Welcome to SEA-SPAN

SEA-span.com is not necessarily intended for academia or for tourists. It is simply for the curious who want to engage with Southeast Asia as movement—of people in motion across a landscape and seascape that is once inviting and foreboding at the same time. Europeans first entered in search of spices, starting with the Portuguese proudly appearing in the 1500s. Four hundred years later, Americans blindly followed the French in exiting ignominiously in the 1900s. What was going on all that time? Equally interesting, what was going on before the arrival of the Europeans? How did Southeast Asia come to cohere as a geographic unit in the first place? How can it be re-imagined, comprehended, remembered by current and future bystanders, including the waves of people who reshaped the watery world called Southeast Asia? 

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