Ooi Kee Beng is Deputy Director of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

With China's transformation into a republic after two millennia as an empire as the starting point, Ooi Kee Beng prompts renowned historian Wang Gungwu through a series of interviews to discuss China, Europe, Southeast Asia and India. What emerges is an exciting and original World
History that is neither Eurocentric nor Sinocentric. If anything, it is an appreciation of the dominant role that Central Asia played in the history of most of mankind over the last several
thousand years.
The irrepressible power of the Eurasian core over the centuries explains much of the development of civilizations founded at the fringes - at its edges to the west, the east and the south. Most
significantly, what is recognised as The Global Age today, is seen as the latest result of these
conflicts between core and edge leading at the Atlantic fringe to human mastery of the sea - in military and mercantile terms. In effect, human history, which had for centuries been configured by continental dynamics, has only quite recently established a new dimension to counteract these. In summary, Wang Gungwu argues convincingly that "The Global is Maritime".