Conference: Pirates, Merchants, and Cool Maps

This weekend I went to a conference at Emory called Sea Rovers, Silk, and Samurai: Maritime China in Global History. It was organized by Tonio Andrade of the History department. It was really fabulous, and brought together leading scholars on East Asian and European history (particularly of the 17th century) in various disciplines, such as military history, cartography, trade relations, and law. There were some very formidable elder celebrities such as John Wills (emeritus professor from USC) and Leonard Blusse (Leiden), but also many younger and extremely impressive scholars from all over the world as well. It was wonderful to have such a great event right here, and I was sorry I could only hear a few of the papers.

One of the things I liked about the conference was that it helped me think about Japan in the 17th century in a way I haven't before. I usually think of travel in terms of barrier stations (sekisho 関所) and highways (kaidô 街道 ); i.e., places you walk to. I don't think much about the sea. The sea seems formless and (obviously) fluid; except for harbors and beaches, it can't be named or celebrated in poetry in the same way that territory (=terra) is. And yet its significance is enormous. I can't believe I've never noticed it much, but I haven't.
So here are some scholars about whose work I intend to learn more:

• John Wills From Ming to Ch'ing: Conquest, Region, and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century China (co-edited with Jonathan Spence) (Yale, 1979 1981)
• Robert Batchelor: He works on the Selden map of China. Totally mind-blowing. He has a paper on porcelain trade between China and Britain that I want to read.  
• Lucille Chia: At UC Riverside. She spoke about porcelain, but she also writes about print culture.  
• Peter Shapinsky: At the University of Illinois. He studies Japanese pirates, matey. I'm particularly interested in reading these two publications: "Polyvocal Portolans: Nautical Charts and Hybrid Maritime Cultures in Early Modern East Asia,"Early Modern Japan, XIV (2006),  4-26; and "With the Sea as their Domain: Pirates and Maritime Lordship in Medieval Japan," in Seascapes, Littoral Cultures and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges ed., Jerry Bentley, Kären Wigen, and Renate Bridenthal (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 221-238.  
• Robert J. Antony: Pirate expert from the University of Macau. He's written a lot, so maybe I should jump in with Pirates in the Age of Sail (W. W. Norton Publishers, 2007)? 

("Pirates" sounds romantic, but of course it must have been scary and awful for the people involved.)
Anyway, it was nice to have so many amazing people in the same room talking to one another about such fascinating subjects.