Maritime Southeast Asia

Maritime Southeast Asia is the island and peninsular portion of Southeast Asia, comprising Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and East Timor, as distinguished from the mainland states of the Indochinese peninsula. Spanning tens of thousands of islands across the Malay Archipelago, the world's largest, the region shares a common Austronesian linguistic and cultural heritage along with a history shaped by centuries of maritime trade linking China, India and the Arab world, and by European colonization under the Dutch, Spanish, British and Portuguese.