Tsukasa Mizushima is a Professor in the Department of Oriental History at the University of Tokyo. His interests include Indian rural development, Pan-Asian GIS-based historical studies, and global history from an Asian perspective. He is the author of Nattar and the Socio-Economic Change in South India in the 18th-19th Centuries (ILCAA, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 1986) and others.

George Bryan Souza is affiliated with the University of Texas, San Antonio and, recently, a Mercator Guest Professor at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. He is the author of The Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in China and the South China Sea, 1630-1754 (Cambridge University Press, 1986 and 2004) and Portuguese, Dutch and Chinese in Maritime Asia, c. 1585-1800: Merchants, Commodities and Commerce (Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum, 2014).

Dennis O. Flynn has been Alexander R. Heron Distinguished Professor of Economics, University of the Pacific, since 1998, and Director, Pacific World History Institute, since 2000. He is author/editor of eleven previous volumes, and co-General Editor (with Arturo Giráldez) of the seventeen-volume series The Pacific World: Lands, Peoples, and History of the Pacific, 1500-1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum, 2001-2014).

Contributors are: George Bryan Souza, Dennis O. Flynn, Marie A. Lee, Ghulam A. Nadri, Bhaswati Bhattacharya, Tsukasa Mizushima, Tomotaka Kawamura, Atushi Ota, Ryuto Shimada, and Ei Murakami.

In Hinterlands and Commodities: Place, Space, Time and the Political Economic Development of Asia over the Long Eighteenth Century, well-known economic and social historians examine important questions concerning temporal and spatial relationships among central places, hinterlands, commodities, and political economic developments in Asia and the Global economy over the long eighteenth century. These timely essays engage hinterlands and commodities providing novel foci on historical impacts maritime trade on political economic developments involving place, space, and time in Asia, thereby furnishing historical background for current conditions. They contribute to discourse concerning historical interactions among indigenous Asian merchant activities and European commercial counterparts.