Pacific Asia, comprised of Northeast Asia, Greater China, and Southeast Asia, has surpassed the combined production of the United States and Europe, and its intraregional economic cohesiveness exceeds that of either the EU or North America. Pacific Asia has emerged gradually and without major conflict, but it should be taken seriously as a region. China is primarily a regional power, but in a prosperous region deeply interconnected to the rest of the world. The United States tends to view China as a lone global competitor, but its global presence and strength rest on its centrality to Pacific Asia. Understanding China in its region is the first task of this book, followed by the challenge of rethinking the global order in terms of a multinodal matrix rather than a bipolar competition of great powers. This requires background on the evolution of the Pacific Asian configuration, including China’s premodern centrality as well as the splintering of the region by European colonialism. Rethinking is aided by commentaries from four of Asia’s leading thinkers about international relationships.

The Introduction describes Veracruz as a central node in trade and migration networks that spanned the early modern globe, but also as a city that nonetheless is not typically afforded a status alongside other colonial American ports, like Havana, Philadelphia, or Cap-Français. In examining Veracruz’s social history more closely, the Introduction argues we can illuminate not only the distinctive social and cultural world of its inhabitants, but through the city’s relationship to ports in the Caribbean, an entire regional system that mediated the definition of colonial categories like race, caste, ethnicity, religion, and status in the seventeenth century, especially for Africans and their descendants. It then situates the book’s contributions at the intersection of three fields of historical scholarship--Latin American, Caribbean, and Atlantic--and offers a detailed outline of the book’s chapters.

The decades after the death of Louis II has been traditionally intended as the first great crisis of the Carolingian politics in Italy, in which war paved the way to the break-down sealed by the year 888. The aim of this chapter is to study royal diplomas addressed to two italian recipients through a time of political turmoil: the sees of Arezzo and Parma in order to study the ways in which political communication was built by the different kings and emperors between 875 and 924. Moreover, the study of royal praecepta will consent the interpretation of the local responses to the challenges of politics and the ways in which memory was constructed by two of the most significant italian bishoprics during the Carolingian period.