Dr Jennifer Gaynor contributed to Panel One of Day One of this 2-day workshop.
Scholarship on maritime Asia allows us to discern a rough congruence between the emergence of early nautical polities in Southeast Asia and much earlier sea-crossing networks of nautical interaction. What are the implications of this apparent overlap for how we understand the emergence of those nautical polities and for our grasp of the history of transregional interactions? This talk describes some of the evidence for these precursor networks among seafaring people around and across the South China Sea, networks that connected places associated with speakers of Austronesian languages. The existence of these precursor nautical networks suggests they have some explanatory significance, alongside transregional interconnections, in the development of nautical polities and in what would become nearly pan-Asian networks of maritime interaction Accompanying PowerPoint presentation, please make available alongside the audio recording.
Follow this link to view the slides from this talk: https://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/sant/islamic_studies/2025-12-22-sant-islamic_studies-jennifer_gaynor-slides.pdfhttps://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/sant/islamic_studies/2025-12-22-sant-islamic_studies-jennifer_gaynor-slides.pdf
