Profits, Power, and Legitimacy ─ The Zheng Maritime Empire in Seventeenth-century Maritime East Asia

Maritime East Asia is a region with a long history of contest. In the 17th century, the Zheng family enterprise found success in regional trade and maintained a high degree of agency despite clashing pressures in the region from Manchu China, Tokugawa Japan, and European colonial powers. The Zheng organization was caught between regional interests and an obligation to continental politics, and ultimately collapsed. In this new pamphlet in the Regions and Regionalisms in the Modern World series, Xing Hang aruges that the Zheng family nonetheless "profoundly shaped the maritime Asian world region and the global order."

Xing Hang currently teaches at Brandeis University. He is the author of Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia: The Zheng Family and the Shaping of the Modern World, c.16201720 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and co-editor (with Tonio Andrade) for Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 15501700. He has also written numerous articles and reviews for major journals, and is a recipient of many grants and awards, including the American Council of Learned Societies Henry Luce Fellowship and the Michael L. Walzer Prize for Excellence in Teaching.