In recent years, after decades of increasing specialization, new approaches have emerged in Asian Studies that focus on larger units of analysis. Some are predicated on transnational or transimperial spaces, whether based around language (the ‘Persianate world’ and ‘Sinosphere’), geography (the Indian Ocean and ‘maritime Silk Road’), or networks (whether forged by commercial, political, or cultural actors). This attention to networks has in turn fostered interest in ‘inter-Asian’ developments, and methods that are at once micro and macro in scale by following small numbers of people (or commodities) across the continent at large. Correspondingly, the rise of not only global history but also environmental and ‘big history’ has encouraged studies of the whole continent, or large sections of it, by way of the Asian (and Eurasian) steppes and mountains as much as river systems and seas. Such big spaces have in turn linked the study of Asian actors and communities in Asia to their correspondents in the Americas, Europe and Pacific, framing Asia within the larger geography of the ‘Pacific Rim,’ ‘Asia-Pacific,’ ‘Indo-Pacific,’ or ‘Eurasia’ – concepts that have found political no less than scholarly purchase. ‘Big Asia,’ then, begs big questions about not only the methodological how, but also the fundamental where and who of Asian history.

The panel includes researchers who were trained in different specific subfields of Asian history (Japan, China, Southeast Asia, and South Asia), but who have also published works beyond standard national or imperial frameworks. Tackling different aspects of big Asian border crossing beyond conventional divides, the contributors discuss a range of new problems and approaches to different topics and time periods. These include: (1) how thinking about the transnational flow of actors, strategies, symbols, and ideologies can change our reading of political histories typically placed within national narratives; (2) how the barriers of language and script have been navigated in the development of inter-Asian understanding; (3) whether the ‘Indo-Pacific’ has a history that actually is compatible with the geo-strategic goals of ‘the Quad;’ (4) whether it is possible to emphasize pan-Asian environmental factors without smuggling in an old environmental determinism through the back door; and (5) how the re-territorialization of Asian borderlands has redrawn boundaries between bodies and ecologies.