| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.4

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A World of Water: Rain, Rivers and Seas in Southeast Asian Histories. Edited by Peter Boomgaard. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007. viii + 368 pp. Tables, maps, figures, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Paper $42.00.
Until recently, few historians have devoted their attention to human interactions with the earth's aquatic environments. This volume suggests numerous ways in which environmental historians might begin to examine this neglected topic. The thirteen multidisciplinary essays demonstrate that water has held multiple and ambiguous meanings in Southeast Asia's past, appearing as both a source of prosperity and a life-threatening danger.	1
The strongest sections of the book investigate the oceans surrounding Southeast Asia. Throughout Southeast Asia's history, as Heather Sutherland makes clear in her survey of the historiography of maritime trade in the region, access to the sea opened up commercial opportunities to coastal areas at the crossroads of exchange between China, India, and Europe. Yet contact with the ocean also exposed people to cyclones, tsunamis, and other disasters that, as Greg Bankoff's archival research on the climate of the Philippines shows, shaped the histories of many Southeast Asian communities. The constant danger and uncertainty that characterized human encounters with the marine environment found expression in the demonic qualities ascribed to monsters and spirits believed to populate its waters, as Sandra Pannell illustrates in her study of indigenous sea cosmologies in southern Indonesia.	. . .

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