Although it has long been considered primarily a land power, China in recent years has made a turn toward the sea, "as evident in its stunning rise in global shipbuilding markets, its vast and expanding merchant marine, the wide offshore reach of its energy and minerals exploration companies, its growing fishing fleet, and indeed its increasingly modern navy," point out editors Erickson and Goldstein (both of the US Naval War College) in their introduction to this collection of 15 papers assessing the prospects for Chinese maritime development in the context of geostrategic issues and world history. Opening papers analyze previous efforts of maritime transformation in the cases of ancient Persia, Sparta, the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, France, Imperial Russia, Imperial Germany, and Soviet Russia. The focus than shifts to China itself in studies of Chinese maritime transformations from the Ming Dynasty to the Cold War, current Chinese capacity in shipbuilding and naval operations, and Chinese understandings of previous maritime powers. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)