Piracy is when a ship attacks and (usually) robs another at sea. Piracy has always been especially common along unprotected shipping lanes where many ships are carrying valuable cargo. It also shows up in places where lots of merchants are engaged in smuggling. Smuggling is when merchants try to avoid trade regulations, either by selling illegal products or by trying to avoid import taxes on legal products....
Along with investiture, tribute missions were another major component of diplomatic relationships between polities in East Asia. China received tribute missions, but so did other governments in the region.
Leaders were invited to send tribute missions on different schedules (e.g. once per year, once every three years, once every 11 years) depending on the closeness between the tribute-sending and tribute-receiving governments. Missions were expensive for the sending government but they also offered economic, political, and cultural...
An official visit from one government to another was a diplomatic mission or an embassy. This could be paired with a tribute mission, but not all diplomatic missions were tribute missions. Also, diplomatic envoys carried gifts, but not all gifts were necessarily seen as tribute by either the giver or receiver. The meaning of the gifts depended on the relationship between the governments.
Investiture is the process of granting someone an official position. This process has existed in different forms all over the world, from ancient times until today. For example, in the United States both the President and justices of the Supreme Court have investiture ceremonies.
The Latin root of the English word, investiture, is vestisVestis means clothing. This makes sense because many investiture ceremonies include giving a person special clothing - literally putting them into...
Every society with a government has some sort of explanation for why particular people hold power. For example, in the United States, we say that our Constitution embodies the will of “the People” because representatives in each state voted to ratify the Constitution. We also accept that a particular person is President because they are elected (indirectly) by voters. For us, voting is a way of expressing what “the People'' want. Being elected gives people the right to temporarily hold political power.
Any organized political entity, including (but not limited to) a city-state, a kingdom, an empire, or a nation-state. Power within a polity can be organized in many different ways (e.g. a king or emperor, elected officials, a council of leading merchants). A polity does not necessarily have total control over a fixed territory, but it is able to access resources in the form of wealth and/or labor. We use this broad term because other terms (e.g. empire, state, kingdom) have connotations or features that don’t fully fit East Asia during this period.
