Living with Water: Peoples, Lives and Livelihoods in Asia and Beyond examines the relation between water and human history through the prism of archaeology, ethnography, history, maritime anthropology, literature, sociology and musicology. Moving away from traditional themes of maritime history such as oceanic trade, migration, slavery, piracy, shipping and port-to-port linkages--and from the generic themes of maritime contacts and market exchanges, of cultural contacts and technology transfers, and of collaboration versus military conflict--the volume focusses instead on human-water interaction in history. We present different types of archives facilitating a history of water with the aim of widening the scope of water histories. Water histories have the potential of bringing remote, marginal histories to the centre of historical research. As Harlaftis (2010) and Grafe (2011) have noted, such histories provide atool for linking the local and the regional with the global, and also provide the possibility of comparing the various scales or levels of water's interaction and intervention with peoples' lives. The spatial extent of the volume is Russia, Bangladesh, India (Assam, Bengal, the Tamil country) and the Philippines. Moving away from traditional themes of maritime history such as oceanic trade, migration, slavery, piracy, shipping and port-to-port linkages--and from the generic themes of maritime contacts and market exchanges, of cultural contacts and technology transfers, and of collaboration versus military conflict--the volume focusses instead on human-water interaction in history. We present different types of archives facilitating a history of water with the aim of widening the scope of water histories. Water histories have the potential of bringing remote, marginal histories to the centre of historical research. As Harlaftis (2010) and Grafe (2011) have noted, such histories provide atool for linking the local and the regional with the global, and also provide the possibility of comparing the various scales or levels of water's interaction and intervention with peoples' lives. The spatial extent of the volume is Russia, Bangladesh, India (Assam, Bengal, the Tamil country) and the Philippines.