquest by Rome (and thrived for several
centuries thereafter as well). Although the Hellenization of the lo-
cals “was not complete or uncontested” (as shown by the use of dif-
ferent administrative systems and linguistic registers), Greek was
clearly the language of politics there, and ethnic Greeks and Helle-
nized locals staffed the upper echelons of government and society
in the Hellenistic kingdoms.218 In other words, when Rome entered
the eastern Mediterranean, it stepped into this Hellenized world,
“the bequest of the conquests of Alexander.”219

Appropriation: Hellenization and Roman Imperialism

The process of the Hellenization of Rome was rooted in consider-
ations of politics and prestige. Unlike the process of hegemonic so-
cialization in the Hellenistic world in the wake of Alexander’s
conquests, “the Romans did not force their culture” on the peoples
of the territories that they dominated and conquered.220 Rome’s
imperial dominance over the Hellenistic world notwithstanding,
it was the Romans who adopted the culture of the subject people.
According to the Roman poet Horace in the first century b.c.e.,
“Greece, the captive, took her savage victor captive, and brought
the arts into rustic Latium.”221 However, this civilizing narrative
was created by the Romans themselves, in part to serve the ideo-
logical agenda of Roman imperialism.222
The Roman polity had encountered Greek culture from its
very beginnings, as noted earlier. “But this stirred no obvious inter-
est by Rome in the lands of the Greek East.”223 Rome began to pay
attention to Greek culture only after its expansion into the world
66 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean

of the Italiote Greeks to its south. Initially, “the hellenization of

Roman Italy had expressed itself in material culture” that was
achieved through the loot and booty acquired from Tarentum (272
b.c.e.), Volsinii (265 b.c.e.), and “by a veritable flood of Greek art
after the capture of Syracuse in 211.”224 Similarly, Rome’s victory
over Macedon in 168 b.c.e. also produced a booty of 20,000 vol-
umes of Greek knowledge from the library at the royal palace at
Pydna.225 Considerations of prestige also promoted the Helleniza-
tion of Rome. Prior to the conquest of Macedonia, Rome was not
considered a beautiful city “in its public or private spaces.”226 Rome
learned about the “aesthetics of power,” both material (such as
monumental architecture and public art) and ideological (such as
the imperial quest to promote humanitas or “liberal values”), from
the Greeks.227
However, Rome had no interest in being “culturally colonized”
by the Greeks.228 The Romans themselves vigorously debated the
Hellenization of Rome. The “most celebrated luxury-hating, anti-
Hellene of the Republican period” was Cato the Censor, who wor-
ried about Rome’s moral decline through imported luxuries.229
Similarly, there were enthusiastic Hellenizers like Cicero, “one of
the primary apostles of Greek intellectual culture at Rome,” who
believed that the Romans had much to learn from the Greeks.230
The civilizing myth of the rustic Romans by the cultured Greeks
noted above needs to be understood in light of these intellectual
debates in Rome.
In fact, the Romans were “orientalizing” the Greeks (in a man-
ner implied by Edward Said) through such debates and critiques of
Greek luxuries to assert their military dominance.231 Even as Cato
was himself “steeped in Greek language, history, and culture,” he
was ultimately more worried about the “destructive character of
many Hellenistic models born within the courts of Alexander’s suc-
cessors” for the republican institutions of Rome itself, instead of
agonizing about Greek culture per se.232 “Hellenization and [impe-
rial] power” went together because it was the Romans who were
“deciding who should exercise the authority of regulating the pro-
cess of acculturation, when, and how.”233
As Tim Whitmarsh has noted, the Hellenization of Rome itself
was never in question; “the only debate . . . was over how it was to
 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean 67

be inserted into an imperial framework.”234 The Roman appropria-

tion of Greek culture was about imperial dominance, as it was
about Rome having “robbed” Greece of its culture.235 After all, “the
Greeks the Romans knew the best were domestic slaves, employed
artisans, and diplomats” with whom they interacted during impe-
rial expansion.236 This imperial assertion of Roman power over
Greece through Hellenization has been characterized as “imperial
Hellenism” because neither was Rome’s “rightful dominance over
Greece” questioned nor were its “art-plundering generals” criti-
cized, even as the Romans vigorously debated how to Hellenize.237
There are two other important facets of this Roman appropriation
of Greek culture. First, Rome’s respect for Greek culture “was fo-
cused upon the past—rather like the British in India [in the nine-
teenth century], they viewed contemporary Greece as decadent.”238
Second, and relatedly, “Hellenism was largely confined to the cul-
tural and intellectual sphere, and located in a complementary, dy-
adic relationship with Roman military and political supremacy.”239
At a more pragmatic level, as Rome expanded into the Helle-
nized world to its east, there were more Greek speakers in the im-
perial Roman Republic from the first century b.c.e. than Latin
speakers.240 These educated Greeks (especially traders, geographers,
and imperial administrators) could be made to serve the imperial
ends related to the expanding Roman polity. Since “Greek was un-
derstood throughout the [Mediterranean] world,” it was better “for
Romans to be celebrated in the world language.”241 Given its “pub-
lic character,” Greek literature, especially rhetoric—“the most im-
portant intellectual discipline in ancient Western history”—was
also useful for Roman imperial administrators, as it was advanta-
geous during the debates in Rome’s senatorial and public assem-
blies.242 Consequently, the absorption of Greek philosophy did not
change “the political views of the Romans who adopted” Greek
thought, instead “it bolstered and sustained those views.”243
An important political reason driving Hellenization was the
role of Rome’s Italian allies. Rome’s imperial expansion under the
Republic was jointly pursued with the Italian allies, as discussed
above. However, the exclusiveness of Roman citizenship before
the Social War (91–87 b.c.e.) meant that the allies (especially the
Italiote Greeks) looked toward Greek culture—a quasi-universal
68 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean

culture in the Mediterranean with which they had had close inter-
action, just like the Romans—to express their participation in the
imperial enterprise. “The Italians became Roman on the condition
that Romans became Italian. Both sides found the point of cultural
convergence in Hellenism.”244 As the Roman elite became “Greek
culturally, the mass of the Greek-speaking population of southern
Italy overnight became Romans legally.”245 Extension of Roman cit-
izenship clearly meant the weakening of local (Greek) political
identities.
However, culture is not unitary, so the Romans (and Italians)
could Hellenize without becoming less Roman or Italian.246 “Roman
traditions claimed no purity of lineage. Distinctiveness of blood or
heritage never took hold as part of the Roman self-conception.”247
From its very beginnings, the Roman identity had been constantly
transformed through the appropriation of some of the cultures that
had been conquered. The destruction of Veii in 396 b.c.e. had made
its patron deity, Juno, into a Roman divinity, “not a defeat of the
other’s god but an appropriation of it.”248 Consequently, the “influx
of Greek culture forced Romans to think about what it was to be
Roman.”249
According to Bang, the Romans “entered the game of competi-
tive emulation with the Greeks.”250 Cicero Latinized Greek philoso-
phy while a Greek, Livius, is believed to have invented Latin
literature. Similarly, even as the Romans emulated Greek art and ar-
chitecture, they enriched it with their own technological innovations
(such as the use of cement and Puteoli stone).251 At the same time, the
Romans also rejected some aspects of Greek culture altogether, such
as music and gymnastics.252 Hellenization and Romanization were,
then, parallel processes because the Hellenization of Italy occurred
simultaneously with the “spread of Roman roads and control.”253
In Rachel Mairs’s words (summarizing Andrew Wallace-Hadrill),
“Rome’s Hellenization is important in understanding the Romaniza-
tion process in the western provinces, where Greek culture, imported
from the Greek East to the Roman center, was reconstituted and re-
imported to the provinces as an essential part of the Romanization
‘package.’”254
The civilization of the Roman Empire was, then, “dual”—
Hellenic and Latin/Roman—as opposed to “composite.”255 Fur-
 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean 69

thermore, there was a profound asymmetry between them as

the dominant direction of cultural change was from Greece to
Rome.256 However, the parallel processes of Hellenization and
Romanization did not necessarily represent inclusivity and cosmo-
politanism. These cultural processes were “ultimately imperial-
ist.”257 While Rome may have adopted the older and venerable
Greek civilization, it also destroyed the much older Punic civiliza-
tion with the destruction of Carthage. Not only did the Romans
“demonize the Carthaginians,” but “Hannibal himself served as a
bogeyman for many generations of misbehaving Roman chil-
dren.”258 Similarly, only those aspects of Egyptian culture were
adopted—such as ruling Egypt as a pharaoh—that allowed Rome
to administer that province effectively. The Hellenization of Rome
was about appropriation related to “the practical and historical suc-
cess” of Rome as an imperial power.259 While Rome’s Greek sub-
jects now identified themselves politically with the Roman
imperium despite their erstwhile imperial role in the Hellenistic
monarchies, they did so through Greek politico-cultural sym-
bols.260 By contrast, despite enthusiastic Hellenization, “Rome
never became a Greek city.”261
Not only did Rome create a “sustainable tributary economy,”
but the cultural Hellenization of Rome also meant that this core–
periphery order was both material and ideational.262 “The [ide-
ational] goal was the imposition and performance of distinction [at
the level of elites], not the forging of cultural homogeneity
[throughout the empire].”263 This cultural process was clearly
Rome-centric as Hellenization was an act of imperial appropriation.
It is also important to note that “Roman power . . . tended to mar-
ginalize and later eliminate local languages” other than Greek.264 As
noted by Anthony Pagden, almost “no trace” remained of “any pre-
Roman literature, oral or written, or any pre-Roman history of the
peoples at the heart of the empire in the western Mediterranean
and northwestern and central Europe. . . . The same was true of the
Roman settlements in North Africa.”265 After all, it is an empire that
is known by the name of the city at its center. So what were the
public goods provided by the empire that ensured its relative stabil-
ity over the centuries?
70 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean

The Roman Core–Periphery System and

the Provision of Public Goods
There were two key structural attributes of this Rome-centric sys-
tem. First, Rome’s “predatory imperialism” reorganized land and
labor in the Mediterranean as wealth began to flow into the city
(and Italy). This process has been referred to as “one of the greatest
transfers of wealth in history.”266 Not only did Rome and Italy not
pay any land taxes after 167 b.c.e., but the indemnities that Rome
extracted after its incessant wars “were [also] spent mostly in
Italy.”267 The institution of slavery was an integral feature of the
Mediterranean economy. Additionally, the confiscation of agricul-
tural land in the defeated polities by Roman colonizers meant that
“Roman citizens became the owners of large estates in the provinces
and the conquering elite of the Romans gradually acquired wealth
commensurate with their conquest of the Mediterranean basin.”268
Second, this core–periphery order was linked to Rome’s hege-
monic alliances that can be traced back to its expansion under the
early Republic. Rome imposed “permanent and unequal treaties”
on its opponents beginning with the Latin League.269 As subordi-
nate allies, Rome’s opponents not only supplied it with troops at
their own cost, but also limited their relations with foreign powers
other than Rome itself. Furthermore, allied troop contributions
were relatively high: they supplied between half and two-thirds of
all troops during the second century b.c.e.270 As noted above,
Rome’s maritime allies like the Italiote Greeks, Etruscans, and
Rhodians had played a significant role in the creation of the
Roman mare nostrum. With the allies as oarsmen and the Romans
as marines, “the secret to Roman success lay not so much in the
maritime transformation of Roman culture but in the ability of the
Romans to attach themselves to those polities and cultures that did
have strong naval traditions.”271
This core–periphery international structure became “tighter”
under the Principate. Economically, the needs of the city of Rome
(especially grain) and the military dictated the patterns of trade
around the Mediterranean.272 The massive standing army of nearly
300,000 soldiers and the large permanent navy were also recruited
from the provinces.273 In fact, service in the military was also a ve-
 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean 71

hicle of Romanization.274 As the subordinate polities transformed

into provinces, Roman law was imposed, albeit unevenly, through-
out this “ecumene,” where a “collective identity” emerged at the
elite level.275 Even as “an illusion of local autonomy” was main-
tained in the provinces, “local institutions, cultural and religious
practices, and power networks were deprived of any political sig-
nificance.”276 For example, the Greeks in the eastern Mediterra-
nean “cared little for the niceties of the Roman republican
constitution” and “treated the emperor simply as a king” after in-
corporating him into their own traditions.277 Similarly, while the
emperor ruled Egypt as a pharaoh and relied on local temple elites,
it was clear that power lay in Rome.
This Rome-centric order was supported by the infrastructure
of Roman public goods: protection (which included the implicit
threat of violence), suppression of piracy, and sea control as a motor
to shape Mediterranean trade. However, it should be noted that the
provision of these functions was deeply implicated with the Roman
understanding of power and peace. “It used to be widely held that
ideas exercised relatively little power in the Roman world, but
fewer now believe this.”278 According to Wolfgang Spickermann,
“ancient Mediterranean empires saw themselves as peacekeeping
powers,” and we should try and understand Pax Romana in these
terms.279
The Romans had a very distinct understanding of peace. “It was
the product of victorious war, something imposed on the van-
quished, the product of surrender, humiliation, and the breaking of
the enemy’s spirit.”280 In turn, this idea of peace was associated with
the idea of power that implied “supremacy as resting on” the issu-
ing of “orders that must be obeyed.”281 In other words, this idea of
power went beyond territorial control and other material resources
in possession. According to Polybius, the Romans approached
power in the sense that implied that others could not afford to “dis-
obey” Rome.282 (Polybius, the Greek historian of Rome in the Hel-
lenistic period, had had a first-hand experience of Roman power
given that he was among the mass deportees of Greek and Macedo-
nian elites sent to Italy after the defeat of Macedonia in 167
b.c.e.)283 Such an articulation of power and the imposition of conse-
quent peace and protection (of allies and dependents) show Rome’s
72 The Order of the Roman Mediterranean

attitude “to express their hegemony . . . being explored through the

language of peace.”284
Consequently, a decade after the Second Punic War, when
Carthage offered to pay off its entire war indemnity to Rome that
was scheduled for periodic payments over fifty years, Rome de-
clined. “Continuous long-term payments emphasized the submis-
sion of the former enemy and gave repeated reminder of her
defeat, a lesson to other powers who might be recalcitrant or bel-
ligerent.”285 Similarly, while Pompey’s victory against the pirates in
67 b.c.e. is legendary, Rome had not even begun “to try to suppress
piracy until the very end of the second century BC.”286 In fact, pi-
racy in the eastern Mediterranean was at least partly a result of the
disarray brought about by Roman expansion in that region in the
first place.287 Even after Pompey, there was a “lack of will” in Rome
to completely eradicate piracy (although it was certainly brought
under control), for it would have removed “a source of slaves.”288
Finally, the creation of the Principate also meant that Rome
had to rethink its practice of sea control because it had literally
conquered all the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. Pax/peace
was now “to be established over the expanse of empire rather than
in relation to an opponent.”289 Consequently, Rome did what it had
been doing for centuries: it appropriated “the Hellenistic ideas of
world domination” to express the Roman pax “in terms of Roman
imperium over the orbis terrarum and terra marique,” or control
over all land and sea.290 The ancient Greek idea of oikoumene or
“the inhabited world” had already been applied to the Romans by
Polybius in the second century b.c.e.291 While the Hellenistic mon-
archs had sought to rule over all land and sea, the Romans justified
their conquests as bringing pax over all land and sea.292 However,
this Roman peace over mare nostrum was the result of conquest and
was maintained by the presence of a permanent navy.
 chapter three
The International Order of
the Classical Indian Ocean
(~First–Fifteenth Centuries c.e.)

T
he trading system of the eastern Indian Ocean (or
maritime Asia) emerged in the absence of a coercive heg-
emonic actor. Since the dominant theories of interna-
tional relations hold that hegemons create international
order, they are unable to account for the making and shaping of this
order that thrived and survived for centuries despite the rise and fall
of several Chinese dynasties as well as many Southeast Asian and
Indian polities. In this chapter, we develop a theoretical account of
the classical Indian Ocean over the longue durée to demonstrate that
the stability of commerce was underwritten by the combination of
the decentralized practices of the large and small actors of this sys-
tem. In other words, there was no hegemonic naval power exercis-
ing sea control in this maritime world. While Chinese empires were
certainly important, it was Southeast Asia’s local initiative that played
the crucial role. Furthermore, despite China’s material and eco-
nomic power, especially during periods of the large empires, South-
east Asian polities (with the partial exception of northern Vietnam)
actively looked across the Bay of Bengal toward India for the ideas
that informed the region’s politico-cultural formations. We argue

73
74 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

that the classical Indian Ocean is the paradigmatic case of a

nonhegemonic, decentered, and multiplex international order that
challenges the dominant view that hegemons make and shape
orders.

Introduction
The international order in the classical Indian Ocean was created
with the active agency of the local Southeast Asian polities, along
with various Indian polities (connected via the Bay of Bengal) as
well as the Chinese empires/polities (which looked toward the
South China Sea). This oceanic corridor between the manufactur-
ing powers of China and India was arguably the most dynamic part
of the global economy by the beginning of the Common Era (and
remained so until the Industrial Revolution [~1800]).1 Notably, no
empire or hegemonic actor controlled this entire maritime expanse
in the eastern Indian Ocean. It was Southeast Asia that connected
the core economies of China in the east with that of India in the
west (with the latter being a multicentered core), thereby playing a
crucial role in the maritime Asian system (see Fig. 2).2
Despite asymmetries with its Asian neighbors, it was the Aus-
tronesian peoples of Southeast Asia who had pioneered the ship-
ping routes to China and India in the prehistorical period, “and
around the beginning of the Common Era, they carried goods be-
tween China and India” on Southeast Asian ships.3 In the absence
of a hegemonic navy patrolling maritime Asia, the local agency of
the Southeast Asian polities was crucial in the making and shaping
of this system. Consequently, Southeast Asia was hardly a periph-
ery of the Chinese and Indian cores; it was in fact pivotal. This is
especially so, because the Chinese and Indian cores did not enrich
themselves through the exploitation of Southeast Asia that re-
mained politically, economically, and culturally vibrant. As shown
in this chapter, even the so-called Chinese tributary system did not
result in the flow of wealth to China at the expense of others as
happened in the Roman tributary system discussed in Chapter 2.
The political and commercial benefits in maritime Asia were more
evenly distributed. Thus configured, the classical eastern Indian
Ocean (~first–fifteenth centuries) is representative of a nonhege-
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 75

Figure 2. Map of the classical eastern Indian Ocean/Southeast Asia ( first–

fifteenth centuries c.e.). (Produced for the authors by Oxford Cartographers)

monic and decentered international order, perhaps the paradig-

matic case for such a multiplex order in the classical world.
Although Southeast Asian polities did pay “tribute” to China, it
represented “ceremonial presents” that provided the political/ritual
façade for trade with China.4 It did not constitute taxation of the sort
levied by Rome in the Mediterranean. While recognizing a loose
form of Chinese primacy implied in such relationships, the Southeast
Asian societies adopted “Indic ideologies and [socio-political] prac-
tices . . . from the necessity to better control the flow of goods” to
and from their own ports.5 China’s leading geopolitical position not-
withstanding, it was Indic ideas that were far more influential in
Southeast Asia, outweighing Sinic ideas. In other words, the Chinese
tributary system was itself embedded within larger maritime Asian
networks that were actively created by the Southeast Asian polities.
76 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

Southeast Asia Indianized by adopting and adapting “key ele-

ments of Indian religious life, arts, and language as well as law and
statecraft.”6 The Indic idea of the mandala (“circle”) to organize
their political organizations (or state-like entities) was also bor-
rowed by the Southeast Asians. The region experienced a wave of
Indianization everywhere with the partial exception of northern
Vietnam where Sinic ideas held sway. However, “even there Indic
elements were not insignificant” as explained subsequently.7 Unlike
Chinese imperialism in northern Vietnam, the Indianization of
Southeast Asia was a peaceful process. According to Hermann
Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, it “is one of the greatest achieve-
ments of Indian history or even the history of mankind” because
“[n]one of the other great civilisations—not even the Hellenic—had
been able to achieve a similar success without military conquest.”8
The aim of this chapter is to explain the role of power and ideas
in the making and shaping of the international order in the classical
eastern Indian Ocean: its open, nonhegemonic, and decentered trad-
ing system, and the Indianization of Southeast Asia. This chapter
emphasizes two factors. First, unlike the Roman Mediterranean, the
practice of sea control was absent from the geopolitics of maritime
Asia. The Chinese empires used the tributary system and resorted to
“political manipulation” to manage this trading order at the Chinese
end of this maritime world.9 On the other hand, even as the South-
east Asian polities depended on the sea for commerce and travel
while fighting wars and engaging in acts of piracy for the control of
maritime wealth, they sought the “[c]ontrol of nearby seas” or of
local waters only, as opposed to controlling the entire long-distance
maritime trade routes straddling the region and beyond.10
Since the “whole archipelago was a crossroads,” there was no
single politico-commercial center in Southeast Asia because
“where exactly the merchants congregated was never a given con-
clusion, and indeed changed over time.”11 Consequently, the net-
works of connectivity fluctuated with the power of the mandalas,
and the resultant order in maritime Asia was a function of “the ac-
cretion of decentralized choices.”12 Given this diversity of political
actors that legitimated their statehood on different ideas—South-
east Asian mandalas, Chinese empires, Sinic Dai Viet (after 938–
939), and Indic polities that interacted with Southeast Asia (and
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 77

with China via Southeast Asia)—and the important role played by

merchant diasporas as explained later, a multiplex order existed in
Southeast Asia.
In effect, there was no single centric power or hegemonic
power in the classical Indian Ocean. The safety of the sea lanes was
the result of “shared management” by different actors.13 The vari-
ous Chinese polities as well as the maritime mandalas were moti-
vated by different reasons to look after their local seas. The
international order in this decentered world was clearly dynamic,
and the intense “interpolity competition” in Southeast Asia was re-
lated to controlling the local waters for “access to foreign prestige
goods,” as opposed to dominating the trade routes via sea control.14
The “seas remained open” in maritime Asia despite the absence of
a maritime hegemon keeping this passage open.15
Second, and relatedly, as Southeast Asian polities competed, they
looked toward Indic politico-cultural models, especially ideas like the
mandala and the associated concepts of the cakravartin (universal/
paramount) ruler, rajadhiraja (the Raja of Rajas), and maharaja (Great
King). The process by which “elements of Indian civilization pene-
trated Southeast Asia . . . unevenly and serendipitously, creating hy-
bridities of endless variation” is best understood as localization.16
Unlike Chinese imperial expansion in the region now corresponding
with contemporary northern Vietnam that “truncated an indigenous
development of a state society in the Red River delta” after 111
b.c.e., state formation that was already underway elsewhere in South-
east Asia began “gaining momentum” beginning in the first century
c.e. “with the adaptation of state ideologies borrowed from India.”17
In contrast to the Mediterranean where Hellenization was
linked with colonization, hegemonic socialization, and imperial ap-
propriation as discussed in Chapter 2, the Indianization of South-
east Asia was not backed by overseas imperialism in the Indic mold,
nor did it emerge out of Indic politico-economic hegemony or
state-backed religious-cultural evangelism. Furthermore, unlike
Greek notions of cultural superiority or the Roman imperial per-
ception of Greece as decadent, the Indianization of Southeast
Asia “was not of much interest to the Indian mainland—neither an
object of political ambition nor a source of cultural hubris.”18 This
was in spite of the fact that India “loomed so large in the Southeast
78 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

Asian imaginaire.”19 As observed by the seventh-century Chinese

Buddhist scholar Xuanzang, “People of distant places generally
designate the land they admire as India.”20 Centuries later, the Na-
gara-Kertagama, the fourteenth-century Javanese politico-cultural
text, could identify only two “renowned” places in the world: Java
and India.21 Indic political models that were perceived as being
universal were actively localized by the Southeast Asians.
The rest of this chapter is divided into four sections. The first
section explains why the classical eastern Indian Ocean centered
on modern Southeast Asia should be treated as an international
system. The following section elucidates the structure of power
and authority in maritime Asia by focusing on its political-strategic
and political-economic interactions. Despite the presence of mari-
time conflict, maritime Asia was the largest trading system of the
premodern global economy. The third section focuses on the Indi-
anization of classical Southeast Asia through the localization of
Indic politico-cultural ideas. Southeast Asia was not a mere periph-
ery of an Indic ecumene; instead, Southeast Asia was a co-creator
of this social system. The fourth and the final section focuses on
the decentered order in maritime Asia and the practices of shared
management in the provision of public goods that kept the trade
routes open even in the absence of a hegemonic navy.

The Classical Eastern Indian Ocean

as an International System
Classical Southeast Asia was a region of mandala polities. The man-
dala refers to the realm of authority of a ruler whose power radi-
ated out from a center and included other such rulers who were
lower in the hierarchy.22 While being unbounded in theory, the
power of the ruler nevertheless diminished with distance from
the center, and eventually ceased to matter or overlapped with the
edges of other powerful rulers from neighboring mandalas. The
identity of the central realm was not fixed, and the number of sub-
ordinate rulers also varied across time and space. Consequently,
mandala rulers “coerced as well as wooed” as they competed for
followers, and the mandalas “expand[ed] and contract[ed] in con-
certina-like fashion.”23 Throughout the classical period, Southeast
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 79

Asia was literally the realm of “hundreds” of mandalas, and some of

the larger ones were “nested amid hundreds of smaller ones.”24
In general, historical Southeast Asia has been ignored in the IR
theoretical scholarship, as discussed in the Introduction. More re-
cently, some scholars like Hendrik Spruyt have treated classical
Southeast Asia as “a distinct regional system.”25 However, Spruyt
did not specifically analyze Southeast Asia as a maritime system,
which is a chief focus of this study. Furthermore, even as Spruyt
acknowledged the “Indianization of Southeast Asia,” he did not ex-
plain how and why Southeast Asia Indianized, and gave undue pri-
macy to religion in the making of its socio-political order. Other
scholars tend to club classical Southeast Asia with East Asia—with
China at the center—in a “closed” region.26 Some have even ar-
gued that this larger region was “not in regular constant contact or
cultural or social relations” with other parts of the world.27 While
Spruyt only paid cursory attention to Southeast Asia’s trade con-
nections with India and China, the region’s political, commercial,
and cultural links with the Indian Ocean world are completely ig-
nored by scholars who focus on East Asia as a closed region.
By contrast, following the lead of Southeast Asian and global his-
torians, we treat classical Southeast Asia as an “open” region.28 The
Southeast Asian states/societies evolved “in communication with ad-
jacent Asian civilizations in India and China.”29 The peoples of mari-
time Southeast Asia had been trading “with India by 500 BCE and
China by 400 BCE.”30 For Southeast Asian polities, “a single contin-
uous ‘sea’ ” linked the eastern Indian Ocean with the South China
Sea.31 Given the old Southeast Asian cliché that “the sea unites, the
land divides,” the geographical edges of this maritime world were lit-
erally and figuratively fluid.32 In fact, this maritime region stretching
from the South China Sea to the Bay of Bengal via contemporary
Southeast Asia exhibited the full range of Buzan and Little’s politico-
military, politico-economic, and politico-cultural interaction pro-
cesses to qualify as an international system, as discussed in Chapter 1.
Hoogervorst has argued that the cultural links between India
and Southeast Asia “were preceded by centuries of commercial in-
teraction,” and that “contacts with wealthy foreign merchants, fre-
quently from South Asia, played an important role in the process
of state formation” in Southeast Asia.33 While long-range overseas
80 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

military encounters were relatively rare between the Indian sub-

continent and Southeast Asia, they did occur. The south Indian
Pallavas militarily intervened in Takuapa in the Thai-Malay penin-
sula in the ninth century for reasons related to the diversion of
maritime trade.34 The most important known examples of Indian
military campaigns in Southeast Asia were the attacks carried out
by the Cholas (in 1017, 1025, and the 1070s), allegedly to retaliate
against Sriwijayan interference in Chola trade with China.35
Southeast Asian polities also sent expeditions into South Asia.
Tambralingga (Nakhon Si Thammarat) in the Thai-Malay penin-
sula attacked Sri Lanka in 1247 and may have controlled its north-
ern regions until 1258.36 A triangular politico-military contest
existed between polities in Sri Lanka, Burma, and the Thai-Malay
peninsula between 1000 and 1200.37 Pagan and Arakan also raided
Bengal for “skilled artisanal workers” after the twelfth century.38
What is noteworthy is that this pattern of known South–Southeast
Asia military encounters dates from centuries after the beginning
of Indianization (~300 c.e.). Moreover, with some exceptions like
the Chola attack, they were limited to relatively low-level raids, es-
pecially when compared with Roman expansion in the Mediterra-
nean or even the Chinese military forays into Southeast Asia.
In 112 b.c.e., the Han emperor Wudi sent “a fleet of 200,000
marines” to Guangdong “in the powerful maritime kingdom of
Nanyue” that included parts of contemporary northern/central
coastal Vietnam.39 Later, in 41–42 c.e., “a naval fleet of over 2,000
multideck warships was sent to Jiaozhi” to reoccupy northern Viet-
nam, which remained in the orbit of various Chinese empires until
938–939 c.e.40 Beyond naval warfare along the Vietnamese coast,
the “first firm historical evidence for the presence of Chinese fleets
in Southeast Asia and beyond comes as late as the thirteenth cen-
tury.”41 While these later Chinese naval forays into Southeast Asia
are subsequently discussed, it is noteworthy that the envoys of Em-
peror Wudi sailed beyond Nanyue to Huangzhi/Kanchi in south-
eastern India “on board Austronesian ships” despite Han China’s
impressive naval capabilities.42
Funan was probably the first Southeast Asian polity to receive
Chinese envoys (from the Wu state around 240 c.e.).43 The Chinese
envoys in Funan met an envoy from the Murunda rulers of eastern
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 81

India. They questioned the Murunda envoy “in detail about the
customs of India, and on their return [to China] . . . they claimed to
have visited or heard about more than a hundred kingdoms in the
Southern Seas.”44 In the fourth century, the Linyi polity in central
Vietnam presented a memorial to the Chinese Jin state “written in
a foreign script, apparently Indic, the earliest reference to the use of
any script in Southeast Asia.”45 That the world beyond northern
Vietnam was an Indianized realm of hundreds of mandalas was well
known to the Chinese polities from the earliest times.
Funan in the Mekong region was “the earliest true Indianised
state of Southeast Asia (1st–7th centuries CE),” and the intense
cultural exchange between India and Southeast Asia meant that “a
package of state concepts and Indian religions (both Buddhism and
Brahmanism) was adopted and adapted by Southeast Asian socie-
ties and their rulers, together with monumental and iconographic
props, and last but not least, the usage of Sanskrit and writing (first
for Sanskrit, soon for vernacular languages).”46 In Majapahit in east
Java, the last of the major Indianized states of Southeast Asia that
survived until the 1530s, “Sanskrit poets from India were welcome
guests” until the late fourteenth century, and Sanskrit inscriptions
were still being composed “as late as 1447.”47
Given the strong politico-cultural links between India and
Southeast Asia in this period (~first–fifteenth centuries), Sheldon
Pollock has argued that “it makes hardly more sense to distinguish
between South and Southeast Asia than between north and south
India, despite what present-day area studies may tell us.”48 Simi-
larly, in terms of commercial and trading links during this period,
“peninsular maritime India and Southeast Asia formed more of
an integrated zone than did southern and northern India” accord-
ing to Richard Smith.49 However, commercial links with China
were crucial because China was the single largest economic actor,
especially during periods of the large empires: Han, Sui, Tang,
Song, Yuan, and Ming. From the Bay of Bengal to the South China
Sea, the classical eastern Indian Ocean can then be thought of as a
“dynamic, pulsing, multi-layered, and fluid” system with Southeast
Asia at its core.50 Since a pan-Southeast Asian indigenous empire
has never existed and given the absence of a hegemonic navy exer-
cising sea control, maritime Asia had a decentered structure.
82 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

Until the Mongol-Yuan maritime invasions in the thirteenth

century, no Chinese polity had tried to politically incorporate
Southeast Asia (beyond Vietnam) or to dominate the sea routes.
After the Mongol-Yuan failure to do so, “Zheng He’s expeditions
could have been the prelude . . . to control over the trade networks
of the Indian Ocean, but this did not happen.”51 As such, the ab-
sence of coercive hegemony in the eastern Indian Ocean cannot be
reduced to geography or to “the stopping power of water.”52 After
all, imperial Japan did bring all of maritime Asia under its hege-
monic domination during the Second World War for approxi-
mately three years (1942–1945). It also made military forays into
the adjacent regions of India while already controlling parts of
southern and eastern China. So how did the classical Indian Ocean
trading system maintain its decentered structure?
Maritime Asia was created bottom-up by the local Southeast
Asian actors (although the role of various Indian groups, and later
the Chinese, was also important). Patterns of maritime connectiv-
ity enabled by monsoon winds had generated this eastern Indian
Ocean system, which was “an environmentally unified space.”53 Ac-
cording to a Chinese source from the third century c.e., Southeast
Asian ships, probably from what today is Indonesia, were more
than fifty meters long, and could carry 600–700 passengers along
with 600 tons of cargo.54 By the eighth century c.e., they could
carry more than 1,000 people.55 Under the Tang (~600–900 c.e.),
Chinese ships may have even ventured beyond Southeast Asia to
southern India’s Malabar coast.56 However, “it is not always clear
that those sailing in Chinese ships were necessarily Chinese.”57
While Indian merchants also traversed these waters from the pre-
historic period, Southeast Asian players were the most important
agents of connectivity.58 Beyond this general process of connectiv-
ity, what kinds of interactions existed in maritime Asia?

Power and Authority: Structure and Interactions

Politico-Military
The Chinese had long recognized that “the Indian Ocean and the
‘southern ocean’ of Southeast Asia formed a single stretch of water,
united by a single system of communications.”59 The envoys the Wu
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 83

state sent to Funan in 240 c.e., as noted above, also wanted “to view
first hand the nature of [maritime] trade . . . and seemingly as well to
evaluate whether conquest down the coast beyond Ton-kin would be
worthwhile.”60 Conquest was ruled out, for the Chinese found no ri-
vals (and China chose to trade with this region through the practices
of the tributary system, as discussed below).61 The Chinese thought
of Southeast Asia “as a realm of ‘squirming worms,’ a politically un-
stable realm that was not generally worthy of Chinese concern.”62
The Chinese perception of Southeast Asian polities as unstable
was a “cultural judgement.” After all, Southeast Asian political sys-
tems based on mandalas were deemed unstable only by different
Sinic “standards of government.”63 Nevertheless, Chinese expansion
toward Southeast Asia stopped after it became clear that “there were
no threats from maritime enemies.”64 On the mainland, Dai Viet
(which became independent in 938–939 c.e.) and the polities in
contemporary Yunnan (Nanzhao and Dali) existed as a buffer be-
tween the Chinese empires and the rest of Southeast Asia. This is in
spite of the fact that the Tang had started mass production and ex-
port of ceramics for foreign markets in the eighth to ninth centu-
ries, and Song ships in the eleventh century even “ventured directly
to Southeast Asian ports.”65 In the longue durée, “closer attention was
paid to more distant places (such as India) than to some neighbor-
ing regions (such as Cambodia).”66
Although the “Southeast Asian demand for manufactured
goods” had “provided an important stimulus to the economy of
southeast China in the late Song period,” and a Chinese navy was
created in 1132, it “never operated beyond China’s coastal wa-
ters.”67 The Song navy was a defensive force against the northern
Mongols. By the end of the thirteenth century, Chinese polities
had the largest navies in the world. The Song had an estimated
13,500 warships, while the Mongol-Yuan had 17,900 warships.68
When the Song were finally conquered, the “decisive battle” with
the Mongols was the naval battle at Yanshan in 1279.69 By then, the
Mongol-Yuan dynasty had already conquered Dali to outflank the
Song in 1253. Interestingly, the Mongols bestowed the Indic title
of maharaja upon the ruler of Dali, a mandala polity at the edges of
the Sinic and Southeast Asian worlds.70 The early Ming had to re-
conquer that region in 1382 to establish their authority.71
84 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

Although the Mongol-Yuan expeditions to Southeast Asia

failed, the early Ming sought to outdo their Yuan predecessors.
However, the Ming navy, which was also the largest in the world in
the early fifteenth century, may have only had an estimated 5,500
warships.72 Based on the size of the fleet, ship design, and ocean-
going activities, Gang Deng has argued that “the climax of the
Chinese sea- and ocean-going activities occurred in Song-Yuan
times, not in Ming,” despite “Zheng He’s spectacular multiple voy-
ages to the Indian Ocean.”73 Although Zheng He was unsuccessful
in controlling the sea routes, it is clear that unlike Rome, which
was at least partially motivated to look at the seas due to its rivalry
with Carthage, China did not unleash its naval thrust into the
south to meet any challenge posed by putative rivals, as there were
none. Notably, the borders established by the Mongol-Yuan be-
tween China and Southeast Asia “have remained more or less the
same to the present day.”74
Although China did not perceive a strategic threat from the
southern seas, it was still concerned about “piracy on the high seas
and rivalries among the maritime kingdoms,” for they could dis-
rupt Sino–Southeast Asian commerce.75 However, instead of at-
tempting conquest or sea control through the deployment of a
hegemonic navy, China managed its maritime interactions through
the tributary system. The ideology of the tributary system empha-
sized “a civilizing mission” that called for the “peaceful transforma-
tion of strangers” and “the winning over of enemies” through the
virtuous example of China’s cultural superiority.76 The rituals of
submission associated with the tributary system were believed to
confirm “the admiration for Chinese civilization.”77 Notably, the
Sinocentric Chinese rulers believed that “the southern barbarians
would eventually become part of the Chinese cultural realm” even
as their politico-cultural moorings lay westward toward India.78
Nevertheless, the Chinese empires did employ a mix of “eco-
nomic enticement, military intimidation, and skillful diplomacy” to
attract tribute-bearing subordinates.79 However, “the ideal policy”
toward the states of the southern seas devoid of strategic threats
was “control by loose reining (chi-mi)” and “winning their confi-
dence through kindness (huai-jou).”80 When practical consider-
ations warranted the pursuit of other policies on occasion, the
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 85

language of the tributary system was flexible enough to ensure the

continuity of the virtuous Sinocentric worldview.
To begin with, it should be noted that the trading system flour-
ished for centuries even before China acquired a large oceangoing
navy during the Song under the rubric of the tributary system.
After losing northern China, the Southern Song “redefined” the
Sinocentric worldview to refer to the territories of this truncated
empire as the embodiment of “the core values of this civilization,”
while continuing to record trade missions as tribute-bearers even
as reliance upon maritime taxes was crucial for the state’s finances,
as discussed in the next section.81
With its “great state” ideology, the Yuan understood tribute to
mean political “submission to a great power,” in this Mongol ver-
sion of tiaˉnxià.82 According to this concept, “there is nothing natu-
ral about the boundaries of a political territory, and . . . the goal of
rulership is to enlarge the realm through conquest.”83 The Mon-
gols literally aspired to world conquest.84 Despite having the larg-
est navy in the world, not only did the vast Yuan navy fail to
conquer Southeast Asia, but “the naval domination of a sizeable
section of the maritime routes, much less the whole, was [also] sim-
ply unobtainable.”85
As ethnically Chinese, the early Ming tried to outdo the Mon-
gol-Yuan through the so-called tiaˉnxià da yi tong (“unifying all-
under-Heaven”) doctrine by bringing the entire eastern Indian
Ocean world under the Sinocentric tributary system (and even
sought to extend it to East Africa and the Persian Gulf).86 Although
the Zheng He naval expeditions did attempt to control and regu-
late maritime trade in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, Chi-
na’s very different dependence on maritime trade (especially when
compared to Rome) meant that this objective failed.87 In any case,
Zheng He had no theory of sea power.88 Furthermore, the Zheng
He “encounters” were an exception as they “differed significantly
from those of previous periods and were never replicated again by
any future court in China.”89
China tried to influence this system through the practices of
the tributary system: by allowing only certain foreign polities to
send merchants and receiving them via the protocols of tributary
relations; by identifying specific Chinese ports that they could
86 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

visit; by determining the frequency of their visits; by allowing

some goods to be traded (but not others); and by imposing restric-
tions on the prices of many of these goods.90 However, China did
not collect any customs dues, akin to Roman practices in Rhodes,
in any of its Southeast Asian tributaries.
The Chinese empires had two primary goals in “managing”
this system, one economic and the other ideological. First, China
was less concerned with “confirming Chinese regional sovereignty
over the maritime passageway” than with seeking tributary trade
“to supply China’s marketplace demand for Indian Ocean products,
and therein increase the volume of taxable international trade tak-
ing place in China’s ports.”91 Second, China sought the ideological
confirmation of the Sinocentric worldview, as explained above. In
other words, China never sought to rule the seas as Rome did. The
Yuan expeditions were motivated by political conquest, while the
Ming fleets sought “to incorporate the countries of maritime Asia
within the tribute system” and “were not seeking territories to con-
quer or sea lanes to monopolize.”92
Although the indigenous momentum toward state formation
was crucial in Southeast Asia, “long-distance sea trade itself played
a key role in stimulating political development which eventually
led to the formation of states.”93 Given the importance of maritime
trade for state formation and the presence of hundreds of mandala
polities that rose and fell, commercial rivalries and warfare were
endemic to classical Southeast Asia. On the mainland, the “heavily
Indianized” Champa polity of central/southern Vietnam was a con-
stant irritation to the northern/Chinese empires (but hardly an ex-
istential threat).94 In the fifth century, Champa launched “almost
annual raids” into this southernmost part of the “Chinese adminis-
tration” that even saw “some southern Chinese people . . . absorbed
by Champa and culturally ‘barbarized.’ ”95 However, Champa itself
was a mandala, a network of “separate, even rival, polities,” as op-
posed to a single kingdom.96
In addition to military tensions with the southern end of the
Chinese empires, and later its intense rivalry with Dai Viet after
the latter’s independence, Champa was in a rivalry with Angkor.
Notably, Angkor tried to expand at the expense of Champa to seek
the South China Sea trade during the Song.97 Simultaneously, Ang-
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 87

kor also expanded toward polities in the Thai-Malay peninsula. In

1012, Angkor may even have entered into an entente with the
Cholas prior to the attacks on Sriwijaya in the Strait of Melaka.98
As such, claims of Sriwijaya’s control of the Strait of Melaka are
probably exaggerated, although it certainly exercised some form of
mandala-like influence there. If Sriwijaya “was attempting to im-
pose its authority over its neighbors, fragmentary references to
blood, battle, and victory on several Palembang inscriptions sug-
gest considerable resistance.”99
Despite frequent warfare, a pan-Southeast Asian empire did
not emerge, as noted earlier. This was at least partly related to the
nature of the mandala political organization and the associated
practices of warfare in classical Southeast Asia. Given the open-
ended mandala polity, “controlling people remained more signifi-
cant than policing fixed territorial boundaries.”100 The political
ecology of premodern Southeast Asia, with its relatively low popu-
lation density (compared to the nearby China and India), contrib-
uted to this because it made “flight rather than fighting” a distinct
possibility.101 Fleeing smaller mandalas dependent upon seaborne
trade could (re)establish themselves in newer locales with relative
ease while avoiding political domination.
Since a mandala required a dominant ruler as well as one or
more lesser rulers, “victories rarely, if ever, led to permanent obliter-
ation of local centers either by colonization or through the influence
of centralized institutions of government.”102 In turn, this allowed
the lesser rulers to overthrow the dominance of the center when the
opportunity arose, while trying to create an alternate mandala with
itself at the center. Consequently, “the object of warfare” was “to in-
crease the available manpower, not to waste it in bloody pitched bat-
tles.”103 So even as wars were often brutal, and slavery and piracy also
existed in the region, the center of a mandala only tried to control
nearby and local waters.104 Not surprisingly, Southeast Asian polities
vigorously competed for such maritime trade.
The Southeast Asian polities also actively tried to influence the
tributary system to their own advantage. In 430 c.e., the Ho-lo-tan
polity of Java sent a tribute mission to China seeking “protection
from afar” after complaining about attacks from neighboring poli-
ties. This Southeast Asian polity was seeking access to the Chinese
88 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

market without any “trading restrictions” in its competition with

others in and around Java.105 For reasons that are not fully docu-
mented, Ho-lo-tan did not send any other tribute missions after
452 c.e. Given that China did not have any naval presence in
Southeast Asia at that time, China’s instructions to others, even if
they were issued, were probably not always obeyed. At the same
time, this example also demonstrates that most Southeast Asian
polities were probably only able to control their local waters as op-
posed to controlling the entire sea lanes through the region, given
that hundreds of such mandala polities existed to China’s south,
and because the practices of warfare also had limits in Southeast
Asia, as discussed above.
Even the presence of the Chinese navy in Southeast Asian wa-
ters in later centuries did not disrupt this general pattern, whereby
Southeast Asian polities sought to manipulate the tributary system
to their own advantage. “In 1279, a small Mongol fleet carrying
envoys who sought Javanese submission to Mongol authority was
driven back by Javanese naval forces” of Kertanagara of the Singa-
sari kingdom.106 A few years later, Kertanagara also disfigured the
faces of the Yuan envoys when they asked for submission again. In
1292–1293, the Yuan sent 1,000 ships and 20,000 soldiers along
with cavalry in an expedition to Java.107 However, they found Ker-
tanagara dead after being defeated by the Kadiri kingdom. Mean-
while, Kertanagara’s son-in-law established the Majapahit kingdom
and submitted to the Mongols, only to defeat Kadiri before ousting
the Mongols themselves.108 After the rise of Majapahit, “trade was
increasingly harder to control for anyone.”109 Even in the absence
of Pax Sinica, trade flourished.
In the intervening centuries between Ho-lo-tan and Majapahit,
the Sriwijaya polity may have attempted to control the trade be-
tween the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea by trying to
dominate the Strait of Melaka. The Sriwijaya mandala entered into
a tributary relationship with China, “suggesting that those who uti-
lized Srivijaya’s ports were given preferential treatment when en-
tering Chinese ports.”110 However, it would be far-fetched to argue
that Sriwijaya dominated the trade between Southeast Asia and
China, for the Javanese Heling kingdom as well as Champa sent far
more tribute missions to China than Sriwijaya under the Tang.111 It
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 89

is nevertheless true that Sriwijaya “used violence when necessary”

in the Strait of Melaka “to make passing ships call at its harbour
and pay duty.”112 However, the success of the Sriwijayan mandala
with the port-polities of this strait “may have been linked by some
kind of treaty or commercial agreements to limit competition,
rather than a hegemonic system based on force.”113
Sriwijaya’s subordination to China was far from decisive to its suc-
cess. Commercial motives meant that Sriwijaya also engaged in ritual
diplomacy with important Southeast Asian polities like Angkor, and
with the Pala (Bengal) and Chola powers across the Bay of Bengal.114
Not only did the Sriwijayan rulers think of themselves as Buddhist
cakravartins (or universal monarchs), a Sriwijayan ruler even referred
to himself as the “King of Ocean Lands” in an embassy to China sent
in 1017.115 However, the Chola invasion of the Strait of Melaka ex-
posed the hollowness of such claims in 1025. One of the most signifi-
cant outcomes of this invasion was Chola control of the Kedah port of
the Sriwijayan mandala at the northern end of the Strait of Melaka.116
(The Cholas did not control the southern edges of this strait, and
consequently did not control the Strait of Melaka either.)
Although Sriwijaya lost its claim (pretense?) to hegemony in
the strait after 1025, “trade continued to grow.”117 In other words,
even if Sriwijaya had temporarily exercised some form of control in
the strait that had fostered commerce, hegemonic control over this
crucial maritime waterway was not necessary to make the trading
system work because maritime trade flourished both before and
after the existence of Sriwijayan influence on this waterway.
Therefore, even as Chinese empires may have adopted the Si-
nocentric view of thinking of Sriwijaya as a vassal that was “polic-
ing the seas” on their behalf to keep the “trade routes to China
open,” it was in fact the “rulers inside and outside Southeast Asia”
who “independently and for their own interests”118 protected the
constantly fluctuating stretches of their local seas to make the trad-
ing system run. As some locales got disturbed in Southeast Asia
time and again, newer (re)connections emerged, and trade contin-
ued in this most dynamic part of the global economy. In effect, it
was the combination of multitudes of local initiatives as opposed to
hegemonic control of the sea routes that made the maritime Asian
trading system.
90 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

Politico-Economic
Well into the Song period, the various Chinese empires played a
“passive” role in China’s maritime trade with the Nanhai (southern
seas) region.119 Despite interest in the Indian Ocean mentioned
above, early China played the role of “the recipient economy,
awaiting ships and goods to arrive at its shores,” and “relied on for-
eign shipping and merchants to acquire and transport Chinese
products” to the outside world.120 Early Chinese elite believed that
commercial endeavors distracted “from the activities fundamental
and indispensable to the survival of the state,” and also led “to a
maladjusted society.”121
However, there was always a demand for the commercial prod-
ucts that came from these southern seas (spices and metals), for
items of religious (Buddhist) significance, and for the “rare and
precious objects” from the south that “played an important part in
legitimizing their [China’s] status.”122 Consequently, China used
the so-called tributary system to manage this commercial relation-
ship, while keeping it under close state supervision (but only at its
Chinese end). Indeed, the “tribute system paralleled, or was in
symbiosis with, a network of commercial trade relations.”123 It pro-
vided a “ritualistic facade of the Chinese emperor’s superiority”
and became the way of acquiring “southern luxuries while avoiding
the semblance of trade.”124
This “ ‘passive’ era of Chinese merchants came to an end” in
1090 under the Song when “the Chinese merchants began to ply
the waters on their own ships,” and “the government started to
permit Chinese ships to depart from basically any port in
China.”125 While China had now begun playing a more active role,
“the firmly entrenched interests” of the other merchants “were not
shaken a bit by [the] Chinese participating in shipping and market-
ing,” as the Chinese traders continued to remain “a minor sharer”
among others.126 While Chang Pin-tsun has emphasized the role of
South and West Asians in the Sino–Southeast Asian trade from the
eleventh to the fourteenth centuries (especially under the Yuan),
Kenneth Hall has argued that this regional trade “was in the hands
of Southeast Asians and Southeast Asia–based traders.”127 Even as
there was some variation over the centuries, China was just one
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 91

player among many along these regional trade networks. China did
not dominate this trading system despite having the world’s largest
economy and the world’s largest navy from the Song onwards.
In practice, different Chinese empires had different motivations
in looking toward the sea. In the late eighth century, the Tang may
have sent a diplomatic mission “crossing the Indian Ocean to the
‘Abbāsids, probably intending to contain the Tibetans with the as-
sistance of the Arabs.”128 After the An Lushan Rebellion in the mid-
eighth century, the Tang had turned toward “maritime commerce
as an option to address its fiscal problems.”129 The Tang were also
mass producing ceramics for foreign markets as noted above, and
Guangzhou had a foreign population of 100,000–200,000 traders of
West Asian, South Asian, and Southeast Asian origins.130 As impres-
sive as these figures are, the “fiscality of T’ang China remained
rural,” as only one-sixtieth of its revenue came from commerce,
while the rest came from agriculture.131
By contrast, the Song approached maritime trade as a means to
earn revenues. Maritime trade in the early years of the Southern
Song contributed up to 20 percent of the state’s cash revenues, in-
creasing to 70 percent by the end of the twelfth century.132 The
Southern Song simply wanted to maintain a monopoly on com-
merce for generating wealth through taxation on maritime trade at
specific Chinese ports, and therefore private trade was encour-
aged.133 Notably, Angela Schottenhammer has characterized the
Southern Song’s policy as “relatively free trade.”134 Southeast Asian
demand for Chinese ceramics also provided a boost to the Chinese
economy at that time. Even as ethnic Chinese traders began to fi-
nance their own shipping and voyages to the southern seas during
these centuries, and many even settled abroad permanently, the
Southern Song did not promote their commercial interests overseas
despite having the world’s largest navy.
Although the Song navy was defensively oriented toward the
Mongol threat from the north, it is noteworthy that Rome’s over-
land challenges from several “barbarian tribes” (and later Parthia)
did not limit its maritime exploits or diminish Rome’s Mediterra-
nean hegemony. Even as relative power favored the Song in relation
to Southeast Asia, they did not venture south politico-militarily.
This is noteworthy because the Chinese economy may have in fact
92 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

become “poorer” on the whole due to consuming the perishable

goods from the southern seas that “disappeared from circulation,”
while paying for them in hard currency that also left China (even as
the state’s revenues increased for a while).135 As early as 965, the
Song instituted laws, including executions, to prevent the drain of
cash from China.136
This drain of money from China also happened under the Yuan,
who instituted “even stricter controls on the use of precious metals
in trading,” and later introduced “paper currency” into the region
“that increased the dependence of foreign merchants on the Chinese
government.”137 Meanwhile, the Yuan were “easy on matters of trade
and tribute,” practiced “relatively free” private trade, and even sup-
ported “the ‘open seas’ (kai hai) policy.”138 However, they were influ-
enced by the Mongol ideology of the great state mentioned above.
Not surprisingly, the Yuan launched “the largest naval cam-
paigns in pre-modern world history” and tried to subdue Southeast
Asia.139 “Despite such efforts, the focus for the Qubilai thrust was
still meant to be the Indian Ocean region.”140 For the Yuan,
Champa was “a pivotal region for the dominance of trade between
the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean,” and they also sent
embassies to southern India seeking submission.141 While these
campaigns failed dramatically even as they affected regional geo-
politics, the Yuan naval thrust was driven by political ideology, not
economics, and they did not attempt to restructure the trade pat-
terns in Southeast Asia.142
In contrast to both the Southern Song and the Yuan, the early
Ming regulated all trade through the formal tributary system.
Their trade and diplomatic outreach “was directed toward South-
east Asia, and more importantly India, at the core of the Indian
Ocean.”143 However, the Ming wanted to outdo the Yuan to bring
this entire zone formally under the tributary system, and even to
expand it. Consequently, they launched seven spectacular naval ex-
peditions “to display the wealth and power” of the empire and to
“spread awe” in the eastern Indian Ocean world—and, of course,
to seek tribute.144 Despite the coercion entailed in these missions,
the Ming was motivated by very different objectives compared
with its Song-Yuan predecessors as well as Rome.145 In the words
of Schottenhammer,
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 93

[The Ming] did not consider the exploitation of foreign

wealth as a means of national enrichment, seeking to estab-
lish politico-economic circumstances and relations in for-
eign countries through exclusive exploitation, [or] through
the removal of natural or human resources [and their trans-
fer] into their own domestic value production.146

This does not mean that the Chinese empires were incapable
of demonstrating the brutality of the Romans. For example, South-
east Asian “K’un-lun slaves” certainly existed in imperial China, al-
though their economic role was very different from that of slaves
in the Roman Empire.147 Nevertheless, the participation of foreign
lands in the formal Chinese/Ming tributary system meant that they
received gifts of greater value than they had presented to the Chi-
nese emperor, in addition to the right to trade at specific ports in
China. As such, formal “tribute” with its emphasis on rare and pre-
cious gifts was very different from the “rents” extracted by the
Roman Republic in the ports of subordinate polities through the
management of their customs dues or as protection money, let
alone from the “taxation” under the Principate. By contrast, the
“Ming drew most of its revenue from the land tax and gave as little
thought to taxing trade as it did to protecting it.”148
Finally, the Ming naval expeditions were not launched to sup-
port ethnic Chinese traders in the region. In fact, the ethnic Chinese
settled in Southeast Asia “frequented Ming ports as ‘foreigners.’ ”149
While the Chinese certainly participated in regional trade during
the Song, Yuan, and the Ming, it was dominated neither by the
ethnic Chinese nor by the Chinese navy/state. Regional trade re-
mained in the hands of local merchant groups in the eastern
Indian Ocean, although they were now joined by their Chinese
counterparts.
On their part, the Southeast Asian mandalas “never came to re-
gard trade as an end in itself” because “[w]ealth was merely an in-
strument of power.”150 State (trans)formation in this mandala world
was linked to the “acquisition by local chiefs of prestige and luxury
goods from trade and the redistribution of some of these amongst
clients,” since it “provided the basis for the exercise of economic
influence and political authority in Southeast Asia.”151 The rulers of
94 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

the Southeast Asian mandalas—the cakravartins, the maharajas, and

the rajadhirajas—were the primi inter pares (“first among equals”) of
such redistribution networks.
Given the sheer size of China and its prestige products like
silk, Southeast Asian traders “understood that the best means of ac-
cess to the huge market of China was to present themselves as trib-
ute-bringers from a barbarian kingdom, particularly one that was
recognized at the Chinese court from older documents regardless
of whether it represented any continuing reality.”152 This was par-
ticularly so because the Chinese court recorded all mercantile mis-
sions as diplomatic missions sent by Southeast Asian rulers who
recognized the superiority of the Chinese emperor.153 Preferential
access to Chinese ports was certainly advantageous in terms of in-
tra-Southeast Asian geopolitics, for it offered privileged access to
the Chinese market. Consequently, these “tributaries” emerged as
important centers for local (intra-Southeast Asian) trade between
China and Southeast Asia.
However, these Chinese tributaries were Indic-style mandala
polities. Southeast Asia’s turn toward India was partly related to the
fact that India was the chief producer of one of the most important
prestige goods of the premodern world: cotton textiles. However,
India—which was home to many large and small polities, not un-
like Southeast Asia itself—was hardly a political or economic hege-
mon. Stephen Dale has argued that the so-called Silk Road was a
“Cotton Road” in the “reverse direction.”154 According to John
Guy, “there is evidence” that India’s textile trade with Southeast
Asia “was established practice by at least the first century AD, when
Indian merchants were establishing themselves in the region.”155
Furthermore, India and the Indianized states of Southeast Asia
“sold cotton cloth to China at an early date in the Christian Era,
and . . . certain kinds of Indian cotton cloth continued to be sold in
China well after the Chinese cultivation of cotton and production
of cotton cloth blossomed in the late thirteenth and early four-
teenth centuries.”156 Indeed, the Javanese Ho-lo-tan’s embassy to
China in 430 c.e. mentioned above included Indian cotton cloth.157
Although the Southeast Asian polities competed vigorously for
trade in the eastern Indian Ocean, this commercial exchange oc-
curred in the absence of Pax Sinica or a hegemonic navy exercising
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 95

sea control. While China resorted to the practices of the tributary

system to manage the trading system, the Southeast Asian polities
turned toward Indic political ideas. How can we explain this pro-
cess of cultural transformation?

The Flow of Ideas: Indianization and Localization

(First–Fifteenth Centuries c.e.)
The Indianization of Southeast Asia—the extensive diffusion of
Indian culture and ideas which had a profound and transformative
impact on the culture, society, and politics of classical Southeast
Asia—and the term “Indianization” have been intensely debated
over the past century or so.158 The “externalist” paradigm stressed
the civilizing influence of Indian culture on the primitive societies
of Southeast Asia and gave primacy to Indian agency through colo-
nization and the establishment of Indian colonies. Such ideas were
championed by colonial European orientalists and the nationalist
Indian advocates of the Greater India Society, all of whom were
steeped in imperialist thinking related to the civilizational influence
of dominant cultures on lesser cultures.159 In reaction to this para-
digm, and in parallel with growing recognition of Southeast Asia as
a coherent region in the postwar period, Southeast Asianist scholars
championed the “autonomous” paradigm. One of the most extreme
cases of this view was J. C. van Leur, who emphasized Southeast
Asia’s civilizational indigenism and dismissed the Indian “world re-
ligions and foreign cultural forms” as “a thin flaking glaze” under
which Southeast Asia’s “old indigenous forms” continued to exist.160
Recent scholarship has dismissed both these extreme positions.
To begin with, Pollock has noted that “a stable singularity called
‘Indian culture,’ so often conjured up by Southeast Asian indige-
nists, never existed.”161 Furthermore, there were no ancient Indian
colonies in Southeast Asia. Although the spread of Indian culture
to Southeast Asia happened via overlapping politico-religious and
commercial networks, most Indians in Southeast Asia were so-
journers over this millennium (even as occasional/individual mi-
gration may have certainly occurred during these centuries).
While there is some archaeological data for early Indian settle-
ments in Khao Sam Kaeo on the Thai-Malay peninsula in the
96 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

fourth century b.c.e., the first “written evidence” of semi-perma-

nent Indian communities in Southeast Asia dates only from 1088
(with this reference related to Barus in Sumatra).162
In the future, population genetics may revise our views on
these movements. For example, the foundation story of Funan
based on the marriage between an Indian brahmin and a local
princess may be rooted in Indian migration to Southeast Asia.163
However, most admixture between Indian and Southeast Asian
populations occurred in the past 500–1,000 years, centuries after
the beginning of the Indianization process according to current
genetic evidence.164 As per current sociological evidence, it is un-
likely that there was any large-scale Indian immigration to South-
east Asia, especially one backed by Indic polities during these
centuries (~first–fifteenth centuries).
Furthermore, it was the Southeast Asians who actively bor-
rowed Indic ideas to bring administrative and ideological “coher-
ence” to the rising “Southeast Asian Buddhist and Brahmanical
states.”165 However, active Southeast Asian agency should not imply
a passive Indian role on the maritime circuits of the Indian Ocean.
Since Indic state ideologies took multiple forms—Hindu (both
Saivite and Vaisnavite) and Buddhist—the Indic agency came in the
form of the persuasive powers of enterprising entrepreneurs who
advocated specific Indic traditions that could be adapted to meet
local needs. However, it was Southeast Asia that attracted such Indic
agents of persuasion, or the Southeast Asians may have themselves
visited India in search of suitable models. This process of transcul-
turation was not rooted in Indian imperialism, whether military,
economic, or cultural. The possible exception here is the Cholas,
who may have promoted Hinduism in Kedah, although this process,
like the Chola invasions, occurred centuries after the beginning of
Indianization. The Chola promotion of Hinduism was also highly
circumscribed in its geographic scope in Southeast Asia.166
Like the externalist view, the autonomous paradigm has also
been challenged. O. W. Wolters had already warned decades ago
that “broad generalizations about a ‘Southeast Asian’ culture should
be avoided” because they risked essentializing the region.167 More
recently, Victor Lieberman has argued that “states and cultures
arose much earlier” in India and “provided a civilizational tem-
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 97

plate” for Southeast Asia, “which looked towards India for cultural
and political models.”168 Furthermore, archaeological evidence indi-
cates that contacts between India and Southeast Asia began in the
second half of the second millennium b.c.e., and that from the mid-
first millennium b.c.e. these contacts were “sustained” as opposed
to “intermittent.”169 In other words, by the time of the Indianiza-
tion of Southeast Asia in the early first millennium c.e., economic
and cultural contacts had led to sustained interactions and “famil-
iarization” across the Bay of Bengal over many centuries.170
However, advanced agriculture, metallurgy, seafaring, maritime
trade, and urbanism already existed in Southeast Asia when the
wave of Indianization began.171 Therefore, not only is the prior
characterization of Southeast Asia as a primitive region before the
impact of Indian civilization erroneous, but the centuries-long fa-
miliarization across the Bay of Bengal also demonstrates that this
transculturation was “an act of pure free will” on the part of South-
east Asia.172 As a consequence, the Southeast Asians “did not be-
come Indians. They became new versions of themselves.”173 Used
thus, the term Indianization can now be used “without hesitation”
to refer to “the period after the 4th century,” when “advanced
states were formed [in Southeast Asia] on the basis of an Indian
model under the influence of Buddhism or Hinduism.”174
Given this understanding, two new models have emerged to ex-
plain the Indianization of Southeast Asia—Pollock’s “Sanskrit cos-
mopolis” and Kulke’s “convergence theory.” For Pollock, the
Sanskrit cosmopolis was a “quasi-global formation” that included
“all of South and much of Southeast Asia” for a millennium, where
a common cosmopolitan order existed that made “similar claims
about the nature and aesthetics of political rule: about kingly virtue
and learning, the dharma [ethics] of governance, and a peculiar uni-
versality of dominion in a world of plural universalities.”175 In this
cosmopolitan realm, the Sanskrit language was used to represent
the aesthetics of political power in a common idiom, while vernacu-
lar/local languages were used for the mundane tasks of governance.
On the other hand, Kulke has argued that the socio-economic and
political “convergence” on both sides of the Bay of Bengal “re-
quired and enabled similar solutions to similar problems of social
change,” and therefore it was the “social nearness” between India
98 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

and Southeast Asia that promoted this social change “under, un-
doubtedly, Indian influence in Southeast Asia.”176 Indianization was,
then, a parallel and simultaneous process on both sides of the Bay
of Bengal.
While both these models are the leading explanations of the
Indianization of Southeast Asia at present, they are not without
shortcomings. Pollock’s model has been criticized for being top-
down (or an elite-driven process), while recent scholarship has also
emphasized the role of artisans and shipmasters as opposed to the
political/commercial and religious elite, who were the carriers of
the high culture.177 Similarly, an excessive emphasis on Sanskrit de-
tracts from the influence of Pali (used by the Theravada Bud-
dhists), Prakrit (the language of the common folk in north/central
India), and Tamil (spoken in south India), for these languages also
influenced Southeast Asia.178 Most important, Daud Ali has cri-
tiqued Pollock for an excessive focus on the Sanskrit literary
aspects of Indianization while ignoring the processes of state
(trans)formation in Southeast Asia.179
In turn, even as Kulke’s theory is precisely about the processes
of state (trans)formation, he did not explain how the common cul-
tural substratum on both sides of the Bay of Bengal emerged in the
first place. In fact, Pierre-Yves Manguin has even asked if South-
east Asia “Indianised before Indianisation,” since Southeast Asia’s
contacts with India predate Indianization by centuries.180 However,
it is also possible that processes of cultural exchange were under-
way across the Bay of Bengal much earlier because there are hints
of “Austronesian settlements in India during the first millennium
BCE.”181 Furthermore, there were different degrees of Indianiza-
tion across time and space in different parts of Southeast Asia dur-
ing the first fifteen centuries of the Common Era.182 Nevertheless,
it has been observed that Kulke’s convergence theory “provides a
sociological complement” to Pollock’s Sanskrit cosmopolis.183
While an argument that integrates both these models is still
awaited, especially one that can explain the variance in time and
space across this vast realm, it is noteworthy that both Pollock and
Kulke have emphasized the process of localization in Southeast
Asia. Localization is a process of “idea transmission” in which bor-
rowed foreign ideas are made local (through discourse, framing,
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 99

grafting, and cultural selection) to make them congruent with local

beliefs, while simultaneously changing the locals’ identity and be-
havior.184 Kulke has explicitly noted that his convergence theory
“tries to explain the spread of Indian culture and its congenial ac-
ceptance and localization in Southeast Asia.”185 Similarly, Pollock
has noted that this process of transculturation involved “a thor-
oughgoing reconstitution of the cognitive landscape” through
“wholesale toponymic transformation” in Southeast Asia that re-
produced the names of prominent Indic kingdoms, rulers, and nat-
ural features locally.186 This allowed Southeast Asia to “be in the
Sanskrit cosmopolis and simultaneously remain at home.”187
The Southeast Asians actively localized Indic ideas. Not only
did the Southeast Asians pioneer the shipping routes to India and
then continue to play an active role in the process of cultural trans-
mission as the shipmasters in the process of connectivity, it was the
Southeast Asian rulers who had “summoned” Indian brahmins to
their courts to legitimize their rule.188 While some Indian brah-
mins may have been present in Southeast Asian capitals, it has re-
cently been suggested that most brahmins in Southeast Asia were
in fact Indianized Southeast Asians (as opposed to Indians) who
had studied at the religious centers in India (or with Indian brah-
mins in Southeast Asia).189 Furthermore, “Southeast Asian patterns
of rulership never shifted to unconditional Brahmin primacy,” as
happened in India itself during the second half of the first millen-
nium, when Buddhism remained politically prominent in South-
east Asia (and eventually predominated).190 In contrast to India,
where Buddhism did encounter Brahmanical violence, there is “no
record of violence between adherents of Hinduism and Buddhism”
in Southeast Asia.191
Nevertheless, Southeast Asia itself changed in this process of
Indianization. To begin with, monarchs with Indic names began ap-
pearing in the Southeast Asian mandalas. The oldest known Sanskrit
inscription in maritime Southeast Asia is that of King Mulavarman
of eastern Kalimantan from the early fifth century. Not only is Mu-
lavarman an Indic name, but the inscription also gives the name of
his father, King Asvavarman, also an Indic name, and that of his
grandfather, King Kundunga, probably a local name.192 While the
inscription talks about gifts to brahmins, it also refers to “traditional
100 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

Austronesian practices . . . in the guise of Sanskrit terms,” thereby

demonstrating the localization process.193 Elsewhere, the Champa
polity invoked Campaˉ from the Sanskrit politico-religious text, the
Mahabharata, while Thai Dvaravati reproduced Dvaˉrakaˉ from the
same text.194 Meanwhile, the Siem Reap was known to the Khmer as
the holy river Ganges, while the Khmer rulers with Indic names
styled themselves as cakravartin rulers.195
The Indianized kings of these Southeast Asian polities funded
the construction of monumental Hindu-Buddhist architecture, in-
cluding Angkor Wat (the largest religious/Hindu structure in the
world) and Borobudur (the largest Buddhist temple). However,
“these places may in fact have been seen by their inhabitants not as
Annam or Laos or Sumatra but as existing inside a Bhaˉratavarsa
[India].”196 In other words, these Southeast Asian holy places were
not “surrogates” of some authentic “India” but “an extension of the
same landscape.”197 The “India” they were living inside was the
ideal politico-cultural realm of Sanskrit/Indic literature as opposed
to an actual polity. The Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang and the
Javanese text Nagara-Kertagama mentioned above were probably
referring to this ideational India (as opposed to an actual polity in
the Indian subcontinent).
While taking inspiration from the Sanskrit politico-cultural lit-
erature and legal texts, the Southeast Asians localized these Indic
codes.198 Such toponymic mimicry and localization of the politico-
cultural literature was happening on both sides of the Bay of Ben-
gal (or in India itself), as explained by Kulke. Importantly, these
processes were near-simultaneous. It was King Rudradaman’s Juna-
garh rock inscription of 150 c.e. in Gujarat that heralded the be-
ginning of the Sanskrit cosmopolis as it marked “a true break in
cultural history” by using a sacral language for political purposes
for the first time “in a public space.”199 Meanwhile, the first San-
skrit inscription from outside the subcontinent, the Cham inscrip-
tion of Vo Canh, near contemporary Nha Trang, “has been dated
between the second and fourth centuries.”200 Not only was this in-
scription more or less contemporary with the appearance of such
inscriptions throughout the subcontinent, it was also “at least as
advanced linguistically and stylistically as the contemporary epi-
graphs within India.”201 Moreover, it has “nothing whatsoever to do
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 101

with India. Rather, it refers to the gift, or tribute, of white ele-

phants offered by the [Cham] king to the Chinese court.”202
So even as Southeast Asia changed, “the cultures of Java and
Cambodia were not hybrid”; instead, the Southeast Asians “re-
tained their distinctive character” as they were changing to con-
form to local needs.203 Not surprisingly, certain aspects of Indian
culture that did not resonate with the locals, such as the brahmani-
cal vision of a caste society, were never adopted in Southeast Asia.
Elsewhere, the spread of Indic ideas amplified the local in South-
east Asia. For example, in fifth-to-sixth-century Funan, the cult of
Siva was used to “unify local deities” as the Khmer rulers tried to
exert political authority over their expanding territorial realm by
incorporating local gods. The cloaking of the local in “Indian garb”
meant “exalting the old while revering the new,” and therefore In-
dianizing while remaining Khmer.204
Additionally, relocalization was another characteristic of this In-
dianized world. This is probably most clearly visible in the prolifer-
ation of India-derived scripts across the region. The origins of the
Burmese, Thai, Lao, Khmer, and old Javanese scripts can be traced
back to the Indic Brahmi script. However, by the eighth century
Sanskrit, “the one self-same cosmopolitan language, undeviating in
its literary incarnation, was being written in a range of alphabets al-
most totally distinct from each other and indecipherable without
specialized study.”205 In other words, different Southeast Asians re-
localized the same aspect of Indian culture at different times in dif-
ferent places according to local sensibilities. The other important
dimension of this relocalization process is the fact that the vector of
ideational flow did not always run from India to Southeast Asia.
Some Southeast Asian polities, such as Dvaravati in eastern Thai-
land, borrowed and relocalized some politico-cultural ideas from the
Indianized Khmer (and not directly from India).206
Finally, Southeast Asia was not a cultural periphery of India, as
ideas circulated from this Indianized world back to India itself. For ex-
ample, the imperial cult of the Cholas of southern India “centered on
their massive temples,” and their “great tank at Gangaikodachola-
puram” was influenced by the practices at Angkor.207 At the same
time, it should be noted that the Indianized kingdoms of Southeast
Asia were centers in their own right, given that their political statehood
102 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

was expressed in the same politico-cultural idiom as in India itself, and

because all of them sought to replicate ideal Indic-style polities. Not
surprisingly, Indian Buddhist masters like Atiśa went to study with
Southeast Asian Buddhist masters like Dharmakīrti in the tenth cen-
tury, and Indian Buddhist pilgrims traveled to Prambanan in central
Java to worship at a Buddhist temple there in the ninth century.208
Nevertheless, there was a degree of asymmetry in the India–
Southeast Asia relationship. While the process of politico-cultural
convergence “was almost simultaneous from one shore of the Bay
of Bengal to the other—within one or two generations (to the ad-
vantage, of course, of the Indian Subcontinent),” it is not known if
any Indian rulers expressed their politico-cultural ideas in any
Southeast Asian language or invoked Southeast Asian gods to mark
their statehood.209 Although this asymmetry is an important factor
in the academic study of India’s interaction with Southeast Asia
over the longue durée, it should not be overlooked that the cultural
circulation noted above meant that the politico-cultural order at
any given point in time during these centuries was decentered.
While no Indian polity “pretend[ed] to universal rule in South-
east Asia” specifically, all the major and minor rulers of India and
Indianized Southeast Asia had universal aspirations in general in
the form of the cakravartin ruler.210 This geo-cultural space was,
then, an anarchy of mandalas where every polity aspired to central-
ity, even as the norms limiting warfare/coercion and the practices
of attracting subordinates were widely diffused. Every cakravartin
ruler tried to produce such centrality through the creation of ideal
Indic political realms. These Indic/Indianized cakravartins coex-
isted with the Chinese “Son of Heaven” in a decentered world
where every ruler thought of himself as the central actor. While all
aspired to universality, they were masters only of their finite locales
even as they varied in size.
In this world of multiple universal centralities, all aspirational,
there is no reason to give centrality to Chinese empires. Given that
prominent Chinese Buddhist monks like Yijing studied in Sriwijaya
in the seventh century, David Henley has argued that, official Chi-
nese rhetoric notwithstanding, the Chinese approached Southeast
Asia and India “not as bearers of what they regarded as superior
civilization, but as seekers of sacred knowledge.”211 At the same
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 103

time, there is also no need to give centrality to the Indian/subcon-

tinental polities over Indianized Southeast Asian polities at any
given point in time. After all, India itself was a decentered politico-
cultural realm, especially after the collapse of the Gupta empire
(~320–500 c.e.), which did not rule all of the subcontinent in any
case. Furthermore, different parts of Southeast Asia borrowed dif-
ferent aspects of Indic culture from multiple centers in India:
South India, Bengal, Gujarat, the Gangetic plains, and so on.212
There was no monolithic Indian culture emanating from a single
point of origin over these centuries, let alone a political process of
Indianization backed by a subcontinental polity.
Furthermore, there were periods when Southeast Asian polities
were politically and culturally at least as sophisticated as, if not more
sophisticated than, their Indian (and Chinese) counterparts. For ex-
ample, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, Angkor, the capital
of the Khmer mandala, was “probably the largest city on earth out-
side China” according to Peter Sharrock.213 However, others believe
that Angkor was the largest city in the world before the Industrial
Revolution.214 Similarly, even as “the largest Chola temples were five
times the size of anything that preceded them,” the Khmer temples
“dwarf[ed] their Indian contemporaries.”215 If anything, the politico-
cultural order in this Indianized world then represented “peer-polity
interactions” among multiple cakravartins who practiced cultural
pluralism in a realm with multiple religions and languages where
none of the boundaries, including political, were absolute.216
While most of Southeast Asia Indianized during this period,
northern Vietnam was Sinicized through a very different politico-
cultural process. Northern Vietnam was transformed through hege-
monic socialization by imperial China, and it “constituted a colony of
the Chinese empire for nearly one thousand years under the Han,
Sui, Tang, and intervening dynasties.”217 The “Chinese wanted to
assimilate the Vietnamese and instill Chinese values, customs, and
institutions.”218 Even then, Sinicization was countered by Indian-
ization in northern Vietnam despite the absence of Indic/subconti-
nental imperialism in Southeast Asia.
Initially, the Austroasiatic (Mon-Khmer) people of Linyi emerged
“as an ‘independent’ polity in . . . the southernmost district of
the Eastern Han Empire,” and then underwent “self-Indianization”
104 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

between the fourth and seventh centuries, before intermixing with the
Indianized Austronesians of Champa to their south.219 As mentioned
earlier, the Chinese empires had a troubled relationship with
Champa. Champa fought in these locales while also engaging in cul-
tural exchanges. Consequently, “[e]ven during the Chinese period,
Indic/Southeast Asian influences had counteracted the Sinicizing
pressures to some extent.”220
After the advent of an independent Dai Viet in the tenth cen-
tury, the northern Vietnamese state emulated Chinese state rituals
and institutions. Therefore, “it was apparently not uncommon [in
the early centuries after independence] for southern Chinese to
emigrate to Vietnam and enter government service there” because
“the two monarchies [China and Dai Viet] were interchangeable
enough.”221 However, “the mandala concept [also] applies to Viet-
nam (Dai Viet) in the early centuries.”222 Even “while establishing
itself as a Sinic patrilineal line, the ruling Ly [dynasty of Dai Viet]
also in 1057 began their own royal cults to Indra (De Thich) and
Brahma (Phan Vuong),” “consciously called up their direct links to
India,” and invoked the Mauryan-Indian Buddhist emperor Aśoka
(~268–232 b.c.e.), who was regarded as the ideal cakravartin.223
In the meantime, the Song (in 1075–1076), the Yuan (in 1250
and again in 1278), and the early Ming (in 1406–1427) tried to re-
conquer Dai Viet but failed. At the same time, the rivalry between
the Dai Viet and Champa for maritime trade continued. There was
a tense geopolitical equilibrium between Dai Viet and Champa,
and the Cham came close to destroying Dai Viet toward the end of
the fourteenth century (~1360–1390).224 In 1415, when Dai Viet
was under Ming occupation, a period that coincided with Zheng
He’s maritime voyages, the Cham ruler Virabhadravarman per-
formed his consecration (abhiseka) ritual, and “re-established Vijaya
[Champa] at the centre of a thriving Indic domain . . . marking the
new age in Indic terms.”225 It was only following its bureaucratic
reorganization after the end of Ming occupation that the re-
Sinicized Dai Viet, now supported by the newly reestablished Con-
fucian ideology, was finally able to defeat Champa decisively in
1471 through the use of Chinese-style firepower.226 Throughout
the classical period, imperial China’s politico-cultural influence be-
yond northern Vietnam was “negligible,” although Southeast Asia
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 105

actively localized Indic culture in the absence of imperialism and

coercion.227
The combination of the practices entailed in the Chinese trib-
utary system and the Indianization of Southeast Asia produced a
decentered order in maritime Asia. Given their different ideational
world and commercial links across the Indian Ocean, the Southeast
Asian polities were hardly the peripheries of a Chinese center de-
spite the rhetoric of the Sinocentric court (and the texts that it
produced). If anything, it was the Chinese tributary system that
was just one component of a larger, decentered Asia. Imbued with
their Indianized worldview, the mandala polities of maritime Asia
actively managed their trade relations with China to collectively
produce the public goods of this trading system.

The Decentered World of the Eastern Indian

Ocean and the Provision of Public Goods
A dynamic and interactionist multiplex order existed in the classi-
cal eastern Indian Ocean. This regional order was not the product
of superior Chinese imperial/material power, or some essentialist
version of the tributary system. Nor did Indic ideas spread “natu-
rally” into an ideational vacuum in Southeast Asia. This order was
in fact an outcome of Southeast Asia’s active agency in fostering
connectivity with Chinese and Indian polities, and the consequent
material and ideational interactions that ensued. The multiplex
order in the eastern Indian Ocean was a highly robust and resilient
order that lasted for centuries even in the absence of a grand de-
sign. It did not depend exclusively on any single polity, not even
imperial China. Although the rise and fall of Chinese empires may
have changed the modes of interaction with China (at the Chinese
end of the system), the maritime interactions across this vast space
continued. As one local mandala disappeared, another assumed its
nodal position in this interactive and interconnected world.
It was the underlying ideational factors that made this order
sticky and long-lasting. According to Hedley Bull, all international
orders have a purpose or goals that sustain the pattern of interac-
tions, as discussed in Chapter 1. A shared normative understanding
of order had historically emerged in the classical eastern Indian
106 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

Ocean that was supportive of the twin goals of making the trading
system run while maintaining distinct politico-cultural identities.
These norms were embedded in both—the ways in which the man-
dala states sought to manage their politico-military and politico-
economic relations, and the rules that governed their trade and
cultural intercourse.
Furthermore, while wars were hardly absent in the classical
eastern Indian Ocean, they were not system-destroying. As ex-
plained above, the very nature of the mandala polities put limits on
warfare, and bureaucratic and territorial incorporation of the de-
feated polity was not the dominant practice. Although motivated
by entirely different interests and ideologies, even the large-scale
naval expeditions by imperial Chinese polities and the Cholas did
not destroy the system, although they did change the fate of some
mandalas. While inter-mandala warfare and the Chinese/Chola ex-
peditions were governed by different logics, their combined effect
was to ensure the twin systemic goals of continued maritime trade
and the maintenance of the distinct politico-cultural identities of
the regional polities, thus ensuring what Karl Deutsch and David
Singer termed systemic “stability,” as discussed in Chapter 1.
In the absence of a hegemonic navy or the practices of sea con-
trol, the decentered world of maritime Asia was based on the
shared management of this trading system. The different actors in
this maritime world pursued multitudes of practices out of their
own self-interest. These practices were tantamount to the “rules”
governing this trading world. China provided access to its large
market while injecting prestige commodities like silk textiles by
manipulating the rituals of the tributary system. The Southeast
Asians actively connected maritime Asia even as they vigorously
competed. The eastward-oriented Indic polities also injected im-
portant goods like cotton textiles, while Indian merchants joined
their Southeast Asian counterparts along these networks. Later, the
addition of Chinese traders in maritime Asia beginning with the
Song happened in the absence of coercion, and they coexisted
alongside preexisting traders. The multiplex order of this trading
system emerged from the interaction of all these decentralized
practices, which were undertaken by different polities in the pur-
suit of different functional and social needs.
 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean 107

Although China did exercise a loose form of primacy through

the tributary rituals, it did not play a hegemonic role. First, there
was no hegemonic peace or Pax Sinica in this maritime world, as
indicated by the examples of warfare mentioned above. In fact, sev-
eral wars were initiated by different Chinese empires themselves.
In the absence of a Chinese navy in Southeast Asia prior to the
Yuan, the Chinese empires attempted to manage regional security
only rhetorically. For example, not only was Champa a continual
menace for the Chinese empires to their south, but China also
sought to discipline Champa in 1167 through “refusal to accept
tribute from the Cham court” instead of eradicating Cham “pi-
racy.”228 Later, even though the Ming had a powerful navy, China
only made a partial attempt to eradicate Asian piracy. While the
Ming navy did suppress piracy by destroying Chen Zuyi’s fleets in
Palembang in 1407, the returning fleet in 1417 encountered Japa-
nese piracy on the Chinese coast.229 Ultimately, it was local actors
like Sriwijaya that tried to control piracy in their own local wa-
ters.230 Security of trade in maritime Asia emerged out of the accre-
tion of such individual efforts. No single naval power controlled
the maritime routes stretching from the South China Sea into the
Bay of Bengal.
Second, China was not the economic center of this trading sys-
tem. As mentioned earlier, India itself was a multicentered core.
Furthermore, Southeast Asia was not an economic periphery of
these cores. In fact, Southeast Asia played the pivotal role of con-
necting maritime Asia with its traders and ships. After China started
manufacturing oceangoing vessels under the Song, the Chinese
built upon the shipping techniques of the Southeast Asians, and
these hybrid Sino-Southeast Asian ships then continued to sail
these waters along with local Southeast Asian ships.231 Additionally,
Southeast Asia injected its own commodities into the system (spices
and metals).
These Southeast Asian products did not constitute the raw ma-
terials for the manufacturing industries of the Chinese and Indian
cores. The Southeast Asian demand for Chinese goods was also
crucial, and it even provided an important stimulus for the Song, as
noted above. More important, maritime Asian resources did not
flow into China at the expense of the region. In fact, some Chinese
108 The Order of the Classical Indian Ocean

empires became poorer with the outflow of cash into Southeast

Asia. The benefits of the Chinese tributary system were more equi-
table because it was simply one part of a wider maritime commer-
cial network in the eastern Indian Ocean. By contrast, given the
direction of the flow of revenue and the very different meaning of
tribute there, it was in the Rome-centric Mediterranean that a
“tributary” economy actually existed.
Third and finally, maritime Asia did not fall under China’s cul-
tural domination. According to Charles Kupchan, hegemonic pow-
ers “seek to extend to their expanding spheres of influence the
norms that provide order within their own polities.”232 While the
Mediterranean did Hellenize/Romanize, as explained in Chapter 2,
China made “no attempts to Sinicize” Southeast Asia.233 Given its
own unique history, northern Vietnam did Sinicize. Outside of
northern Vietnam, no polity in Southeast Asia emulated China’s
domestic political model. Throughout this truly decentered region,
it was Indic ideas that spread through the process of localization (as
opposed to Indic imperialism). In sum, despite power asymmetry
with China and the spread of Indic politico-cultural ideas, it was
Southeast Asia’s active local initiative in the security, economic, and
ideational realms that collectively produced a nonhegemonic inter-
national order through the shared management of maritime Asia.
 chapter four
The Rise of the Indo-Pacific and
the Return of Geopolitics

T
he rise of china and the growing rivalry between
China and the United States have increased the impor-
tance of maritime Asia. However, given the strong asso-
ciation between hegemony and international order
drawn from the Roman Mediterranean, this rivalry is widely per-
ceived as a clash between competing hegemonies. But the idea of a
pluralist and decentered order developed in this book better cap-
tures the emerging geopolitical configuration in the Indo-Pacific.
As explained in this chapter, where we extrapolate our findings
from the previous chapter on the classical eastern Indian Ocean,
the local initiative of the Southeast Asian states (individually and
collectively) is actively shaping the regional order along with the
regional norms rooted in the so-called ASEAN [Association of
Southeast Asian Nations] Way that are also being extended into
the Indo-Pacific. In turn, these norms are influencing and condi-
tioning politico-military and politico-economic interactions across
this vast space, thereby playing a formative role in the making of
the international order in the Indo-Pacific. Southeast Asian states
reject hegemony and are coengaging the United States, China,
and other consequential players like India and Japan. Although

109
110 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific

motivated by different reasons, all these powers are collectively

producing the public goods of trade and security through the
shared management of maritime Asia. We argue that the future of
the Indo-Pacific has resonances with the nonhegemonic classical
Indian Ocean, where multitudes of local initiatives are collectively
producing an open and multiplex order.

The Indo-Pacific
According to Aaron Friedberg, the Indo-Pacific region connecting
the Pacific and the Indian Oceans “is the central front” of the on-
going Sino-American contest, which “is likely to be a protracted
military rivalry.”1 Indeed, the United States recognizes the Indo-
Pacific “as the world’s center of gravity.”2 Similarly, leading Chi-
nese scholars like Wang Jisi have also observed that the world’s
“economic and political center of gravity” has been shifting to “the
Asian mainland and the regions where the Indian and Pacific
Oceans merge.”3 Not surprisingly, China is modernizing its navy
for contingencies “in the two oceans region . . . the western Pacific
Ocean and northern Indian Ocean,” even as China does not use
the Indo-Pacific nomenclature.4 Importantly, this oceanic space
corresponds with the eastern Indian Ocean discussed in Chapter 3.
Not surprisingly, the emerging regional order in the Indo-
Pacific has become the subject of a major debate. There are two
important views regarding the emerging order in the Indo-Pacific
because of this looming Sino-American contest. First, invoking the
so-called Thucydides Trap, named after the ancient Greek histo-
rian, Graham Allison is of the view that China’s rise is “undercut-
ting America’s status as a global hegemon.” While Allison does not
argue that war is inevitable, he sees considerable potential for it.
Although the idea of the Thucydides Trap and the associated
power transition paradigm have been widely critiqued, “they con-
tinue to dominate popular and academic discussions.”5
The U.S. Department of Defense is fearful that a rising China
is seeking “Indo-Pacific regional hegemony,” as China wishes to
“reorder the [Indo-Pacific] region.”6 While the United States is be-
lieved to have heretofore held the “command of the sea” that has
underwritten “world trade,” some scholars argue that the United
 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific 111

States and China are now in a contest for “maritime dominance” in

the Indo-Pacific.7 After all, China overtook the United States as
the world’s largest trading nation in 2013, displacing the United
States from the top position it had held since the end of the
Second World War.8
The second view posits an ASEAN-centered Indo-Pacific region
led by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Indeed, the
ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP) envisions an “ASEAN-
centered” region, whereby its “central role” shapes the economic
and security architecture, and promotes peace and prosperity in the
Indo-Pacific.9 All the major powers of this region have endorsed
ASEAN-centrality, at least rhetorically. ASEAN-led institutions such
as the East Asia Summit (EAS), the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF),
and the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus (ADMM-Plus)
are expected to provide the mechanisms to manage regional issues in
the Indo-Pacific.
However, the idea of ASEAN-centrality—though always tenu-
ous and perhaps even mythical—has come under challenge in re-
cent years by the Quad grouping of the United States, Japan,
Australia, and India.10 The Quad is an important component of the
American strategic response to the rise of China. Consequently,
Sino-American rivalry has led ASEAN to search for ways to rede-
fine its centrality.11 Nevertheless, given ASEAN’s vulnerabilities to
great power politics, it has also been suggested that ASEAN unity
and neutrality may be more important than centrality.12 Therefore,
ASEAN must “downsize” to focus on issues within Southeast Asia
rather than striving for centrality in the Indo-Pacific.13
We reject the notions of a Thucydidean power transition and
that of ASEAN-centrality in this chapter. A hegemonic power tran-
sition is not in the making in the Indo-Pacific. Therefore, no hege-
monic naval power exercising sea control is likely to emerge in the
region. The belief that a hegemonic naval power that keeps the sea
routes open is necessary for a maritime trading system is based on
a generalization drawn from Roman history. However, it has no
basis in maritime Asia.14 At the same time, even as ASEAN-led
mechanisms will have some role to play in the regional architec-
ture, ASEAN will hardly be central. In fact, a decentered and mul-
tiplex system is in the making in the Indo-Pacific. Order in this
112 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific

region, especially the provision of public goods for the safety of the
all-important sea lanes, will emerge from the accretion of the local
initiatives of several actors, large and small, individually and collec-
tively. As in the classical eastern Indian Ocean discussed in Chapter
3, regional public goods also will be provided through the practices
of shared management in the contemporary Indo-Pacific and not
through hegemonic or great power management.
The rest of this chapter is divided into three sections. First, we
address the gap between the classical Indian Ocean and the con-
temporary Indo-Pacific by focusing on the brief history of the pe-
riod after the European intrusion into this space (post-1498). In
particular, we analyze the periods of presumed British and Ameri-
can naval hegemonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
that are believed to have occurred in “succession.”15 We argue that
the politico-military, politico-economic, and ideational underpin-
nings of British and American interactions show that maritime he-
gemony over the past 200 years was fleeting and tentative,
especially in the Indian Ocean. If anything, Britain and the United
States were the primi inter pares among the naval powers, but not
hegemonic. Furthermore, local agency continued to matter to re-
gional order building in the Indian Ocean.
Second, our focus on the contemporary Indo-Pacific shows the
deeply interactive and mutually reinforcing politico-military and
politico-economic interactions taking place across the region.
More specifically, we posit that U.S.-China rivalry is not a compe-
tition of competing hegemonies but a quest for relative position
and a geopolitical contest over access to this oceanic space. Third,
we show that these politico-military and politico-economic inter-
actions are being actively influenced and shaped by the regional
norms embedded within the ASEAN Way, and that Southeast Asia
is actively shaping the regional order.
We argue that while China has attenuated American domi-
nance in maritime Asia, this is unlikely to result in Chinese hege-
mony. At the same time, renewed American hegemony is also
unlikely. The absence of a hegemonic power exercising the com-
mand of the sea will not result in maritime disorder. A decentered
and nonhegemonic regional order is in the making in the eastern
Indian Ocean, with overlapping layers of governance at the
 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific 113

subregional and regional levels through bilateral, minilateral, and

multilateral initiatives. The eastern Indian Ocean will also be an
“open” space given the (re)entry of some extraregional (European)
actors.16 Most important, we highlight the agency of the Southeast
Asian states, especially for coengaging all the major powers while
rejecting hegemonism.

The Indian Ocean after 1500

The period after the Portuguese entry into the Indian Ocean in
1498 is often referred to as “the Vasco da Gama era,” a euphemism
for an era of European dominance.17 For example, Paul Kennedy
has argued that the Europeans dominated the world for “four cen-
turies” prior to World War I.18 However, recent scholarship has
emphasized that the “old image” of this period as the Vasco da
Gama era “of a succession of hegemonic European powers control-
ling the early modern Indian Ocean—first the Portuguese, then
the Dutch, and finally the British—is now no longer acceptable.”19
The Portuguese entry into the Indian Ocean “was not the ‘break
with the past’ that is sometimes described,” as a “multicentered or
polycentric equilibrium emerged in the Indian Ocean trade,” after
some readjustment.20 Not only did the Portuguese become a “part
of the structure of medieval Asian trade,” but the Dutch “also car-
ried on trade much as any Asian merchant” would have done, de-
spite the growing role of armed trade and monopolies.21
This was largely because the commodities of European trade
such as South and Southeast Asian spices “could not be produced
in Europe at all, or could only be produced there with considerable
difficulty.”22 More important, China and India remained the manu-
facturing powerhouses for centuries prior to the Industrial Revolu-
tion. Due to this “Sino-Indian Great Divergence,” the European
powers had to pay in bullion (mined from the Americas) for the
silk and cotton textiles of China and India.23 Therefore, Asian trad-
ing networks continued to remain resilient and even thrived in the
centuries after 1498. According to Michael Pearson, the Europeans
did not introduce “any qualitative change into the [Indian] ocean
for the first three hundred years of their presence there.”24 This is
of course not to deny the growing role of armed trade, but only to
114 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific

emphasize that the European powers were not hegemonic during

these centuries.25 It was only in the aftermath of the Industrial
Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that a European power be-
came dominant in Asia.26

British Naval Power and Maritime Asia

Britain’s defeat of France during the Napoleonic Wars and “the
takeover of Dutch possessions (South Africa, Ceylon, Malacca)” are
believed to have turned the Indian Ocean into a “British lake.”27
Others have argued that the Indian Ocean had become a “British
lake” by the end of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763).28 However,
the French continued in Mauritius, and the Dutch remained en-
sconced in Java and the Moluccas until they were dislodged by the
British—with the support of their Indian sepoys—during the Napo-
leonic Wars. Consequently, Derek McDougall has referred to the
post-1815 Indian Ocean as “a ‘British lake’ centered on India.”29
While there is no doubt that Britain emerged as the leading naval
power in the world after 1815, it is a matter of some debate whether
British naval power was hegemonic and if this naval hegemony was
necessary for the functioning of the maritime trading system.
According to Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, “the British
navy was really enforcing a world more like premodern Asia, and
Britain’s illustrious forebears were close kin to those it now con-
demned as criminals [or pirates].”30 In other words, a hegemonic
British navy was perhaps not needed to keep the trade routes open
in the Indian Ocean since such a navy did not exist in premodern
Asia, as explained in Chapter 3. Therefore, for Sugata Bose, the In-
dian Ocean was “both . . . a British lake and it was not,” for in the
zone stretching from Zanzibar to Singapore, Indian and Chinese
“intermediary capitalists” built their “own lake.”31 Consequently, a
layered order existed in the Indian Ocean in which local agency
played a key role despite colonialism, and British power did not
(and perhaps could not) stamp out “sectors or pockets of local dom-
inance in Southeast Asia” of this “dependent seaborne commerce”
of the Asians.32 As such, even as Britain emerged as the leading naval
power after 1815, the quest for such a navy can be explained by fac-
tors other than the need to make the trading system run.
 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific 115

Buzan and Little’s framework of politico-military and politico-

economic interactions underpinned by ideas that make and shape
international orders, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, is useful
here too. First, in terms of politico-military interactions, Britain
lacked serious maritime security rivals after the Napoleonic Wars.
Britain’s naval primacy “depended far more on the persistent weak-
ness of defeated European rivals,” the absence of powerful indige-
nous naval actors in Asia, and the awareness that “any attempt to
move from primacy to hegemony would be risky.”33 Second, in
terms of politico-economic interactions, trade for Britain was sur-
vival-driven, and not just about wealth or political power. Given
Britain’s acute dependency on imported food as well as raw materi-
als such as cotton for the Industrial Revolution, the British navy
sought to rule the waves.34
Third, in an ideational sense, the British leadership also made
“a conscious connection with the Roman imperium.”35 This is per-
haps not that surprising because, as discussed in Chapter 2, Rome
also did not have serious security rivals after the destruction of
Carthage, and because of its reliance on maritime trade for food.
Furthermore, in the realm of ideas, Britain remained mercantile,
not liberal, at least in the early decades after 1815.36 It was a com-
bination of these factors, along with the need to defend Britain, an
island state, which led Britain to emerge as the leading naval
power. Even as its powerful navy might have served British inter-
ests, a hegemonic British navy was not required to make the Indian
Ocean trading system run, for it upheld a world like premodern
Asia that lacked such a naval power. It was the local conditions in
the Indian Ocean that enabled Britain to exercise a particular kind
of power.
As noted by Andrew Lambert, the British did not “so much im-
pose” a trading order, but instead worked “to sustain it in the de-
fense of their interests” by relying on “an effective sea-based
deterrent.”37 However, this is only true for British interactions with
the Western great powers. In the eastern Indian Ocean (and indeed
in the world outside Europe), British naval power did play an im-
portant role in the making and shaping of British colonialism. Our
argument is simply that naval hegemony was not needed to keep
the sea lanes open, especially in the Indian Ocean.
116 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific

In other words, the nature of British naval primacy was far more
contingent than is commonly assumed in the international relations
scholarship. Britain’s naval dominance—to the degree that it ex-
isted—depended more upon “situational conditions.”38 Consequently,
the Western great powers “did not experience British naval mastery
as a yoke” due to “the peculiarly hollow character of naval hege-
mony.”39 The powerful British navy upheld British—not systemic—
interests. Patrick O’Brien has even argued that Britain’s rulers did not
“contemplate or presume to occupy the [hegemonic] place retrospec-
tively assigned to them by social science.”40 This raises serious doubts
for the Anglo-American hegemonic “succession” paradigm of Gilpin,
and for those like Ikenberry who trace the origins of the liberal order
to Britain in the nineteenth century.41

American Naval Power and Maritime Asia

Even after the beginning of Britain’s “free trade” regime in 1846
(albeit “free trade” linked with colonialism), the United States re-
sorted to “economic nationalism” through “informal means” in-
cluding “high tariff walls,” and by establishing “a rival imperial
trade bloc” in the Americas.42 Notably, “US naval growth begin-
ning in the 1880s was funded by revenues from the tariff.”43 How-
ever, not only did the United States face no rival in the 1890s with
the termination of the Anglo-American military rivalry around that
time, but “the United States was not a trading nation” as “less than
10 per cent of U.S. GDP came from foreign trade” in 1900.44
Consequently, the rise of America’s naval power was not driven
by politico-military interactions with rivals. At the same time,
politico-economic interactions to help support the management of
a liberal economic order were also not its motivations. Instead, it
was the influence of Mahanian ideas and aspirations to the world
leadership in the British (and Roman) mold that was decisive. The
American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan was of the opinion
that the British path to global predominance through naval mas-
tery was open to “any state that had the mind and the will to follow
its example.”45 This Mahanian view had a definite influence on the
emerging American approach to naval power around the beginning
of the twentieth century.46 According to Lambert, the “US neither
 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific 117

needed nor wanted a global sea-control navy, but it was most anx-
ious that Britain should not have one. . . . In both World Wars US
policymakers treated Britain as a strategic and economic rival to be
defeated, even if it chose to do so with fiscal tools.”47 The tools
employed by the Americans in their contest with the British were
in the domains of finance, international communications, global
transportation, and fossil fuels.
Not surprisingly, competition “rather than cooperation contin-
ued to characterize the [Anglo-American] relationship on key politi-
cal-economic issues” well into the mid-twentieth century, and both
the decline of British power and the rise of American power in the
first half of the century have been overstated in the literature.48
Given all these qualifications, O’Brien has referred to the Anglo-
American “hegemonic succession paradigm” and “the representation
of Pax Britannica as an antecedent or precedent for the hegemony
of the United States” as “a myth” and a “theory without history.”49
The United States did emerge as primus inter pares among the
naval powers after the Second World War. According to Stephen
Wertheim, America’s elites consciously chose the policy of armed
primacy after the fall of France in 1940. However, this was “not
merely the material condition” of American preponderance, nor
was it about “contain[ing] or defeat[ing] a particular rival. . . .
[Instead, primacy was] an axiom about America’s role in the world,
closer to the status of an identity than to that of a policy or strat-
egy.”50 Importantly, after 1945 the Americans wanted an influence
comparable to Britain’s before the war, and therefore the acquisi-
tion of overseas military bases was an important American war
aim.51 The number of permanent American military bases increased
from fourteen in the 1930s to over 1,000 by 1956.52
Notably, the U.S. navy faced an uncertain future immediately
after 1945. The “defence of sea lanes and trade did not count,” and it
was the Korean War (1950–1953) that “saved the navy.”53 During its
ensuing Cold War with the Soviet Union, the United States did not
pursue the Mahanian strategy of sea control for commercial reasons.
Instead, American strategy was about using its power, especially sea
power, “to magnify the power of Western forces in general,” and for
the territorial defense of Western Europe and Japan.54 In other words,
power projection and containment of the Soviet Union, as opposed to
118 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific

sea control to make the trading system run, were the chief purposes of
America’s naval power during the Cold War.55
For its part, the Soviet navy was “powerless to contest U.S. su-
premacy,” and the Soviet economy was only partially integrated
with the world economy.56 “[B]y far, the most important role of the
Soviet Navy in the Cold War was its potential contribution to the
defence of the [Soviet] homeland.”57 The Soviet navy “was not
built to challenge the Western navies on the high seas for sea con-
trol.”58 The presence of nuclear weapons may have also played a
role in ensuring that “neither side could afford to block the other’s
seaborne access.”59 Indeed, Cold War superpower competition
“never led to a disruption of seaborne trade.”60
While the United States was clearly the leading naval power
during the Cold War, especially in the Atlantic and the Pacific
Oceans, Britain continued to be the leading sea power in the In-
dian Ocean immediately after the Second World War.61 This fur-
ther complicates the narrative of successive Anglo-American
hegemonies discussed above. In the 1950s and 1960s, “the US
Navy remained under what it regarded as a British-administered
regional security umbrella” in the Indian Ocean.62 It was only after
the British withdrawal from the “east of Suez” after 1971, and with
America’s growing naval presence in Diego Garcia (a British-held
territory in the Indian Ocean taken from Mauritius), that America
emerged as the leading naval power there.63
However, the 1970s and 1980s also saw the establishment of
Soviet military bases (and/or the Soviet use of local military bases)
in East Africa and Yemen as well as Cam Rahn Bay. Naval presence
in Vietnam also gave the Soviets the ability to oversee the Strait of
Malacca in the eastern Indian Ocean.64 Soviet naval presence in the
Indian Ocean meant that the region remained nonhegemonic even
as the United States boasted the most powerful navy there. In any
case, the superpowers did not obstruct seaborne commerce during
the Cold War. “Since 1945 the defence of maritime trade has only
rarely been an issue, with the Tanker War of the late 1980s and So-
mali piracy the high points of Western activity.”65
The end of the Cold War and the Soviet withdrawal from the
Indian Ocean made the United States the dominant power in the
region. In the post–Cold War world, American naval power has
 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific 119

been “presented as the key guarantor” of the “ ‘global commons’

. . . the idea that free movement by sea, particularly of trade, was a
general good that was essential to the world system.”66 However,
Carla Norrlof has argued that America’s “primary consideration
has been the protection of American business and political interests
. . . even though security provision in the form of military bases
and naval patrols has been a public good of sorts from which other
non-American firms may also have benefitted.”67 This implies that
to the degree American naval dominance has provided these public
goods “of sorts,” they are the consequence of American power
(perhaps even unintended), rather than the cause behind the estab-
lishment of such an American order in the first place.
Furthermore, others have noted that “offensive economic war-
fare has virtually disappeared from discussions of naval utility,”
thereby raising the question whether a hegemonic navy that keeps
trade routes open for the functioning of a maritime trading system
is needed at all.68 The “shipping that delivers food, fuel, and raw
materials is effectively unguarded, often beyond the control of na-
tional states” that “rely on a combination of international law and
shared interest, rather than naval force, to ensure shipping moves
without hindrance from other nations, or non-state actors.”69
Even Barry Posen, who had earlier noted that American “mili-
tary power underwrites world trade” by commanding the com-
mons, has now argued that a “security hegemon” is “unnecessary to
insure international trade,” because “[m]utual deterrence” can pro-
tect the global trade routes.70 Given that the rise of China is raising
the possibility—at least the academic possibility—of naval block-
ades, and therefore of offensive economic warfare between the
great powers, we need to understand the emerging order in the
contemporary Indo-Pacific in the context of this larger theoretical
and historical background.

Structure and Interactions in the Indo-Pacific

Politico-Military and Politico-Economic Interactions
Writing in the aftermath of 9/11, Kennedy believed that there was
only one military superpower in the world. He argued that the
“Pax Britannica was run on the cheap . . . the Royal Navy was equal
120 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific

only to the next two navies,” while “right now all the other navies
in the world combined could not dent American maritime suprem-
acy.”71 Indeed, for James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, “[t]hat
America rules the waves is a virtual axiom of contemporary inter-
national politics,” and the world had “taken for granted that the
US Navy underwrites freedom of navigation.”72 However, as China
emerged as the largest trading power in the world by 2013, Beijing
undertook its concomitant naval buildup. According to Hu Bo, one
of China’s leading naval scholars, China was “very likely to over-
take the United States to become the largest stakeholder of the
world’s sea lanes.”73
The U.S.-China maritime contest is partially an outcome of
the relative decline of America’s naval supremacy and the rise of
Chinese naval power. Given its dependency on imported energy
from the Middle East to fuel its growing economy, China is inter-
ested in the safety of its sea lanes, which run from the China Seas
into the Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean is also crucial for China’s
international trade and for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).74 In-
deed, Southeast Asia’s “gateway position between the Pacific and
Indian Oceans, and its role as a global hub for maritime trade and
transport” has made the eastern Indian Ocean a region of strategic
significance for China.75 Given the stakes, Friedberg is of the opin-
ion that “if they are going to initiate hostilities in the Pacific, Chi-
na’s leaders will have strong incentives to do so simultaneously in
the Indian Ocean.”76 Not surprisingly, America’s leaders “no longer
intend to treat China, India, or Southeast Asia as separate bilateral
cases” when it comes to maritime issues.77
However, as explained above, a hegemonic navy is not needed
to make the trading system run. For Lambert, the United States
continues to remain a continental power, albeit one with the most
powerful navy in the world. The United States is the “dominant sea
power in strategic terms, but no one would argue that it is depen-
dent upon the ocean for its existence.”78 This view is also echoed by
Posen, for whom the United States has a large and diverse economy
“producing manufactured goods, advanced technology, raw materi-
als, energy, and foodstuffs,” and connections “with Canada and
Mexico further broaden the base. Though free trade is beneficial,
the United States can go it alone if necessary.”79 For David Gom-
 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific 121

pert, even as “sea power is an important aspect of American power

now, it was the foundation of British power” in the nineteenth cen-
tury, given its different strategic environment, including depen-
dency on imported food and raw materials.80 Therefore, “sea power
does not have inordinate importance as it did in Britain when the
Royal Navy was synonymous with greatness,” because “the United
States is the world’s leading power in virtually all respects.”81
Similarly, the reorientation of China’s economy due to its com-
mercial rivalry with the United States and the “dual circulation”
strategy is likely to tilt it domestically even as international ties will
remain important.82 In any case, the U.S.-China economic rivalry
centers on tariffs, standard settings, technology, finance, and infra-
structure, and is therefore very different from the zero-sum trade
contest between Rome and its classical rivals in the Mediterranean,
or the contest between the mercantile European powers of the
early modern period that influenced Mahan’s thinking.83 China is
among America’s top three trading partners (along with Canada
and Mexico), while America remains China’s leading trade partner
despite some “decoupling.”84 More important, it seems like sys-
temic/economic leadership transition is not in the offing in the
U.S.-China rivalry, and that their economic contest is likely to cen-
ter around the status of primus inter pares (or relative rank).85
Consequently, the U.S.-China contest seems primarily moti-
vated neither by traditional security concerns nor by trade-related
issues per se. Instead, it seems to be rooted in the ideational issues
related to prestige and status at the apex of the international sys-
tem.86 For Wertheim, America’s quest of armed primacy that began
during the Second World War was “intended to outlive the cir-
cumstances of its origination and shape the distant, perhaps per-
petual, future.”87 Similarly, Fritz Bartel has argued that the end of
the Cold War in which America emerged victorious had affirmed
the belief “that the United States should remain the most powerful
country in the world.”88
In turn, Wang Gungwu has argued that China is “really a con-
tinental power,” and that it is “acquiring enough maritime power to
protect itself against the maritime global world” led by the United
States.89 Importantly, China is aware of its relatively weak naval po-
sition, especially because China has “never really won a serious
122 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific

naval battle” in its entire history.90 Therefore, Chinese leaders are

now beginning to understand that it is important to be a maritime
power in order to be a truly global power.91 According to Singa-
pore’s Lee Kuan Yew, Chinese leaders want to “share this century
as co-equals with the U.S.”92 It is these status/positional dynamics
that are at play in the U.S.-China maritime contest in the eastern
Indian Ocean.
Under President Donald Trump, the United States was deter-
mined “to maintain U.S. strategic primacy in the Indo-Pacific re-
gion” while preventing China “from establishing new, illiberal
spheres of influence,” as the United States feared that China aimed
“to dissolve U.S. alliances and partnerships in the region.”93 The
administration of President Joseph Biden has also reiterated Amer-
ica’s determination “to strengthen our [America’s] long-term posi-
tion in and commitment to the Indo-Pacific,” by building “a
balance of influence that is maximally favorable to the United
States” and its allies and partners, as the fear of China’s pursuit of
“a sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific . . . [in order] to become
the world’s most influential power” continues.94
In fact, soon after the Cold War, the Pentagon was talking
about “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger
regional or global role,” as it sought to preserve America’s dominant
position into the future.95 Importantly, East Asia was identified as “a
region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be suffi-
cient to generate global power.”96 By 2001, the Pentagon had come
to define the “east Asian littoral . . . as the region stretching from
south of Japan through Australia and into the Bay of Bengal.”97
In other words, the United States has been determined to
maintain its primacy since the end of the Cold War, and the pri-
mary reason behind this quest has been the resolve to maintain
America’s position as the leading superpower while preventing the
emergence of a regional (Asian) and global challenger. As such, this
determination is not driven by the desire to keep the sea routes
open for the functioning of the global economy, since such a hege-
mon is not needed in the first place, although America’s position
has often been justified in these terms.
Furthermore, the “expansion” of the definition of maritime
East Asia to include Australia and the Bay of Bengal in 2001—even
 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific 123

before the term “Indo-Pacific” became common—was to some de-

gree a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that China’s power was
rapidly rising, and that a newer approach was needed to maintain
American primacy.98 By thus expanding the region, the United
States was making it difficult for China to dominate its (now much
larger) region, given its greater geographical scope and the addi-
tion of other powerful actors like Australia and India.99 By the mid-
2000s, the United States was already “pivoting” to Asia (even
before formally articulating this strategy in 2011) with the aim of
maintaining American primacy and preventing Chinese hege-
mony.100
However, it was also increasingly clear that “contested zones”
where “the United States can probably pursue selective engage-
ment but not . . . primacy,” and where the United States “will not be
able to establish command [of the commons/sea],” were fast be-
coming a reality.101 China’s military-technological transformation
centered on anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) strategies, and
long-range precision-guided munitions have transformed maritime
East Asia into such a contested zone.102 Indeed, the general progno-
sis is that China will be increasingly able to challenge the United
States at greater distances from the Chinese coast.103 Although
there is no doubt that the United States remains the strongest naval
power in the world, it is primus inter pares as opposed to one that
maintains command of the maritime Asian commons.
The U.S.-China naval competition, then, centers on two inter-
connected politico-military and politico-economic facets. First, as
leading economic powers, the United States and China are devel-
oping their navies “to protect and expand [their] trade” as they vie
for the top position at the apex of the international system.104 While
the United States is clearly trying to preserve its position as the
leading naval power, China is trying to prevent American hege-
mony (or command of the seas) in the Indo-Pacific given China’s
own reliance on the sea lanes. Consequently, China’s “objective is
to acquire an effective presence and maintain basic operational
depth” in the Indo-Pacific, as opposed to “overthrowing the
United States and India in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.”105 Even
as China is rapidly rising, it is in a relatively disadvantageous geo-
graphical position when it comes to accessing the Indian Ocean
124 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific

given the long supply lines and the “gateway” position of the mari-
time Southeast Asian chokepoints noted above. Consequently,
China is seeking secure access to the Indian Ocean as opposed to
hegemony in the Indo-Pacific.106
As a result, the second dimension in their naval rivalry revolves
around the geopolitics of access. The United States is determined
to maintain continued access to regions around China given Chi-
na’s growing A2/AD capabilities. In the meantime, China faces the
“Malacca dilemma” in accessing the Indian Ocean given the overall
maritime superiority of the United States in the Indo-Pacific. Ac-
cessing the Indian Ocean is crucial for both China’s energy security
and its Belt and Road Initiative.107 Consequently, the “rivalry be-
tween [the] major powers is likely to be played out in large part in
terms of naval power projection and with new warships and related
technologies.”108 However, naval power projection does not require
command of the seas. As early as the 1970s, Hedley Bull was al-
ready expressing a “grave doubt as to whether the kind of sea power
traditionally pursued by the Western powers,” which was “directed
towards the command of the seas in wartime and paramount politi-
cal influence over distant coastal states in peacetime,” could “con-
tinue to be exercised.”109
These two dynamics—competition over relative position and
the geopolitics of access—are shaping the American and Chinese
strategic approaches to the Indo-Pacific. While the United States
is seeking to prevent (and perhaps reverse) its relative naval decline
in the Indo-Pacific, China seems more interested in protecting its
sea lanes in the Indian Ocean in general instead of specifically con-
trolling the sea lanes. China is also keen to prevent the emergence
of American (or Indian) hegemony in the Indian Ocean. None of
this means that China is on a path toward regional hegemony.
At the same time, Southeast Asia is not a passive region in this
great power rivalry. Instead, the region is actively shaping great
power engagement. The most important Southeast Asian ide-
ational underpinning is the rejection of hegemonism, whether
American, Chinese, or that of any other player.110 Consequently,
the cumulative American, Chinese, Indian, and Southeast Asian
strategic approaches to the eastern Indian Ocean are in the process
of creating a nonhegemonic and decentered regional order. The
 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific 125

shared management entailed in the decentralized combination of

the local agency of Southeast Asia and the efforts of the major
powers is collectively providing the regional public good of the se-
curity of the sea lanes.

The United States’ Approach and Politico-Military Interactions

There are three strands in America’s emerging strategy. First, the
United States is transforming its postwar hub-and-spokes pattern of
alliances into various bilateral and minilateral alignments.111 The
United States is not only deepening some of its full-fledged alli-
ances (with Japan and Australia, for example), but is also pursuing
security relationships beyond such alliances with partners like Viet-
nam and India. Furthermore, America’s various security partners are
also forging defense and security relationships with each other in-
stead of creating such links with the United States only. Scholars are
referring to such relationships as “networks” and “patchworks.”112
The Quad is perhaps the most prominent of such groupings in
the Indo-Pacific. Japan’s proactive diplomacy with its other three
partners—in bilateral and trilateral settings—was crucial to the
formation of the Quad. India has entered into military logistics
agreements with all three of its Quad partners.113 These agree-
ments have provisions for reciprocal access to military facilities for
supplies and fuels, thereby increasing the reach of their respective
militaries.114 Japan and Australia have also entered into a reciprocal
access agreement that paves the way for their militaries “to work
seamlessly with each other on defense and humanitarian issues,”
thus making Japan’s strategic relationship with Australia its closest
such partnership after its alliance with the United States.115
Notably, China perceives the Quad to be directed against it.116
However, China is not unduly worried as the Quad falls short of a
full-fledged alliance. Since India does not have an alliance with the
United States (or with the other Quad members), Beijing thinks of
the Quad as “an uneasy 3+1 rather than a monolithic quartet.”117 In-
dia’s quest for strategic autonomy, along with the others’ reluctance
to fight alongside India against China in the Himalayas, means that
such alliances are unlikely. In other words, there is recognition in
China of the Quad as “a mechanism for the four countries concerned
126 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific

to coordinate their policies, rather than indicating a single, fixed

strategy.”118
Furthermore, China now possesses the largest navy in the
world in terms of the number of vessels.119 Between 2014 and 2018,
China also launched vessels with a combined tonnage “greater than
the tonnages of the entire French, German, Indian, Italian, South
Korean, Spanish, or Taiwanese navies.”120 The United States never-
theless maintains the most technologically capable naval forces in
the world and has advantages over China when it comes to carriers,
submarines, and land-based air power in support of naval opera-
tions given America’s regional and global network of military
bases.121 The United States’ Quad partners also possess capable
naval forces and are unlikely to be “pushovers,” especially in certain
geographic/local theaters.122 Consequently, neither the United
States (by itself or via the Quad) nor China is likely to emerge as
hegemonic in the contested zones of the Indo-Pacific.
Second, the United States is promoting the rise of India. One of
the “desired end states” of President Trump’s Indo-Pacific strategy
was to ensure that India “remains preeminent in South Asia and takes
the leading role in maintaining Indian Ocean security, increases en-
gagement with Southeast Asia, and expands its economic, defense,
and diplomatic cooperation with other U.S. allies and partners in the
region.”123 Similarly, one of President Biden’s “action plans” in the
Indo-Pacific includes America’s “support” for “India’s continued rise
and regional leadership,” including active connections with Southeast
Asia.124 The underlying logic behind this strategy is the belief that the
rise of India will help balance China’s power in the region, for India
has reasons independent of the United States to do so as a conse-
quence of the Sino-Indian rivalry. In other words, the simultaneous
presence of Sino-American and Sino-Indian rivalries and the absence
of such a strategic rivalry between the United States and India enable
the United States to accommodate the slow rise of India.
Not surprisingly, China’s leading scholars of India have noted
that the United States is “promoting India from the periphery of the
Asia-Pacific region to the core of the Indo-Pacific region.”125 While
this is likely to exacerbate the Sino-Indian rivalry, China’s primary
concern is to prevent the emergence of a hegemonic power in the
Indian Ocean that could deny access to China.126 Given India’s over-
 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific 127

all naval inferiority compared with China, there is little fear of In-
dia’s ability to do so by itself. Furthermore, the absence of an
alliance between the United States and India also implies that a joint
bid by them to deny China access to the Indian Ocean is unlikely.
According to Gabriel Collins and William Murray, “China is not
fundamentally vulnerable to a maritime energy blockade in circum-
stances other than a global war.”127 Even that would require blockading
not just the Malacca Strait but also the Lombok and Sunda Straits, in
addition to the routes around Australia. Furthermore, the “[s]ecurity of
regional sea-borne trade and security of sea-borne trade with China
are completely entangled,” thereby creating more hurdles for any po-
tential blockade, as it will also adversely affect America’s East Asian al-
lies and partners.128 Not surprisingly, Cuiping Zhu has noted that “no
country including India will have the ability to independently control
the ocean in the future. The control over the Indian Ocean by the US
is likely to be the final stage of control over the ocean by a single coun-
try since the Western world rules [sic] the Indian Ocean.”129 In other
words, a hegemonic power controlling the sea routes and managing
the trading system is unlikely to emerge even as major power competi-
tion is resulting in the pursuit of coercion and countercoercion strate-
gies by the rival great powers. Instead of sea control, these powers
seem to be building the capabilities to project their naval power.
The third component of the United States’ strategic approach
to the Indo-Pacific includes the involvement of extraregional part-
ners and allies in regional affairs. Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy spe-
cifically calls for engaging with allies and partners from “outside
of the region,” especially the EU and NATO.130 While NATO’s
engagement with the Indo-Pacific is in its early stages, individual
European powers are already engaging with the region.
The United Kingdom has teamed up with the United States
and Australia through the trilateral AUKUS security pact that aims
to provide Australia with nuclear powered submarines.131 The
United Kingdom and Japan are also working on a reciprocal access
agreement like the one between Australia and Japan noted above.132
India and the United Kingdom are also in the process of negotiat-
ing a reciprocal logistics pact that will enhance the reach of their
respective militaries.133 Along with the Five Power Defence Ar-
rangements (FPDA) among Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New
128 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific

Zealand, and the United Kingdom, these developments are likely

to raise Britain’s strategic profile in the Indo-Pacific.134
Similarly, France is also a resident power with island territories
in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. India and France have al-
ready signed a mutual logistics agreement for their militaries, and
France has also unveiled its Indo-Pacific strategy and is fostering
closer links with Australia and Japan.135 The engagement of these ex-
traregional powers in the Indo-Pacific points toward an “open” re-
gional order that is not restricted to the countries of the Indo-Pacific.
Consequently, America’s three-pronged approach to the region
centered on the Quad, India, and the involvement of the extrare-
gional powers is in fact pointing toward multipolarity.136 However,
this is a more diffuse multipolarity, akin to what Evelyn Goh has
referred to as a “patchwork.”137 After all, ranging from full-fledged
alliances to security partnerships, there are different degrees of se-
curity alignments in the region. Furthermore, these states also have
very different threat perceptions of China. While the United States
and Japan are keen to slow (and perhaps reverse) their relative de-
cline vis-à-vis China, India is approaching China as a rising power
(albeit warily, due to the large power gap with China).138
Australian analysts also worry that “[g]rowing Indian naval
power may not always reinforce Canberra’s interests unless it can
be coordinated with Australian or U.S. activity.”139 Unlike Austra-
lia, which is seeking to augment America’s power and position in
the Indo-Pacific, a rising India will probably use its power “to max-
imise India’s influence, not America’s.”140 This patchworked multi-
polarity of multiple powers with different strategic interests, with
different relationships with China, and in multiple fora (from the
Quad to AUKUS) that are the sites of cooperation in different
functional areas, means that America’s own approach to the Indo-
Pacific is pointing toward a nonhegemonic multiplex region.

China’s Approach: Mutually Reinforcing Politico-Economic and

Politico-Military Interactions
As discussed in Chapter 3, historical Chinese empires approached
the region stretching from the South China Sea into the Indian
Ocean as a singular maritime space. In the contemporary context,
 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific 129

China’s growing dependence on the Indian Ocean sea lanes, the

BRI (which includes the so-called Maritime Silk Road, or MSR),
and the United States’ approach to the Indo-Pacific discussed
above mean that China continues to think of the Indian Ocean as
“[g]eo-strategically . . . closely linked” to the South China Sea.141
Indeed, as mentioned above, the Chinese navy is officially striving
to emerge as a two-ocean navy. According to Garver, “[u]nless
China can secure its interests in the SA-IOR,” or South Asia-
Indian Ocean Region, “China will remain a regional East Asian
power and fall short of its aspiration of being a global power.”142
Consequently, some scholars have argued that China is build-
ing a Mahanian navy that seeks sea control. For Holmes and Yoshi-
hara, Chinese strategists “seem especially attached to the more
bellicose dimensions of Mahan’s work,” and the “command of the
commons has assumed a central position in Chinese strategic
thinking and military strategy.”143 Similarly, Yves-Heng Lim has ar-
gued that China is seeking “sea control in the Indian Ocean” and
that this quest is “bound to create frictions, if not outright conflict”
with India and the United States.144 However, this is hardly the
dominant view in the literature. According to Hu, China cannot
emerge as dominant in the Indian Ocean unless the United States
and India “make major strategic mistakes” or “suffer a sharp de-
cline in their national power.”145 These developments are not very
likely, especially simultaneously.
Therefore, China is more interested in building “strategic buf-
fer zones along China’s long sea lanes of communication,” as op-
posed to becoming a regional hegemon.146 While this strategy may
involve “selective sea control in certain parts of the Indian Ocean,”
especially if China is able to establish a network of military bases
along its maritime routes, this offensive thrust is driven by China’s
relatively weak position compared to the United States and geo-
graphical disadvantages in relation to India.147 China seeks to main-
tain “operational depth” as it seeks access to the Indian Ocean, in
addition to developing the ability to pursue countercoercion if sub-
jected to coercion by its adversaries.148
“China is not yet building up a global network of bases to
massively project power abroad or to attack the United States,” or
India for that matter.149 Unlike the United States, which enjoys
130 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific

access to military bases overseas at least partially due to its military

alliances, China is unlikely to underwrite the security of the states
where its military bases may emerge (except, perhaps, in select
cases), as China has tended to avoid alliances.150 As such, China is
only likely to have a “restricted constituency of support” for its
overseas military bases.151
China established its first overseas military base in Djibouti in
the western Indian Ocean in 2017. However, the United States,
Italy, France, and Japan also have military bases in that country.152
Similarly, Singapore entered into a pact with China in 2019 “that
allows Chinese warships to continue using its military facilities.”153
However, this is a politico-commercial agreement, and “a more
persistent” Chinese presence in Singapore “seems highly unlikely
given the city-state’s close security links with the US.”154 Singapore
and India also have a reciprocal logistics agreement that allows
their respective navies to use the other side’s facilities for resup-
plies and fuel. According to Ng Eng Hen, the Singaporean defense
minister, this agreement will promote closer India–Singapore co-
operation in Indian waters as well as the Strait of Malacca.155 In
other words, this race for bases and the geopolitics of access are
not a zero-sum game. While China is certainly emerging as a
major power in the Indian Ocean, it is hardly the only one.
Consequently, others have argued that China is not seeking mari-
time dominance. Although a Mahanian school of thought does exist
in China (alongside other schools of thought on matters pertaining to
sea power), China is in fact seeking “multiple ways to project its sea
power.”156 Except perhaps in its near-seas coastal waters, “China has
no interest in sea control beyond a certain degree of strategic depth,
including a secure bastion area for ballistic missile submarines.”157 In
other words, even this limited degree of sea control is largely driven
by strategic reasons as opposed to those related to maritime trade.
China’s naval modernization is largely about the quest to cement its
great power credentials and to ensure the security of its maritime
routes.158 Therefore, China is pursuing a three-pronged approach in
pursuit of these interests, none of which implies sea control.
First, even as China is determined to emerge as a maritime
power, it is not putting all its “eggs in the maritime basket.”159
China is seeking access to the Indian Ocean directly via maritime
 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific 131

routes and indirectly via continental routes through Myanmar and

Pakistan. “Strategically, Myanmar is China’s link to the Indian
Ocean.”160 A gas pipeline carrying supplies from the Bay of Bengal
to southern China became operational in 2013, while a parallel
pipeline started pumping oil in 2014.161 Similarly, plans are also un-
derway to connect western China with the Persian Gulf via Paki-
stan. Although these developments may imply a different
vulnerability by implicating China in Pakistan’s and Myanmar’s do-
mestic politics and internal security concerns, they have the poten-
tial to ameliorate China’s “Malacca dilemma.”
Chinese analysts are under no illusion that these pipelines will
remove China’s dependence on the Strait of Malacca. Neverthe-
less, these options are still being pursued as a “form of effective
hedging in order to prevent other countries from blackmailing
China” given its maritime vulnerabilities.162 China’s leading strate-
gists are among the advocates of such “continental bridges” to the
Indian Ocean.163 China’s search for these continental routes to the
Indian Ocean also demonstrates that it is not pursuing (and per-
haps cannot pursue) sea control in the eastern Indian Ocean.
Second, China’s BRI also builds upon this land–sea complemen-
tarity. Although the BRI has been critiqued as a unilateral Chinese
initiative that seeks to mimic the U.S. hub-and-spokes model in
Asia, its overland component is also seen as a lifeline “in case of sup-
ply disruptions at sea or economic isolation.”164 It is also significant
that many of these overland routes (like the one via Pakistan into the
Persian Gulf) traverse way beyond the eastern Indian Ocean. Simi-
larly, the maritime component of the BRI also aims to go beyond
Southeast Asia via the “China + ASEAN + X” model into South Asia,
East Africa, the Middle East, and beyond.165 Not surprisingly, Chi-
na’s supply routes and the BRI—analogous to America’s support for
extraregional powers in the Indo-Pacific discussed above—are also
pointing toward an “open” order in the eastern Indian Ocean.
Third and finally, China is pursuing its own minilateral initia-
tives. The Lancang–Mekong Cooperation (LMC) mechanism that
held its first summit in 2016 is “the first Chinese-built Southeast
Asian institution.”166 The LMC includes China and the countries
of mainland Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand,
and Vietnam), and focuses on sustainable development, regional
132 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific

infrastructure, and nontraditional security issues.167 However, it

should not be seen in isolation, since this mechanism allows China
to engage with several Southeast Asian countries collectively in a
multilateral setting other than ASEAN.
Furthermore, China, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand have been
conducting joint patrols on the Lancang-Mekong River since
2011.168 It has even been suggested that this so-called Mekong
mode implies a security architecture “dominated by China and sup-
ported by other Mekong countries.”169 In turn, the United States
has specifically raised the issue of “extraterritorial river patrols” as
a new challenge in Southeast Asia that is undermining existing in-
stitutions.170 These developments have the potential to divide con-
tinental and maritime Southeast Asia.171
In turn, the BRI has the potential to accelerate this trend. The
Singapore–Kunming Rail Link (SKRL) may create an “alternative”
route from southern China into the Bay of Bengal via “southern
Thailand and the western Malay Peninsula,” thereby contributing to
reducing China’s reliance on the maritime routes.172 The East Coast
Rail Link (ECRL) connecting the Thai-Malaysian border in the
northeast to Malaysia’s west coast is “also intended to provide . . . a
land link between the contested South China Sea and the busy Strait
of Malacca shipping corridor.”173 As with Pakistan and Myanmar, the
SKRL and ECRL may also entangle China with the domestic politi-
cal issues of these countries. Nevertheless, given the continental-
maritime contest between the United States and China, there is now
an “intense interest in the potential unity of Southeast Asia as an in-
dependent region.”174 Whether or not the Sino-American rivalry re-
orders Southeast Asia along its continental and maritime axes, China
does not seem to be pursuing sea control or naval hegemony, even as
it attenuates America’s post–Cold War regional predominance
through its growing power projection capabilities.

The Flow of Ideas: Southeast Asian Agency and “the

ASEAN Way” in the Indo-Pacific
The Southeast Asian states, whether individually or collectively, are
not mere spectators in the U.S.-China contest in the Indo-Pacific.
Southeast Asia is actively shaping great power engagement with the
 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific 133

region.175 More specifically, it is the regional norms embedded in

the so-called ASEAN Way that are being projected into the Indo-
Pacific. The ASEAN Way refers to the regional norms that
emerged in Southeast Asia during the Cold War that sought con-
flict avoidance while preventing great power domination in the re-
gion.176 Focusing on informality, consultation, and consensus, they
emerged from the region’s effort to stay strategically relevant in the
context of great power rivalry. The ASEAN Way typically refers to
four core features: the nonuse of force and pacific settlement of dis-
putes; regional autonomy and “regional solutions to regional prob-
lems”; the doctrine of noninterference; and avoidance of military
pacts and preference for bilateral defense cooperation.
After the Cold War, norms that emphasized cooperative secu-
rity and “open” regionalism were promoted in the wider Asian re-
gion. The aim of this normative framework was to coengage all the
major powers while promoting strategic restraint and responsible
conduct. Some of these ideas spread through institution building
in the form of soft regionalism such as the ARF. Others were em-
bodied in ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC),
which has been signed by all the members of the EAS. While there
is no need to overstate the amplification of these norms from
Southeast Asia into the wider Indo-Pacific, they have come to con-
stitute a regional “cognitive prior.”177
The region rejects hegemonism and wants to avoid a zero-sum
rivalry between the United States and China. The Unites States
remains the region’s largest cumulative foreign investor, even as
China has emerged as its largest trade partner.178 Given the United
States’ long-standing security links with the region and Southeast
Asia’s complex relationship with China, rooted in history and ge-
ography, the regional states have chosen “to work selectively with
China and the United States, rather than siding entirely with one
or the other.”179
Southeast Asian states are “ambivalent about the United
States” and the role it “should play in the region,” as the United
States often appears “distracted, arrogant, condescending, fickle,
and self-preoccupied.”180 At the same time, the region’s unity over
China has also frayed, and on certain issues, such as the South
China Sea, Beijing is seen as a bully. For example, China has “told
134 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific

Southeast Asian states to not talk about the South China Sea
among themselves prior to meeting as a group with China,” and
such high-handedness has meant a “surplus in [China’s] repellent
power” in parts of the region.181 Southeast Asia has adopted a
three-pronged approach to manage this rivalry that ultimately
seeks to reject hegemony by keeping both China and the United
States engaged in the region in addition to working with other ex-
ternal powers.
First, Southeast Asian states have been the initiators of many of
the changes in the regional order, and “regional states have wid-
ened the composition of this order.”182 Importantly, Southeast
Asian states are setting their own discourse on the Indo-Pacific.183
Indonesia sees itself at the center of the Indo-Pacific region, a
“Global Maritime Fulcrum” that connects the Indian and Pacific
Oceans.184 Furthermore, Indonesia’s approach to the Indo-Pacific
had a major influence on the AOIP. The AOIP emphasized its
“open” and “inclusive” nature, and avoided the term “free” as used
in the American articulation of it, as it was seen as directed toward
China. Similarly, while no state in the region rejects China’s BRI,
they also keep their exposure to the BRI limited, as shown by the
pushback from the second Mahathir government in Malaysia.185
Additionally, latent ideas such as the Indonesian initiative for an
“Indo-Pacific wide treaty” modeled on ASEAN’s TAC also point
toward the amplification of ASEAN’s norms and ideas at the level
of the Indo-Pacific in the future.186
As noted by Martin Stuart-Fox almost two decades ago, the
Southeast Asian states “want the United States to remain a power-
ful presence [in the region] . . . but they do not want to be part of
any balance-of-power coalition. At the same time, they also want to
make room for China.”187 Southeast Asia is also wary of the Quad
transforming into a collective defense organization (although there
is little prospect of the Quad developing into a military alliance, as
discussed above). As with its rejection of balance-of-power configu-
rations, Southeast Asia is also against hegemonic regionalism given
its simultaneous coengagement with the United States and China.
ASEAN-led institutions such as EAS, the ARF, and the
ADMM-Plus are perhaps the only Indo-Pacific–wide regional in-
stitutions, and they include both the United States and China, in
 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific 135

addition to other important powers, despite past and ongoing ri-

valries among many of them. While sometimes disparagingly dis-
missed as mere “talk-shops,” such groupings are among the few
venues where the “strategic rivals” can cooperate “towards the real-
ization of functional goals,” including regional capacity building
for humanitarian and disaster relief (HADR) and other nontradi-
tional dimensions of maritime security.188 At the same time, it
should be noted that the membership of some of these institutions,
such as the ARF, extends beyond the Indo-Pacific. Along with the
AOIP, which is concerned with “regional architecture in Southeast
Asia and the surrounding regions,” ASEAN’s initiatives, like those of
the United States and China discussed above, also point toward an
“open” regional order.189
Second, the Southeast Asian states are also establishing their
own minilaterals that are not ASEAN-led. The Indonesia-Singa-
pore Coordinated Patrols to counter piracy in the Singapore Strait,
initiated in 1992, were followed by a series of other such bilateral
initiatives in maritime Southeast Asia. By 2004, this was trans-
formed into the Malacca Straits Sea Patrol with the addition of
Malaysia, while Thailand joined this initiative in 2008, as these
four states sought to coordinate their naval patrols in the Malacca
and Singapore Straits. In fact, they are even allowed “hot pursuit
rights of five nautical miles into the sovereign waters of the other
members.”190 In the meantime, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia
had already started cooperative air patrols over the Straits of Ma-
lacca and Singapore by 2005 through an initiative known as “Eyes
in the Sky” Combined Maritime Air Patrols. This was followed by
the creation of their Intelligence Exchange Group in 2006. The
threefold endeavor of these four states (coordinated naval patrols,
coordinated air patrols, and intelligence sharing) is now known as
the Malacca Straits Patrol (MSP).191
It is noteworthy that the beginning of this minilateral in 2004
was prompted by the Lloyd’s Joint War Risk Committee’s classifi-
cation of the Malacca Strait “as a war zone,” thereby raising the in-
surance premium for ships passing through that waterway.192 In
addition to these financial considerations, the littoral states were
wary of any attempt by the external great powers to dominate the
Malacca Strait. “For Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, the key to
136 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific

preventing other powers from controlling access to the region is to

find the resources to control it themselves,” despite the many dif-
ferences among the Southeast Asian states.193 By 2006, Lloyd’s had
removed the Malacca Strait’s designation as a war zone. This de-
velopment further demonstrates that a hegemonic navy is not
needed to make the trading system run as local initiative can per-
form such security functions by generating these public goods in
specific locales of concern, including at important chokepoints
such as the Malacca Strait.
Similarly, maritime attacks by the Abu Sayyaf Group led to the
launch of the Sulu-Sulawesi Seas Patrols (SSSP) by Indonesia, Ma-
laysia, and the Philippines in 2017. Notably, these patrols are mod-
eled on the MSP and include coordinated naval and air patrols as
well as intelligence sharing (but without hot pursuit rights).194 In
part, this initiative emerged as a result of concerns in Indonesia
and Malaysia that China would send its ships to patrol these waters
at the behest of the Philippines.195 Nevertheless, China and other
major powers like Japan and the United States have demonstrated
their support for this initiative by helping the local states with ca-
pacity building for maritime security.196 Importantly, this trilateral
mechanism emerged even as Malaysia and the Philippines have
maritime boundary issues related to the Sabah territorial dispute.197
These problems notwithstanding, the MSP and the SSSP point to-
ward local initiatives backed by the great powers that collectively
produce regional public goods.
Third and finally, the Southeast Asian states are also actively
engaging India in the eastern Indian Ocean. Singapore is perhaps
one of the more enthusiastic supporters of India’s engagement with
the region. As early as 2005, Goh Chok Tong noted that “India’s
rise” would make it “less tenable to regard South and East Asia as
distinct strategic theaters interacting only at the margins.”198 India
is also a member of the EAS, ARF, and ADMM-Plus. Although
India is not a member of the MSP, it does engage in bilateral coor-
dinated patrols with all three of its maritime neighbors in the
eastern Indian Ocean: Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar.199 Fur-
thermore, India also has a reciprocal naval logistics agreement with
Vietnam in addition to the one with Singapore noted above.200 In-
dian military facilities on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands allow
 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific 137

New Delhi to project its power not only into the Strait of Malacca,
but also into the South China Sea.201 According to Sam Bateman,
“both India and China have claims to being Southeast Asian coun-
tries in their own right.”202 The Chinese military is aware of India’s
eastward ambitions and is concerned about “Japan’s going south-
ward [into the Indian Ocean] and India’s advancing eastward . . .
intersect[ing] in the South China, forming dual arcs” directed at
China.203
While India’s engagement with the region may seem relatively
new, it hearkens to the days of the “cosmopolitan Indian Ocean of
time and memory,” as discussed in Chapter 3.204 In fact, Southeast
Asia’s orientation toward Northeast Asia only and the relative ne-
glect of the Indian Ocean is a recent and short-lived phenomenon
in the longer sweep of history. The region is gradually assuming its
pivotal role at the nexus of India and China, and is actively con-
necting the Indian Ocean with the South China Sea.

Conclusion
In sum, the rise of China and the Sino-American rivalry do not
portend a hegemonic, Thucydidean power transition. At the same
time, great power rivalry and the increasingly “open” dimension of
the regional order also make ASEAN-centrality suspect (except
rhetorically). Crucially, local initiative is central to regional order
making in the Indo-Pacific. As the United States and China com-
pete for relative position and maritime access, Southeast Asia is co-
engaging both the major powers while rejecting hegemony. Along
with the ASEAN-led institutions and the regional norms embodied
in the ASEAN Way, Southeast Asian states are beginning to pro-
vide regional public goods for the safe transit of trade. They are
doing so both individually and collectively, partnering with each
other and with all the consequential players in the region. South-
east Asia’s active participation—along with others such as India,
Japan, and Australia, in addition to the United States and China—
in the making of the regional order has given it added depth and
resilience as it has become “thick” with the participation of multiple
actors. The passing of American dominance is not producing disor-
der or instability. In fact, a nonhegemonic order is in the making in
138 The Rise of the Indo-Pacific

the Indo-Pacific even in the absence of a grand design, although

the process is being actively influenced by ASEAN’s normative
framework. As Southeast Asia actively assumes its pivotal position
between China and India, an open, decentered, and multiplex Indo-
Pacific is in the making with echoes of the classical Indian Ocean,
where a nonhegemonic order prevailed despite power asymmetries
among the various players. A hegemonic navy exercising sea control
is not in the offing in the Indo-Pacific.
 Conclusion
The Past as Prelude: An Emerging
Indo-Pacific Multiplex

W
e have undertaken large-scale, cross-cultural,
and trans-epochal comparisons between the Roman
Mediterranean (~sixth century b.c.e.–third century
c.e.) and the classical Indian Ocean (first–fifteenth
centuries c.e.) in this book. Our analysis has implications for contem-
porary debates on the role of power and ideas in the making of world
orders.1 These debates often revolve around three key issues: (1) he-
gemony and power; (2) the power of ideas; and (3) the provision of
public goods in the different international orders. In each of these
areas, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean/Southeast Asian sys-
tems offer contrasting pictures. Simply put, the classical Indian
Ocean provides a different paradigm of international order. The In-
dian Ocean/Southeast Asian system suggests a nonhegemonic, decen-
tered, and ideationally driven pattern of interactions, whereas in the
Mediterranean it was the materially powerful actors that played the
leading role. Unlike the classical Indian Ocean, a coercive hegemonic
order emerged in the Mediterranean, where even the ideational dy-
namics were dictated by the materially powerful actors.
We discuss these issues and their implications for the emerging
world order in this concluding chapter, which is divided into two

139
140 Conclusion

sections. First, we systematically compare the Roman Mediterra-

nean and the Classical Indian Ocean around the three key themes
mentioned above. Such a comparison broadens our understanding
of power and agency in international relations theory. It calls for
abandoning Eurocentrism and allowing diversity and pluralism in
theory, thereby making a contribution to Global IR. Consequently,
we pay particular attention to the classical Indian Ocean here, for
this system is new to the international relations scholarship. This is
also important for our findings related to nonhegemonic orders and
may be more applicable to the emerging order in the contemporary
Indo-Pacific. As we show in the second section, contemporary be-
liefs related to a hegemonic contest between the United States and
China in the Indo-Pacific are ultimately based on universalizations
that emerge from the Roman Mediterranean. By contrast, we argue
that the contextualized generalizations that emerge from the classi-
cal Indian Ocean allow for other possibilities.
Before proceeding, we wish to emphasize that “[c]omparison
itself is not synonymous with reification.”2 We are not arguing that
there is something innate in the Mediterranean that makes West-
ern orders materially and coercively driven while Asian orders are
somehow intrinsically peaceful. Our argument is that IR theory as
we understand it today universalizes from the historical experi-
ences of the classical Mediterranean. However, the classical Medi-
terranean was connected through different processes than the
classical Indian Ocean. Whereas war and coercion played a crucial
role in generating the hegemonic Rome-centric order in the Medi-
terranean, trade and cultural integration were far more important
in maritime Asia. In this way, we offer the international system-
level analogue to the arguments on state formation by Jack Gold-
stone and John Haldon, who observe:

In the Western tradition . . . ideological integration has

been seen, until recently, at least, as a secondary aspect of
state formation, a reflection, perhaps, of the dominance
of military institutions and coercion in the political history
of the western Eurasian world. . . . [However, the] persis-
tence of ideological integration can allow states to survive
even with considerable administrative decentralization.3
 Conclusion 141

While Roman hegemonic power held the Mediterranean to-

gether, the decentralized classical Indian Ocean remained con-
nected through cultural and commercial interactions. This does
not mean that war was absent from the classical Indian Ocean, as
we have shown in Chapter 3. Nevertheless, the patterns set in mo-
tion by the politico-military, politico-economic, and ideational in-
teractions discussed in earlier chapters generated very different
types of orders in these two systems. Therefore, the generalizations
that emerge from the classical Indian Ocean—that orders can be
nonhegemonic and decentered—are just as valid as those that have
emerged from the Roman Mediterranean and have dominated in-
ternational relations theoretical scholarship with their emphasis on
coercion and hegemony. It is the context of these generalizations
that gives them their full meaning and analytical weight.
Therefore, macrohistorical comparisons are crucial, and even
Fernand Braudel noted that the “comparative history of the world”
is “the only scale on which our problems can be solved or at any
rate correctly posed.”4 Without engaging in comparative macrohis-
torical exercises of understudied international systems like the clas-
sical Indian Ocean undertaken here, we risk remaining stuck in
Eurocentric modes of thinking while ignoring large-scale decen-
tered patterns through which humans may have organized their in-
ternational systems and societies for long stretches of time (and
may do so yet again, albeit with suitable variation to account for
the changed context). Since a decentered global order may indeed
be the future of our international system,5 this emphasis on mari-
time Asia is apt, and we argue that the classical Indian Ocean
represents the paradigmatic case of such a nonhegemonic and de-
centered order. After all, that system thrived for centuries without
a system-wide hegemon. By contrast, the better-known Roman
Mediterranean has generally been approached as the paradigmatic
case of a hegemonic (core–periphery) international order.
Such large-scale historical comparisons advance knowledge by
making three types of contributions. First, they produce context-specific
generalizations, and consequently advance IR theory. Our comparison
of the classical Mediterranean and the classical eastern Indian Ocean
tells us that maritime trading orders do not need hegemonic navies to
manage the system. Commercial and cultural integration can hold such
142 Conclusion

systems together depending upon the patterns of interpolity interac-

tions. Consequently, the public goods of trade and security can emerge
from the decentralized practices of multiple actors, large and small,
through shared management of the system. Second, and relatedly, these
findings can also help us understand real-world transformations—such
as those underway in the contemporary Indo-Pacific—in a new light
instead of remaining stuck in old ways of thinking.
Before turning to these features in the following two sections
of this chapter, it should be noted that the third and final contribu-
tion of such comparisons is to force us to rethink international his-
tory. Consequently, IR theorization can also contribute to newer
understandings of the past instead of simply using history to de-
velop theory. Our comparative exercise makes three such contribu-
tions to our understanding of the past. First, as we have shown, it is
important to approach Southeast Asia as an “open” region. South-
east Asia was deeply interconnected with the eastern Indian Ocean
as well as the South China Sea. Consequently, we cannot approach
historical Southeast Asia as a closed region by focusing only on
intra–Southeast Asian dynamics, or by treating it as a part of a
larger East Asian space by neglecting its Indian Ocean orientation.
Second, and relatedly, this perspective enables us to see the so-
called Chinese tributary system as embedded within a larger, de-
centered maritime Asian world, instead of making essentialized
claims about China’s timeless centrality.
Third, and finally, our macrohistorical analysis also allows us to
challenge the dominant historical narratives of the hegemonic
order theories, whether liberal or otherwise, because our account
highlights the coercion and violence entailed in those processes
that have otherwise been glossed over in mainstream interpreta-
tions. As noted in the Introduction, the liberal hegemony argu-
ment of G. John Ikenberry (and his collaborators) ignores the
violence of British imperialism after emphasizing “willing” collabo-
ration. However, it is also surprising that even realist accounts of
hegemonic stability like that of Robert Gilpin refer to Pax Britan-
nica as “generally liberal” instead of coercive and imperial, even
as Gilpin acknowledged in a footnote that “[t]he possession of
India was a critical factor in England’s global political and eco-
nomic position.”6
 Conclusion 143

This elision of violence, coercion, and warfare in the hege-

monic Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, and Pax Americana is at least
partially an outcome of the relative neglect of maritime trading sys-
tems in IR theorization. However, by “sink[ing] a huge anchor in
[historical] details” in our comparative and extrapolative chapters
that explicitly focus on maritime worlds, we challenge the tradi-
tional hegemonic accounts while simultaneously showing other—
nonhegemonic—possibilities.7 Consequently, we argue for more
engagement with (Asian) history for IR theorization, and agree
with Evelyn Goh that “the assertion that there is no need for new
theories or approaches because the existing ones explain the world
quite well is simply wrong.”8 Our theorization has important impli-
cations for the debates around power and ideas in the making and
shaping of international orders.

Power and Ideas in the Roman Mediterranean

and the Classical Indian Ocean
Hegemony and Power
Roman hegemony in the Mediterranean represented Rome’s “au-
thoritative power.”9 After all, the Romans understood the exercise
of their power as a relationship of command and obedience that
was backed by military coercion.10 Hegemonic ordering emerged
“structurally” through a top-down process in the Mediterranean,
in which the identities and positions of the “center” and the “prov-
inces” were established that enabled the flow of economic re-
sources from the periphery to the core.11 Roman hegemony was
not created to constrain the hegemon through a legitimized set of
rules.12 This hegemonic power purposively tried to coopt the pro-
vincial elite through Hellenization/Romanization, and allowed
them to partake in the material and social benefits of this trading
system.13 While the Mediterranean may have eventually enjoyed an
imperial peace for two centuries after 31 b.c.e., this peace emerged
out of system-wide conquest and was maintained under the watch-
ful eye of the permanent Roman navy.
In contrast to Rome’s structural hegemony, China’s loose primacy
in the eastern Indian Ocean was not established through military
144 Conclusion

means, nor was it simply emergent due to China’s much larger econ-
omy. This maritime system was forged from the combination of the
“productive power”14 of several actors with different social and mate-
rial capacities that nevertheless allowed them to generate collective
action through the interaction of their decentralized choices. Unlike
the Roman Mediterranean, where the structural identities of the cen-
ter and the periphery emerged out of coercive interactions, the east-
ern Indian Ocean was characterized by the relationships between
“pre-constituted social actors,”15 both Sinic and Indic. Therefore,
Chinese primacy was not imposed top-down. Instead, it was both
top-down and bottom-up, as China and the Southeast Asian polities
sought to manage the material power asymmetry between them to
meet their different material and social needs.
The “mode of power” constitutes the material and ideational
relations “that are generative of both actors and the way in which
power is exercised.”16 Unlike Rome, where coercion played an im-
portant role in power relations, attraction played a key role in the
eastern Indian Ocean. The ideology of Sinocentrism as well as the
ideas that underpinned the mandala polities emphasized attracting
and wooing subordinates while downplaying coercion.17 However,
Southeast Asian polities were not attracted to China due to Sinic
ideas of “relational affection and obligation.”18 The cognitive mode
underpinning the mandala ideas was Indic (not Sinic). Since man-
dala polities have both superordinate and subordinate actors, as ex-
plained in Chapter 3, Southeast Asian actors emphasized “power
sharing” to manage their social and material interactions.19
Consequently, the social distance between the Indianized and
Sinicized worlds could be bridged through the ritual practices of the
tributary system. In other words, Southeast Asia was not bandwag-
oning with China for material advantages, and their different ide-
ational worlds did not make social interactions incommensurable.
The social praxis of their different ideational systems made coexis-
tence despite cultural diversity possible.20 Not surprisingly, Roman
hegemony disappeared with the waning of Roman power. By con-
trast, China’s loose primacy in the diverse eastern Indian Ocean
world was durable and survived for centuries even in the absence of
a system-wide hegemonic navy, despite the rise and fall of several
Chinese dynasties and multitudes of Southeast Asian polities.
 Conclusion 145

Chinese primacy in Southeast Asia had another important char-

acteristic. China “did not seek to control the foreign policies of the
tributary states other than towards itself.”21 Southeast Asian polities
engaged with polities in India “independent[ly]” of their relations
with the Chinese empires.22 Furthermore, diplomatic relations be-
tween Indian and Southeast Asian polities did not represent a rela-
tionship of paramountcy and subordination given the convergent
development of polities on both sides of the Bay of Bengal, even as
the Southeast Asian polities actively localized Indic ideas. Despite
their “acceptance of the Chinese world order, Southeast Asian king-
doms never saw themselves as committed to that order alone. . . .
India was always an alternative pole of [sociological] attraction (and
status). . . . Their foreign relations cultures, while hierarchical,
recognised several potentially competing centres of power, and
made allowance for shifting power relationships.”23 In such a fluid
world, where no power ruled the seas, order emerged out of the dy-
namic interactions of multiple local actors, where Southeast Asian
agency made all the difference. Therefore, maritime Asia, a decen-
tered realm, is representative of an alternative paradigm of order
making and order shaping, in contrast to the hegemonic logic of
the core–periphery Mediterranean system.

The Power of Ideas

Although the Hellenization of the classical Mediterranean was as-
sociated with the processes of colonization, hegemonic socialization,
and imperial appropriation, the Indianization of Southeast Asia was
almost entirely pacific. The most important known examples of In-
dian military campaigns in Southeast Asia were the attacks carried
out by the Cholas in the eleventh century, possibly as a punitive ac-
tion against Sriwijayan interference in Chola trade with Song
China. But this was far from the normal pattern of relations be-
tween Indic and Southeast Asian polities. While the Cholas may
have exercised some form of geopolitical influence around the
northern edges of the Strait of Melaka after these attacks, it is
noteworthy that they occurred centuries after the localization en-
tailed in the spread of Indic culture had begun. Although violence
was certainly not absent in maritime Asia, it was far from being the
146 Conclusion

primary vehicle for the spread of Indian culture. (It is noteworthy

that the list of history’s 100 deadliest events compiled by National
Geographic does not feature any wars across the Indian Ocean in
the periods under consideration here, but does include wars in
the classical Mediterranean such as the First and Second Punic
Wars, as well as the Ming conquest and occupation of northern
Vietnam.)24
A second major difference between Hellenization and Indian-
ization has to do with local initiative and agency. While local
agency has been emphasized in the process of the Hellenization of
the Mediterranean in the archaic age, it appears to have been
greater in the case of Indianization. For example, the local popula-
tion of Sicily did not call upon Greek culture to legitimize Greek
rule. In fact, the Sikels faced the threat of extinction from the
Greeks. By contrast, the Southeast Asians deliberately borrowed
Indic ideas after having been familiar with them for centuries.
While the Khmers Indianized while remaining Khmer, as dis-
cussed in Chapter 3, the Hellenization of Sicily left very little
trace of the preexisting culture and identity of the local population.
In the words of a narrative found in the exhibits of the Syracuse
Museum:

From the 7th century onwards, the indigenous cultures are

to be transformed by the contact with the Greeks, and the
process of assimilation and acculturation will go on until
the absorption of Greek culture by the natives, so that from
5th century B.C. differences will be only economic rather
than cultural.25

This was in marked contrast to the spread of Indian culture in

Southeast Asia. As we have seen, not only did the elements of the
preexisting local culture remain fairly visible, but the Southeast
Asians also modified or localized the foreign elements in accor-
dance with indigenous cultures and practices. Notwithstanding the
fact that the design of Southeast Asian Hindu temples is based on
the sacred Mount Meru and is undergirded by Indic conceptions
of state and kingship, one finds, as many commentators have noted,
that there is no Angkor Wat, Bayon, or Borobudur in India.
 Conclusion 147

Finally, in both the Roman Mediterranean and Southeast Asia,

the more powerful political actors, Rome and China, did not turn
out to wield the most powerful ideational influence. After all, Ro-
manization was informed by Hellenization, and Rome appropriated
the local ideas of the subjugated Greek people to assert and maintain
its imperial power. By contrast, in Southeast Asia it was the ideas of
power that served local political, economic, and cultural needs, which
were localized in the absence of imperialism. These ideas were based
upon Indic politico-cultural models that were perceived as universal.
Outside of northern Vietnam, where Sinicization was based on hege-
monic socialization and imperialism, it was Indic ideas that prevailed.
Additionally, northern Vietnam Indianized to some degree even in
the absence of the hegemony of subcontinental polities.
Although the “exchanges across the Bay of Bengal were made
on the basis of equality,” the Chinese “always demanded that the
‘southern barbarians’ acknowledge Chinese suzerainty by the regu-
lar sending of tribute.”26 While the Vietnamese transformed
through hegemonic socialization, they cleverly used Sinic ideas in the
long run “to defend” their own “independent status in the face of
Chinese imperial pretensions.”27 By contrast, Pollock has pointed
out that the same cannot be said “in the case of the Khmer’s use of
Sanskrit,” which spread in the absence of subcontinental hege-
mony/imperialism.28 However, it would be erroneous to conclude
that the rest of Southeast Asia turned toward Indian culture to es-
cape from China’s strategic domination.
Monica Smith has argued that the adoption of the Chinese
model would have “implied or invited Chinese control,” and there-
fore the Southeast Asians looked toward India, as “Indian political
entities were too weak for physical expansion.”29 However, such an
instrumentalist reading of the spread of Indic ideas in Southeast
Asia is not tenable, and certainly not beyond the examples of Linyi
and Funan in the late third century that Smith used. As late as the
tenth century, there were large Southeast Asian polities like Pagan
on the mainland of which the Chinese “knew nothing.”30 Further-
more, as argued in Chapter 3, prior to the conquest of Yunnan by
the Yuan, and in the absence of a viable navy until the Song, most
of continental Southeast Asia and almost all of maritime Southeast
Asia was beyond the strategic reach of the Chinese empires.
148 Conclusion

In fact, the main difference between Indianization and Sinici-

zation appears to be ideational. As Yuri Pines has pointed out, the

alternative to submission—and the only act that meant real

independence [in the Sinic world]—would be to proclaim
oneself as an emperor, a new “Son of Heaven,” second to
none. This, however, implied that a local leader sought the
unification of All-under-Heaven under his aegis, which
meant that he could neither coexist with other self-pro-
claimed emperors nor tolerate autonomous kingdoms, at
least in the long-term.31

Not only was state formation in the Sinic world “accomplished

using Chinese forms and titles,” it was also paradoxically “depen-
dent on formal recognition from the Chinese empire.”32 By con-
trast, state formation in the Indianized world of Southeast Asia did
not depend upon formal recognition from any subcontinental pol-
ity. All that an ambitious ruler had to do was to replicate the ideal
Indic polity in his realm and attract subordinates of his own. The
creation of these idealized realms entailed self-legitimizing pro-
cesses, and allowed all such kings to claim universal titles—like the
cakravartin ruler—for themselves even as the actual extent of their
mandala polities remained limited in practice. As explained above,
coexistence and mutually beneficial commercial interactions be-
tween the self-proclaimed Chinese Son of Heaven and the univer-
sal cakravartin rulers of the mandala polities were nevertheless
possible despite their different ideational underpinnings.

The Provision of Public Goods in the Two World Orders

In the Mediterranean, it was Rome, the hegemonic power, which
supplied the public goods to make the trading system run. These
public goods included protection (involving the implicit threat of
violence), the suppression of piracy, and sea control exercised by the
hegemonic Roman navy to keep the sea routes open. This gener-
ated a core–periphery economic system in the Mediterranean that
ensured the flow of material resources (both revenue and human
resources/slaves) into the Roman/Italian center. In other words,
 Conclusion 149

the Roman hegemon established a “tributary” system that enriched

Rome. Although a general peace or Pax Romana did exist in the
Mediterranean, it emerged only after Rome’s Mediterranean-wide
imperial conquest. Even as the tribute from the subordinate poli-
ties then transformed into formal taxation from the provinces, it
continued to flow from the Mediterranean periphery into the
Roman center. Rome and Italy remained exempt from land taxes
for centuries.
By contrast, maritime Asia was configured differently. First,
there was no Pax Sinica in the classical eastern Indian Ocean, even
though the various (large) Chinese empires were the most power-
ful political actors of that system. China’s promotion of security
and the management of interpolity conflict in the region were oc-
casional and selective. For example, conflict between China’s tribu-
taries like Champa and Dai Viet, or between those in the Java Sea
and the Strait of Malacca, was not uncommon despite occasional
Chinese attempts to mediate between them.
This is especially true for the period prior to the twelfth cen-
tury, when China did not have a navy that sailed beyond northern
Vietnam.33 Later, under the Yuan and the early Ming, it was the
Chinese empires that were the sources of large-scale regional war-
fare. Similarly, China’s suppression of piracy was also irregular and
episodic, even under the Ming. As discussed in Chapter 3, China
tried to tackle piracy through the practices of the tributary system—
by refusing to accept tribute from piratical subordinates—instead of
systemically eradicating maritime piracy.34 In other words, Chinese
power was not associated with regional peace in maritime Asia,
where conflict remained endemic.
Second, there was no hegemonic Chinese navy exercising sea
control in maritime Asia. The public good of the security of the sea
lanes emerged from the accretion of local and decentralized initia-
tives: the Southeast Asian mandala polities only sought to control
their local waters, while the Chinese empires resorted to political
manipulation via the tributary system (but only at the Chinese end
of the system). In other words, unlike the Roman Mediterranean,
where the Roman hegemon ensured sea control via hegemonic (or
great power) management, the public good of the security of the
sea lanes in maritime Asia emerged from shared management of the
150 Conclusion

trading system. Even as the polities of maritime Asia competed vig-

orously for trade, the eastern Indian Ocean lacked a hegemonic
naval power that dominated entire trade routes, as happened in the
Mediterranean. Importantly, the local agency of the Southeast
Asians played a crucial role in the creation and maintenance of this
system.
This made maritime Asia into a truly decentered realm. It was
the Southeast Asians, especially those from the Austronesian
groups, who pioneered the sea routes to China and India, and con-
tinued to play the key role in connecting that system. Furthermore,
they did so on ships built with local techniques and sailed using
local navigational ideas. While the Indians certainly joined the
Southeast Asians on these voyages from an early date, the Chinese
role was initially passive for several centuries. Later, when active
Chinese participation started under the Song, they continued to re-
main just one among several actors sailing these waters. After
China started manufacturing oceangoing vessels under the Song,
the Chinese built upon the shipping techniques of the Southeast
Asians.
These “hybrid” ships then continued to coexist with the “indig-
enous traditions” of both China and Southeast Asia.35 As spectacu-
lar as the Yuan and Ming fleets were, they simply sailed across
routes that had been used by the Southeast Asians (and others) for
centuries. According to Hedley Bull, “sea power” is also determined
by the “merchant marine” and by the polity’s “maritime outlook
and tradition,” and does not depend upon naval (military) power
alone.36 Sea power remained dispersed in this decentered world.
Maritime trade in Asian waters was not dominated by China or the
ethnic Chinese, and it remained in the hands of the region’s plural-
istic trading communities.
Nevertheless, there was a loose form of Chinese primacy in
maritime Asia displayed in the practices of the so-called tributary
system. However, there were important differences with the
Roman Mediterranean. While tribute in the Roman world con-
sisted of revenue and resources that flowed into the Roman center
at the expense of the periphery, tribute in maritime Asia simply
meant gifts, as explained in Chapter 3. Although Roman tribute
consisted of taxes and rent, “tribute transactions” in maritime Asia
 Conclusion 151

represented a relationship of “selling and purchasing” in the guise

of “tribute goods and ‘gifts.’ . . . In fact, it is quite legitimate to view
tribute exchange [in maritime Asia] as a commercial transaction.”37
Not surprisingly, Rome became rich through its Mediterranean
tribute. However, China had to pay large sums of money for mari-
time Asian products. As explained earlier, some Chinese empires
even became “poorer” as a consequence. In other words, in
contrast to the Roman tributary system that generated a core–
periphery order by enriching Rome, maritime Asia was a decen-
tered realm, and the tributary system was just one part of this
larger decentered world where the economic benefits were more
evenly distributed.
Therefore, even as the Southeast Asian polities accepted a form
of asymmetry in their relations with China through the rituals of
the tributary system, they were hardly the peripheries of a Chinese
center. After all, tribute in Southeast Asia was understood very dif-
ferently from that at the Chinese end of this system. While China
accepted tribute as gifts that confirmed its civilizational superiority,
Southeast Asian rulers thought of it as “the polite exchange of gifts
as a form of formality that went with mutually beneficial trade” and
believed that the rituals of this system in China “established status
hierarchy, not vassalage.”38 The cakravartin rulers of the polities like
the Angkor mandala, with their large capital city (which was per-
haps the largest pre-industrial city in the world) and monumental
temple architecture, were hardly China’s civilizational inferiors. In
fact, there were times when the Chinese themselves went to South-
east Asian centers for cultural attainment. For example, the Chinese
Buddhist monk Yijing went to study Sanskrit in Sriwijaya in the
seventh century after sailing there on Sriwijayan ships.39
Just like the fluid and dynamic hierarchy among the rulers of
the Southeast Asian mandalas (both within these mandalas and be-
tween them), the relationship between the Southeast Asian manda-
las and China was also “impermanent.”40 Therefore, Chinese
hierarchy was accepted “without discredit,” and it had to be con-
stantly created and recreated through the rituals of the tributary
system.41 After all, they were self-proclaimed cakravartin rulers in
dialogue with the self-proclaimed Son of Heaven. The shared man-
agement of the practices of this world are perhaps best understood
152 Conclusion

through the example of the Song emperor Taizu accepting the

tribute of a rhinoceros horn “with a pattern resembling a dragon
and the Chinese character for ‘Song’ ” from Sriwijaya “as evidence
that he had received the mandate of heaven.”42 A gift from this cul-
tural center with long-distance navigation technologies and skills
that “became a prominent symbol of the Song dynasty’s legiti-
macy” hardly made Sriwijaya an inferior, except in the official rhet-
oric of the Sinocentric elite.43
Chinese primacy, to the degree that it existed, was therefore
loose and fluid. Outside of Sinic Dai Viet, Chinese investiture was
not the pathway to political legitimacy in the Indianized world of
the Southeast Asia. In this mandala realm, it was the creation of an
idealized polity of Sanskrit political texts (and monumental temple
architecture and Indic names) that played such a role. It is note-
worthy that Southeast Asian court chronicles “say next to nothing
about China . . . because to have done so would neither have en-
hanced the king’s glory, nor reinforced the Southeast Asian
(Hindu/Buddhist) worldview.”44 Unlike the Roman emperor, who
ruled Egypt as a pharaoh, the Chinese emperor did not preside
over the Southeast Asian mandala polities as a Buddhist cakravartin.
China’s loose primacy was, then, a dynamic attribute of this system,
and Southeast Asian agency played an active role in producing it,
both materially and ideationally. Maritime Asia was held together
by these decentralized and diverse cultural and trading practices
even in the absence of a hegemonic navy exercising sea control.

A Decentered or Multiplex Order in

the Emerging Indo-Pacific
This book has provided a comparative study of the Mediterranean
and Indian Ocean, with lessons for the contemporary Indo-Pacific
region, which subsumes the historic Indian Ocean region. Hence
our final section offers some conclusions concerning the shape of
the emerging Indo-Pacific international order, which we character-
ize as a multiplex international order, as opposed to a hegemonic
or multipolar one.
We start by recapping some of the key theoretical arguments and
backdrop of our book. Since the international relations theoretical
 Conclusion 153

scholarship has largely emerged from the universalization of Western

historical experiences, analogies are often drawn from the Roman
Mediterranean, or generalizations that emerge thereof are universal-
ized, while nonhegemonic and decentered historical orders of the type
that existed in Asia are ignored. For example, Gilpin drew an analogue
with the Roman Empire and argued that “Pax Britannica and Pax
Americana, like the Pax Romana, ensured an international system of
relative peace and security.”45 This Roman analogy was also invoked
by Paul Kennedy, for whom Britain “reproduce[d] afloat something
like the political and economic dominance of the Roman Empire” as
“seaborne trade” was “dominated by [Roman/British] naval power.”46
Consequently, these scholars have interpreted the history of the post-
1498 Indian Ocean as the “the Vasco da Gama era” or a “succession”
of European naval hegemonies, as explained in Chapter 4.
Given this reliance on Mediterranean history, international re-
lations scholarship sees naval hegemony and sea control as neces-
sary for the making and shaping of maritime trading systems. For
Kennedy, “[a]s soon as man had recognized the suitability of the
sea as a medium through which to dispatch troops or to exchange
wares, he turned his attention to constructing a weapon which
would enable him to achieve and retain command of the sea—the
ship of war.”47 Therefore, he argued that “the need to secure com-
mand of the maritime trade-routes” is one of the “central axioms of
the doctrine of sea power.”48 According to Gilpin’s notion of hege-
monic stability, “British sea command” provided the framework for
the economic order in the nineteenth century, and the United
States did so in the twentieth century as the “successive” hege-
monic power.49 Joseph Nye’s liberal hegemonic argument also
shares this view of successive British and American hegemonies.
Nye has argued that “the United States, like the United Kingdom
in the nineteenth century, has an interest in keeping international
commons, such as the oceans, open to all.”50 According to a recent
Council on Foreign Relations “backgrounder,” the U.S. Navy “has
a command of the sea” analogous to “the British Navy more than a
century before it,” and it “protects seaborne commerce” and “gen-
erally maintains order at sea.”51 As per this view, an important pub-
lic good provided by these hegemonic powers was their command
of the sea to make the trading system work.
154 Conclusion

Such views are in fact echoed in the works of many scholars.

According to Ken Booth, the difference between “balance of power
systems on land and at sea” is that “the former [have] usually been
based on an equilibrium of power, [while] the latter [have] been
based on preponderance. Over the last century-and-a-half, the
high level of order and freedom at sea was the result of pax Britan-
nica followed by pax Americana,” as they were both “preponderant
naval powers.”52 For Geoffrey Gresh, “Europe dominated much of
East Asia’s maritime space” for “centuries,” and the United States
“has ruled the waves and the international order that came with it”
since the end of the Cold War.53
Geoffrey Till has explicitly noted that the “canon of sea power
thinking and analysis is heavily dominated by Western, rather than
Asian, Arabic, African, or South American thought.”54 Further-
more, “the great masters of Western thought, Alfred Thayer
Mahan and Sir Julian Corbett,” were especially concerned with
“the ways in which sea control might be secured, maintained, and
exploited” despite their many differences.55 Mahanian thought,
with its emphasis on the “control” of “mercantile trade and routes,”
is particularly evident in Kennedy’s work and in his emphasis on
British “naval mastery.”56 Mahan’s thinking also influenced Ameri-
can thought at the beginning of the twentieth century, as noted in
Chapter 4. According to Andrew Lambert, this “ ‘New’ American
Navy” was “Roman” as it was “serving the interests of a continental
great power.”57 Importantly, this “Mahanian doctrine of sea power”
has “continued to dominate US military thinking” ever since.58
Michael Mastanduno has referred to the navy as a lynchpin of
American hegemony as it “controlled and protected global trade
routes.”59 For Michael Mandelbaum, even as the U.S. Navy pa-
trolled the world’s oceans to keep the sea lanes open “in case of war,”
it provided protection to commercial shipping as “a by-product.”60
In a similar vein, David Shambaugh has argued that the United
States has been providing maritime Asia with the “public good” of
“keeping open the sea lanes and commons throughout,” although
many regional militaries, especially those in Southeast Asia, were
“free riding” on the United States.61
In other words, these ideas and practices drawn from the Med-
iterranean, European, and American milieux are taken as universal
 Conclusion 155

and axiomatic—and applicable to all times and all places. However,

by ignoring the coercion entailed in the Roman path to Mediterra-
nean supremacy, this view also mischaracterizes British and Ameri-
can naval predominance by downplaying the role of colonialism in
the case of the former, and the pathway of the global wars and ri-
valries of the twentieth century for the latter. On that understand-
ing, it does not take much to view American naval power (or
British naval power in the past) as being oriented toward the status
quo, while presenting any challenge to it as revisionism.
In fact, the looming Sino-American Thucydidean hegemonic
transition discussed in Chapter 4 is at least partly informed by this
perspective. According to Graham Allison, China, as a “rising
power,” is endeavoring to hasten America’s “retreat” from maritime
Asia. (For Allison, the United States is the “ruling power.”)62 Others
also argue along these lines. For Bruce Jones, for example, naval
power is “the handmaiden to American hegemony” and “the US
Navy was securing the trade of its allies.”63 Furthermore, China was
in the process of making “a bid for counter-hegemony” and was
“fast becoming a fuller maritime power than the United States.”64
However, as argued in this book, the classical Indian Ocean
trading system centered on modern Southeast Asia was developed
and sustained for centuries in the absence of a hegemonic naval
power. With its “porous” eastern borders that flow “imperceptibly
into the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean,” the Indian Ocean
“has a fundamentally different history” from that of the Mediterra-
nean Sea.65 For the Indian Ocean world—“the world’s first ‘global
economy’ ”—“economic and cultural integration proved more effi-
cient than force.”66 More important, “[n]one of the Indian Ocean
states seriously attempted to control or regulate trade.”67 This is
not to argue that the Indian Ocean trading world was uniquely
peaceful, for naval violence and piracy were certainly features of
the region’s maritime history.68 However, despite evidence for
some naval and maritime conflict, “nothing suggests that they took
place on a similar scale as, for example, in Mediterranean history.”69
Although historians have known that the classical Indian Ocean
was organized differently from the Mediterranean, it has heretofore
been ignored by international relations scholars and foreign policy
analysts. Therefore, instead of the hegemonic succession implied in
156 Conclusion

the power shift from the United States to China, we argue for a
paradigm shift in thinking related to the making and shaping of
maritime trading systems.70 Our analysis of the geopolitical dynam-
ics in the contemporary eastern Indian Ocean makes the case for a
nonhegemonic international order with echoes of the classical east-
ern Indian Ocean, where such a hegemonic navy did not exist. In-
stead of a hegemonic navy exercising sea control, as in the Roman
Mediterranean, we think that shared management that accrues from
the decentralized decisions of several great and lesser powers will
collectively provide the public good of the security of the sea lanes
in the Indo-Pacific. Not only is Southeast Asia not free-riding, but
Southeast Asian agency is also crucial to the making and shaping of
the emerging regional order. Furthermore, the norms embodied in
the ASEAN Way are actively shaping the region’s politico-military
and politico-economic interactions.
In other words, the rise of China as an Indo-Pacific naval power
does not imply a Chinese counterhegemonic bid to displace the
United States. A nonhegemonic international order is in the making
in the eastern Indian Ocean. Not only is Sinocentrism unlikely, but
the United States is also not likely to reestablish the primacy that it
enjoyed after the Cold War. While the rise of China has diminished
American predominance, neither of these powers is likely to emerge
as hegemonic. China and the United States are competing over rel-
ative position in the region and aim to secure their access to the re-
gional maritime commons. In other words, their competition
revolves around naval power projection, not sea control. Moreover,
they are not the only major powers in the region, as others such as
India, Japan, Australia, France, and the United Kingdom also form a
part of the emerging regional dynamics.
Furthermore, our analysis shows that local—Southeast Asian—
initiative matters. Southeast Asian states are individually and col-
lectively coengaging all the major powers while rejecting the
hegemony of any single great power. The Southeast Asian states
are also trying to limit great power rivalry by giving all of them ac-
cess to the region. Southeast Asia’s vision of the Indo-Pacific is not
that of a hermetically sealed region. Instead, it points toward an
“open” order as Southeast Asia resumes its historical role as the
pivot connecting the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
 Conclusion 157

ASEAN-led institutions are engaging all the great powers. Fur-

thermore, Southeast Asian minilaterals like the Malacca Straits Pa-
trol (MSP) and the Sulu-Sulawesi Sea Patrols (SSSP) can provide
regional public goods for the security of the trade routes at select
locales, as argued in Chapter 4. These initiatives are also supported
by the major powers through various mechanisms including capac-
ity building (by the United States, China, and Japan) and coordi-
nated patrols (with India).
In turn, the United States is approaching the Indo-Pacific
through minilaterals like the Quad and AUKUS, while promoting
the rise of India and supporting the engagement of extraregional
(especially European) powers with the region. Meanwhile, China is
building continental bridges to the Indian Ocean and pursuing the
BRI (which points toward a different kind of openness in the form
of China + ASEAN + X). China is also pursuing its own minilater-
als, such as the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation mechanism and the
Mekong River Patrols. As such, China is not trying to dominate
the maritime passageway even as it is seeking access to it and is de-
veloping the capabilities to project its military power.
Therefore, the waning of America’s post–Cold War leadership
does not mean that “turbulent seas [lie] ahead,” as argued by some.71
The “plausible alternative” to the American “role as the functional
equivalent of the world’s government”—a view reminiscent of hege-
monic stability—is not “less” governance and “less . . . pleasant”
consequences, as argued by others.72 Nor should we implicitly be-
lieve that to “wish for a multipolar international order” instead of a
dominant power that provides “the infrastructure of law and order
necessary to keep the trade routes open” is “the height of folly.”73
Generalizations that emerge from the Roman precedent are
not universal, they are context-dependent. Nevertheless, the strong
association between hegemony and order in mainstream accounts
of international relations also distorts prescriptions for American
foreign policy. More specifically, proponents of liberal hegemony
posit a binary choice between America’s full engagement, which is
believed to promote order, and “pull[ing] back” by the United
States, which is viewed as a challenge for “protecting the global
economic commons” such as the sea lanes and commercial shipping
corridors.74 However, this is a false binary because the United
158 Conclusion

States can remain fully engaged without being hegemonic. Based

on the precedent of the classical eastern Indian Ocean, ongoing de-
velopments in the contemporary Indo-Pacific—where the United
States continues to remain engaged but is no longer hegemonic—
show that the accretion of the decentralized choices of multiple
powers can collectively produce the public goods of trade and secu-
rity in maritime systems. In fact, the shared management of the sys-
tem by multiple actors adds depth and resilience to the
international order, as it is no longer dependent upon the material
power of any one single actor. Therefore, contra G. John Ikenberry,
Charles Krauthammer, and Richard Haass, who were quoted in the
opening section of the Introduction, the passing of U.S. hegemony
is not producing a “less desirable” world with insecure sea lanes, or,
worse, disorder.
To restate our main findings, including those with both aca-
demic and policy relevance, a multiplex international order is in
the making in the Indo-Pacific. Our reasons for this assertion,
using the conceptualization of multiplex order in Chapter 1, and
the discussion of the empirical chapters, are as follows.
First, it is far from likely that the Indo-Pacific, of which the In-
dian Ocean is a part, will develop into a hegemonic order. In the
past (after World War II), one could speak of U.S. hegemony in
East Asia, one that was far from complete anyway. But U.S. hege-
mony was far less complete in the Indian Ocean part of the Indo-
Pacific. Today, with U.S. global hegemony seriously eroding, it is
even more difficult to apply that label to U.S. power and influence
over the wider Indo-Pacific region, notwithstanding India’s in-
creasing strategic alignment with the United States. It is even less
likely that China will emerge as a hegemonic power—even as a re-
gional hegemon—in the Indo-Pacific. Some of the barriers to this
have been discussed in Chapter 4, and are otherwise familiar—
among them, the limits of China’s naval power-projection capabil-
ity in the Indian Ocean segment of the Indo-Pacific. In addition,
China’s economic clout, though substantial, is undercut by a push-
back against the BRI from many countries in the region. The eco-
nomic rise of India also offsets Chinese economic dominance to
some degree. And China suffers from limited soft power, or a
“trust deficit,” especially in Southeast Asia.75 The Indo-Pacific is
 Conclusion 159

primarily a maritime arena, and hence control of the sea is critical

to turning it into a maritime hegemony by a single power. But the
United States is likely to be the last naval superpower to command
the seas.76 Sea control, whether by the United States, China, or
India, is not in the offing in the Indo-Pacific.
Second, we argue that multipolarity does not adequately describe
the international order of the Indo-Pacific. As noted in Chapter 1,
multipolarity is about the distribution of material power, with little
recognition of the role of other actors, including regional and middle
powers, or institutions, which are subsumed under the big power
poles. But in reality, some regional powers and regional groupings
play a significant role in shaping an international order—providing
predictability and stability, and sometimes economic well-being
through regional integration. Multipolarity pays scant attention to
ideas, norms, and nonstrategic interaction capacity, which were quite
important in the Indian Ocean international order in the past and
will remain so into the future. In other words, we hold that while the
distribution of material power in the Indo-Pacific may be shaped by
multiple great powers, including the United States, China, India, and
to a lesser degree the EU, Russia, and Japan, it is a far cry from a
classic multipolar system.
Middle powers such as Australia, and regional powers such as In-
donesia and Vietnam, play a significant role in shaping Indo-Pacific
international order, and they are not, especially the regional powers,
beholden to U.S. or Chinese power and purpose. For example, Indo-
nesia has steadfastly refused to take sides in the U.S.-China competi-
tion. ASEAN as a group also remains reluctant to choose between
the United States and China in shaping its security and economic di-
rection. Further into the Gulf region, Saudi Arabia, a country with
much financial clout in the Indo-Pacific, is signaling a shift away
from its close alignment with the United States, while in the south-
ern tip of the African segment of the Indo-Pacific, South Africa is
turning against the United States. Yet neither of them is embracing a
Chinese hegemonic sphere. Similarly, Iran is an adversary of the
United States without being a Chinese ally.
In other words, while multiple great powers are present in the
region, they are promoting overlapping and layered forms of gover-
nance even as they may individually be pursuing their own
160 Conclusion

self-interest. In the Indo-Pacific, great power dominance in general is

substantially tempered by institutions like the EAS, ARF, and
ADMM-Plus, and initiatives that exist at the subregional level in
maritime Southeast Asia (such as the MSP and the SSSP, as discussed
in Chapter 4). While some forms of cooperation involve the great
powers (the China-led BRI and Lancang-Mekong Cooperation
mechanism, or the U.S.-led Quad), they are hardly harbingers of re-
gional hegemonism. As noted above, the important role of larger
groupings like the ARF and EAS, which include not only most na-
tions of the Asian region but also all the great powers of the world at
the present time (the EU is part of the ARF but not the EAS), adds to
the cross-cutting nature of regional interactions, which prevents the
hegemony of a single power or the collective dominance of a group
of powers (multipolarity). This pattern is further sustained not least
by the principle of “ASEAN-centrality,” which, while eroding some-
what, remains the only acceptable convening formula for Asia-Pacific
and Indo-Pacific regionalism.
One implication of the foregoing analysis is that a key feature
of the emerging Indo-Pacific international order is the central role
of Asian countries, including great powers, rising powers, regional
powers, and their economic and security connections in formative
roles in the making and shaping of the international order. At the
same time, the active agency of the non-great powers is also inte-
gral to this order, as ASEAN is playing a pivotal, constitutive, and
especially normative role in this decentered, nonhegemonic, and
open order in the Indo-Pacific.
Third, as discussed in Chapter 4, patterns of economic interac-
tions and interdependence linkages in the Indo-Pacific remain di-
verse and cross-cutting. Despite attempts at decoupling, trade and
investment ties between China and the United States, and between
China and U.S. allies such as Japan, South Korea, the Philippines,
and Thailand, remain substantial. In fact, China has become the
main bilateral trading partner of the vast majority of Indo-Pacific
nations, including those mentioned above, which look to the United
States for security. This situation is reinforced by the generally in-
clusive or “open” nature of Asia-Pacific regional groupings (keeping
in mind that Asia-Pacific, not Indo-Pacific, remains the most com-
mon organizing framework for regional bodies in the area). The
 Conclusion 161

RCEP economic grouping, which the United States is not a part of,
binds China with major Asian economies except India. The Asia-
Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) grouping, of which both
China and the United States are members, does not include India.
Finally, cultural diversity and ideological pluralism remain the
hallmarks of the Indo-Pacific international order. Unlike Western
Europe or the transatlantic region, there is, and never will be, in the
Indo-Pacific the predominance of a single cultural or civilizational
framework, nor will this doom it to experience a Huntingtonian
“clash of civilizations.” Unlike the predominance of Christianity in
Europe and the transatlantic arena, the religious and civilizational
landscape of the Indo-Pacific has been and will remain shaped by
Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism, as well as Islam and
Christianity, which have made their way into the region in more re-
cent centuries. This makes it impossible for the region to embrace
not only a Western model of domestic or regional governance, but
also Chinese or Indian or Islamic cultural dominance or modes of
governance. Ideologically, too, unlike Western Europe and the
north Atlantic regions, the Indo-Pacific will remain very pluralistic,
with democracies, quasi democracies, authoritarian regimes, mili-
tary dictatorships, and communitarian societies interacting and
mostly coexisting. While such ideological pluralism may seem con-
ducive to disunity or conflict, it has not prevented regional coopera-
tion, including within ASEAN, in a part of the world that is a
veritable mosaic of cultures, religions, and political systems.
All these features of the emerging Indo-Pacific ensure its fit
within a multiplex international order framework, rather than a
hegemonic or even a multipolar one (the latter except in the nar-
row sense of distribution of material power). But this is also not
the vision of the Indo-Pacific as represented in the Quad or the
strategic vision pushed by the United States, which excludes
China. Rather, it is the classical decentered Indian Ocean–style
multiplex order—a nonhegemonic, open, inclusive, and dynamic
order—as distinct from the hegemonic classical Mediterranean,
that is likely to come closer to defining the emerging and future
Indo-Pacific region. Academics and policymakers will be well ad-
vised to take note of this if they want to develop a more viable and
durable Indo-Pacific construct.
This page intentionally left blank
 Acknowledgments

This book has been in the making for some time. Some of the ini-
tial research and conceptualization behind the book was done by
Acharya in Sicily in 2011, and was presented by him in a lecture to
the CdLM Storia e cultura dei paesi mediterranei at the University of
Catania, Sicily, in January 2011. Subsequent versions were pre-
sented in a keynote speech by Acharya to the Asian Political and
International Studies Association (APISA) Congress in Ankara in
October 2012; at the 54th International Studies Association An-
nual Convention in San Francisco in April 2013; and in his ongo-
ing course lectures at American University in Washington, DC. In
2017, Pardesi joined Acharya in the project, leading to an expan-
sion of its scope. He has presented some of the core arguments of
the book, most recently at a LUCIR Seminar at Leiden University
in April 2023; at the GIGA Institute for Asian Studies in Hamburg
in April 2023; in an online webinar organized by the Graduate Re-
search and Development Network on Asian Security (GRADNAS)
in May 2023; and at a Political Science and International Relations
Seminar at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in Au-
gust 2023. Our sincere thanks to all the participants at these events
for their valuable comments and suggestions.
Thanks are also due to the Research Trust of Victoria Univer-
sity of Wellington for two small grants to cover the costs of the
maps of the classical Mediterranean and classical Southeast Asia
(the eastern Indian Ocean), and the index.

163
164 Acknowledgments

We would also like to express our gratitude to Jaya Aninda

Chatterjee, our editor at Yale University Press, for her interest, pa-
tience, and continuous encouragement for this book over the years.
Finally, thanks are due to Harry Haskell, our copyeditor, whose
hard work ensured that we were able to clearly express our ideas.
 Notes

Introduction
1. Gideon Rose, ed., What Was the Liberal Order? The World We May Be Losing
(New York: Foreign Affairs, 2017); “Out of Order? The Future of the Inter-
national System,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 96, no. 1 (January/February 2017); An-
drew Browne, “The End of America’s World Order,” Bloomberg, November
19, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2019-11-19/the-
end-of-america-s-world-order? (accessed 2/22/2024); Alfred McCoy, “The
End of Our World Order Is Imminent,” The Nation, February 28, 2019,
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/end-of-world-order-empire-cli
mate-change/ (accessed 6/16/2021).
2. G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transforma-
tion of the American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2011).
3. Anne-Marie Slaughter, “The Return of Anarchy?,” in “The Next World
Order,” special 70th anniversary issue, Journal of International Affairs
(2017): 11–16; Robert Blackwill and Thomas Wright, The End of World
Order and American Foreign Policy (New York: Council on Foreign Rela-
tions, May 2020), https://www.cfr.org/report/end-world-order-and-ameri
can-foreign-policy (accessed 2/22/2024).
4. Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 32.
5. Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 70,
no. 1 (1990/1991): 27.
6. Richard N. Haass, “The Unraveling: How to Respond to a Disordered
World,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 93, no. 6 (November/December 2014): 70–74,
75–79.
7. Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, Regions and Powers: The Structure of Interna-
tional Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Some
elements of Buzan and Wæver’s theory of “regional security complexes”

165
166 Notes to Pages 5–7

are helpful in conceptualizing nonhegemonic international orders

(NHIOs). Some regional security complexes are nonhegemonic: for ex-
ample, those regional security complexes which are “centered” by an in-
stitution (e.g., EU-Europe), rather than by a great power (East Asia or
North America). A “standard” regional security complex, marked by the
absence of a global level power in them, can be a NHIO, provided it does
not have a regional hegemon (bear in mind that Buzan and Wæver allow
such regional security complexes to have regional hegemons, which is
contrary to the idea of NHIOs). While some such linkages and compari-
sons can be made and are helpful, the concept of NHIOs is an entirely
distinct theoretical construct, and should not be viewed as an adjunct to
the theory of regional security complexes. Its focus is not on how regions
are organized, but on exploring and analyzing patterns of international
relations which have emerged without a hegemon or by taming any sin-
gle or collective hegemony.
8. Theda Skocpol, “Doubly Engaged Social Science: The Promises of
Comparative Historical Analysis,” in James Mahoney and Dietrich Rue-
schemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 409.
9. Skocpol, “Doubly Engaged Social Science,” 411.
10. Wang Gungwu, “The Universal and the Historical: My Faith in History,”
in New Thinking on Peace: Essays on Peace and Human Security, Civiliza-
tional Dialogue, History, Education, Global Citizenship and University of the
21st Century, compiled lectures of Wang Gungwu et al. (Singapore: Sin-
gapore Soka Association, 2006), 23–40, quote on p. 27.
11. Louis Gernet, quoted in Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean in the An-
cient World (London: Penguin, 2001), 258.
12. Iver B. Neumann, “Entry into International Society Reconceptualized: The
Case of Russia,” Review of International Studies, vol. 37, no. 2 (2011): 471.
13. Raymond Cohen and Raymond Westbrook, Amarna Diplomacy: The Be-
ginnings of International Relations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1992), 5.
14. Kurt A. Raaflaub, “Series Editor’s Preface—The Ancient World: Com-
parative Histories,” in Kurt A. Raaflaub, ed., War and Peace in the Ancient
World (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), vii.
15. Wang Gungwu, “The Universal and the Historical: My Faith in History,”
Fourth Daisaku Ikeda Annual Lecture (Singapore: Singapore Soka Asso-
ciation, 2005), 6.
16. Daniel H. Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the
Polis to the Global Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007),
91.
17. Deudney, Bounding Power, 91. Although Deudney stresses republican and
not imperial Rome, he does discuss the Punic Wars, the turning point in
Rome’s rise to imperial hegemony.
 Notes to Pages 8–9 167

18. Neville Morley, The Roman Empire: The Roots of Imperialism (London:
The Pluto Press, 2010), 2.
19. “Rome gave the Mediterranean world its own code of law and left as a
legacy to Western civilization the first law of nations.” See Robert Gilpin,
War & Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1981), 36 and 192.
20. Gilpin classifies the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage as an ex-
ample of a hegemonic war. See Gilpin, War & Change in World Politics,
200. Copeland looks at the Peloponnesian War and the Punic Wars to
review Thucydides’ account and the debate over whether war is caused
by domestic or international factors. See Dale C. Copeland, The Origins
of Major War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 210–13.
Mearsheimer cites the Roman Empire as an example of his thesis that
great powers can achieve regional hegemony, although he does not dis-
cuss this in great detail. He also mentions the Mughal and Qing empires
as regional hegemonies. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 272.
21. Richard Ned Lebow, “Thucydides the Constructivist,” American Political
Science Review, vol 1, no. 3 (2001): 547–60; Richard Ned Lebow, The Cul-
tural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008); and Christian Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State:
Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
22. Deudney, Bounding Power.
23. Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S.
Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Also see J. Rufus
Fears, “The Lessons of the Roman Empire for America Today,” Heritage
Lecture #917, December 19, 2005, https://www.heritage.org/political
-process/report/the-lessons-the-roman-empire-america-today (accessed
2/22/2024). For a study of how the founding American leaders were in-
fluenced by Mediterranean thought, see Carl J. Richard, The Founders and
the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1994).
24. Barry Buzan and Richard Little, “The Idea of ‘International System’: The-
ory Meets History,” International Political Science Review / Revue internatio-
nale de science politique, vol. 15, no. 3 (July 1994): 235. Following Morley, The
Roman Empire, we would argue that these were to some extent constructed
or imagined antecedents, especially during the Renaissance, which reflected
the search for a usable past on which to base the European revival.
25. George Modelski and William R. Thompson, Seapower in Global Politics,
1494–1993 (London: Macmillan, 1988), 4.
26. Benjamin de Carvalho and Halvard Leira, “Introduction: Staring at the
Sea,” in Benjamin de Carvalho and Halvard Leira, eds., The Sea and Inter-
national Relations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 1.
168 Notes to Pages 9–11

27. Modelski and Thompson, Seapower in Global Politics, 6.

28. Carla Norrlof, “The Waning of Pax Americana?,” Great Discussions
(2018): 12–13. Norrlof also mentions two other Pax regimes. She notes
that Pax Ottomana secured caravan routes (or overland routes), while Pax
Mongolica used force to secure “sea lanes and trade routes.” However, as
argued later in this book, there was no Pax Mongolica in the eastern In-
dian Ocean under the Yuan dynasty.
29. Ali Parchami, Hegemonic Peace and Empire: The Pax Romana, Britannica,
and Americana (London: Routledge, 2009), 61.
30. Parchami, Hegemonic Peace and Empire, 154.
31. Joseph Grieco, G. John Ikenberry, and Michael Mastanduno, Introduction
to International Relations: Enduring Questions & Contemporary Perspective
(London: Palgrave, 2015), 176.
32. Grieco, Ikenberry, and Mastanduno, Introduction to International Relations,
364.
33. Grieco, Ikenberry, and Mastanduno, Introduction to International Relations,
177.
34. Andrew Lambert, Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires,
and the Conflict that Made the Modern World (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2018), 317.
35. Kurt A. Raaflaub, “Series Editor’s Preface,” vii.
36. An exception here is the English School. See Adam Watson, The Evolu-
tion of International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis (London:
Routledge, 1992); Barry Buzan and Richard Little, International Systems
in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Also see Stu-
art J. Kaufman, Richard Little, and William C. Wohlforth, eds., The Bal-
ance of Power in World History (New York: Palgrave, 2007); and Cohen and
Westbrook, Amarna Diplomacy.
37. Buzan and Little, “The Idea of ‘International System,’ ” 231.
38. Buzan and Little, International Systems in World History, 3.
39. Michael Cox, Tim Dunne, and Ken Booth, “Empires, Systems and
States: Great Transformations in International Politics,” Review of Inter-
national Studies, vol. 27 (December 2001): 15.
40. Buzan and Little, International Systems in World History, 11. The work of Im-
manuel Wallerstein is of course especially important in exploring the eco-
nomic dimensions of international systems. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The
Modern World System, 4 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
41. This is the least developed element of the revised conception of interna-
tional systems, and hence one of the key contributions of this book.
Kauffman, Little, and Wohlforth do incorporate normative aspects of
balance of power systems, while in the same volume and his other works
David Kang brings out important ideational elements in his study of the
East Asian international system before the Western colonial era. See
Kaufman, Little, and Wohlforth, The Balance of Power in World History.
 Notes to Pages 11–13 169

42. This is consistent with one of constructivism’s central claims. See Alexan-
der Wendt, “Collective Identity Formation and the International State,”
American Political Science Review, vol. 88, no. 2 (June 1994): 384–96. See
also Buzan and Little, International Systems in World History, 12.
43. G. John Ikenberry and Charles A. Kupchan, “Socialization and Hegemonic
Power,” International Organization, vol. 44, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 283–315.
44. Barry Buzan and Richard Little, “The Idea of ‘International System,’ ” 239.
45. New archaeological evidence would put the beginnings of the Southeast
Asian/Indian Ocean system to the 1st–4th centuries c.e. See Amitav
Acharya, Civilizations in Embrace: The Flow of Ideas and the Transformation
of Power (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2012).
46. Persia and Carthage are the other major players in the classical Mediterra-
nean, which featured prominently in the early balance of power dynamics
of the Mediterranean system. But Persia ceased to be a major player after
Alexander’s defeat of Darius, when a key strand of Hellenization occurred
through the establishment of the Hellenistic kingdoms. Subsequently,
Roman expansion obliterated Carthage and the Hellenistic kingdoms. Al-
though Carthage was an expansionist power, especially in Sicily and Spain,
Hannibal’s conquests were in response to Roman expansion. The source of
the Carthaginian civilization was, of course, the Phoenicians from the Le-
vant coast, whose expansion was motivated by commerce rather than con-
quest (hence with some parallels to Indian influence in Southeast Asia).
But the influence of those two powers deserves more recognition than is
found in traditional discussions of Mediterranean civilization and interna-
tional order, although this is beyond the scope of this book.
47. J. M. Roberts and Odd Arne Westad, The Penguin History of the World, 6th
ed. (Penguin: London, 2013), Kindle Loc. 4524.
48. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the
Age of Philip II, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
49. The Mediterranean analogy and its limits have been used to study the In-
dian Ocean, East Asia, and Southeast Asia (and combinations thereof). As
explained in Chapter 3, we focus on Southeast Asia, stretching from the
eastern Indian Ocean into the South China Sea. Notable works influenced
by this Mediterranean analogy include K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civili-
zation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia be-
fore Europe: Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam
to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Heather Suther-
land, “Southeast Asian History and the Mediterranean Analogy,” Journal of
Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 34, no. 1 (2003): 1–20; and Angela Schotten-
hammer, ed., The East Asian Mediterranean: Maritime Crossroads of Culture,
Commerce and Human Migration (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008).
50. Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001), 39–67. Additionally, Steinberg considered
170 Notes to Pages 13–20

Micronesia as a third type of such ocean-space construction, along with

the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean.
51. Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers, “The Uses of Comparative His-
tory in Macrosocial Inquiry,” Comparative Studies in Society and History,
vol. 22, no. 2 (1980): 178.
52. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of
the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8.
53. Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World,
25th Anniversary Edition (New York: Routledge, 2016), 54, 61.
54. Patrick O’Brien, “Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives
for the Restoration of Global History,” Journal of Global History, vol. 1,
no.1 (2006): 5–7.
55. For examples of such extrapolative works, see chapter 7 in Peter J. Kat-
zenstein, A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); and chapter 6 in Amitav Achar-
ya, Whose Ideas Matter? Agency and Power in Asian Regionalism (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2009).
56. Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to
the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Henry
Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2014); Niall Ferguson,
Civilization: The West and the Rest (London: Allen Lane, 2011); and John
M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2004).
57. Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, “Ideas and Foreign Policy: An
Analytic Framework,” in Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds.,
Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993), 9.
58. Stuart J. Kaufman, Richard Little, and William C. Wohlforth, “Conclu-
sion: Theoretical Insights from the Study of World History,” in Kaufman,
Little and Wohlforth, The Balance of Power in World History, 246.
59. Kaufman, Little and Wohlforth, “Conclusion,” 244.
60. Kaufman, Little and Wohlforth, “Conclusion,” 244.

Chapter One. Power, Ideas, and International

Systems/Orders
1. Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008),
242.
2. Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World
Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 46.
3. F. S. Northedge, The International Political System (London: Faber and
Faber, 1976).
4. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, “Introduction,” in Hedley Bull and Adam
Watson, eds., The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1984), 1.
 Notes to Pages 20–23 171

5. Importantly, some scholars “draw no distinction between international

society and system, historically or theoretically,” and “treat international
society as a particular kind of social structural formation, preceded by,
and embedded within, wider networks of global social and political inter-
action.” Christian Reus-Smit and Tim Dunne, “The Globalization of In-
ternational Society,” in Tim Dunne and Christian Reus-Smit, eds., The
Globalization of International Society (New York: Oxford University Press,
2017), 33.
6. Barry Buzan and Richard Little, International Systems in World History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
7. Buzan and Little, International Systems in World History, 12.
8. Buzan and Little, International Systems in World History, 90–96.
9. Buzan and Little, International Systems in World History, 12.
10. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society, 3rd ed. (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
2002), 4.
11. Bull, The Anarchical Society, 16–19.
12. Bull, The Anarchical Society, 19.
13. John K. Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign
Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968). For more recent
work that applies the term world order to major civilizations, see Henry
Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin, 2014); Barry Buzan and Am-
itav Acharya, Reimagining International Relations: World Orders in the
Thought and Practice of Indian, Chinese and Islamic Civilizations (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
14. Andrew Hurrell, On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of In-
ternational Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.
15. Amitav Acharya, The End of American World Order (Cambridge: Polity, 2014).
16. Kissinger, World Order, 2.
17. Amitav Acharya, Constructing Global Order: Agency and Change in World
Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
18. Amitav Acharya, “Global South Reacts to Western Call for Unity Against
Russia,” Responsible Statecraft, 20 March 2022, https://responsiblestate
craft.org/2022/03/29/global-south-reacts-to-western-call-for-unity
-against-russia/ (accessed 2/24/2024).
19. Patrick Morgan, “Regional Security Complexes and Regional Orders”
and David A. Lake and Patrick M. Morgan, “The New Regionalism in
Security Affairs,” in David A. Lake and Patrick M. Morgan, eds., Regional
Orders: Building Security in a New World (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1997), 32 and 3–19.
20. “World Order,” Oxford English Dictionary, September 2023, https://doi.
org/10.1093/OED/8231727668 (accessed 12/11/2023).
21. Mohammed Ayoob, “Regional Security and the Third World,” in Moham-
med Ayoob, ed., Regional Security in the Third World (London: Croom Helm,
1986), 4.
172 Notes to Pages 23–27

22. “World Order,” Macmillan English Dictionary: For Advanced Learners of

American English (Oxford: Macmillan Education, 2005), 1686.
23. For details, see Acharya, Constructing Global Order, 4–5.
24. Karl W. Deutsch and David J. Singer, “Multiple Power Systems and In-
ternational Stability,” World Politics, vol. 16, no. 3 (1964): 390–406.
25. Muthiah Alagappa, “The Study of International Order,” in Muthiah Al-
agappa, ed., Asian Security Order: Instrumental and Normative Features
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 39.
26. Acharya, Constructing Global Order.
27. Buzan and Little, International Systems in World History.
28. “The ancient Greek and modern societies of states exhibit a basic simi-
larity: both have been organized according to the principle of sover-
eignty.” Christian Reus-Smit, “The Constitutional Structure of
International Society and the Nature of Fundamental Institutions,” Inter-
national Organization, vol. 51, no. 4 (Autumn 1997): 570.
29. “Hegemony,” Merriam-Webster.com, https://www.merriam-webster.
com/dictionary/hegemony (accessed 12/9/2023).
30. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, rev. ed. (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 68.
31. Robert W. Cox, Production, Power and World Order: Social Forces in the
Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 7.
32. Robert W. Cox, “Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An
Essay in Method,” Millennium, vol. 12, no. 2 (1983): 162–75.
33. Robert W. Cox, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1996), 136.
34. Robert Cox, “Robert Cox on World Orders, Historical Change, and the
Purpose of Theory in International Relations,” 37, http://www.theory
talks.org/2010/03/theory-talk-37.html (accessed 12/29/2022); Cox, Ap-
proaches to World Order, 85–143.
35. Teresa L. Thompson, “Ideological Hegemony,” in Teresa L. Thompson,
ed., Encyclopedia of Health Communication (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2014),
688–89, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483346427 (accessed 2/22/2024).
36. For discussion of empires—their sources of order and variation—see Mi-
chael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Alexander
Motyl, Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possi-
bilities (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); S. N. Eisenstadt, The
Political Systems of Empires: The Rise and Fall of the Historical Bureaucratic So-
cieties (New York: Free Press, 1969); Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott,
The Disintegration and Reconstruction of Empires (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe,
1966). For a discussion of European empire and reactions to it, see Philip
D. Curtin, The World and the West: The European Challenge and the Overseas
Response in the Age of Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2000); Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, “Retrieving the Imperial: Empire
and International Relations,” Millennium, vol. 31 (2002): 109–27.
 Notes to Pages 27–29 173

37. Doyle, Empires, 40. Watson also made a similar distinction. See Adam
Watson, The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Historical
Analysis (London: Routledge, 1992), 15.
38. Barkawi and Laffey, “Retrieving the Imperial.”
39. Kenneth N. Waltz, “Political Structures,” in Robert O. Keohane, ed., Ne-
orealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 73.
40. Buzan and Little, International Systems in World History, 440.
41. David A. Lake, “Beyond Anarchy: The Importance of Security Institu-
tions,” International Security, vol. 26, no. 1 (Summer 2001): 129–60.
42. Also see Ayşe Zarakol, Hierarchies in World Politics (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2017).
43. David C. Kang, “Hierarchy and Stability in Asian International Rela-
tions,” in G. John Ikenberry and Michael Mastanduno, eds., International
Relations Theory and the Asia-Pacific (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2003), 166–67.
44. “Suzerainty,” Cambridge Dictionary, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/
dictionary/english/suzerainty (accessed 12/9/2023).
45. “Suzerainty is a vaguer concept.” See Watson, The Evolution of Interna-
tional Society, 15.
46. Fairbank, The Chinese World Order. This earlier notion of a Chinese world
order emphasizing Confucian virtues such as the emperor’s impartiality
and benevolence toward tributary states has been challenged by a new
body of work which emphasizes Chinese realpolitik. Alastair Iain John-
ston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese His-
tory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
47. John K. Fairbank, “Introduction,” in Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank,
eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10: Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, part 1
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 30.
48. Manjeet S. Pardesi, “Decentering Hegemony and ‘Open’ Orders: Fif-
teenth-Century Melaka in a World of Orders,” Global Studies Quarterly,
vol. 2, no. 4 (2022).
49. John K. Fairbank, “A Preliminary Framework,” in The Chinese World
Order, 9.
50. Amitav Acharya, “Will Asia’s Past Be Its Future?,” International Security,
vol. 28, no. 3 (Winter 2003/2004): 149–64; Wang Gungwu, “China’s
Overseas World,” in Wang Gungwu, To Act Is to Know: Chinese Dilemmas
(Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2003), 306; Wang Gungwu,
“Early Ming Relations with Southeast Asia,” in Fairbank, The Chinese
World Order, 50.
51. Acharya, “Will Asia’s Past Be Its Future?,” 154. Also see James Millward,
“We Need a New Approach to Teaching Modern Chinese History,”
Medium, October 9, 2020, https://jimmillward.medium.com/we-need-a
-new-approach-to-teaching-modern-chinese-history-we-have-lazily-re
peated-false-d24983bd7ef2 (accessed 2/24/2024).
174 Notes to Pages 29–32

52. Wang, “China’s Overseas World,” 302.

53. Wang, “China’s Overseas World,” 303. Also see Chapter 3.
54. Andrew J. Nathan and Robert S. Ross, The Great Wall and Empty Fortress:
China’s Search for Security (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 21.
55. Barry R. Posen, “Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation
of U.S. Hegemony,” International Security, vol. 28, no. 1 (2003): 5.
56. Christopher Layne, “The Unipolar Illusion Revisited: The Coming End
of the United States’ Unipolar Moment,” International Security, vol. 31,
no. 2 (2006): 12.
57. Joseph S. Nye, “American Hegemony or American Primacy?,” Project
Syndicate, March 9, 2015, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commen
tary/american-hegemony-military-superiority-by-joseph-s—nye-2015
-03 (accessed 2/24/2024).
58. Mark Beeson, “Hegemony,” Oxford Bibliographies, https://www.oxfordbib
liographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199756223/obo-978
0199756223–0101.xml (accessed 12/9/2023).
59. Ian Clark, Hegemony in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 16.
60. A. F. K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Knopf, 1958), 322.
61. Organski, World Politics, 292.
62. Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression: 1929–1939 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973; rev. ed. 1986).
63. But in making this argument—and this is often forgotten—Kindleberger
argued that the condition of a single nation having a globally dominant
economy could only occur under very special (and unlikely) circum-
stances. He presented this option merely as a heuristic and not a condi-
tion that one should expect in empirical reality. Kindleberger’s objective
was to point out the empirical impossibility of hegemonic stability and to
promote the understanding of cooperation needed to build a well-func-
tioning world order. HST is thus the incorrect application of this heuris-
tic to the field of international relations.
64. Isabelle Grunberg, “Exploring the ‘Myth’ of Hegemonic Stability,” Inter-
national Organization, vol. 44, no. 4 (Autumn 1990): 431.
65. Grunberg, “Exploring the ‘Myth’ of Hegemonic Stability,” 432.
66. Robert Gilpin (with Jean Gilpin), The Political Economy of International Re-
lations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Stephen Krasner,
“State Power and the Structure of International Trade,” World Politics,
vol. 28, no. 3 (1976): 317–43. See also Joshua S. Goldstein and Jon C.
Pevehouse, International Relations, Brief Edition, 2012–2013 Update
(Harlow: Pearson, 2014), 56, 80, and 125.
67. Grunberg, “Exploring the ‘Myth’ of Hegemonic Stability,” 432.
68. Grunberg, “Exploring the ‘Myth’ of Hegemonic Stability,” 433. Also see
David P. Calleo, Beyond American Hegemony: The Future of the Western Alli-
ance (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 218 and 220; David P. Calleo and
 Notes to Pages 32–33 175

Benjamin Rowland, America and the World Political Economy: Atlantic Dreams
and National Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 17;
both cited in Grunberg, “Exploring the ‘Myth’ of Hegemonic Stability,”
432.
69. Ruggie asserts that while multilateralism was not a postwar American in-
vention, “[l]ooking more closely at the post-World War II situation . . . it
was less the fact of American hegemony, that accounts for the explosion of
multilateral arrangements than of American hegemony.” John Gerard
Ruggie, “Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution,” in John Ge-
rard Ruggie, ed., Multilateralism Matters: The Theory and Praxis of an Insti-
tutional Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 8.
70. For a critique of the ethnocentric bias of the hegemonic stability theory,
such as Gilpin’s contention that free trade is imposed by a “superior soci-
ety,” see Grunberg, “Exploring the ‘Myth’ of Hegemonic Stability,” 444–48.
The reference is to Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cam-
bridge University Press, 1981), 129.
71. Duncan Snidal, “The Limits of Hegemonic Stability Theory,” Interna-
tional Organization, vol. 39, no. 4 (Autumn 1985): 614.
72. One example of the denial of non-Western agency or contributions to in-
ternational orders would be found in the very idea of “reciprocity” as im-
plied in Bull’s formulation of the lack of “capacity of Asian and African
powers to enter into relationships on a reciprocal basis with European
states.” Absence of such reciprocity is a key rationale for the “standard of
civilisation” thesis, used by European theorists and leaders to justify colo-
nization and exclude and marginalize non-Western societies. The Euro-
pean standard of civilization and the concept of reciprocity are based on
the ability “to provide domestic law and order, administrative integrity,
protection of the rights of foreign citizens, or the fulfilment of contracts,”
and to play the game of balance of power. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson,
“Conclusion,” in Bull and Watson, The Expansion of International Society,
427. This was in reality intended to secure for themselves economic op-
portunities and privileges (everything else, including spreading the gos-
pel, was secondary), which had been gained sometimes voluntarily, but on
many occasions through use of force or coercion. Not only were the ben-
efits to non-Western states in these arrangements unclear, but non-
Western states might have recognized that they would be entering into
one-sided relationships that would heavily favor the Europeans. The de-
mand for reciprocity in this sense could be construed as an excuse for ex-
ploitation. By viewing the expansion of European international society as
a matter of Europeans seeking reciprocity, the early English School pro-
ponents obscured the fact that colonialism was a fundamentally nonrecip-
rocal institution. The Expansion remained ambiguous about the “standard
of civilisation” criteria employed by the Europeans. Bull and Watson ac-
knowledge that standard of civilization reflected European arrogance and
176 Notes to Pages 33–34

was highly self-serving, but still stress the standard as being based on the
realities of international life. Bull and Watson, “Conclusion,” 427.
73. Though providing the clearest and most influential articulation of the
concept, Ikenberry followed other liberal thinkers. On his part, Keohane
mentioned “liberal international arrangements” and “liberal international
political economy,” rather than “liberal international order.” Keohane
was borrowing from Gilpin’s observation about the role played by Britain
and the United States in creating and enforcing “the rules of a liberal in-
ternational economic order.” See Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony:
Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1984), 8, 31, and 54. It was after the Cold War that
the liberal order, strengthened by the defeat of communism and the ad-
vance of democracy and capitalism under internationalist U.S. leadership,
acquired its broadest meaning: encompassing economic interdependence
(free trade), multilateral rules and institutions, democratic political sys-
tems, and values and norms (especially universal human rights).
74. G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transforma-
tion of the American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2011), 224. In this book, Ikenberry uses a variety of expressions to denote
the same: “liberal hegemonic order” (xi, 224), “American-led liberal
world order” (xii), “American-led liberal hegemony” (224), “free world,
the American system, the West, the Atlantic world, Pax Democratica, Pax
Americana, the Philadelphia system” (35). See p. 7 for a brief description
of these descriptions of U.S.-led order.
75. Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, xii, 18, and 224.
76. Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 7.
77. Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, xiii.
78. Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 6.
79. Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 9.
80. In understanding this debate, on which there is a vast literature, it is useful
to separate works of those who focus on the decline of the United States
and the decline of the international order it built, keeping in mind that the
latter does not always refer specifically to the LIO, but also to other refer-
ents, such as unipolarity, or simply to the U.S.-led world order or U.S. he-
gemony. In this book, we use the terms “LIO,” “liberal world order,”
“Liberal Hegemony,” and “U.S.-led liberal hegemonic order” interchange-
ably. Those who argue that U.S. power is declining include Paul Kennedy,
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Vintage, 1989); Fareed
Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Parag
Khanna, The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Global
Competition in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 2009);
National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2008); and Ian Bremmer,
Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World (New York:
 Note to Page 34 177

Penguin, 2012). Those who refute the decline of U.S. power include Mi-
chael Beckley, “China’s Century? Why America’s Edge Will Endure,” In-
ternational Security, vol. 36, no. 3 (Winter 2011/12): 41–78; Michael
Beckley, Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); Stephen G. Brooks and William
C. Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge
of American Primacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008);
Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “Assessing the Balance,”
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, vol. 20, no. 2 (June 2011): 201–19;
Robert J. Lieber, Power and Willpower in the American Future: Why the
United States Is Not Destined to Decline (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012); Robert Kagan, The World America Made (New York: Vintage,
2012); Josef Joffe, The Myth of America’s Decline: Politics, Economics, and a
Half Century of False Prophecies (New York: Liveright, 2014). But the polar-
ity debate does not tell us about changes to order. For writings of those
who argue that the U.S.-led international order is in decline, see Christo-
pher Layne, “This Time It’s Real: The End of Unipolarity and the Pax
Americana,” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 1 (March 2012):
203–13; Barry R. Posen, “From Unipolarity to Multipolarity: Transition in
Sight?,” in G. John Ikenberry, Michael Mastanduno, and William C.
Wohlforth, eds., International Relations Theory and the Consequences of Unipo-
larity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 317–41; and Amitav
Acharya, The End of American World Order (New York: Polity, 2014). Achar-
ya was the first to distinguish between the decline of U.S. power and the
decline specifically of the LIO, arguing that the former may happen
whether the United States itself is declining or not. Now there is a grow-
ing literature on LIO’s crisis and decline, including by those who believe
that the LIO was a “myth” and will not survive. See Naazneen Barma, Ely
Ratner, and Steven Weber, “The Mythical Liberal Order,” National Interest
(March/April 2013): 56–67, https://nationalinterest.org/article/the-mythi
cal-liberal-order-8146 (accessed 2/22/2024); John J. Mearsheimer, “Bound
to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order,” International
Security, vol. 43, no. 4 (Spring 2019): 7–50; John J. Mearsheimer, The Great
Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2018); Charles L. Glaser, “A Flawed Framework: Why the
Liberal International Order Concept Is Misguided,” International Security,
vol. 43, no. 4 (Spring 2019): 51–87; Patrick Porter, “A World Imagined:
Nostalgia and Liberal Order,” Policy Analysis No. 843 (Washington, DC:
CATO Institute, June 5, 2018), https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/
world-imagined-nostalgia-liberal-order (accessed 2/22/2024); Bentley B.
Allan, Srdjan Vucetic, and Ted Hopf, “The Distribution of Identity and the
Future of International Order: China’s Hegemonic Prospects,” Interna-
tional Organization, vol. 72, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 839–69; and Stacie E. God-
dard, “Embedded Revisionism: Networks, Institutions, and Challenges to
178 Notes to Pages 34–37

World Order,” International Organization, vol. 72, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 763–
97. Among the defenders of the LIO’s resilience and ability to survive, see
G. John Ikenberry, “Liberal Internationalism 3.0: America and the Dilem-
mas of Liberal World Order,” Perspectives on Politics, vol. 7, no. 1 (March
2009): 71–87; Joseph S. Nye, “Will the Liberal Order Survive? The His-
tory of an Idea,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 96, no. 1 (January/February 2017): 10–
16; and Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, “Liberal World: The
Resilient Order,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 97, no. 4 (July/August 2018): 16–24.
81. Amitav Acharya, The End of American World Order (Cambridge: Polity,
2014).
82. Acharya, The End of American World Order, 15.
83. Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon, Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling
of the American Global Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
84. Duncan Snidal, “The Limits of Hegemonic Stability Theory,” Interna-
tional Organization, vol. 39, no. 4 (1985): 579–614.
85. Young identified three types of leadership: structural, entrepreneurial, and
intellectual: “The structural leader translates power resources into bargain-
ing leverage in an effort to bring pressure to bear on others to assent to the
terms of proposed constitutional contracts. The entrepreneurial leader
makes use of negotiating skill to frame the issues at stake, devise mutually
acceptable formulas, and broker the interests of key players in building
support for these formulas. The intellectual leader, by contrast, relies on
the power of ideas to shape the thinking of the principles in processes of
institutional bargaining.” Oran R. Young, “Political Leadership and Regime
Formation: On the Development of Institutions in International Society,”
International Organization, vol. 45, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 307.
86. David Rapkin, “Leadership and Cooperative Institutions,” in Andrew
Mack and John Ravenhill, eds., Pacific Cooperation: Building Economic and
Security Regimes in the Asia-Pacific Region (St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin,
1994), 109.
87. Andrew F. Cooper, Richard A. Higgott, and Kim R. Nossal, Relocating
Middle Powers: Australia and Canada in a Changing World Order (Vancou-
ver: University of British Columbia Press, 1993), 12.
88. Cooper, Higgott, and Nossal, Relocating Middle Powers, 13.
89. Rapkin, “Leadership and Cooperative Institutions,” 118.
90. Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “The Rise and Fall of the
Great Powers in the Twenty-first Century,” International Security, vol. 40,
no. 3 (2016): 8.
91. Brooks and Wohlforth, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the
Twenty-first Century,” 8.
92. Barry R. Posen, “Emerging Multipolarity: Why Should We Care?,” Cur-
rent History, vol. 108, no. 721 (November 2009): 350.
93. Zaki Laidi, “What Multipolarity Really Means,” http://www.laidi.com/
sitedp/sites/default/files/Week%201.pdf (accessed 4/15/2020).
 Notes to Pages 37–39 179

94. The terms “Multiplex” and “G-Plus” are coined by Acharya, to distin-
guish multipolarity from the emerging world order. Acharya, The End of
American World Order; Amitav Acharya, “After Liberal Hegemony: The
Advent of a Multiplex World,” Ethics and International Affairs, vol. 31, no.
3 (Fall 2017): 271–85. The word multiplex derives from Latin “multi- +
plicaˉre to fold.” See “Multiplex,” Dictionary.com, https://www.dictionary.
com/browse/multiplexing (accessed 12/9/2023). The word was first used
in mid-sixteenth-century mathematics. In its original sense, it meant
“having many folds; many times as great in number; of many parts.” See
“Multiplex,” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/
word/multiplex (accessed 12/9/2023).
As an adjective, multiplex conveys the sense of “having many parts or
aspects”—such as “the multiplex problem of drug abuse.” It can also mean
“manifold” and “multiple,” as in “the multiplex opportunities in high tech-
nology.” See “Multiplex,” Dictionary.com, https://www.dictionary.com/
browse/multiplexing (accessed 12/9/2023). Perhaps the most common
form of usage refers to a multiplex cinema or theater: “a group of two or
more motion-picture theatres on the same site or in the same building,
esp. a cluster of adjoining theaters.” See “Multiplex,” Collins English Dic-
tionary, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/multiplex
(accessed 12/9/2023). Yet another meaning associated with multiplex is
“multidimensional,” specifically three-dimensional mapmaking, or map-
making in a “stereoscopic device that makes it possible to view pairs of
aerial photographs in three dimensions.” See “Multiplex,” https://www.col
linsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/multiplex (accessed 12/9/2023). In
the telecommunications field, the meaning of multiplex or multiplexing
can be understood by contrasting it with the term “mirroring.” Mirroring
“takes one data file and copies it to many devices,” whereas multiplexing
“writes the data files to many places simultaneously” without having a sin-
gle point of origin. See “Multiplexing,” Free On-Line Dictionary of Comput-
ing, https://foldoc.org/multiplex (accessed 12/9/2023). All these meanings
speak to a connected multiplicity in structure and interactions in creating
a common product or public good and service.
95. “A Worrying New World Order,” The Economist, September 11, 2008,
https://www.economist.com/europe/2008/09/11/a-worrying-new-world
-order (accessed 2/22/2024); Richard N. Haass, “The Age of Nonpolar-
ity: What Will Follow U.S. Dominance?,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 87, no. 3
(May/June 2008): 44–56.
96. For an earlier attempt to distinguish among different types of leadership,
see Young, “Political Leadership and Regime Formation.”
97. Other concepts have been suggested as alternatives to “LHO” or “multi-
polarity,” such as “multi-ordered” and “multinodal.” The idea of a multi-
ordered world has similarities with the emphasis on regions or localities
in the multiplex concept, but it does not suggest how or to what extent
180 Notes to Pages 39–41

the orders are connected. See Trine Flockhart, “A Multi-Ordered World,”

RSA Journal, vol. 164, no. 3 (2018): 26–31. The multinodal world is rather
similar to the multiplex world. Brantly Womack presents the multimodal
world “as a stable pattern of states, each the locus of one end of a radiat-
ing bundle of bilateral relationships. Given their vast differences of size
and assets, most relationships between states are asymmetric.” Brantly
Womack, “China’s Future in a Multinodal World Order,” Pacific Affairs,
vol. 87, no. 2 (2014). This harks back to the notion of hierarchy, and lays
too much stress on bilateralism or a “hub-and-spoke” configuration,
thereby understating the importance of multilateral relationships.
98. For historical examples of such decentered systems, see Pardesi, “Decen-
tering Hegemony and ‘Open’ Orders”; Manjeet S. Pardesi, “Interna-
tional Order in Ancient India,” in Amitav Acharya, Daniel A. Bell, Rajeev
Bhargava, and Yan Xuetong, eds., Bridging Two Worlds: Comparing Classical
Political Thought and Statecraft in India and China (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2021), 284–310.

Chapter Two. The International Order of the Roman

Mediterranean (~Sixth Century b.c.e.–Third Century c.e.)
1. Greg Woolf, Rome: An Empire’s Story, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2022), 209; Kurt A. Raaflaub, “From City-State to Empire:
Rome in Comparative Perspective,” in Johann P. Arnason and Kurt A.
Raaflaub, eds., The Roman Empire in Context: Historical and Comparative
Perspectives (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 52.
2. Peter Fibiger Bang, The Roman Bazaar: A Comparative Study of Trade and Mar-
kets in a Tributary Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
This transepochal study compares the Roman Empire with the Mughal em-
pire (and to a lesser degree with the Ottoman and Ming/Qing empires).
3. Greg Woolf, “Rome and Imperialism,” in Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope,
eds., The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, 2nd ed.
(Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 2333.
4. James Tan, “The Roman Republic,” in Andrew Monson and Walter
Scheidel, eds., Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 224; Michael Mann,
The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986), 268; Tan, “The Roman Republic,” 225.
5. Walter Scheidel, “The Early Roman Monarchy,” in Monson and
Scheidel, Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States, 229–
57 (especially 240).
6. Peter Fibiger Bang, “Lord of All the World—The State, Heterogeneous
Power and Hegemony in the Roman and Mughal Empires,” in Peter
Fibiger Bang and C. A. Bayly, eds., Tributary Empires in Global History
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 181, 185.
 Notes to Pages 41–45 181

7. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 250.

8. Greg Woolf, “Inventing Empire in Ancient Rome,” in Susan E. Alcock,
Terence N. D’Altroy, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Carla M. Sinopoli, eds.,
Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 312.
9. Woolf, “Rome and Imperialism,” 2342.
10. Johann P. Arnason, “The Roman Phenomenon: State, Empire, and Civi-
lization,” in Arnason and Raaflaub, The Roman Empire in Context, 357.
11. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 269.
12. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2008), 26; Robin Waterfield, Taken at the Flood:
The Roman Conquest of Greece (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014),
212.
13. Waterfield, Taken at the Flood, 212.
14. Woolf, “Inventing Empire in Ancient Rome,” 314.
15. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 271.
16. Geoffrey Rickman, “The Creation of Mare Nostrum: 300 BC–500 AD,”
in David Abulafia, ed., The Mediterranean in History (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2003), 132.
17. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 199.
18. Abulafia, The Great Sea, 199.
19. Scheidel, “The Early Roman Monarchy,” 252.
20. Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 26.
21. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of
Mediterranean History (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 24–25.
22. J. G. Manning, The Open Sea: The Economic Life of the Ancient Mediterra-
nean World from the Iron Age to the Rise of Rome (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2018), 237.
23. Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 25.
24. Matthew P. Loar, Carolyn MacDonald, and Dan-el Padilla Peralta, “In-
troduction,” in Matthew P. Loar, Carolyn MacDonald, and Dan-el Pa-
dilla Peralta, eds., Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural
Appropriation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 3.
25. Erich S. Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome, vol. 1
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 260.
26. W. V. Harris, Roman Power: A Thousand Years of Empire (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2016); Woolf, Rome.
27. Robert Morstein-Marx and Nathan Rosenstein, “The Transformation of
the Republic,” in Nathan Rosenstein and Robert Morstein-Marx, eds., A
Companion to the Roman Republic (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), 625.
28. Manning, The Open Sea, 238.
29. Angelos Chaniotis, Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to
Hadrian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 3–7.
182 Notes to Pages 45–47

30. Kostas Vlassopoulos, Greeks and Barbarians (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2013), 280. According to Vlassopoulos, the interactions be-
tween the Greeks and others in the Mediterranean were shaped by
networks of connectivity (mobility of people, ideas, and technologies);
colonization (through the creation of apoikiai); Panhellenic festivals, in-
stitutions, and ideas; and through the impact of empires.
31. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History: Abridgement of Volumes VII–X, ed.
D. C. Somervell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 4.
32. Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Histor-
ical Analysis (London: Routledge, 1992), 94–106.
33. Daniel Deudney, “ ‘A Republic for Expansion’: The Roman Constitution
and Empire and Balance-of-Power Politics,” in Stuart J. Kaufman, Rich-
ard Little, and William C. Wohlforth, eds., The Balance of Power in World
History (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 149; Michael W. Doyle, Empires
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 83.
34. Arthur M. Eckstein, Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of
Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 2.
35. Eckstein, Mediterranean Anarchy, 5; Deudney, “ ‘A Republic for Expan-
sion,’ ” 155.
36. Barry Buzan and Richard Little, International Systems in World History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 92.
37. Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 25.
38. Mario Torelli, “The Battle for the Sea Routes: 1000–300 BC,” in Abu-
lafia, The Mediterranean in History, 99–121.
39. According to Lambert, the Mediterranean had emerged as “a single eco-
nomic system” between 800 and 500 b.c.e. See Andrew Lambert,
Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That
Made the Modern World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 34.
40. Bang, “Lord of All the World,” 179, 181.
41. P. F. Bang, “Rome and the Comparative Study of Tributary Empires,” The
Medieval History Journal, vol. 6, no. 2 (2003): 209.
42. Woolf, “Rome and Imperialism,” 2340–41.
43. Bang, The Roman Bazaar, 82.
44. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 274.
45. Peter Fibiger Bang, “The King of Kings: Universal Hegemony, Imperial
Power, and a New Comparative History of Rome,” in Arnason and Raa-
flaub, The Roman Empire in Context, 339.
46. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 269.
47. Although citizenship was extended to the Italian allies after the Social
War (91–87 b.c.e.), a period long after the emergence of Rome’s effective
hegemony, it had served as “punishment for defeated communities” until
the second century b.c.e. See Clifford Ando, “Making Romans: Citizens,
Subjects, and Subjectivity in Republican Empire,” in Myles Lavan, Rich-
ard E. Payne, and John Weisweiler, eds., Cosmopolitanism and Empire:
 Notes to Pages 47–48 183

Universal Rulers, Local Elites, and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Near
East and Mediterranean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 169.
48. Peter F. Bang, “Tributary Empires and the New Fiscal Sociology: Some
Comparative Reflections,” in Monson and Scheidel, Fiscal Regimes and the
Political Economy of Premodern States, 542.
49. Scheidel, “The Early Roman Monarchy,” 249; Keith Hopkins, “The Po-
litical Economy of the Roman Empire,” in Ian Morris and Walter
Scheidel, eds., The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to
Byzantium (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 184.
50. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 3: The
Perspective of the World, trans. Siân Reynolds (London: Collins, 1984), 33.
51. Perry Anderson, The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony (Verso: London,
2017), 3. Watson’s “pendulum” analogy also sees continuity across the
notional spectrum from multiple independent political units to empires
via the intermediate categories of hegemony and dominion. Watson, The
Evolution of International Society, 13–18.
52. Krishan Kumar, Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the
World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 42–43.
53. Paul W. Blank, “The Pacific: A Mediterranean in the Making?,” Geo-
graphical Review, vol. 89, no. 2 (1999): 266.
54. Blank, “The Pacific,” 269–70.
55. Given Watson’s notional pendulum mentioned above (note 51), hege-
mony itself can be conceptualized along a spectrum from “loose” to
“tight.” Relatedly, others have characterized imperial control along such
a spectrum. For example, Runciman conceptualized empires as both
“loosely controlled” and “tightly controlled.” Similarly, empires may be
either “formal or informal” for Doyle too. See W. G. Runciman, “Empire
as a Topic in Comparative Sociology,” in Bang, Tributary Empires in
Global History, 99; and Doyle, Empires, 30.
56. Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and
the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2007), xxv. Also see Robert Gilpin, War & Change in World
Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); George Modelski
and William R. Thompson, Seapower in Global Politics, 1494–1993 (Seat-
tle: University of Washington Press, 1987); and George Modelski and
William R. Thompson, Leading Sectors and World Powers: The Coevolution
of Global Economics and Politics (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1996).
57. Philippe Beaujard, “The Indian Ocean in Eurasian and African World-
Systems before the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of World History, vol. 16,
no. 4 (2005): 415. Also see Philippe Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian
Ocean: A Global History, vols. 1 and 2, translation edited by Tamara Lor-
ing, Francis Meadows, and Andromeda Tait (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2019).
184 Notes to Pages 48–50

58. Jack A. Goldstone and John F. Haldon, “Ancient States, Empires, and
Exploitation: Problems and Perspectives,” in Scheidel, The Dynamics of
Ancient Empires, 3.
59. Douglas A. Irwin and Kevin H. O’Rourke, “Coping with Shocks and
Shifts: The Multilateral Trading System in Historical Perspective,” in
Robert C. Feenstra and Alan M. Taylor, eds., Globalization in an Age of
Crisis: Multilateral Economic Cooperation in the Twenty-First Century (Chi-
cago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 17.
60. Barry Buzan and George Lawson, The Global Transformation: History, Mo-
dernity, and the Making of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015), 1. Buzan and Lawson refer to this interactive
process as “mode of power.”
61. In general, liberals emphasize “interdependence” among trading states
while realists emphasize “control” over vital overseas supplies. See Hen-
drik Spruyt, “War, Trade, and State Formation,” in Carles Boix and Susan
C. Stokes, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 211–35.
62. Neal G. Jesse, Steven E. Lobell, Galia Press-Barnathan, and Kristen P. Wil-
liams, “The Leader Can’t Lead When the Followers Won’t Follow: The
Limitations of Hegemony,” in Kristen P. Williams, Steven E. Lobell, and
Neal G. Jesse, eds., Beyond Great Powers and Hegemons: Why Secondary States
Support, Follow, or Challenge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 4.
Also see Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, “Regimes of World Order:
Global Integration and Production of Difference in Twentieth-Century
World History,” in Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Anand A. Yang,
eds., Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History (Honolulu: Uni-
versity of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 205. Hierarchy can take multiple forms in
practice. For a noteworthy recent contribution on this, see Ayşe Zarakol, ed.,
Hierarchies in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
63. David Abulafia, “Mediterraneans,” in W. V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the
Mediterranean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 64.
64. See Kaufman, Little, and Wohlforth, The Balance of Power in World His-
tory, especially the introductory and concluding chapters.
65. Woolf, Rome, 117–18.
66. William C. Wohlforth, Stuart J. Kaufman, and Richard Little, “Introduc-
tion: Balance and Hierarchy in International Systems,” in Kaufman, Lit-
tle, and Wohlforth, The Balance of Power in World History, 16–17.
67. Rickman, “The Creation of Mare Nostrum,” 133.
68. Wolfgang Spickermann, “The Roman Empire,” in Yuri Pines, Michal
Biran, and Jörg Rüpke, eds., The Limits of Universal Rule: Eurasian Empires
Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 115.
69. Harris, Roman Power, 15.
70. Eckstein, Mediterranean Anarchy, 159; Rickman, “The Creation of Mare
Nostrum,” 128.
 Notes to Pages 50–52 185

71. Harris, Roman Power, 26, 32; Lincoln Paine, The Sea & Civilization: A
Maritime History of the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), Kindle
Loc. 2559.
72. Harris, Roman Power, 30–31.
73. Harris, Roman Power, 33.
74. Spickermann, “The Roman Empire,” 117.
75. Daniel J. Gargola, “The Mediterranean Empire (264–134 BCE),” in
Rosenstein and Morstein-Marx, A Companion to the Roman Republic, 147.
76. Arthur M. Eckstein, “Rome Dominates the Mediterranean,” in Andrew S.
Erickson, Lyle J. Goldstein, and Carnes Lord, eds., China Goes to Sea:
Maritime Transformation in Comparative Historical Perspective (Annapolis:
Naval Institute Press, 2012), 69.
77. Gargola, “The Mediterranean Empire,” 149.
78. Spickermann, “The Roman Empire,” 118.
79. Harris, Roman Power, 26.
80. Spickermann, “The Roman Empire,” 118.
81. Gargola, “The Mediterranean Empire,” 153.
82. Nathan Rosenstein, “War, State Formation, and the Evolution of Mili-
tary Institutions in Ancient China and Rome,” in Walter Scheidel, ed.,
Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 29.
83. Deudney, “ ‘A Republic for Expansion,’ ” 155.
84. William V. Harris, “Power,” in Alessandro Barchiesi and Walter Scheidel,
eds., The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies, 2010, https://doi.org/10.1093/
oxfordhb/9780199211524.013.0036 (accessed 11/4/2022).
85. Woolf, “Rome and Imperialism,” 2337. In particular, see William V. Har-
ris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 B.C. (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1979).
86. Woolf, “Rome and Imperialism,” 2334.
87. Harris, Roman Power, 33.
88. Woolf, Rome, 78.
89. Michael Pitassi, The Roman Navy: Ships, Men & Warfare, 350 BC–AD 475
(Barnsley: Seaforth Publishing, 2012), 359.
90. Woolf, Rome, 78.
91. Deudney, “ ‘A Republic for Expansion,’ ” 158.
92. Deudney, “ ‘A Republic for Expansion,’ ” 161.
93. Eckstein, Mediterranean Anarchy, 309.
94. Chester G. Starr, The Roman Imperial Navy, 31 B.C.–A.D. 324 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1941).
95. D. B. Saddington, “Classes: The Evolution of the Roman Imperial Fleets,”
in Paul Erdkamp, ed., A Companion to the Roman Army (Malden: Black-
well, 2007), 201; Eckstein, “Rome Dominates the Mediterranean,” 65.
96. Harris, Roman Power, 34.
97. Eckstein, “Rome Dominates the Mediterranean,” 65.
186 Notes to Pages 52–54

98. Pitassi, The Roman Navy, 44; Catherine M. Gilliver, “Battle,” in Philip
Sabin, Hans van Wees, and Michael Whitby, eds., The Cambridge History
of Greek and Roman Warfare, vol. 2: Rome from the Late Republic to the
Late Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 143.
99. Spickermann, “The Roman Empire,” 116.
100. Bang, “Trade and Empire,” 42.
101. Andrew Wilson, “Machines, Power and Ancient Economy,” The Journal
of Roman Studies, vol. 92 (2002): 1–32.
102. Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, “Provincializing Rome: The Indian Ocean
Trade Network and Roman Imperialism,” Journal of World History, vol.
22, no. 1 (2011): 27–54. Notably, they conquered parts of Arabia and
reached the Persian Gulf, and some Roman emperors even harbored the
ambition of conquering India.
103. Ron Harris, “The Organization of India-to-Rome Trade: Loans and
Agents in the Muziris Papyrus,” in Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci and Dennis
P. Kehoe, eds., Roman Law and Economics, vol. 1: Institutions and Organi-
zations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 163–96.
104. Carlos Noreña, “Imperial Integration on Rome’s Atlantic Rim,” in Har-
riet I. Flower, ed., Empire and Religion in the Roman World (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2021), 35–70; Eckstein, “Rome Dominates
the Mediterranean,” 63.
105. Rolf Strootman, “Introduction: Maritime Empires in World History,” in
Rolf Strootman, Floris van den Eijnde, and Roy van Wijk, eds., Empires of
the Sea: Maritime Power Networks in World History (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 13.
106. Abulafia, The Great Sea, 174; Rickman, “The Creation of Mare Nos-
trum,” 131.
107. Eckstein, Mediterranean Anarchy, 234.
108. Doyle, Empires, 88.
109. Torelli, “The Battle for the Sea Routes,” 104.
110. Rickman, “The Creation of Mare Nostrum,” 131.
111. Abulafia, The Great Sea, 189.
112. Rosenstein, “War, State Formation, and the Evolution of Military Insti-
tutions in Ancient China and Rome,” 31.
113. Peter Fibiger Bang, “Predation,” in Walter Scheidel, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to the Roman Economy (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), 201.
114. Nicholas Purcell, “The Ancient Mediterranean,” in Peregrine Horden
and Sharon Kinoshita, eds., A Companion to Mediterranean History
(Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 66.
115. Purcell, “The Ancient Mediterranean,” 67.
116. Starr, The Roman Imperial Navy, 176.
117. Philip de Souza, “War at Sea,” in Brian Campbell and Lawrence A. Tri-
tle, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Warfare in the Classical World (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2013), Kindle Loc. 8494.
 Notes to Pages 54–56 187

118. Boris Rankov, “Fleets of the Early Roman Empire, 31 BC–AD 324,” in
Robert Gardiner, ed., The Age of the Galley: Mediterranean Oared Vessels
since Pre-Classical Times (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1995), 78.
119. Adrian Goldsworthy, “War,” in Sabin, van Wees, and Whitby, The Cam-
bridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare, vol. 2, 105.
120. Eckstein, “Rome Dominates the Mediterranean,” 72.
121. David J. Bederman, “The Sea,” in Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters,
eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 359–80.
122. Georgia L. Irby, Using and Conquering the Watery World in Greco-Roman
Antiquity (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 203; Kaius Tuori, “The Savage Sea
and the Civilizing Law: The Roman Law Tradition and the Rule of Sea,”
in Hans Kopp and Christian Wendt, eds., Thalassokratographie: Rezeption
und Transformation antiker Seeherrschaft (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018), 210.
123. Starr, The Roman Imperial Navy, 179.
124. Pitassi, The Roman Navy, 368–78.
125. John Haldon, “The Political Economy of Empire: ‘Imperial Capital’
and the Formation of Central and Regional Elites,” in Peter Fibiger
Bang, C. A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel, eds., The Oxford World History of
Empires, vol. 1: The Imperial Experience (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2021), 195.
126. Norms can have constitutive and regulative effects. Peter J. Katzenstein,
“Introduction: Alternative Perspectives on National Security,” in Peter J.
Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996); Yuen Foong Khong, “East Asia and the Strate-
gic ‘Deep Rules’ of International/Regional Society,” in Barry Buzan and
Yongjin Zhang, eds., Contesting International Society in East Asia (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 144–66; Goldstone and
Haldon, “Ancient States, Empires, and Exploitation: Problems and Per-
spectives,” 12.
127. Martha Finnemore, “Legitimacy, Hypocrisy, and the Social Structure of
Unipolarity: Why Being a Unipole Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be,”
World Politics, vol. 61, no. 1 (2009): 59.
128. David Abulafia, “Thalassocracies,” in Horden and Kinoshita, A Compan-
ion to Mediterranean History, 142.
129. Torelli, “The Battle for the Sea Routes,” 99.
130. Abulafia, The Great Sea, 184; Peter Fibiger Bang, “Trade and Empire: In
Search of Organizing Concepts for the Roman Economy,” Past and Pres-
ent, vol. 195 (May 2007): 42.
131. Andrew Wilson, “A Forum on Trade,” in Scheidel, The Cambridge Com-
panion to the Roman Economy, 287.
132. Hopkins, “The Political Economy of the Roman Empire,” 179–80.
Only 11 percent of the population of Egypt was recorded as enslaved,
compared to 35 percent for Italy.
188 Notes to Pages 56–58

133. Bang, “Trade and Empire,” 40.

134. Neville Morley, “Slavery Under the Principate,” in Keith Bradley and
Paul Cartledge, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 1: The
Ancient Mediterranean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), 265, 267, 274.
135. Harris, Roman Power, 21.
136. Keith Bradley, “Slavery in the Roman Republic,” in Bradley and Cart-
ledge, The Cambridge World History of Slavery, 244.
137. Harris, Roman Power, 86.
138. Harriet I. Flower, “The Imperial Republic,” in Barchiesi and Scheidel,
The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies, https://doi.org/10.1093/ox
fordhb/9780199211524.013.0033 (accessed 11/4/2022).
139. Bang, “Predation,” 200.
140. Philip Kay, Rome’s Economic Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014), 37–38.
141. James Lacey, Rome: Strategy of Empire (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2022), 41.
142. Nicholas Sekunda and Philip de Souza, “Military Forces,” in Philip
Sabin, Hans van Wees, and Michael Whitby, eds., The Cambridge History
of Greek and Roman Warfare, vol 1: Greece, the Hellenistic World and the
Rise of Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 352.
143. Bang, “Predation,” 203, 208, 213.
144. Hopkins, “The Political Economy of the Roman Empire,” 184.
145. Armin Eich and Peter Eich, “War and State-Building in Roman Repub-
lican Times,” Scripta Classica Israelica, vol. 24 (2005): 25.
146. Kay, Rome’s Economic Revolution, 1.
147. Kay, Rome’s Economic Revolution, 58.
148. Kay, Rome’s Economic Revolution, 57.
149. Kay, Rome’s Economic Revolution, 2.
150. Abulafia, The Great Sea, 200.
151. Rickman, “The Creation of Mare Nostrum,” 132.
152. Hopkins, “The Political Economy of the Roman Empire,” 191.
153. Paul Erdkamp, “The Grain Trade in the Roman World,” in Scheidel,
The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, 308.
154. Ronald Rogowski, Commerce and Coalitions: How Trade Affects Domestic
Political Alignments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 146.
155. Harris, “Power.”
156. Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 23.
157. William E. Dunstan, Ancient Rome (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield,
2011), 113–35.
158. Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
(London: Harper, 2005), Kindle Loc. 5272.
159. Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome, 249.
160. Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome, 251.
 Notes to Pages 58–60 189

161. Rachel Mairs, “Hellenization,” in Roger S. Bagnall, Kai Brodersen,

Craige B. Champion, Andrew Erskine, and Sabine R. Huebner, eds., The
Encyclopedia of Ancient History (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), https://
doi.org/10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah22144 (accessed 11/5/2022).
162. Simon Hornblower, “Hellenism, Hellenization,” Oxford Classical Diction-
ary, December 22, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/978019938
1135.013.2994 (accessed 11/5/2022).
163. Thomas N. Habinek, The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and
Empire in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 34.
164. Nicholas Purcell, “On the significance of East and West in today’s ‘Hel-
lenistic’ history: reflections on symmetrical worlds, reflecting through
world symmetries,” in Jonathan R. W. Prag and Crawley Quinn, eds.,
The Hellenistic West: Rethinking the Ancient Mediterranean (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), 390.
165. Christoph Ulf, “Models of Culture Contact and Cultural Change: Mov-
ing Beyond National and Linguistic Traditions,” in Franco de Angelis,
ed., A Companion to Greeks Across the Ancient World (Hoboken: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2020), 126.
166. On hegemonic socialization, see Amitav Acharya, Constructing Global
Order: Agency and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2018), 36–38.
167. Mogens Herman Hansen, “Colonies and Indigenous Hellenized Com-
munities,” in Mogens Herman Hansen and Thomas Heine Nielsen,
eds., An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2004), 152.
168. Franco de Angelis, “Colonies and Colonization,” in George Boys-
Stones, Barbara Graziosi, and Phiroze Vasunia, eds., The Oxford Hand-
book of Hellenic Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 49.
169. Quoted in Roderick Beaton, The Greeks: A Global History (New York:
Basic Books, 2021), 88.
170. Gocha R. Tsetskhladze, “Revisiting Ancient Greek Colonisation,” in
Gocha R. Tsetskhladze, ed., Greek Colonisation—An Account of Greek
Colonies and Other Overseas Settlements, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2006),
xxviii.
171. Hansen, “Colonies and Indigenous Hellenized Communities,” 150–53.
172. Craig Benjamin and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, “The Mediterranean,” in
Craig Benjamin, ed., The Cambridge World History, vol. 4 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), Kindle Loc. 9077; Ostler, Empires of
the Word, Kindle Loc. 5069.
173. Tamar Hodos, Local Responses to Colonization in the Iron Age Mediterranean
(London: Routledge, 2006). However, they did not compete in the Black
Sea, where the Greeks established colonies but not the Phoenicians, or
in Sardinia, where the Phoenicians established colonies but not the
Greeks.
190 Notes to Pages 60–63

174. Ian Morris and Alex R. Knodell, “Greek Cities in the First Millennium
BCE,” in Norman Yoffee, ed., The Cambridge World History, vol. 3 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 360.
175. Mogen Herman Hansen, Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City-
State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 34.
176. Tsetskhladze, “Revisiting Ancient Greek Colonisation,” xlviii.
177. Hansen, Polis, 34, 45.
178. Beaton, The Greeks, 85; Hansen, “Colonies and Indigenous Hellenized
Communities,” 150.
179. Tsetskhladze, “Revisiting Ancient Greek Colonisation,” xlvii.
180. Mogens Herman Hansen, “The Lifespan of the Hellenic Polis,” in Han-
sen and Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis, 19.
181. Tsetskhladze, “Revisiting Ancient Greek Colonisation,” lxv.
182. Hodos, Local Responses to Colonization in the Iron Age Mediterranean, 10.
183. Tsetskhladze, “Revisiting Ancient Greek Colonisation,” xxix.
184. Robin Osborne, “Early Greek Colonization? The Nature of Greek Set-
tlement in the West,” in Nick Fisher and Hans van Wees, eds., Archaic
Greece: New Approaches and New Evidence (London: Duckworth, 1998),
262.
185. Hansen, “Colonies and Indigenous Hellenized Communities,” 151. On
strategic interaction, see Acharya, Constructing Global Order, 33–36.
186. Beaton, The Greeks, 90.
187. D. W. R. Ridgway, “Colonization, Greek,” in Simon Hornblower and
Antony Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization,
2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 191; Vlassopoulos,
Greeks and Barbarians, 15.
188. John Boardman, The Greeks Overseas: Their Early Colonies and Trade
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1980), 190.
189. Hodos, Local Responses to Colonization in the Iron Age Mediterranean, 11.
190. Sara Owen, “Analogy, Archaeology and Archaic Greek Colonization,” in
Henry Hurst and Sara Owen, eds., Ancient Colonizations: Analogy, Simi-
larity and Difference (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 13.
191. Tsetskhladze, “Revisiting Ancient Greek Colonisation,” lvi–lix.
192. Hodos, Local Responses to Colonization in the Iron Age Mediterranean, 152.
193. Owen, “Analogy, Archaeology and Archaic Greek Colonization,” 20.
194. Hansen, Polis, 44.
195. Christoph Ulf, “Rethinking Cultural Contacts,” in Robert Rollinger and
Kordula Schnegg, eds., Kulturkontakte in Antiken Welten: Vom Denkmodell
zum Fallbeispiel (Leuven: Peeters, 2014), 527.
196. Nicholas Purcell, “Colonization and Mediterranean History,” in Hurst
and Owen, Ancient Colonizations, 117, 120, 129.
197. Tsetskhladze, “Revisiting Ancient Greek Colonisation,” xxix.
198. Tsetskhladze, “Revisiting Ancient Greek Colonisation,” liii.
199. Hodos, Local Responses to Colonization in the Iron Age Mediterranean, 20.
 Notes to Pages 63–66 191

200. Arnason, “The Roman Phenomenon,” 373.

201. Tsetskhladze, “Revisiting Ancient Greek Colonisation,” xlix.
202. Hansen, Polis, 33.
203. Hansen, Polis, 35–36.
204. Ulf, “Rethinking Cultural Contacts,” 526.
205. Tsetskhladze, “Revisiting Ancient Greek Colonisation,” lxv.
206. Tsetskhladze, “Revisiting Ancient Greek Colonisation,” lxiv.
207. M. B. Hatzopoulos, “Macedonia and Macedonians,” in Robin J. Lane
Fox, ed., Brill’s Companion to Ancient Macedon: Studies in the Archaeology
and History of Macedon, 650 BC–300 AD (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 43–44.
208. Beaton, The Greeks, 175.
209. Simon Hornblower, The Greek World, 479–323 BC, 4th ed. (London:
Routledge, 2011), 99.
210. Chaniotis, Age of Conquests, 391.
211. Beaton, The Greeks, 201.
212. Pierre Briant, “Colonization, Hellenistic,” in Hornblower and Spaw-
forth, The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization, 191.
213. Vlassopoulos, Greeks and Barbarians, 280.
214. Vlassopoulos, Greeks and Barbarians, 280; Ostler, Empires of the Word,
Kindle Loc. 5194.
215. Vlassopoulos, Greeks and Barbarians, 285–86.
216. Beaton, The Greeks, 205–10.
217. Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East
and West (New York: Random House, 2008), 94.
218. Vlassopoulos, Greeks and Barbarians, 285, 300.
219. Tim Whitmarsh, “Hellenism,” in Barchiesi and Scheidel, The Oxford
Handbook of Roman Studies, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199
211524.013.0047 (accessed 11/5/2022).
220. Benjamin and Wiesner-Hanks, “The Mediterranean,” Kindle Loc. 9443.
221. Quoted in Susan E. Alcock, Graecia Capta: The Landscapes of Roman
Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1.
222. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “The Creation and Expression of Identity:
The Roman World,” in Susan E. Alcock and Robin Osborne, eds., Clas-
sical Archaeology, 2nd ed. (Chichester: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 375;
Whitmarsh, “Hellenism.”
223. Erich S. Gruen, “Rome and the Greek World,” in Harriet I. Flower, ed.,
The Roman Republic, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2014), 282.
224. Keith Branigan, “Hellenistic Influence on the Roman World,” in John
Wacher, ed., The Roman World, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1987), 41.
225. Branigan, “Hellenistic Influence on the Roman World,” 45.
226. Mario Torelli, “The Topography and Archaeology of Republican
Rome,” in Rosenstein and Morstein-Marx, A Companion to the Roman
Republic, 94.
192 Notes to Pages 66–69

227. Whitmarsh, “Hellenism.”

228. Peter Fibiger Bang, “Imperial Ecumene and Polyethnicity,” in Barchiesi
and Scheidel, The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies, https://doi.org/
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199211524.013.0043 (accessed 11/5/2022).
229. Whitmarsh, “Hellenism.”
230. Whitmarsh, “Hellenism.”
231. Waterfield, Taken at the Flood, 210.
232. Waterfield, Taken at the Flood, 210; Torelli, “The Topography and Ar-
chaeology of Republican Rome,” 95.
233. Alessandro Barchiesi, “Roman Perspectives on the Greeks,” in Boys-
Stones, Graziosi, and Phiroze Vasunia, The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic
Studies, 106.
234. Whitmarsh, “Hellenism” (emphasis original).
235. Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 24.
236. Waterfield, Taken at the Flood, 210.
237. Whitmarsh, “Hellenism.”
238. Tim Whitmarsh, “Greece and Rome,” in Boys-Stones, Graziosi, and
Phiroze Vasunia, The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies, 123.
239. Whitmarsh, “Greece and Rome,” 121.
240. Whitmarsh, “Hellenism.”
241. Wallace-Hadrill, “The Creation and Expression of Identity,” 372.
242. Ostler, Empires of the Word, Kindle Loc. 5042.
243. Branigan, “Hellenistic Influence on the Roman World,” 45.
244. Wallace-Hadrill, “The Creation and Expression of Identity,” 384.
245. Beaton, The Greeks, 231.
246. Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 23–24.
247. Erich S. Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2011), 344–45.
248. Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity, 349.
249. Waterfield, Taken at the Flood, 213.
250. Bang, “Imperial Ecumene and Polyethnicity.”
251. Torelli, “The Topography and Archaeology of Republican Rome,” 96–97.
252. Ostler, Empires of the Word, Kindle Loc. 5272.
253. Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 26.
254. Mairs, “Hellenization.”
255. Arnason, “The Roman Phenomenon,” 368.
256. However, Greek culture was also changed as it responded to the Roman
Empire. See Tim Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire:
The Politics of Imitation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
257. Whitmarsh, “Hellenism.”
258. Erich Gruen, “Rome and Others,” in Rosenstein and Morstein-Marx, A
Companion to the Roman Republic, 469.
259. William W. Batstone, “Literature,” in Rosenstein and Morstein-Marx, A
Companion to the Roman Republic, 561.
 Notes to Pages 69–72 193

260. In 10 b.c.e., the historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus asserted that

Rome was a Greek city and that the “Romans were Greek in origin.”
See Craige B. Champion, ed., Roman Imperialism: Readings and Sources
(Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 268; and Woolf, Rome, 174. In 155 c.e., the
Anatolian sophist Aelius Aristides also praised the Roman “world empire
founded on military might” as “an inflated version of a Greek polis.” See
Beaton, The Greeks, 251.
261. Waterfield, Taken at the Flood, 235.
262. Woolf, Rome, 221.
263. Peter Fibiger Bang, “The Roman Empire,” in Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A.
Bayly, and Walter Scheidel, eds., The Oxford World History of Empire, vol.
2: The History of Empires (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 264.
264. Harris, Roman Power, 30.
265. Pagden, Worlds at War, 105–6.
266. Lacey, Rome, 44.
267. Woolf, Rome, 86.
268. Kay, Rome’s Economic Revolution, 189.
269. Woolf, Rome, 46.
270. Harris, Roman Power, 31.
271. Eckstein, “Rome Dominates the Mediterranean,” 65, 74.
272. Rickman, “The Creation of Mare Nostrum,” 135–36.
273. Bang, “The Roman Empire II,” 22.
274. Abulafia, The Great Sea, 209.
275. Bang, “Imperial Ecumene and Polyethnicity.” Roman coinage was also
introduced in the subjugated polities (or their own local coins were
stamped with the image of the Roman emperor).
276. Hopkins, “The Political Economy of the Roman Empire,” 185; Gold-
stone and Haldon, “Ancient States,” 24.
277. Bang, “Lord of All the World,” 180.
278. Harris, Roman Power, 7.
279. Spickermann, “The Roman Empire,” 113.
280. Nathan Rosenstein, “War and Peace, Fear and Reconciliation at Rome,”
in Kurt A. Raaflaub, ed., War and Peace in the Ancient World (Malden:
Blackwell, 2007), 227.
281. Gargola, “The Mediterranean Empire,” 150.
282. Harris, Roman Power, 34.
283. Andrew Erskine, “Polybius among the Romans: Life in the Cyclops’
Cave,” in Christopher Smith and Liv Mariah Yarrow, eds., Imperialism,
Cultural Politics, and Polybius (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012),
17–32.
284. Hannah Cornwell, “Pax” and the Politics of Peace: Republic to Principate
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 34.
285. Erich S. Gruen, “Material Rewards and the Drive for Empire,” in
Champion, Roman Imperialism, 33.
194 Notes to Pages 72–75

286. Pompey’s campaigns involved 500 warships, 120,000 infantry, and 5,000
cavalry. Goldsworthy, “War,” 104; Woolf, Rome, 103.
287. The antipirate campaigns of Marcus Antonius in 102 b.c.e. marked the
“first” Roman attempt to deal with this issue. Woolf, Rome, 156.
288. Simon Hornblower, “Sea Power, Greek and Roman,” Oxford Classical
Dictionary, March 7, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/978019938
1135.013.5775 (accessed 11/6/2022). Also see David Braund, “Piracy
Under the Principate and the Ideology of Imperial Eradication,” in John
Rich and Graham Shipley, eds., War and Society in the Roman World
(London: Routledge, 1993), 195–212; and Pitassi, The Roman Navy, 375.
289. Cornwell, “Pax” and the Politics of Peace, 197.
290. Cornwell, “Pax” and the Politics of Peace, 197.
291. Peter Fibiger Bang, “Between Aśoka and Antiochus: An Essay in World
History on Universal Kingship and Cosmopolitan Culture in the Helle-
nistic Ecumene,” in Peter Fibiger Bang and Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, eds.,
Universal Empire: A Comparative Approach to Imperial Culture and Repre-
sentation in Eurasian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012), 68.
292. Arnaldo Momigliano, “ ‘Terra Marique,’ ” The Journal of Roman Studies,
vol. 32, parts 1 and 2 (1942): 53–64.

Chapter Three. The International Order of the Classical

Indian Ocean (~First–Fifteenth Centuries c.e.)
1. On this “Sino-Indian Great Divergence” until 1800, when China and
India were the world’s most productive regions, see James Belich, John
Darwin, and Chris Wickham, “Introduction: The Prospect of Global
History,” in James Belich, John Darwin, Margret Frenz, and Chris Wick-
ham, eds., The Prospect of Global History (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2016), 7–8.
2. Philippe Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean: A Global History, 2 vols.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Also see Janel L. Abu-
Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
3. Craig Lockard, Southeast Asia in World History (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2009), 15.
4. John K. Fairbank, “A Preliminary Framework,” in John King Fairbank,
ed., The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 7.
5. Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Early States of Insular Southeast Asia,” in Charles
F. W. Higham and Nam C. Kim, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Early
Southeast Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), https://doi.
org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199355358.013.36 (accessed 12/4/2022).
 Notes to Pages 76–78 195

6. James R. Rush, Southeast Asia: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/97801902
48765.003.0002 (accessed 12/3/2022).
7. Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context,
c. 800–1830, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 15.
While the societies of the historical Philippines are normally left out of the
Indianization paradigm, recent scholarship has shown that Indic political ideas
had an impact even there. See Joefe B. Santarita, “Panyupayana: The Emer-
gence of Hindu Polities in the Pre-Islamic Philippines,” in Shyam Saran, ed.,
Cultural and Civilisational Links between India and Southeast Asia: Historical and
Contemporary Dynamics (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 93–105.
8. Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, A History of India, 4th ed.
(New York: Routledge, 2004), 153.
9. O. W. Wolters, Early Southeast Asia: Selected Essays, ed. Craig J. Reynolds
(Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2008), 67.
10. Lockard, Southeast Asia in World History, 6–7.
11. Engseng Ho, “Foreigners and Mediators in the Constitution of Malay
Sovereignty,” Indonesia and the Malay World, vol. 41, no. 120 (2013): 151.
12. David Singh Grewal, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 6.
13. Shared management is obviously distinct from the more familiar “great
power management” of international relations theory. See Amitav Achar-
ya, “Power Shift or Paradigm Shift? China’s Rise and Asia’s Emerging Se-
curity Order,” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 1 (2014): 160.
14. Bérénice Bellina, “Southeast Asia and the Early Maritime Silk Road,” in
John Guy, ed., Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast
Asia (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014), 21.
15. O. W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives,
rev. ed. (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999), 45.
16. Rush, Southeast Asia, https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780190248765.
003.0002 (accessed 12/4/2022). On localization, see Wolters, History,
Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives; and Amitav Acharya,
Constructing Global Order: Agency and Change in World Politics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2018), 33–67.
17. Charles F. W. Higham, “Social Change in Southeast Asia during the
Iron Age” and Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Early States of Insular Southeast
Asia,” in Higham and Kim, The Oxford Handbook of Early Southeast Asia,
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199355358.013.26 and https://
doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199355358.013.36 (accessed 12/4/2022).
18. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit,
Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2006), 271.
19. Barbara Watson Andaya, “Imagination, Memory and History: Narrating
India–Malay Intersections in the Early Modern Period,” in Radhika Seshan,
196 Notes to Pages 78–80

ed., Narratives, Routes and Intersections in Pre-Modern Asia (London: Rout-

ledge, 2017), 11.
20. Quoted in Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 234.
21. Theodore G. T. Pigeaud, ed. and trans., Java in the Fourteenth Century: A
Study in Cultural History: The Nagara-Kertagama by “Rakawi” Prapanca of
Majapahit, 1365 A.D., vol. 3 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 97.
22. Hermann Kulke, “State Formation and Social Integration in Pre-Islamic
South and Southeast Asia,” in Karashima Noboru and Hirosue Masashi,
eds., State Formation and Social Integration in Pre-modern South and South-
east Asia (Tokyo: The Toyo Bunko, 2017), 317–20.
23. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, 28, 34.
Also see S. J. Tambiah, World Conqueror & World Renouncer (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976).
24. Rush, Southeast Asia, https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/97801902
48765.003.0002 (accessed 12/5/2022).
25. Hendrik Spruyt, The World Imagined: Collective Beliefs and Political Order
in the Sinocentric, Islamic and Southeast Asian International Societies (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 259.
26. Andrew J. Coe and Scott Wolford, “East Asian History and International
Relations,” in Stephan Haggard and David C. Kang, eds., East Asia in the
World: Twelve Events that Shaped the Modern International Order (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 278.
27. David C. Kang and Kenneth W. Swope, “East Asian International Rela-
tions over the Longue Durée,” in Haggard and Kang, East Asia in the
World, 23.
28. On open and closed systems/regions, see Barry Buzan and Richard Little,
International Systems in World History (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000).
29. Rush, Southeast Asia, https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780190248765.
003.0002 (accessed 12/3/2022).
30. Lockard, Southeast Asia in World History, 15.
31. Leonard Andaya, “A History of Trade in the Sea of Melayu,” Itinerario,
vol. 24, no. 1 (2000): 88.
32. John N. Miksic and Geok Tian Goh, Ancient Southeast Asia (New York:
Routledge, 2017), 44.
33. Tom Hoogervorst, “Commercial Networks Connecting Southeast Asia
with the Indian Ocean,” Asian History, Oxford Research Encyclopedias,
December 22, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.
013.541 (accessed 12/4/2022).
34. Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean, vol. 2, 86.
35. Tansen Sen, “The Military Campaigns of Rajendra Chola and the Chola-
Srivijaya-China Triangle,” in Hermann Kulke, K. Kesavapany, and Vijay
Sakhuja, eds., Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa: Reflections on the Chola Naval
Expeditions to Southeast Asia (Singapore: ISEAS, 2009), 61–75.
 Notes to Pages 80–82 197

36. Rila Mukherjee, “The Indian Ocean World of Srivijaya,” in Kenneth R.

Hall, Suchandra Ghosh, Kaushik Gangopadhyay, and Rila Mukherjee,
eds., Cross-Cultural Networking in the Eastern Indian Ocean Realm, c. 100–
1800 (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2019), 178. Tambralingga may have at-
tacked Sri Lanka again in 1262.
37. Kenneth R. Hall and John K. Whitmore, “Southeast Asian Trade and the
Isthmian Struggle, 1000–1200,” in Kenneth R. Hall and John K. Whitmore,
eds., Explorations in Early Southeast Asian History (Ann Arbor: The University
of Michigan Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 1976), 303–40.
38. Rila Mukherjee, “Introduction: Bengal and the Northern Bay of Bengal,”
in Rila Mukherjee, ed., Pelagic Passageways: The Northern Bay of Bengal Be-
fore Colonialism (Delhi: Primus, 2011), 13.
39. Gang Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities and Socioeconomic Development,
c. 2100 B.C.–1900 A.D. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997), 9.
40. Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities and Socioeconomic Development, 69.
41. Michael Flecker, “The Bakau Wreck: An Early Example of Chinese Ship-
ping in Southeast Asia,” The International Journal of Nautical Archeology,
vol. 30, no. 2 (2001): 221.
42. Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean, vol. 1, 317.
43. Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean, vol. 1, 505.
44. Paul Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese: Studies in the Historical Geography of
the Malay Peninsula before A.D. 1500 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Ma-
laya Press, 1961), 14.
45. Fabrizia Baldissera, “The Mobility of People and Ideas on the Seas of
Ancient India,” in Philip de Souza and Pascal Arnaud, eds., The Sea in
History: The Ancient World (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press,2017), 558.
46. Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Dialogues between Southeast Asia and India: A
Necessary Reappraisal,” in Anna L. Dallapiccola and Anila Verghese, eds.,
India and Southeast Asia: Cultural Discourses (Mumbai: The K. R. Cama
Oriental Institute, 2017), 24–25.
47. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 127, 130.
48. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 16.
49. Richard Smith, “Trade and Commerce across Afro-Eurasia,” in Benjamin
Z. Kedar and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, eds., The Cambridge World His-
tory, vol. 5: Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conflict, 500 CE–1500 CE
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 239.
50. Our conception overlaps with that of Acri, who thinks of South/South-
east/East Asia as “a single interconnected network.” Andrea Acri, “Imag-
ining ‘Maritime Asia,’ ” in Andrea Acri, Kashshaf Ghani, Murari K. Jha,
and Sraman Mukherjee, eds., Imagining Asia(s): Networks, Actors, Sites
(Singapore: ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute, 2019), 37.
51. Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean, vol. 2, 467.
52. William C. Wohlforth, Stuart J. Kaufman, and Richard Little, “Introduc-
tion: Balance and Hierarchy in International Systems,” in Stuart J.
198 Notes to Pages 82–83

Kaufman, Richard Little, and William C. Wohlforth, eds., The Balance of

Power in World History (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 16–17.
53. Andrea Acri, Roger Blench, and Alexandra Landman, “Introduction: Re-
connecting Histories across the Indo-Pacific,” in Andrea Acri, Roger
Blench, and Alexandra Landman, eds., Spirits and Ships: Cultural Transfers
in Early Monsoon Asia (Singapore: ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute, 2017), 5.
54. Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Trading Ships of the South China Sea: Shipbuild-
ing Techniques and Their Role in the History of the Development of
Asian Trade Networks,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the
Orient, vol. 36, no. 3 (1993): 261–62.
55. Manguin, “Trading Ships of the South China Sea,” 262.
56. Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean, vol. 2, 37.
57. Paul Buell, “Qubilai’s Maritime Mongols,” Asian History, Oxford Re-
search Encyclopedias, July 30, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/acre-
fore/9780190277727.013.472 (accessed 12/5/2022); Tamara Bentley,
“Trade in East and South China Seas, 600 CE to 1800 CE,” Asian His-
tory, Oxford Research Encyclopedias, September 26, 2018, https://doi.
org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.66 (accessed 2/23/2024).
58. Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean, vol. 1, 289.
59. Wolters, Early Southeast Asia, 66.
60. Kenneth R. Hall, “Small Asian Nations in the Shadow of the Large:
Early Asian History through the Eyes of Southeast Asia,” Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 27, no. 1 (1984): 59.
61. The British were the first-ever maritime rival that China encountered in
these waters in the nineteenth century. Martin Stuart-Fox, A Short His-
tory of China and Southeast Asia: Tribute, Trade, and Influence (Crows Nest:
Allen & Unwin, 2003), 21.
62. Hall, “Small Asian Nations in the Shadow of the Large,” 64.
63. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, 37.
Wolters made this observation from the perspective of Sinic Dai Viet to-
ward its Indianized neighbors.
64. Wang Gungwu, China Reconnects: Joining a Deep-Rooted Past to a New
World Order (Singapore: World Scientific, 2019), Kindle Loc. 2596.
65. Angela Schottenhammer, “Imperial Maritime China,” Asian History, Ox-
ford Research Encyclopedias, May 23, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1093/
acrefore/9780190277727.013.209 (accessed 12/5/2022); Geoffrey C.
Gunn, History without Borders: The Making of an Asian World Region, 1000–
1800 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 9.
66. Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities and Socioeconomic Development, 54.
67. John N. Miksic, Singapore & the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300–1800 (Singa-
pore: NUS Press, 2013), 98; Schottenhammer, “Imperial Maritime
China.”
68. Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities and Socioeconomic Development, 71.
69. Schottenhammer, “Imperial Maritime China.”
 Notes to Pages 83–85 199

70. James A. Anderson, “The Outer Limits of Steppe Power: Mongol Excur-
sions in Southeast Asia,” in Timothy May and Michael Hope, eds., The
Mongol World (New York: Routledge, 2022), 874.
71. Wang Gungwu, “Ming Foreign Relations: Southeast Asia,” in Denis
Twitchett and John K. Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol.
8, part 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 302.
72. Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities and Socioeconomic Development, 71.
73. Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities and Socioeconomic Development, 55, 57.
74. Wang, China Reconnects, Kindle Loc. 2617.
75. Wolters, Early Southeast Asia, 67.
76. Charles Holcombe, The Genesis of East Asia, 221 B.C.–A.D. 907 (Hono-
lulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), 40.
77. Wang Gungwu, Renewal: The Chinese State and the New Global History
(Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2013), Kindle Loc. 274.
78. Hall, “Small Asian Nations in the Shadow of the Large,” 61.
79. Yuri Pines, The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China
and Its Imperial Legacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 35.
80. Wang Gungwu, “The Rhetoric of a Lesser Empire: Early Sung Relations
with Its Neighbors,” in Morris Rossabi, ed., China Among Equals: The
Middle Kingdom and its Neighbors, 10th–14th Centuries (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1983), 60.
81. Wang, China Reconnects, Kindle Loc. 2490.
82. Wang, “Chinese Tribute System,” in Ooi Keat Hin, ed., Southeast Asia: A
Historical Encyclopedia from Angkor Wat to East Timor (Santa Barbara: ABC
Clio, 2004), 352.
83. Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World (London: Profile, 2019), 8.
84. On the Mongols’ continental exploits, see Ayşe Zarakol, Before the West:
The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2022).
85. Thomas T. Allsen, The Steppe and the Sea: Pearls in the Mongol Empire
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 163.
86. Tansen Sen, “The Formation of Chinese Maritime Networks to South-
ern Asia, 1200–1450,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Ori-
ent, vol. 49, no. 4 (2006): 436.
87. It failed for other reasons, too, including China’s attention to the no-
madic continental threat from the north.
88. Edward L. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in Early Ming Dynasty,
1405–1433 (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006), 3.
89. Tansen Sen, “Diplomacy, Trade and the Quest for the Buddha’s Tooth:
The Yongle Emperor and Ming China’s South Asian Frontier,” in Craig
Clunas, Jessica Harrison-Hall, and Luk Yu-ping, eds., Ming China: Courts
and Contacts 1400–1450 (London: The British Museum, 2016), 26; and
Geoff Wade, “The Zheng He Voyages: A Reassessment,” Journal of the
Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 78, no. 1 (2005): 37–58.
200 Notes to Pages 86–88

90. Takeshi Hamashita, “The Tribute Trade System and Modern Asia,” in
A. J. H. Latham and Heita Kawakatsu, eds., Japanese Industrialization and
the Asian Economy (London: Routledge, 1994), 91–107.
91. Kenneth R. Hall, “Commodity Flows, Diaspora Networking, and Con-
tested Agency in the Eastern Indian Ocean, c. 1000–1500,” TRaNS:
Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia, vol. 4, no. 2 (2016):
406.
92. Robert Finlay, “The Treasure-Ships of Zheng He: Chinese Maritime
Imperialism in the Age of Discovery,” Terrae Incognitae, vol. 23, no. 1
(1991): 8.
93. Jan Wisseman Christie, “State Formation in Early Maritime Southeast
Asia: A Consideration of the Theories and Data,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-,
Land-en Volkenkunde, vol. 151, no. 2 (1995): 244.
94. Holcombe, The Genesis of East Asia, 101.
95. Holcombe, The Genesis of East Asia, 102.
96. Michael Vickery, “Champa Revisited,” in Tran Ky Phuong and Bruce M.
Lockhart, eds., The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art (Singapore:
NUS Press, 2011), 378.
97. Vickery, “Champa Revisited,” 394–407.
98. G. Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (Canberra: Australian
National University Press, 1975), 136.
99. Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia
(London: Macmillan, 1982), 20.
100. Michael W. Charney, “Warfare in Premodern Southeast Asia,” Asian
History, Oxford Research Encyclopedias, April 26, 2018, https://doi.
org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.238 (accessed 12/5/2022).
101. Miksic and Goh, Ancient Southeast Asia, 233.
102. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, 28.
103. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, vol. 1:
The Lands below the Winds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988),
123. While Reid made this argument for early modern Southeast Asia, it
probably holds true for classical Southeast Asia too.
104. There is limited literature on slavery in classical Southeast Asia, al-
though various forms of patron-client relations certainly existed. Miksic
and Goh, Ancient Southeast Asia, 247.
105. For the excerpt from the Ho-lo-tan ruler’s message to China, see O. W.
Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce: A Study of the Origins of Śrīvijaya
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 151.
106. Anderson, “The Outer Limits of Steppe Power,” 882.
107. Reid, A History of Southeast Asia, 43.
108. James P. Delgado, Khubilai Khan’s Lost Fleet: In Search of a Legendary Ar-
mada (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2008), 166.
109. Paul D. Buell, “Maritime Silk Road: The Mongols and the Indian
Ocean,” in May and Hope, The Mongol World, 460.
 Notes to Pages 88–91 201

110. Hall, “Small Asian Nations in the Shadow of the Large,” 63.
111. Miksic, Singapore & the Silk Road of the Sea, 66.
112. Miksic, Singapore & the Silk Road of the Sea, 112.
113. Miksic and Goh, Ancient Southeast Asia, 297.
114. Hermann Kulke, “Śrīvijaya Revisited: Reflections on State Formation of
a Southeast Asian Thalassocracy,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-
Orient, vol. 102 (2016): 45–96.
115. Manguin, “Early States of Insular Southeast Asia”; Paul Pelliot, Notes on
Marco Polo II (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1963), 839.
116. John N. Miksic, “Śrīvijaya,” in Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A. Bayly, and Wal-
ter Scheidel, eds., The Oxford World History of Empire, vol. 2: The History
of Empires (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 415.
117. Miksic, Singapore & the Silk Road of the Sea, 144.
118. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, 45.
119. Wang Gungwu, “The Nanhai Trade: A Study of the Early History of
Chinese Trade in the South China Sea,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch
of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 31, part 2, no. 181 (1958): 114.
120. Derek Heng, “Southeast Asian Trade in a Global Perspective, from An-
tiquity to the Modern Era,” Asian History, Oxford Research Encyclope-
dias, June 20, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.
013.540 (accessed 12/4/2022).
121. Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, 2nd ed. (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 144.
122. Miksic, Singapore & the Silk Road of the Sea, 32.
123. Hamashita, “The Tribute Trade System and Modern Asia,” 92.
124. Pines, The Everlasting Empire, 35; Miksic, Singapore & the Silk Road of the
Sea, 32.
125. Schottenhammer, “Imperial Maritime China.”
126. Chang Pin-tsun, “The Rise of Chinese Mercantile Power in Maritime
Southeast Asia, c. 1400–1700,” Crossroads, vol. 6 (October 2012): 209.
127. Kenneth R. Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and So-
cietal Development, 100–1500 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 34.
128. Schottenhammer, “Imperial Maritime China.”
129. Tansen Sen, “Early China and the Indian Ocean Networks,” in de Souza
and Arnaud, The Sea in History, 546.
130. Sen, “Early China and the Indian Ocean Networks,” 546.
131. S. A. M. Adshead, China in World History, 3rd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2000), 116.
132. Gang Deng, The Premodern Chinese Economy: Structural Equilibrium and
Capitalist Sterility (London: Routledge, 1999), 316.
133. Geoff Wade, “Chinese Engagement with the Indian Ocean during the
Song, Yuan, and Ming Dynasties (Tenth to Sixteenth Centuries),” in Mi-
chael Pearson, ed., Trade, Circulation, and Flow in the Indian Ocean World
(New York: Palgrave, 2015), 75.
202 Notes to Pages 91–94

134. Angela Schottenhammer, “China’s Emergence as a Maritime Power,” in

John W. Chaffee and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of
China, vol. 5, part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 525.
135. Schottenhammer, “China’s Emergence as a Maritime Power,” 516–17.
136. Robert S. Wicks, Money, Markets, and Trade in Early Southeast Asia: The
Development of Indigenous Monetary Systems to AD 1400 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Southeast Asia Program, 1992), 24.
137. Wicks, Money, Markets, and Trade in Early Southeast Asia, 25–26.
138. Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynas-
ties (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2010), 219; Stuart-Fox, A Short
History of China and Southeast Asia, 64; Bentley, “Trade in East and South
China Seas.”
139. Gakusho Nakajima, “The Naval Power of the Yuan Dynasty,” in Mi-
chael Balard, ed., The Sea in History: The Medieval World (Woodbridge:
Boydell Press, 2017), 821.
140. Buell, “Qubilai’s Maritime Mongols.”
141. Anderson, “The Outer Limits of Steppe Power,” 880.
142. Vu Hong Lien, “The Mongol Navy: Kublai Khan’s Invasions in Dai
Viet and Champa,” Working Paper no. 25, Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre,
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, June 2017, https://www.iseas.edu.
sg/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/nscwps25.pdf (accessed 12/6/2022).
143. Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean, vol. 2, 215.
144. Dreyer, Zheng He, 1.
145. Dreyer, Zheng He, 1.
146. Angela Schottenhammer, “China’s Rise and Retreat as a Maritime
Power,” in Robert J. Anthony and Angela Schottenhammer, eds., Beyond
the Silk Roads: New Discourses on China’s Role in East Asian Maritime His-
tory (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017), 204.
147. Schottenhammer, “China’s Emergence as a Maritime Power,” 521.
148. Warren I. Cohen, East Asia at the Center: Four Thousand Years of Engage-
ment with the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 164.
149. Tansen Sen, “Maritime Southeast Asia between South Asia and China to
the Sixteenth Century,” TRaNS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of
Southeast Asia, vol. 2, no. 1 (2014): 43.
150. O. W. Wolters, The Fall of Śrīvijaya in Malay History (Kuala Lumpur: Ox-
ford University Press, 1970), 176.
151. J. Kathirithamby-Wells, “Introduction: An Overview,” in J. Kathirith-
amby-Wells and John Villiers, eds., The Southeast Asian Port and Polity:
Rise and Demise (Singapore: Singapore University Press), 2.
152. Anthony Reid, A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads (Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 30.
153. Sen, “Early China and the Indian Ocean Networks,” 537.
154. Stephen F. Dale, “ “Silk Road, Cotton Road or . . . Indo-Chinese Trade
in Pre-European Times,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 43, no. 1 (2009): 82.
 Notes to Pages 94–96 203

155. John Guy, Woven Cargoes: Indian Textiles in the East (New York: Thames
and Hudson, 1998), 55.
156. Dale, “Silk Road, Cotton Road or . . . Indo-Chinese Trade in Pre-European
Times,” 80.
157. Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean, vol. 1, 512.
158. For useful reviews of these debates, see Andrea Acri, “ ‘Local’ vs. ‘Cos-
mopolitan’ in the Study of Premodern Southeast Asia,” Suvannabhumi:
Multi-disciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 9, no. 1 (2017):
7–52; and Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Introduction,” in Pierre-Yves Man-
guin, A. Mani, and Geoff Wade, eds., Early Interactions between South and
Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange (Singapore: Institute
of Southeast Asian Studies, 2012).
159. Monica L. Smith, “ ‘Indianization’ from the Indian Point of View: Trade
and Cultural Contacts with Southeast Asia in the Early First Millen-
nium C.E.,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol.
42, no. 1 (1999): 1–26; Susan Bayly, “Imagining ‘Greater India’: French
and Indian Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode,” Modern Asian
Studies, vol. 38, no. 3 (2004): 703–44. The Indian advocates of the
Greater India Society were also trying to compensate for India’s colo-
nial status at that time by envisioning Indian empires in Southeast Asia
in the past.
160. J. C. van Leur, “On Early Asian Trade,” in J. C. van Leur, ed., Indonesian
Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History (The Hague:
W. van Hoeve Ltd., 1955), 95.
161. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 535.
162. Berenice Bellina, “Beads, Social Change and Interaction between India
and South-east Asia,” Antiquity, vol. 77, no. 296 (June 2003): 285–97;
Miksic and Goh, Ancient Southeast Asia, 357.
163. However, a recent study supporting this view was based on the study
of the genome of just one Southeast Asian individual, who showed con-
siderable Indian admixture. Piya Changmai, Ron Pinhasi, Michael
Pietrusewsky, et al., “Ancient DNA from Protohistoric Period Cambodia
Indicates that South Asians Admixed with Local Populations as Early
as 1st–3rd Centuries CE,” Scientific Reports, vol. 12, no. 22507 (2022),
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-26799-3 (accessed 1/5/2023).
164. Piya Changmai et al., “Indian Genetic Heritage in Southeast Asian Pop-
ulations,” PLOS Genetics, February 17, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1371/
journal.pgen.1010036 (accessed 12/7/2022).
165. Stephen A. Murphy and H. Leedom Lefferts, “Globalizing Indian Reli-
gions and Southeast Asian Localisms: Incentives for the Adoption of
Buddhism and Brahmanism in First Millennium CE Southeast Asia,” in
Tamar Hodos, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globaliza-
tion (London: Routledge, 2017), 770, 784.
166. Miksic and Goh, Ancient Southeast Asia, 397–401.
204 Notes to Pages 96–99

167. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, 54.
168. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. 2, 107.
169. Tom Hoogervorst, “Southeast Asia in the Ancient Indian Ocean World:
Combining Historical Linguistic and Archaeological Approaches” (D.
Phil. diss., University of Oxford, 2012), 47; Bérénice Bellina, “Southeast
Asia and the Early Maritime Silk Road,” in Guy, Lost Kingdoms, 24.
170. John Guy, “Introducing Early Southeast Asia,” in John Guy, ed., Lost
Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia (New York:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014), 5.
171. Miksic and Goh, Ancient Southeast Asia.
172. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 133.
173. Rush, Southeast Asia, https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780190248765.
003.0002 (accessed 12/7/2022).
174. Karashima Noboru and Hirosue Masashi, “Coordinator’s Report” on
the Second International Symposium of Inter-Asia Research Networks
(March 8–9, 2014) on “State Formation and Social Integration in Pre-
modern South and Southeast Asia: A Comparative Study of Asian Soci-
ety,” Modern Asian Studies Review, vol. 5 (2014): 50, http://www.
toyo-bunko.or.jp/research/e-journal/MASR05.pdf (accessed 12/7/2022).
175. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 11, 257.
176. Hermann Kulke, “The Concept of Cultural Convergence Revisited: Re-
flections on India’s Early Influence in Southeast Asia,” in Upinder Singh
and Parul Pandya Dhar, eds., Asian Encounters: Exploring Connected Histo-
ries (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 10.
177. Pierre Yves-Manguin, “Protohistoric and Early Historic Exchange in
the Eastern Indian Ocean: A Re-evaluation of Current Paradigms,” in
Schottenhammer, Early Global Interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean
World, vol. 1, 99–120.
178. Acri, “ ‘Local’ vs. ‘Cosmopolitan’ in the Study of Premodern Southeast
Asia,” 24.
179. Daud Ali, “The Early Inscriptions of Indonesia and the Problem of the
Sanskrit Cosmopolis,” in Manguin, Mani, and Wade, Early Interactions
between South and Southeast Asia, 277–97.
180. Manguin, “Introduction,” xvi, xvii.
181. Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean, vol. 1, 464.
182. Acri, “ ‘Local’ vs. ‘Cosmopolitan’ in the Study of Premodern Southeast
Asia,” 20.
183. Ali, “The Early Inscriptions of Indonesia and the Problem of the San-
skrit Cosmopolis,” 282.
184. Acharya, Constructing Global Order, 42.
185. Kulke, “State Formation and Social Integration in Pre-Islamic South
and Southeast Asia,” 307.
186. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 234.
187. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 274.
 Notes to Pages 99–101 205

188. Manguin, “Protohistoric and Early Historic Exchange in the Eastern

Indian Ocean”; van Leur, “On Early Asian Trade,” 98.
189. Johannes Bronkhorst, “The Spread of Sanskrit in Southeast Asia,” in
Manguin, Mani, and Wade, Early Interactions between South and Southeast
Asia, 263–75.
190. Johann P. Arnason, “State Formation and Empire Building,” in Benja-
min Z. Kedar and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, eds., The Cambridge World
History, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 502.
191. K. T. S. Sarao, The Decline of Buddhism in India: A Fresh Perspective (New
Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2012); Miksic and Goh, Ancient South-
east Asia, 151.
192. Manguin, “Early States of Insular Southeast Asia.”
193. J. G. de Casparis and I. W. Mabbett, “Religion and Popular Beliefs of
Southeast Asia before c. 1500,” in Nicholas Tarling, ed., The Cambridge
History of Southeast Asia, vol. 1: From Early Times to c. 1800 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 306.
194. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 235.
195. Michael D. Coe, “The Khmer Empire,” in Bang, Bayly, and Scheidel,
The Oxford World History of Empire, vol. 2, 437.
196. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 222.
197. Guy, “Introducing Early Southeast Asia,” in Guy, Lost Kingdoms, 8.
198. For examples of such politico-literary localizations in eleventh–
fourteenth-century Java, see John K. Whitmore, “Kingship, Time, and
Space: Historiography in Southeast Asia,” in Sarah Foot and Chase F.
Robinson, eds., The Oxford History of Historical Writing, 400–1400, vol. 2
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 107–10.
199. Prior to this, Indic rulers, including the Mauryan emperor Aśoka (~268–
232 b.c.e.), had not used Sanskrit to express political power. Pollock,
The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 69.
200. Vickery, “Champa Revisited,” 366.
201. Richard Salomon, Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in
Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Other Indo-Aryan Languages (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 92.
202. Frederick M. Asher, “India Abroad: Evidence for Ancient Indian Maritime
Activity,” in Matthew Adam Cobb, ed., The Indian Ocean Trade in Antiquity:
Political, Cultural, and Economic Impacts (New York: Routledge, 2019), 159.
203. Acri, “ ‘Local’ vs. ‘Cosmopolitan’ in the Study of Premodern Southeast
Asia,” 17.
204. Murphy and Lefferts, “Globalizing Indian Religions and Southeast
Asian Localisms,” 782–83.
205. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 273–74. By
contrast, the Vietnamese wrote in Chinese characters, even if they were
“always pronounced in Vietnamese.” See Wolters, History, Culture, and
Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, 72.
206 Notes to Pages 101–104

206. Robert L. Brown, The Dvaˉravatī Wheels of Law and the Indianization of
South East Asia (Brill: Leiden, 1996), 75–76, 159–60, 169–74.
207. Kulke and Rothermund, A History of India, 160.
208. Andrea Acri, “The Place of Nusantara in Sanskritic Buddhist Cosmopo-
lis,” TRaNS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia, vol. 6,
no. 2 (2018): 145, 148.
209. Michael Jacq-Hergoulac’h, The Malay Peninsula: Crossroads of the Mari-
time Silk Road, trans. Victoria Hobson (Brill: Leiden, 2002), 95.
210. Holcombe, The Genesis of East Asia, 102.
211. David Henley, “Introduction: Seasons and Civilizations,” in David Hen-
ley and Nira Wickramasinghe, eds., Monsoon Asia: A Reader on South and
Southeast Asia (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2023), 33.
212. Kulke and Rothermund, A History of India, 158–61.
213. Peter Sharrock, “Heruka-Mandalas across Maritime Asia,” in Andrea
Acri and Peter Sharrock, eds., The Creative South: Buddhist and Hindu
Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia, vol. 1 (Singapore: ISEAS—Yusof Ishak
Institute, 2022), 128.
214. Damian Evans, Christophe Pottier, Roland Fletcher, and Michael Bar-
betti, “A Comprehensive Archaeological Map of the World’s Largest
Preindustrial Settlement Complex at Angkor, Cambodia,” Proceedings of
the National Academy of Science, vol. 104, no. 36 (2007): 14277–82.
215. William Dalrymple, “Monumental Angkor Wat and the Lost Ruins of
Cambodia,” Financial Times, August 7, 2022, https://www.ft.com/
content/7611e804-6bc6-41d0-bb74-3bf13ecc83c0 (accessed 12/7/2022).
216. Colin Renfrew, “Introduction: Peer Polity Interaction and Socio-political
Change,” in Colin Renfrew and John F. Cherry, eds., Peer Polity Interaction
and Socio-Political Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 1–18.
217. Rush, Southeast Asia, https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780190248765.
003.0002 (accessed 12/9/2022).
218. Lockard, Southeast Asia in World History, 28.
219. Momoko Shiro, “ ‘Mandala Champa’ Seen from Chinese Sources,” in
Tran and Lockhart, The Cham of Vietnam, 121; Vickery, “Champa Revis-
ited,” 372–73.
220. Tran Quoc Vuong, “Viet-Cham Cultural Contacts,” in Tran and Lock-
hart, The Cham of Vietnam, 274.
221. Holcombe, The Genesis of East Asia, 163.
222. Rush, Southeast Asia, https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780190248765.
003.0002 (accessed 12/9/2022).
223. Whitmore, “Cultural Accommodation and Competition on the
Champa/Viet Coast Over Two Millennia,” in Hall, Ghosh, Gangopad-
hyay, and Mukherjee, Cross-Cultural Networking in the Eastern Indian
Ocean Realm, 231, 233.
224. Vickery, “Champa Revisited,” 376.
 Notes to Pages 104–110 207

225. Whitmore, “Cultural Accommodation and Competition on the

Champa/Viet Coast Over Two Millennia,” 247–48.
226. Even then, a much-diminished Champa polity continued to exist until
1832.
227. Holcombe, The Genesis of East Asia, 102.
228. Miksic and Goh, Ancient Southeast Asia, 436.
229. Dreyer, Zheng He, 31, 170.
230. Andaya and Andaya, A History of Malaysia, 25. Their association with
“sea nomads” of Southeast Asia like the Orang Laut was crucial, for
such groups were able to protect trade and form navies as well as engage
in acts of piracy.
231. Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Trading Ships of the South China Sea,” 274.
232. Charles A. Kupchan, “The Normative Foundations of Hegemony and
the Coming Challenge to Pax Americana,” Security Studies, vol. 23, no. 2
(2014): 223.
233. Nicholas Tarling, “Status and Security in Early Southeast Asian State
Systems,” in Ooi Keat Gin and Hoang Ahn Tuan, eds., Early Modern
Southeast Asia (New York: Routledge, 2016), 20.

Chapter Four. The Rise of the Indo-Pacific

and the Return of Geopolitics
1. Aaron L. Friedberg, “What’s at Stake in the Indo-Pacific,” Proceedings
(USNI), Vol. 147/10/1,424 (October 2021), https://www.usni.org/maga
zines/proceedings/2021/october/whats-stake-indo-pacific.
2. The White House, “Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States,” February
2022, 4, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/U.S.
-Indo-Pacific-Strategy.pdf (accessed 2/23/2024).
3. Wang Jisi, “China in the Middle,” The American Interest, February 2,
2015, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/02/02/china-in-the
-middle/ (accessed 2/23/2024).
4. “Science of Military Strategy (2013),” 18–19 and 309. The full text of this
document, which was prepared by China’s Academy of Military Sciences,
was translated into English and published under the auspices of Project
Everest and the China Aerospace Studies Institute on February 8, 2021,
https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/CASI/Display/Article/2485204/plas-sci
ence-of-military-strategy-2013/ (accessed 2/23/2024).
5. See Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape
Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), Kindle
Loc. 530. Steve Chan, “China and Thucydides’s Trap,” in Huiyun Feng
and Kai He, eds., China’s Challenges and International Order Transition: Be-
yond Thucydides’s Trap (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020),
42. Chan’s is one of best academic critiques of the Thucydides Trap.
208 Notes to Pages 110–113

6. The Department of Defense, “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report: Prepared-

ness, Partnerships, and Promoting a Networked Region,” June 1, 2019, 8,
https://media.defense.gov/2019/Jul/01/2002152311/-1/-1/1/DEPART
M E N T- O F - D E F E N S E - I N D O - PA C I F I C - S T R AT E G Y- R E
PORT-2019.PDF (accessed 2/23/2024). The phrase “reorder the region”
is included at the beginning of the document in a message from Patrick
Shanahan, then acting secretary of defense.
7. Barry Posen, “Command of the Commons: The Military Foundations of
U.S. Hegemony,” International Security, vol. 28, no. 1 (2003): 7, 46; Geof-
frey Till, “The Changing Dynamics of Seapower and Concepts of Bat-
tle,” in Jo Inge Bekkevold and Geoffrey Till, eds., International Order at
Sea: How It Is Challenged, How It Is Maintained (London: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2016), 184.
8. Phillip Inman, “China Overtakes US in World Trade,” The Guardian,
February 11, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/feb/11/
china-worlds-largest-trading-nation (accessed 2/23/2024).
9. ASEAN, “ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific,” June 23, 2019, https://
asean.org/speechandstatement/asean-outlook-on-the-indo-pacific/ (ac-
cessed 2/23/2024).
10. Evan A. Laksmana, “Whose Centrality? ASEAN and the Quad in the
Indo-Pacific,” Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, vol. 3, no. 5 (2020): 106–17.
11. See Seng Tan, “Consigned to Hedge: South-east Asia and America’s ‘Free
and Open Indo-Pacific’ Strategy,” International Affairs, vol. 96, no. 1
(2020): 131–48.
12. Amitav Acharya, “The Myth of ASEAN Centrality?,” Contemporary
Southeast Asia, vol. 39, no. 2 (2017): 273–79.
13. Amitav Acharya, ASEAN and Regional Order: Revisiting Security Commu-
nity in Southeast Asia (New York: Routledge, 2021), 133.
14. Imperial Japan was perhaps the closest that any Asian power has come to
achieving maritime regional hegemony. However, this period was fleet-
ing (1942–1945) and coincided with a global war.
15. Robert Gilpin, War & Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), 144.
16. Arguably, the inclusion of the United States is itself a manifestation of
the openness of the regional order in maritime Asia.
17. It was perhaps Panikkar, the Indian scholar-diplomat, who popularized
this expression. K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of
the Vasco da Gama Epoch of Asian History, 1498–1945 (London: George
Allen & Unwin, 1953).
18. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and
Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 244.
19. Rolf Strootman, “Introduction: Maritime Empires in World History,” in
Rolf Strootman, Floris van den Eijnde, and Roy van Wijk, eds., Empires of
the Sea: Maritime Power Networks in World History (Leiden: Brill, 2020),
 Notes to Pages 113–114 209

17. For a broader critique of Kennedy’s Eurocentrism, see Ayşe Zarakol,

Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2022), 128–31.
20. Philippe Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean: A Global History, vol. 2
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 666; Ronald Findlay
and Kevin O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy
in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007),
156.
21. Ashin Das Gupta, Malabar in Asian Trade, 1740–1800 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1967), 11, 18.
22. Kevin O’Rourke, “Politics and Trade: Lessons from Past Globalisations,”
Bruegel Essay and Lecture Series, Brussels, 2009, 13, https://www.brue
gel.org/2009/01/politics-and-trade-lessons-from-past-globalisations/
(accessed 2/23/2024).
23. James Belich, John Darwin, and Chris Wickham, “Introduction: The
Prospect of Global History,” in James Belich, John Darwin, Margret
Frenz, and Chris Wickham, eds., The Prospect of Global History (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016), 7–8.
24. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003), 11. Also
see Anjana Singh, “Early European Mercantilism and Indian Ocean
Trade,” in Strootman, van den Eijnde, and van Wijk, Empires of the Sea,
252; Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman, International Order in Diversity:
War, Trade, and Rule in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2015); and John M. Hobson, Multicultural Origins of the Global
Economy: Beyond the Western-Centric Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2021).
25. Singh, “Early European Mercantilism and Indian Ocean Trade,” 252;
Phillips and Sharman, International Order in Diversity; and Hobson, Mul-
ticultural Origins of the Global Economy.
26. Barry Buzan and George Lawson, The Global Transformation: History, Mo-
dernity, and the Making of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015).
27. Michael North, A World History of the Seas: From Harbour to Horizon
(London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 214.
28. Gerald S. Graham, The Politics of Naval Supremacy: Studies in British Mari-
time Ascendancy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 44.
29. Derek McDougall, “Regional Organizations and Geopolitics in the In-
dian Ocean,” Asian History, Oxford Research Encyclopedias, November
29, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.681.
30. Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Soci-
ety, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present, 4th ed. (New York:
Routledge, 2018), 178.
31. Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global
Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 274.
210 Notes to Pages 114–116

32. Bose, A Hundred Horizons, 27.

33. Patrick O’Brien, “The Myth of Anglophone Succession,” New Left Re-
view, vol. 24 (November/December 2003), https://newleftreview.org/is
sues/ii24/articles/patrick-o-brien-the-myth-of-anglophone-succession
(accessed 2/23/2024).
34. Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke, “Free Trade, Industrialization, and the
Global Economy, 1815–1914,” in N. A. M. Rodger, ed. (and General Edi-
tor: Christian Buchet), The Sea in History: The Modern World (Wood-
bridge: The Boydell Press, 2017), 103–14.
35. Andrew Lambert, “The Pax Britannica and the Advent of Globalization,”
in Daniel Moran and James A. Russell, eds., Maritime Strategy and Global
Order: Markets, Resources, Security (Washington, DC: Georgetown Uni-
versity Press, 2016), Kindle Loc. 217.
36. Ian Clark, Hegemony in International Society (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2011), 104.
37. Lambert, “The Pax Britannica and the Advent of Globalization,” Kindle
Loc. 222, 271.
38. Clark, Hegemony in International Society, 118.
39. Daniel H. Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis
to the Global Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 149.
40. O’Brien, “The Myth of Anglophone Succession.”
41. For a broader discussion on some of these themes, see Jeanne Moore-
field, “Crashing the Cathedral: Historical Reassessments of Twentieth-
Century International Relations,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 81,
no. 1 (2020): 131–55.
42. Marc-William Palen, “Empire by Imitation? US Economic Imperialism
within a British World System,” in Martin Thomas and Andrew Thomp-
son, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198713
197.013.12 (accessed 2/23/2024). Also see Peter J. Hugill, “The American
Challenge to British Hegemony, 1861–1947,” Geographical Review, vol.
99, no. 3 (2009): 403–25.
43. Katherine C. Epstein, “The Sinews of Globalization,” in Robert L.
Blower and Andrew Preston, eds., The Cambridge History of America and
the World, vol. 3: 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2021), 46.
44. William R. Thompson, “The Evolution of a Great Power Rivalry: The
Anglo-American Case,” in William R. Thompson, ed., Great Power Rival-
ries (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 201–21; Rob-
ert S. Ross, “Nationalism, Geopolitics, and Naval Expansionism from the
Nineteenth Century to the Rise of China,” Naval War College Review, vol.
71, no. 4 (2018): 25.
45. Jon Sumida, “New Insights from Old Books: The Case of Alfred Thayer
Mahan,” Naval War College Review, vol. 54, no. 3 (2001): 104.
 Notes to Pages 116–119 211

46. Harold Sprout and Margaret Sprout, The Rise of American Naval Power,
1776–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).
47. Andrew Lambert, Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires
and the Conflict That Made the Modern World (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2018), 303, 305.
48. Epstein, “The Sinews of Globalization,” 58. Also see Hugill, “The Ameri-
can Challenge to British Hegemony, 1861–1947.”
49. O’Brien, “The Myth of Anglophone Succession.”
50. Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Suprem-
acy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), 6–7.
51. Christopher T. Sanders, America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Em-
pire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), https://doi.org/10.1093/
acprof:oso/9780198296874.003.0001 (accessed 2/23/2024).
52. Gretchen Heefner, “Overseas Bases and the Expansion of US Military
Presence,” in David C. Engerman, Max Paul Friedman, and Melani
McAlister, eds., The Cambridge History of America and the World, vol. 4:
1945 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 55.
53. Lambert, Seapower States, 307.
54. Norman Friedman, Seapower as Strategy: Navies and National Interests (An-
napolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001), 203.
55. On these and other roles of sea power, see Bruce A. Elleman, Principles of
Maritime Power (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).
56. Buchet, “General Conclusion,” in Rodger, and Buchet, The Sea in History,
764.
57. Colin S. Gray, “The Sea and the Soviet Empire,” in Rodger and Buchet,
The Sea in History, 592.
58. Lambert, Seapower States, 312.
59. Friedman, Seapower as Strategy, 181.
60. James A. Russell, “The Indian Ocean,” in Moran and Russell, Maritime
Strategy and Global Order, Kindle Loc. 4791.
61. Phillip Darby, British Defence Policy East of Suez, 1947–1968 (London:
Oxford University Press, 1973).
62. Russell, “The Indian Ocean,” Kindle Loc. 4704.
63. Peter H. Sand, United States and Britain in Diego Garcia: The Future of a
Controversial Base (New York: Palgrave, 2009); David Vine, Island of
Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
64. Friedman, Seapower as Strategy, 197.
65. Lambert, Seapower States, 329.
66. Jeremy Black, “Looking to the Future,” in Rodger and Buchet, The Sea in
History, 720.
67. Carla Norrlof, America’s Global Advantage: US Hegemony and International
Cooperation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 17, 180–81
(emphasis added).
212 Notes to Pages 119–121

68. Steven Haines, “New Navies and Maritime Powers,” in Rodger and Bu-
chet, The Sea in History, 87.
69. Lambert, Seapower States, 328–29.
70. See note 7 above. Also see Barry R. Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for
U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 63–64.
71. Paul Kennedy, “The Eagle Has Landed,” Financial Times, February 2, 2002, 1.
72. James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, Chinese Naval Strategy in the 21st
Century: The Turn to Mahan (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1.
73. Hu Bo, “China in a Multipolar World,” in Paul Kennedy and Evan Wil-
son, eds., Navies in Multipolar Worlds: From the Age of Sail to the Present
(New York: Routledge, 2021), 223.
74. Tim Winter, The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2022), 141–83; Nadège Rolland, China’s Eur-
asian Century: Political and Strategic Implications of the Belt and Road Initia-
tive (Seattle: The National Bureau of Asian Research, 2017).
75. Mingjiang Li, “Southeast Asia through Chinese Eyes: A Strategic Back-
yard?,” in Donald K. Emmerson, ed., The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast
Asia and China in the 21st Century (Stanford: Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-
Pacific Research Center, 2020), 111.
76. Friedberg, “What’s at Stake in the Indo-Pacific.”
77. Angela Schottenhammer, “Introductory Remarks: What Is the ‘Indo-Pa-
cific’?,” Crossroads: Studies on the History of Exchange Relations in the East
Asian World, October 2017, 89, https://www.ostasien-verlag.de/
zeitschriften/crossroads/cr/pdf/CR_16_2017_083-097_Schottenhammer.
pdf (accessed 2/23/2024).
78. Lambert, “The Pax Britannica and the Advent of Globalization,” 6; Lam-
bert, Seapower States, 317.
79. Posen, Restraint, 18. On the contribution of Canada and Mexico for
America’s global position, see Julián Castro-Rea, “Asymmetric Interde-
pendence: North America’s Political Economy,” in Zak Cope and Im-
manuel Ness, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Economic Imperialism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2022), https://doi.org//10.1093/ox
fordhb/9780197527085.013.41 (accessed 2/23/2024).
80. David C. Gompert, Sea Power and American Interests in the Western Pacific
(Santa Monica: RAND, 2013), 157.
81. Gompert, Sea Power and American Interests in the Western Pacific, 68 (em-
phasis original).
82. William J. Norris, “Geostrategic Implications of China’s Twin Economic
Challenges,” Discussion Paper, Council on Foreign Relations, June 2017;
and “China’s ‘Dual-Circulation’ Strategy Means Relying Less on For-
eigners,” The Economist, November 5, 2020.
83. Markus Brunnermeier, Rush Doshi, and Harold James, “Beijing’s Bis-
marckian Ghosts: How Great Powers Compete Economically,” The
Washington Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 3 (2018): 161–76.
 Notes to Pages 121–123 213

84. United States Census Bureau, “Top Trading Partners—May 2022,” n.d.,
https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/highlights/toppartners.
html (accessed 2/23/2024); and National Bureau of Statistics of China,
“China Statistical Yearbook,” 2019, https://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/ndsj/
2019/indexeh.htm (accessed 2/23/2024).
85. William R. Thompson, American Global Pre-Eminence: The Development and
Erosion of Systemic Leadership (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
86. See Yuen Foong Khong, “Power as Prestige in World Politics,” Interna-
tional Affairs, vol. 95, no. 1 (2019): 119–42. For a general discussion of
status in great power rivalries, see T. V. Paul, Deborah Welch Larson, and
William C. Wohlforth, eds., Status in World Politics (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2014).
87. Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World, 7.
88. Fritz Bartel, “The Illusions of the United States’ Great Power Politics
after the Cold War,” in Engerman, Friedman, and McAlister, The Cam-
bridge History of America and the World, vol. 4, 537.
89. Ooi Kee Beng, The Eurasian Core and Its Edges: Dialogue with Wang
Gungwu on the History of the World (Singapore: Institute of Southeast
Asian Studies, 2015), 214.
90. Wang Gungwu, “China, ASEAN, and the New Maritime Silk Road,”
ThinkChina, November 16, 2021, https://www.thinkchina.sg/wang
-gungwu-china-asean-and-new-maritime-silk-road (accessed 2/23/2024).
91. Ooi Kee Beng, The Eurasian Core and Its Edges, 159–67.
92. Graham Allison, Robert D. Blackwill, and Ali Wayne, Lee Kuan Yew: The
Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (Cam-
bridge: The MIT Press, 2013), Kindle Loc. 244.
93. The White House, “U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific,” Jan-
uary 5, 2021, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/up
loads/2021/01/IPS-Final-Declass.pdf (accessed 2/24/2024).
94. The White House, “Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States,” 5 (em-
phasis added).
95. “Excerpts from the Pentagon’s Plan: ‘Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New
Rival,’ ” New York Times, March 8, 1992, sec. 1, p. 14 (emphasis added).
96. “Excerpts from the Pentagon’s Plan.”
97. U.S. Department of Defense, “Quadrennial Defense Review Report,”
September 30, 2001, 2 (note 1), https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/
Documents/quadrennial/QDR2001.pdf?ver=AFts7axkH2zWUHncRd8y
Ug%3D%3D (accessed 2/23/2024).
98. For an important Australian perspective, see Rory Medcalf, Contest for the
Indo-Pacific: Why China Won’t Map the Future (Carlton: Black Inc., 2020).
99. Manjeet S. Pardesi, “The Indo-Pacific: A ‘New’ Region or the Return of His-
tory?,” Australian Journal of International Affairs, vol. 74, no. 2 (2020): 124–46.
100. Nina Silove, “The Pivot before the Pivot: U.S. Strategy to Preserve the
Power Balance in Asia,” International Security, vol. 40, no. 4 (2016): 45–88.
214 Notes to Pages 123–125

101. Posen, “Command of the Commons,” 7.

102. Evan Braden Montgomery, “Contested Primacy in the Western Pacific:
China’s Rise and the Future of U.S. Power Projection,” International
Security, vol. 38, no. 4 (2014): 115–49.
103. Eric Heginbotham et al., The U.S.-China Military Scorecard: Forces, Geog-
raphy, and the Evolving Balance of Power, 1996–2017 (Santa Monica:
RAND, 2015).
104. Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson, “Balancing on Land and at Sea:
Do States Ally Against the Leading Global Power?,” International Secu-
rity, vol. 35, no. 1 (2010): 17. Also see William R. Thompson, “Status
Conflict, Hierarchies, and Interpretation Dilemmas,” in T. V. Paul, Deb-
orah Welch Larson, and William C. Wohlforth, eds., Status in World Pol-
itics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 219–45.
105. Hu Bo, Chinese Maritime Power in the 21st Century: Strategic Planning,
Policy and Predictions, trans. Zhang Yanpei, ed. Geoffrey Till (New York:
Routledge, 2020), 191.
106. You Ji, “The Indian Ocean: A Grand Sino-Indian Game of ‘Go,’ ” in David
Brewster, ed., India and China at Sea: Competition for Naval Dominance in the
Indian Ocean (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), https://doi.
org//10.1093/oso/9780199479337.003.0006 (accessed 2/23/2024).
107. Hailin Ye, “The Strategic Landscape of South Asia and Indian Ocean
Region,” in Rong Wang and Cuiping Zhu, eds., Annual Report on the De-
velopment of International Relations in the Indian Ocean Region (2014)
(Heidelberg: Springer, 2015), 27–40.
108. Black, “Looking to the Future,” 728.
109. Hedley Bull, “Sea Power and Political Influence,” Adelphi Papers, vol. 16,
no. 122 (1976): 9.
110. For details, see Acharya, ASEAN and Regional Order.
111. There is a vast literature on America’s postwar hub-and-spokes system.
See Christopher Hemmer and Peter J. Katzenstein, “Why Is There No
NATO in Asia? Collective Identity, Regionalism, and the Origins of
Multilateralism,” International Organization, vol. 56, no. 3 (2002): 575–
607; Victor D. Cha, “Powerplay: Origins of the U.S. Alliance System in
Asia,” International Security, vol. 34, no. 3 (2009/2010): 158–96;
Amitav Acharya, “Norm Subsidiarity and Regional Orders: Sovereignty,
Regionalism, and Rule-Making in the Third World,” International Stud-
ies Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 1 (2011): 95–123; and Yasuhiro Izumikawa,
“Network Connections and the Emergence of the Hub-and-Spokes Al-
liance System in East Asia,” International Security, vol. 45, no. 2 (2020):
7–50.
112. Matteo Dian and Hugo Meijer, “Networking Hegemony: Alliance Dy-
namics in East Asia,” International Politics, vol. 57, no. 2 (2020): 131–49
(this is the lead article in a special issue titled “Networking Hegemony:
Alliance Dynamics in East Asia”); Evelyn Goh, “In Response: Alliance
 Notes to Pages 125–127 215

Dynamics, Variables, and the English School for East Asia,” International
Politics, vol. 57, no. 2 (2020): 278–84.
113. Rajesh Rajagopalan, “Evasive Balancing: India’s Unviable Indo-Pacific
Strategy,” International Affairs, vol. 96, no. 1 (2020): 75–93.
114. Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, “India’s Military Outreach: Military Logis-
tics Agreements,” The Diplomat, September 9, 2021, https://thediplomat.
com/2021/09/indias-military-outreach-military-logistics-agreements/
(accessed 2/24/2024).
115. “Japan, Australia Sign Defence Pact for Closer Cooperation,” Reuters,
January 6, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/japan-aus
tralia-sign-defence-cooperation-pact-2022-01-06/ (accessed 2/23/2024).
116. Ketian Zhang, “The Quad and Sino-Indian Relations,” China-India
Brief, vol. 207 (2022): 5–7.
117. Feng Zhang, “China’s Curious Nonchalance Towards the Indo-Pacific,”
Survival, vol. 61, no. 3 (2019): 200.
118. Zhang Jie, “The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and Reconstruction of
Asia-Pacific Order,” China International Studies, vol. 74, no. 55 (January/
February 2019), 67.
119. Mallory Shelbourne, “China Has World’s Largest Navy with 355 Ships
and Counting, Says Pentagon,” USNI News, November 3, 2021, https://
news.usni.org/2021/11/03/china-has-worlds-largest-navy-with-355
-ships-and-counting-says-pentagon (accessed 2/24/2024).
120. Nick Childs and Tom Waldwyn, “China’s Naval Shipbuilding: Deliver-
ing on Its Ambition in a Big Way,” Military Balance Blog, May 1, 2018,
https://www.iiss.org/blogs/military-balance/2018/05/china-naval-ship
building (accessed 2/24/2024).
121. Ian Livingston and Michael E. O’Hanlon, “Why China Isn’t Ahead of
the US Navy, Even with More Ships,” Brookings Blog, September 10,
2018, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/09/10/
why-china-isnt-ahead-of-the-us-navy-even-with-more-ships/ (accessed
2/23/2024).
122. T. V. Paul, “The Rise of China and the Emerging Order in the Indo-
Pacific Region,” in Feng and He, China’s Challenges and International
Order Transition, 71–94.
123. The White House, “U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific,” 3.
124. The White House, “Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States,” 16.
125. Li Li, “The New Trend of India’s Rising as a Great Power,” Contempo-
rary International Relations, vol. 28, no. 2 (2018): 45.
126. Sumit Ganguly, Manjeet S. Pardesi, and William R. Thompson, The
Sino-Indian Rivalry: Implications for Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2023).
127. Gabriel B. Collins and William S. Murray, “No Oil for the Lamps of
China?,” Naval War College Review, vol. 61, no. 2 (2008): 8, 14.
128. Gompert, Sea Power and American Interests in the Western Pacific, 168.
216 Notes to Pages 127–128

129. Cuiping Zhu, “Changes of the International Environment in the Indian

Ocean Region and the Strategic Choices for China,” in Cuiping Zhu, ed.,
Annual Report on the Development of the Indian Ocean Region (2019): Assess-
ments of Indian Ocean International Environment (Singapore: Springer,
2021), 13.
130. The White House, “Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States,” 10.
131. “Aukus: UK, US and Australia Launch Pact to Counter China,” BBC
News, September 16, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-58564837
(accessed 2/23/2024).
132. “Japan, U.K. Agree on Defense Pact amid China’s Rise in Indo-Pacific,”
Kyodo News, 6 May 2022, https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/05/
7323f9ef85f8-urgent-japan-britain-agree-on-defense-cooperation-pact.
html (accessed 2/23/2024).
133. Srinjoy Chowdhury, “India, Britain Working on Logistics Agreement,
Defence Minister May Visit London Next Month,” Times Now, May 7,
2022, https://www.timesnownews.com/india/india-britain-working-on-
logistics-agreement-defence-minister-may-visit-london-next-month-ar
ticle-91397367 (accessed 2/23/2024).
134. Ralf Emmers, “The Role of the Five Power Defence Arrangements in
Southeast Asian Security Architecture,” in William Tow and Brendan
Taylor, eds., Bilateralism, Multilateralism and Asia-Pacific Security: Con-
tending Cooperation (London: Routledge, 2013), https://www.taylorfran
cis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203367087-10/role-five-power
-defence-arrangements-southeast-asian-security-architecture-ralf
-emmers?context=ubx&refId=793a2e3f-e48b-4d12-b2db-7b0f9a185865
(accessed 2/23/2024).
135. Huma Siddiqui, “India-France Operationalize Their Logistics Support
Agreement,” Financial Express, January 25, 2019, https://www.financialex
press.com/defence/india-france-operationalise-their-logistics-support
-agreement/1455043/ (accessed 2/23/2024); Ministry for Europe and
Foreign Affairs (France), “France’s Indo-Pacific Strategy,” n.d., https://
www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/en_dcp_a4_indopacifique_022022_
v1-4_web_cle878143.pdf (accessed 2/23/2024).
136. Frédéric Grare and Jean-Loup Saman, The Indian Ocean as a New Politi-
cal and Security Region (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); David Brew-
ster, “The Red Flag Follows Trade: China’s Future as an Indian Ocean
Power,” in Ashley J. Tellis, Alison Szalwinski, and Michael Wills, eds.,
Strategic Asia 2019: China’s Expanding Strategic Ambitions (Seattle: Na-
tional Bureau of Asian Research, 2019), 174–209.
137. Goh, “In Response,” 279.
138. Brantly Womack, “Mapping the Multinodal Terrain of the Indo-Pacific,”
Settimana News, February 28, 2018, http://www.settimananews.it/
italia-europa-mondo/mapping-multinodal-terrain-indo-pacific/ (accessed
2/23/2024).
 Notes to Pages 128–130 217

139. Rory Medcalf, “Grand Stakes: Australia’s Future between China and
India,” in Ashley J. Tellis, Travis Tanner, and Jessica Keough, eds., Strate-
gic Asia 2011–12: Asia Responds to Its Rising Powers, China and India (Seat-
tle: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2011), 200.
140. Hugh White, “Old Friends in the New Asia: New Zealand, Australia,
and the Rise of China,” in Robert G. Patman, Iati Iati, and Balazs
Kiglics, eds., New Zealand and the World: Past, Present, and Future (Singa-
pore: World Scientific, 2018), 193.
141. You, “The Indian Ocean.”
142. John W. Garver, “Calculus of a Chinese Decision for Local War with
India,” in Jagannath P. Panda, ed., India and China in Asia: Between Equi-
librium and Equations (London: Routledge, 2019), 93.
143. Holmes and Yoshihara, Chinese Naval Strategy, 27 and 74.
144. Yves-Heng Lim, “China’s Rising Naval Ambitions in the Indian Ocean:
Aligning Ends, Ways and Means,” Asian Security, vol. 16, no. 3 (2020):
406.
145. Hu, “China in a Multipolar World,” 225.
146. You Ji, China’s Military Transformation: Politics and War Preparation (Cam-
bridge: Polity, 2016), 137.
147. You, “The Indian Ocean.”
148. Hu, Chinese Maritime Power, 191.
149. Leah Dreyfuss and Mara Karlin, “All That Xi Wants: China Attempts to
Ace Bases Overseas,” in Tarun Chhabra, Rush Doshi, Ryan Haas, and
Emilie Kimball, eds., Global China: Assessing China’s Growing Role in the
World (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2021), 270.
150. It was America’s victory in the Second World War that paved the
way for such access; China has only one formal ally, North Korea.
China also enjoys what is sometimes referred to as a “quasi-alliance”
with Pakistan.
151. Clark, Hegemony in International Society, 123.
152. “Ace of Bases,” The Economist, May 20, 2022, https://www.economist.
com/special-report/2022/05/20/ace-of-bases (accessed 2/23/2024).
153. David Boey, “Singapore’s Art of the Deal in Defence Diplomacy,” The
Straits Times, October 22, 2019.
154. Ian Storey, “Will China Establish Military Bases in Southeast Asia?,”
ISEAS Commentary, September 28, 2020, https://www.iseas.edu.sg/
media/commentaries/will-china-establish-military-bases-in-southeast
-asia/ (accessed 2/23/2024).
155. Cynthia Choo, “Singapore, India Conclude Bilateral Naval Pact,” Today,
November 29, 2017, https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/singa
pore-india-concludes-bilateral-naval-pact (accessed 2/23/2024).
156. Edward Sing Yue Chan, “Beyond Mahanianism: The Evolution of Chi-
na’s Policy Discussion in Sea Power Development,” Asian Security, vol.
18, no. 1 (2022): 39 and 50. In addition to the Mahanian School, Chan
218 Notes to Pages 130–132

discusses the Harmonious, Administrative, and Balancing Schools in

Chinese naval thought.
157. Lambert, Seapower States, 316.
158. Andrea Ghiselli, “The Chinese People’s Liberation Army ‘Post-modern’
Navy,” The International Spectator, vol. 50, no. 1 (2015): 117–36.
159. Wang Gungwu, “China, ASEAN, and the New Maritime Silk Road,”
ThinkChina, November 16, 2021, https://www.thinkchina.sg/wang
-gungwu-china-asean-and-new-maritime-silk-road (accessed 2/23/2024).
160. David I. Steinberg, “China’s Myanmar, Myanmar’s China: Myths, Illu-
sions, Interactions,” in Emmerson, The Deer and the Dragon, 366.
161. Christina Larson, “China’s Oil Pipeline through Myanmar Brings Both
Energy and Resentment,” Bloomberg, February 5, 2014, https://www.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-02-04/chinas-oil-pipeline-through
-myanmar-brings-energy-and-resentment (accessed 2/23/2024).
162. Ye, “The Strategic Landscape of South Asia and Indian Ocean Region,”
38.
163. Wang, “China in the Middle.”
164. Joseph Chinyong Liow, “The Strategic Rationale of China’s Belt and
Road Initiative,” in Joseph Chinyong Liow, Hong Liu, and Gong Xue,
eds., Research Handbook on the Belt and Road Initiative (Cheltenham: Ed-
ward Elgar, 2021), 103 and 109.
165. Hu, Chinese Maritime Power, 185.
166. Nguyen Khac Giang, “China Is Making Mekong Friends,” East Asia
Forum, May 19, 2018, https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2018/05/19/china
-is-making-mekong-friends/ (accessed 2/23/2024).
167. Xue Gong, “Lancang-Mekong Cooperation: Minilateralism in Institu-
tional Building and Its Implications,” in Bhubhinder Singh and Sarah
Teo, eds., Minilateralism in the Indo-Pacific: The Quadrilateral Security Dia-
logue, Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism, and ASEAN (London:
Routledge, 2020), 57–73.
168. Edward Wong, “China and Neighbors Begin Joint Mekong River Pa-
trols,” New York Times, December 10, 2011, https://www.nytimes.
com/2011/12/11/world/asia/china-and-neighbors-begin-joint-mekong
-river-patrols.html (accessed: 2/23/2024).
169. Lei Jun quoted in Jörn Dosch and Shannon Cui, “China’s 21st Century
Maritime Silk Road: A Route to Pax Sinica in Southeast Asia?,” in Em-
merson, The Deer and the Dragon, 339.
170. U.S. Department of State, “A Free and Open Indo-Pacific: Advancing a
Shared Vision,” November 4, 2019, 10, https://www.state.gov/wp-con
tent/uploads/2019/11/Free-and-Open-Indo-Pacific-4Nov2019.pdf (ac-
cessed 2/23/2024).
171. Shang-su Wu, “Lancang-Mekong Cooperation: The Current State of
China’s Hydro-Politics,” in Singh and Teo, Minilateralism in the Indo-Pa-
cific, 80.
 Notes to Pages 132–135 219

172. Kent E. Calder, Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2019), 133.
173. Murray Hiebert, Under Beijing’s Shadow: Southeast Asia’s China Challenge
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), 337.
174. Wang Gungwu, “Global History: Continental and Maritime,” Asian Re-
view of World Histories, vol. 3, no. 2 (2015): 217.
175. Acharya, ASEAN and Regional Order, 65–99.
176. Amitav Acharya, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia:
ASEAN and the Problem of Regional Order, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge,
2014), 43–79.
177. Amitav Acharya, Whose Ideas Matter: Agency and Power in Asian Regional-
ism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 145.
178. David Shambaugh, “U.S.–China Rivalry in Southeast Asia: Power Shift
or Competitive Coexistence?,” International Security, vol. 42, no. 4
(2018): 85–127.
179. Tan, “Consigned to Hedge,” 131.
180. Joseph Chinyong Liow, Ambivalent Engagement: The United States and
Regional Security in Southeast Asia after the Cold War (Washington, DC:
Brookings, 2017), 16–17; David Shambaugh, Where Great Powers Meet:
America & China in Southeast Asia (New York: Oxford University Press,
2021), 61.
181. Donald K. Emmerson, “The Deer and the Dragon: Asymmetry versus
Autonomy,” in Emmerson, The Deer and the Dragon, 6, 29.
182. Goh, “In Response,” 280.
183. Amitav Acharya, “Why ASEAN’s Indo-Pacific Outlook Matters,” East
Asia Forum, August 11, 2019, https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2019/
08/11/why-aseans-indo-pacific-outlook-matters/ (accessed 2/23/2024).
184. Dewi Fortuna Anwar, “Indonesia and the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-
Pacific,” International Affairs, vol. 96, no. 1 (2020): 111–29.
185. Acharya, ASEAN and Regional Order, 76–77.
186. Ang Cheng Guan, Southeast Asia after the Cold War: A Contemporary His-
tory (Singapore: NUS Press, 2019), 191.
187. Martin Stuart-Fox, A History of China and Southeast Asia: Tribute, Trade,
and Influence (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2003), 241.
188. See Seng Tan, “ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus: Multilateral-
ism Mimicking Minilateralism?,” in Singh and Teo, Minilateralism in the
Indo-Pacific, 129.
189. ASEAN, “ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific,” June 23, 2019, https://
asean.org/speechandstatement/asean-outlook-on-the-indo-pacific/ (ac-
cessed 2/23/2024) (emphasis added).
190. Ian Storey, “Southeast Asia’s Minilateral Counter-Piracy/Sea-Robbery
Initiatives,” in John E. Bradford, Jane Chan, Stuart Kaye, Clive Schofield,
and Geoffrey Till, eds., Maritime Cooperation and Security in the Indo-
Pacific Region: Essays in Honor of Sam Bateman (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 309.
220 Notes to Pages 135–137

191. This paragraph draws from Mark David Chong, “Securitising

Piracy and Maritime Terrorism along the Malacca and Singapore
Straits: Singapore and the Importance of Facilitating Factors,” in Nich-
olas Tarling and Xin Chen, eds., Maritime Security in East and Southeast
Asia: Political Challenges in Asian Waters (Singapore: Palgrave, 2017),
43–84.
192. Yinghui Lee, “Singapore’s Conceptualization of Maritime Security,”
CSIS Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, December 1, 2021,
https://amti.csis.org/singapores-conceptualization-of-maritime-secu
rity/ (accessed 2/23/2024).
193. John Garofano and Andrea J. Dew, “Conclusion: Access and Security in
the Indian Ocean,” in John Garofano and Andrea J. Dew, eds., Deep Cur-
rents and Rising Tides: The Indian Ocean and International Security (Wash-
ington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013), 302.
194. Hadyu Ikrami, “Sulu-Sulawesi Seas Patrol: Lessons from the Malacca
Straits Patrol and Other Similar Cooperative Frameworks,” The Interna-
tional Journal of Maritime and Coastal Law, vol. 33 (2018): 799–826.
195. Storey, “Southeast Asia’s Minilateral Counter-Piracy/Sea-Robbery Ini-
tiatives,” 308.
196. Ian Storey, “Trilateral Security Cooperation in the Sulu-Celebes Seas: A
Work in Progress,” ISEAS Perspectives, August 27, 2018, https://www.
iseas.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/ISEAS_Perspective_2018_
[email protected] (accessed 2/23/2024).
197. Storey, “Southeast Asia’s Minilateral Counter-Piracy/Sea-Robbery Ini-
tiatives,” 309.
198. Goh Chok Tong, “Keynote Address by Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong
at the Official Launch of the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS)
on Thursday, 27 May 2005, at 8:00 pm at Orchard Hotel,” Singapore
Government Press Release, https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/
pdfdoc/2005012701.htm (accessed 2/23/2024).
199. Prashanth Parameswaran, “India, Myanmar Ink New Naval Patrol Pact,”
The Diplomat, February 23, 2016, https://thediplomat.com/2016/02/
india-myanmar-ink-new-naval-pact-on-coordinated-patrols/ (accessed
2/23/2024).
200. Dinakar Peri, “India and Vietnam Sign Mutual Logistics Agreement,”
The Hindu, June 8, 2022, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/
india-vietnam-ink-military-logistics-support-pact-vision-document-to
-expand-defence-ties/article65506502.ece (accessed 2/23/2024).
201. Koh Swee Lean Collin, “China-India Rivalry at Sea: Capabilities,
Trends and Challenges,” Asian Security, vol. 15, no. 1 (2019): 5–24.
There is some debate as to whether India can play a strategic role to the
east of the Strait of Malacca. See Rahul Roy-Chaudhury and Kate Sulli-
van de Estrada, “India, the Indo-Pacific and the Quad,” Survival, vol. 60,
no. 3 (2018): 181–94.
 Notes to Pages 137–143 221

202. Sam Bateman, “Conclusion: Do Rough Seas Lie Ahead?,” in Sam

Bateman and Joshua Ho, eds., Southeast Asia and the Rise of Chinese and
Indian Naval Power: Between Rising Powers (London: Routledge, 2010),
234.
203. “Science of Military Strategy (2013),” 89.
204. Emrys Chew, “Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean: Maritime Connec-
tions across Time and Space,” in Sam Bateman, Jane Chan, and Euan
Graham, eds., ASEAN and the Indian Ocean: The Key Maritime Links,
RSIS Policy Paper, 2011, 17.

Conclusion
1. G. John Ikenberry and Charles Kupchan, “Socialization and Hegemonic
Power,” International Organization, vol. 44, no. 3 (1990): 283–315; Amitav
Acharya, Whose Ideas Matter: Agency and Power in Asian Regionalism
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Amitav Acharya, “Norm Subsid-
iarity and Regional Orders: Sovereignty, Regionalism, and Rule-Making
in the Third World,” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 1 (2011):
95–123.
2. Zoltán Biedermann, “(Dis)connected History and Multiple Narratives of
Global Early Modernity,” Modern Philology, vol. 119, no. 1 (2021): 23
(note 31).
3. Jack A. Goldstone and John F. Haldon, “Ancient States, Empires, and Ex-
ploitation: Problems and Perspectives,” in Ian Morris and Walter
Scheidel, eds., The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to
Byzantium (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 12, 14.
4. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 2
(London: Book Club Associates, 1983), 137.
5. Amitav Acharya, The End of American World Order, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:
Polity, 2018); Barry Buzan and George Lawson, The Global Transforma-
tion: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
6. Robert Gilpin, War & Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), 37, 138 (note 13).
7. Stephen Jay Gould quoted in Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion
in the Early Modern World, 25th Anniversary Edition (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2016), 60.
8. Evelyn Goh, “US Dominance and American Bias in International Rela-
tions Scholarship: A View from the Outside,” Journal of Global Security
Studies, vol. 4, no. 3 (2019): 406.
9. On the various dimensions of power, see Michael Mann, The Sources of
Social Power, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 8.
10. D. A. Cohen and J. E. Lendon, “Strong and Weak Regimes: Comparing
the Roman Principate and the Medieval Crown of Aragon,” in Johann P.
222 Notes to Pages 143–147

Arnason and Kurt A. Raaflaub, eds., The Roman Empire in Context:

Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011),
100.
11. On the production of power through social relations, see Michael Bar-
nett and Raymond Duvall, “Power in International Politics,” International
Organization, vol. 59, no. 1 (2005): 48.
12. On this dimension of hegemony, see Ian Clark, Hegemony in International
Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
13. On such elite cooptation, see Ikenberry and Kupchan, “Socialization and
Hegemonic Power.”
14. Barnett and Duvall, “Power in International Politics,” 61.
15. Barnett and Duvall, “Power in International Politics,” 45.
16. Buzan and Lawson, The Global Transformation, 1.
17. On attraction, see Manjeet S. Pardesi, “Decentering Hegemony and
‘Open’ Orders: Fifteenth-Century Melaka in a World of Orders,” Global
Studies Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 4 (2022).
18. The Sinic Northeast Asian polities may have historically been attracted
to China due to their shared ideology. Feng Zhang, Chinese Hegemony:
Grand Strategy and International Institutions in East Asian History (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 7.
19. Hermann Kulke, “State Formation and Social Integration in Pre-Islamic
South and Southeast Asia,” in Karashima Noboru and Hirosue Masashi,
eds., State Formation and Social Integration in Pre-modern South and South-
east Asia (Tokyo: The Toyo Bunko, 2017), 315.
20. On the management of diversity in the making of social orders, see
Christian Reus-Smit, “Cultural Diversity and International Order,” Inter-
national Organization, vol. 71, no. 4 (2017): 851–85.
21. Feng Zhang, “International Societies in Pre-Modern East Asia: a prelim-
inary framework,” in Barry Buzan and Yongjin Zhang, eds., Contesting In-
ternational Society in East Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014), 32.
22. Tansen Sen, “Maritime Southeast Asia between South Asia and China to
the Sixteenth Century,” TRaNS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of
Southeast Asia, vol. 2, no. 1 (2014): 32.
23. Martin Stuart-Fox, A Short History of China and Southeast Asia: Tribute,
Trade, and Influence (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2003), 94.
24. Alberto Lucas López and Kaya Lee Berne, “Peaks of Brutality,” National
Geographic, June 2020, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/
graphics/graphic-wwii-and-the-100-deadliest-events-in-history-feature?
(accessed 2/23/2024). This list of deadliest events is inclusive of all types
of violent deaths.
25. Amitav Acharya’s personal notes, January 2011.
26. G. Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (Canberra: Australian
National University Press, 1975), 34.
 Notes to Pages 147–153 223

27. O. W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives,

rev. ed. (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999), 72.
28. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit,
Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2006), 128.
29. Monica L. Smith, “ ‘Indianization’ from the Indian Point of View: Trade
and Cultural Contacts with Southeast Asia in the Early First Millennium
C.E.,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 42, no. 1
(1999): 18.
30. Stuart-Fox, A Short History of China and Southeast Asia, 60.
31. Yuri Pines, The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China
and Its Imperial Legacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 29.
32. Charles Holcombe, The Genesis of East Asia, 221 B.C.–A.D. 907 (Hono-
lulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), 57.
33. The large Han fleets that were sent into northern and central Vietnam,
as noted in Chapter 3, meant that China certainly had the capabilities to
do so.
34. There is the obvious issue of tautology here. The Chinese management
of trade through the practices of the tributary system meant that non-
tribute-bearing polities that tried to engage in trade with China were
branded as pirates. However, there were other forms of regional piracy
too, especially in the mandala world of Southeast Asia (in intra-Southeast
Asian interactions). China did not attempt to “manage” such acts of pi-
racy at the systemic level in maritime Asia. This was hardly a possibility
before the twelfth century in the absence of a Chinese navy, and there-
fore China relied on the tributary system.
35. Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Trading Ships of the South China Sea: Shipbuild-
ing Techniques and Their Role in the History of the Development of
Asian Trade Networks,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the
Orient, vol. 36, no. 3 (1993): 274.
36. Hedley Bull, “Sea Power and Political Influence,” Adelphi Papers, vol. 16,
no. 122 (1976): 1.
37. Takeshi Hamashita, “The Tribute Trade System and Modern Asia,” in A.
J. H. Latham and Heita Kawakatsu, eds., Japanese Industrialization and the
Asian Economy (New York: Routledge, 1994), 96.
38. Stuart-Fox, A Short History of China and Southeast Asia, 33–34.
39. John N. Miksic, Singapore & the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300–1800 (Singa-
pore: NUS Press, 2013), 67.
40. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, 35.
41. Stuart-Fox, A Short History of China and Southeast Asia, 32.
42. Miksic, Singapore & the Silk Road of the Sea, 94.
43. Miksic, Singapore & the Silk Road of the Sea, 94–95.
44. Stuart-Fox, A Short History of China and Southeast Asia, 35–36.
45. Gilpin, War & Change in World Politics, 145.
224 Notes to Pages 153–154

46. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London:
Allen Lane, 1976), 2; Paul Kennedy, “The Sea and Seapower within the
International System,” in N. A. M. Rodger and Christian Buchet, eds.,
The Sea in History: The Modern World (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press,
2017), 5.
47. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, 2 (emphasis added).
48. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, 35.
49. Robert Gilpin, “Economic Interdependence and National Security in
Historical Perspective,” in Klaus Knorr and Frank N. Trager, eds., Eco-
nomic Issues and National Security (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
1977), 31; Gilpin, War & Change in World Politics, 144; Robert Gilpin,
Global Political Economy: Understanding the International Economic Order
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 43–44.
50. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Recovering American Leadership,” Survival, vol. 50,
no. 1 (2008): 65.
51. Jonathan Masters, “Sea Power: The U.S. Navy and Foreign Policy,”
Backgrounder, Council on Foreign Relations, August 19, 2019, https://
www.cfr.org/backgrounder/sea-power-us-navy-and-foreign-policy (ac-
cessed 2/23/2024).
52. Ken Booth, Navies and Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, 2014 [1977]),
248. On the difference between balancing on land and at sea, see Jack S.
Levy and William R. Thompson, “Balancing on Land and at Sea: Do
States Ally Against the Leading Global Power?,” International Security,
vol. 35, no. 1 (2010): 7–43.
53. Geoffrey F. Gresh, To Rule Eurasia’s Waves: The New Great Power Competi-
tion at Sea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 175, 272.
54. Geoffrey Till, “The Changing Dynamics of Seapower and Concepts of
Battle,” in Jo Inge Bekkevold and Geoffrey Till, eds., International Order
at Sea: How It Is Challenged, How It Is Maintained (London: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2016), 178.
55. Till, “The Changing Dynamics of Seapower and Concepts of Battle,” 178.
56. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, 3.
57. Andrew Lambert, Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires
and the Conflict That Made the Modern World (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2018), 301.
58. Michael T. Klare, “Mahan Revisited: Globalization, Resource Depen-
dency, and Maritime Security in the Twenty-First Century,” in Daniel
Moran and James A. Russell, eds., Maritime Strategy and Global Order:
Markets, Resources, Security (Washington, DC: Georgetown University
Press, 2016), Kindle Loc. 6788.
59. Michael Mastanduno, “Order and Change in World Politics: The Finan-
cial Crisis and the Breakdown of the US–China Grand Bargain,” in
G. John Ikenberry, ed., Power, Order, and Change in World Politics (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 167.
 Notes to Pages 154–158 225

60. Michael Mandelbaum, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the
World’s Government in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Public Affairs,
2005), 92.
61. David Shambaugh, Where Great Powers Meet: America & China in South-
east Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 87.
62. See Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape
Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), Kindle
Loc. 2718.
63. Bruce D. Jones, To Rule the Waves: How Control of the World’s Oceans Shapes
the Fate of the Superpowers (New York: Scribner, 2021), 155, 305.
64. Jones, To Rule the Waves, 305.
65. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003), 3.
66. Angela Schottenhammer, “Introduction,” in Angela Schottenhammer,
ed., Early Global Interconnectivity Across the Indian Ocean World, vol. 1:
Commercial Structures and Exchanges (Cham: Springer, 2019), 1; Philippe
Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean: A Global History, vol. 2 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 660.
67. Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and
the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2007), 151.
68. Sebastian R. Prange, “The Contested Sea: Regimes of Maritime Violence
in the Pre-Modern Indian Ocean,” Journal of Early Modern History, vol.
17, no. 1 (2013): 9–33.
69. Tom Hoogervorst, “Commercial Networks Connecting Southeast Asia
with the Indian Ocean,” Asian History, Oxford Research Encyclopedias,
December 22, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.
013.541 (accessed 2/23/2024).
70. Amitav Acharya, “Power Shift or Paradigm Shift? China’s Rise and Asia’s
Emerging Security Order,” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 1
(2014): 158–73.
71. Gresh, To Rule Eurasia’s Waves, 287.
72. Mandelbaum, The Case for Goliath, 224.
73. Kevin O’Rourke, “Politics and Trade: Lessons from Past Globalisations,”
Bruegel Essay and Lecture Series, Brussels, 2009, 28–29, https://www.
bruegel.org/2009/01/politics-and-trade-lessons-from-past-globalisa
tions/ (accessed 2/23/2024).
74. Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William C. Wohlforth,
“Don’t Come Home, America: The Case Against Retrenchment,” Inter-
national Security, vol. 37, no. 3 (2012/2013): 41. On bipartisan support for
sustaining liberal hegemony in the United States, see Carla Norrlof,
“The Waning of Pax Americana?,” Great Discussions (2018): 19.
75. For a discussion of China’s trust deficit in Southeast Asia, see Amitav
Acharya, ASEAN and Regional Order: Revisiting Security Community in
Southeast Asia (London: Routledge, 2021).
226 Note to Page 159

76. For the related but different argument that the United States is in fact
the last superpower, see Barry Buzan, “The Inaugural Kenneth N. Waltz
Annual Lecture, A World without Superpowers: Decentered Globalism,”
International Relations, vol. 25, no. 1 (2011): 3–25; and Acharya, The End of
American World Order.
 Index

Page numbers followed by the letter “f ” indicate a figure.

Abulafia, David, 55 AUKUS security pact, 127

Acharya, Amitav, 22, 29, 177n80, Australia: alliances of, 125, 128. See also
179n94 Quad grouping
Alagappa, Muthiah, 24 Austronesian peoples, 74, 80, 98, 100,
Alexander the Great, 44, 63–66, 104, 150
169n46
Ali, Daud, 98 Bang, Peter Fibiger, 47, 54, 57, 68
Allison, Graham, 110, 155 Barkawi, Tarak, 27
Angkor, 86–87, 89, 101, 103, 151 Bartel, Fritz, 121
Angkor Wat, 100, 146 Bateman, Sam, 137
appropriation, 41, 43–44, 47–48, 56, Beaujard, Philippe, 48
58–59, 65–69, 72, 145, 147 Bendix, Reinhard, 13
Arnason, Johann, 63 Biden, Joseph, 122, 126–27
ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting Boardman, John, 62
Plus (ADMM-Plus), 111, 134, 136, Borobudur, 100
160 Bounding Power (Deudney), 7
ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), 111, Braudel, Fernand, 12, 47, 141
133–36, 160 Brazil, LHO and, 35
ASEAN Way, 109, 112, 133, 137, Britain: Chinese rivalry, 198n61; free
156–57 trade and, 31; Indian Ocean “British
Association of Southeast Asian Nations Lake,” 114–15, 118; naval
(ASEAN): ASEAN-centered region, hegemony, 112, 116; naval primacy,
111; decentered and multiplex 115–16; Roman comparison, 115
system, 111–13; unity and neutrality Brooks, Stephen G., 36–37
of, 111 Bull, Hedley, 20–23, 105, 124, 150,
Atiśa, 102 175n72

227
228 Index

Burma, 80 93; trade routes and, 123–24;

Bush, George W. and Bush warfare and, 107; world order and,
administration, 2 173n46; World Trade Organization
Buzan, Barry, 8, 10, 20–21, 27, 45–46, (WTO) and, 34. See also Funan
79, 115 China (Ming): China (Song), 93; naval
expeditions, 84, 93; piracy and, 107;
cakravartin rulers, 77, 89, 94, 100, reconquer Dali region, 83, 104;
102–4, 148, 151–52 tributary system of, 85, 92
Cambodia, 101 China (Song): free trade and, 86, 91–
Carthage: Carthaginian-Macedonian 92; hybrid Sino-Southeast Asian
treaty, 51; Rome and, 41–42, 45–46, ships of, 107; navy and Mongols, 91;
50, 52–54, 69, 72, 169n46; wars and, navy of, 85; passive role in maritime
56 trade, 90; reconquer Dali region,
Cato the Censor, 66 104; source of revenue, 91;
Cham inscription of Vo Canh, 100–101 Southeast Asian ports, 83–84
Champa polity, 86, 88, 92, 100, 104, China (Tang), 88, 91
107, 149 China (Wu state), 83
Chang Pin-tsun, 90 China (Yuan): cash drain, 92; Mongol-
Chaniotis, Angelos, 44 Yuan expeditions, 84; naval
China: alliances and security campaigns of, 85–86, 88, 92;
relationships, 130, 217n150; Anti- reconquer Dali region, 104
Access and Area Denial (A2/AD), Chinese tributary system, 14, 29–30,
123–24; Belt and Road Initiative 74–76, 84–86, 88, 90–91, 94, 105–8
(BRI), 120, 124; British rivalry, Chinese tributary system, embedded
198n61; Champa and, 107; within a larger Asia, 142, 151
decentered Asia, 102; economic Cholas, 80, 87, 89, 96, 101, 106, 145
links, 81; Indian Ocean and, 129; Cicero, 66, 68
Japan and, 137; LHO and, 35; loose Civilizations (Ferguson), 16
primacy of, 75; maritime campaigns classical international systems, 10, 12–
of, 84; maritime energy blockade, 14, 17
127; Maritime Silk Road (MSR), Cleopatra, 65
129; maritime trade and, 82–83, 88, Cohen, Raymond, 6
90; Middle Eastern energy imports Collins, Gabriel B., 127
and, 120; military and, 80, 130; colonialism, 32, 37, 114–15, 155,
Myanmar and, 130; naval 175n72
modernization, 110, 126, 130; navy colonization, 43, 47, 50, 52–55, 59–64,
and naval power of, 121–22, 129– 66, 70, 154, 182n30
30; Pakistan and, 130; Quad comparative studies, 15–17, 141–42
grouping and, 125–26; Roman Conquest and Commerce (Lang), 13
comparison, 93; Singapore and, 130; constructivism, 169n42
Sinic ideas, 75–76, 83, 103–4, 108, Cooper, Andrew F., 36
144, 147–48; Sino-American rivalry, Copeland, Dale C., 167n20
111–12, 126, 132, 137; Sinocentric Cox, Robert W., 25–26
worldview, 85–86, 89; slavery and, Cuiping Zhu, 127
 Index 229

Dai Viet, 76, 83, 86, 104, 149, 152, global order, 21–22, 24, 36, 141
198n63. See also Vietnam Goh, Evelyn, 128, 143
Dale, Stephen F., 94 Goh Chok Tong, 136
decentered orders, 3, 39, 141; in the Goldstein, Judith, 16
classical Indian Ocean, 5, 15, 23, 25, Goldstone, Jack, 48, 140
74–76, 81, 102, 145, 150; future Gompert, David C., 120–21
world order, 6, 39, 141; India, 103; Great Depression, 31, 174n63
in the Indo-Pacific, 18, 111, 124, Greater India Society, 203n159
138, 152–61; public goods, 105–8 Greco-Roman civilization: comparison
Deudney, Daniel, 7–8, 45, 166n17 to India and China, 4; hegemony
Deutsch, Karl W., 23, 106 of, 5, 8; influence of, 8–9, 182n30;
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 193n260 origins of, 7; sovereignty of, 172n28
Discourses (Livy), 8 Grieco, Joseph, 9
Doyle, Michael W., 27, 45 Grunberg, Isabelle, 32
Guy, John, 94
East Asia Summit (EAS), 111, 133–34,
136, 160 Haass, Richard, 2, 38, 158
Eastern Origins of Western Civilizations Haldon, John, 48, 140
(Hobson), 16 Hall, Kenneth R., 90
Eckstein, Arthur M., 45 Hannibal, 51, 69, 169
Egypt: conquest of, 42; Greek Hansen, Mogens Herman, 59, 62
settlements and, 63–65; Rome and, hegemon, naval, 9–10, 112, 114–16,
43, 46, 51–52, 54, 57–58, 69; slavery 119–21, 132, 153
and, 186n132; state-backed hegemon, naval and absence in Asia,
agriculture, 53 73–74, 78, 84, 94–95, 111, 136, 138,
empire, 8, 12, 25, 27 141, 144, 150, 152, 155–56
Eurocentrism, 5, 140–41 hegemonic socialization, 59, 189n166;
eastern Mediterranean, 63–65;
Ferguson, Niall, 16 northern Vietnam, 103, 147
Five Power Defence Arrangements Hegemonic Stability Theory (HST), 9,
(FPDA), 127 31–33
Foreign Affairs, 1 hegemony: conflations with, 25, 27;
France, 128 consent and, 26; definition of,
Friedberg, Aaron L., 110, 120 25–26; distinctions of, 27–28;
Fukuyama, Francis, 15 Gramscian notion of, 25–26; Greco-
Funan, 80–81, 83, 96, 101, 147 Roman, 41, 46–49, 72; ideational or
ideological, 26–27; Indo-Pacific,
Gang Deng, 84 110, 112; Marxism and, 25; and
Garver, John W., 129 order, 3, 8, 49, 109, 183n55, 208n14;
Geertz, Clifford, 13 and polarity, 37; and power, 143–45;
Gilpin, Robert, 48, 116, 142, 153, Roman Mediterranean and Classical
167n20, 175n70, 176n73 Indian Ocean, 139–41; Southeast
Global International Relations Asian, rejection of, 109, 134, 137,
(Global IR), 17, 140 156, 167n20
230 Index

Hellenistic Rhodes, 52–54, 86 Murunda, 80–81; non-Western

Hellenization: agriculture and, 62; civilizations, 3; Singapore and, 136;
Classical Greece and, 18; definition Sino-Indian rivalry, 126–27; United
of, 58; Eastern Mediterranean and, States and, 126; Vietnam and, 136;
63; empire’s elites and, 49; Greek World Trade Organization (WTO)
colonial poleis, 59–62; Greek and, 34. See also Quad grouping
culture and, 192n256; Indianization Indianization: convergence theory,
comparison, 4, 14, 77, 145, 147; 97–99, 102; definition of, 76; how
influence on Roman Empire, 5; and why, 79; local agency and, 146;
inverse flow, 58; local agency and, military encounters and, 80–81;
146; local culture and, 63; political process of, 103; Sanskrit
Macedonia and, 64; parallel process, cosmopolis, 97–100; Sinicization
43, 61–62, 68–69; Romanization comparison, 148; Southeast Asia
and, 40; Roman Republic and, 45, and, 95–96, 99, 105. See also
47, 59, 143; Rome and, 41–44, 59, mandala
65–67, 69, 193n260; Rome’s Indian Ocean: comparison to Greco-
allies and, 67–68. See also Alexander Roman, 4; cultural and commercial
the Great interaction, 141; European
Henley, David, 102 dominance of, 113–14; future world
hierarchy, 27–28. See also Chinese example, 6; history of, 169n45;
tributary system international maritime system of,
Higgott, Richard A., 36 12, 73, 78–79; international order
Hobbes, Thomas, 8 and systems, 24; map of, 75f;
Hobson, John, 16 multiplex order of, 3–6, 15, 23;
Hodos, Tamar, 60, 62 naval powers lacking, 73;
Holmes, James R., 120, 129 nonhegemonic order, 74–75; open
Hoogervorst, Tom, 79 or closed sea, 79; Portugal and, 113;
Horden, Peregrine, 43, 46 sea control lacking, 76; shipping
Hu Bo, 120, 129 routes, 74; trading system, 4, 113.
Hurrell, Andrew, 21 See also classical international
systems
Ikenberry, G. John, 1–2, 9, 26, 33, 35, Indic ideas, 75–76, 78
116, 142, 158, 176nn73–74 Indic polities, 76–78, 152
India: Brahmin primacy, 99; Britain Indo-Pacific region: expansion of,
and, 203n159; cotton production, 122–23; security of, 127–28
94; cultural and political models, 97; International Monetary Fund (IMF), 32
decentered, 103; diplomacy of, 125; international order: alternatives to
eastern Indian Ocean and, 136–37; hegemony, 35–36; definition of,
France and, 128; Gupta empire, 21–23; distinctions of, 22–23; peace
103; immigration to Southeast Asia, and, 23; scope of, 24; stability of,
95–96, 203n163; influence of, 4, 12, 19–20, 22–23, 30–31
14; Japan and, 137; LHO and, 22, International Relations theory (IR
35; major power, 17; memberships, theory), 7, 10–11, 16, 40, 48, 140–41.
136; military facilities, 136–37; See also Westphalian system
 Index 231

international system: balance of power, hegemony and coercion, 26;

168n41; definition of, 20, 171n5; multiplexity and, 37; NHIO and,
distinctions of, 22–23; interaction 39; non-Western grievances, 35;
capacity, 21; process, 21; Western nations and, 34
Renaissance and, 167n24; stability Liberal International Order (LIO),
of, 17; structure, 21 1–3, 20, 22, 26, 34, 177n80
Irwin, Douglas, 48 Lieberman, Victor, 96
Islam Observed (Geertz), 13 Lim, Yves-Heng, 129
Little, Richard, 8, 10, 17, 20–21, 27,
Japan: ASEAN Way and, 109; 45–46, 79, 115, 168n41
diplomacy of, 125, 127, 160; great Livius, 68
powers and, 159; overseas bases and, Livy, 8
130; as part of East Asia, 122; piracy Lloyd’s Joint War Risk Committee,
and, 107, 136; regional hegemony, 135–36
208n14; World War II and, 82. See localization, 14, 39, 77–78, 98–101,
also Quad grouping 108, 145–46, 195n16; circulation,
Java, 78, 81, 87–88, 94, 101–2, 114, 149 101–2; relocalization, 101

Kang, David, 28–29, 168n41 Machiavelli, 8

Kaufman, Stuart J., 17, 168n41 Macmillan English Dictionary, 23
Kennedy, Paul, 113, 119, 153–54 macrohistorical comparisons, 5, 141–42
Keohane, Robert, 16, 19, 35, 176n73 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 116–17, 121,
Khmer mandala, 100–101, 103, 146–47 129–30, 154
Kindleberger, Charles P., 31, 174n63 Mair, Rachel, 68
King Mulavarman, 99 Malacca Straits, 118, 124, 127, 130–32,
King Rudradaman, 100 136, 220n201
Kings or People (Bendix), 13 Malacca Straits Patrol (MSP), 135
Kissinger, Henry, 15, 22 Malaysia, 127, 132, 134–36
Krauthammer, Charles, 2, 158 mandala (circle): anarchy of mandalas,
Kulke, Hermann, 76, 97–100 102; Angkor and, 151; in China’s
Kupchan, 108 south, 88; Chinese view of
instability, 83; classical period and,
Laffey, Mark, 27 79; decentralized world, 148–49;
Laidi, Zaki, 37 goal of power, 93; Indianized China,
Lake, David A., 28 81; Indianized worldview, 105, 152;
Lambert, Andrew, 9, 115–16, 120, 154, Indic idea of, 76; Indic names and,
182n30 99; intra-Southeast Asia trade and,
Lang, James, 13 94; Khmer and, 103; rulers and
Lebow, Richard Ned, 8 dominance, 87; shared management,
Lee Kuan Yew, 122 Manguin, 77, 106; Sinocentrism
Liberal Hegemonic Order (LHO): and, 144; Sriwijayan success, 89;
alternatives to hegemony, 179n97; state formation and, 86; theory of,
criticisms of, 36; Hegemonic 78; Vietnam and, 104; warfare and,
Stability Theory (HST) and, 30, 33; 87, 106, 200n103
232 Index

Manguin, Pierre-Yves, 98 Nation-Building and Citizenship

Mann, Michael, 46–47 (Bendix), 13
Manning, Joseph Gilbert, 44 Neumann, Iver, 5
Marcus Antonius, 194n287 Ng Eng Hen, 130
maritime East Asia. See Indo-Pacific region Nonhegemonic International Order
maritime international systems, 8–10, (NHIO): alternative to hegemonic
12, 16, 106 orders, 10, 20; ASEAN Way and,
maritime Southeast Asia, 79, 82, 99, 160; classical Indian Ocean and,
124, 132, 135, 147, 160 141; contemporary Indo-Pacific,
Mastanduno, Michael, 9, 154 140; Eastern Indian Ocean and, 3–4,
McDougall, Derek, 114 6, 25, 74, 76, 112, 139; geopolitical
Mearsheimer, John, 25, 167n20 dynamics and, 156; great powers
Mediterranean Sea: analogy of, and, 124, 137–38; local initiative,
169n49; hegemonic order of, 4–5, 108; Mediterranean comparison,
169n46; history of, 5, 40; 153; multiplex system, 39, 161;
international maritime system of, regional security complexes, 166n7;
12, 14–15, 44–46; international Soviet presence, 118
order and systems, 24; map of, 42f; non-Western civilizations, 3, 11, 16–17,
mare nostrum (Roman lake), 42, 48– 22, 32–35, 175n72
49, 52, 70, 72; open or closed sea, Norrlof, Carla, 9, 119, 168n28
49; Phoenicians and, 46, 54, 60–61, North Atlantic Treaty Organization
63, 169n46, 189n173; single (NATO), 127
economic system, 182n39 Northedge, Frederick Samuel, 20
Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 25 Nossal, Kim R., 36
Modelski, George, 8–9 Nye, Joseph S., 30, 153
mode of power, 144, 184n60
Mommsen, Theodor, 51 O’Brien, Patrick, 116–17
Mongols and Mongol-Yuans, 29, 82– open orders/regions, 3, 49, 79, 142,
85, 88, 91–92 173n48, 196n28; Indian Ocean, 76;
Mughal empire, 167n20, 180n2 Indo-Pacific, 110, 113, 128, 130,
multiplex orders: ASEAN Way and, 133–35, 137, 160–61, 208n16;
111, 128; definition of, 3, 37–39, Liberal Hegemonic Order, 34;
179n94; Indian Ocean and, 4, 6, 23, Mediterranean and Rome, 49
74–75, 105–6, 110; Indo-Pacific Organski, Abramo Fimo Kenneth, 30
region and, 152, 158, 161; Origins of Political Order (Fukuyama),
multipolarity and, 179n94; 15
nonhegemonic world of, 37–39; O’Rourke, Kevin, 48
Roman comparison, 15; Southeast Oxford English Dictionary, 23
Asia and, 77, 138. See also Indian
Ocean Pagden, Anthony, 69
Murray, William S., 127 Pallavas, 80
Panikkar, 208n17
Nagara-Kertagama, 78, 100 Parchami, Ali, 9
Nathan, Andrew J., 30 Pax Americana, 9, 143, 153–54
 Index 233

Pax Britannica, 9, 117, 119–20, 142–43, Raaflaub, Kurt A., 6, 10

153–54 Rapkin, David, 36
Pax Mongolica, 168n28 regional security complexes, 118,
Pax Ottomana, 168n28 165n7
Pax Romana, 9, 41, 43, 48, 71, 143, 149, Reus-Smit, Christian, 8
153 Roman Empire: agriculture of, 70;
Pax Sinica, 88, 94, 107, 149 British analogy, 153; citizenship in,
Pearson, Michael, 113 182n47; code of law, 8, 167n19;
Peloponnesian War (Thucydides), 7 colonization and, 43, 47, 50–53;
Persia, 64, 169n46 core–periphery, 14–15, 23, 41, 43–
Philippines, 136, 160, 195n7 44, 47, 69–70, 141, 145, 148, 151;
piracy, 50, 72, 107, 118, 136, 194n287, Greece and, 44; hegemonic order
207n230 of, 5, 23; history of, 41, 44–45;
Plato, 60 Indian Ocean trade, 53; influence
polarity: bipolarity, 2, 36–37; of, 8; landing spaces and, 54–55;
multipolarity, 36–38, 128, 159–60; Latin League, 50, 70; navy of, 52,
unipolarity, 2, 33, 36, 45 54, 72; pendulum analogy, 45,
Pollock, Sheldon, 81, 95, 97–99, 147 183n51, 183n55; pirates and, 50, 72,
Polybius, 71–72 194n287; predatory imperialism, 57,
Pomeranz, Kenneth, 13, 114 70; Principate, 41, 44, 46–47, 52,
Pompey, 72, 194n286 56–57, 70, 72, 93; Punic Wars, 41,
Posen, Barry, 30, 37, 119–20 44–46, 50–52, 55–56, 72, 146,
power of ideas, Roman Mediterranean 166n17, 167n20; sea control, 43–44,
and Classical Indian Ocean, 139–40 48, 52–53, 55; slave trade, 47, 56–57,
power projection, naval, 117, 124, 132, 67, 70, 72, 186n132; trading system,
156, 158 40, 48–49, 55–56, 184n61, 186n102;
primacy: American, 30, 117, 121–23, tributary system, 41–42, 47, 58, 69–
156; British, 115; Chinese, loose 70; wars and conquests, 41, 46, 50–
primacy, 75, 79, 107, 143–45, 150, 52, 56–57, 70–71. See also Carthage;
152 Hellenization; Mediterranean Sea;
provisions of public/collective goods, 4, Sicily
14–15, 18, 20, 23, 139–40, 142, 157– Romanization, 40–43, 68–69, 71, 143,
58; beyond hegemony, 35, 37–38; 147
hegemony and, 25, 31, 33; the Roman Republic, 54–57, 59, 67,
Indian Ocean, 105–8, 136–37; the 71, 93
Indo-Pacific, 110, 112; Roman Ross, Robert S., 30
Mediterranean and Classical Indian Rothermund, Dietmar, 76
Ocean, 148–52; Rome, 48, 89–92; Ruggie, John Gerard, 32, 175n69
the U.S., 119 Runciman, Walter Garrison,
Purcell, Nicholas, 43, 46, 62 183n55

Quad grouping (United States, Japan, Sanskrit language, 81, 97–101, 147,
Australia, India), 111, 125–26, 128, 151–52
134, 157, 160–61 Schottenhammer, Angela, 91–93
234 Index

sea control: absence in maritime Asia, Tambralingga, 80, 197n36

73, 76–77, 81, 84, 95, 106, 111, 132, Tanker War (1980s), 118
148–49, 152–56, 159; China, 129– Thai Dvaravati, 100
32; Rome, 9, 14, 40, 43, 44, 48, 52– Thai-Malay peninsula, 80, 87, 95, 132
55, 71–72; the Soviet Union, 118; Thompson, William R., 8–9
the U.S., 117–18 Thucydides, 7–8, 167n20
Shanahan, Patrick, 208n6 Thucydides’ Trap, 110–11
shared management, 77–78, 106, 108, Topik, Steven, 114
110, 112, 125, 142, 149–51, 156, Toynbee, Arnold J., 45
158, 195n13 transculturation, 62, 96–97, 99
Sharrock, Peter, 103 Trump, Donald and Trump
Sicily, 50–51, 56–57, 59–62, 146 administration, 1, 35, 122, 126
Singer, David J., 23, 106
Sinicization, 103–4, 108, 147–48 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Skocpol, Theda, 13 (USSR), 34, 118
Smith, Monica, 147 United Kingdom. See Britain
Smith, Richard, 81 United States: alliances and security
Snidal, Duncan, 32, 35 relationships, 124, 127; British
Somali piracy, 118 rivalry, 117; China and hegemony,
Somers, Margaret, 13 110; decline of, 176n80; economic
South Asia-Indian Ocean Region (SA- and security institutions, 32; foreign
IOR), 129 trade and, 116, 123; hegemonic
Southeast Asia: advanced practices of, order of, 1–2, 27, 31, 33, 120–22,
97; asymmetry with India, 102; 176n74; Indo-Pacific region and,
caste society, 101; connectivity with 121–23; Korean War and Cold War,
China and India, 105; economic 117–19, 121; last naval superpower,
system of, 81; genetics and, 96, 159; leadership, 8, 35, 157, 176n73,
203n163; hegemony rejection, 109– 178n85; military bases, 117, 119;
10; Hindu-Buddhist architecture, multilateralism and, 175n69; naval
100; Indic ideas and, 96, 98; local hegemony, 112–13, 116–17, 208n16;
waters and, 88; military campaigns, naval primacy of, 126; patchwork
80, 87; piracy and, 107, 207n230; multipolarity, 128; Sino-American
rulership and, 99; shipping rivalry, 111–12, 120–23, 126, 132,
techniques of, 107; slavery and, 87, 137. See also Quad grouping
200n104 United States Department of Defense,
Spickermann, Wolfgang, 71 110, 208n6
Spruyt, Hendrik, 79
Sri Lanka, 29, 80, 197n36 van Leur, Jacob Cornelis, 95
Sriwijaya polity, 80, 87–89, 102, 107, Vasco da Gama era, 113, 208n17
145, 151–52 Vietnam: Champa polity, 86; China
Steinberg, Philip E., 13, 170n50 and, 77, 80, 149; India and, 136,
Sulu-Sulawesi Seas Patrols (SSSP), 147; Linyi polity, 81; Ming invasion
136 of, 29; Sinic ideas in, 76, 103–4, 108;
suzerainty, 28, 127, 173n45 Soviet presence in, 118; United
 Index 235

States security alliance with, 125. Womack, Brantly, 180n97

See also Champa polity Woolf, Greg, 49
Virabhadravarman (Cham ruler), 104 The World in Depression (Kindleberger),
Vlassopoulos, Kostas, 44, 182n30 31
World Order (Kissinger), 15
Waltz, Kenneth N., 27 world order, definition of, 21–23
Wang Gungwu, 5–6, 121 World Trade Organization (WTO), 34
Wang Jisi, 110 Wudi (Han emperor), 80
Watson, Adam, 20, 45–46, 175n72,
183n51, 183n55 Xuanzang, 78, 100
Wertheim, Stephen, 117, 121
Westbrook, Raymond, 6 Yijing (Buddhist monk), 102
Westphalian system, 5, 11, 17, 24, 27– Yongle (Ming emperor), 29
28 Yoshihara, Toshi, 120, 129
What Was the Liberal Order?, 1 Young, Oran R., 35, 178n85
Whitmarsh, Tim, 66 Yunnan, 30, 83, 147
Wohlforth, William C., 17, 36–37,
168n41 Zakaria, Fareed, 19, 30
Wolters, Oliver William, 96, 198n63 Zheng He, 29, 82, 84–85, 104