These essays appeared originally as a special issue of Modern Asian Studies in March 2012. We are delighted that Cambridge University Press, India, have decided to republish them in book form. As the introduction mentions, the collection originated at a workshop in Dubai in February 2008, funded by the Social Science Research Council. It was one of twelve structured around the theme of ‘Inter-Asian Connections’. For most of us at our workshop, it was a first meeting and a first encounter with Dubai. The time, place and circumstances — travellers chance-met in a caravanserai, as it were — spoke eloquently to our theme of ‘Sites of Asian Interaction’, and generated what was, for us, a particular exciting and fresh discussion. We are grateful to everybody who took part in the meeting: both to our authors and to C. J. Wee Wanling and Engseng Ho. For the journal issue we solicited new contributions by Chua Ai Lin and Carolien Stulte, whose research illuminates the diversity of the ‘sites’ of interactions in exciting ways. For this edition, we have added an essay by Tim Harper, which also first appeared in Modern Asian Studies in November 2013, and which was very indebted to the workshop. All the essays are reprinted here with the kind permission of Modern Asian Studies, for which our warm thanks go to its editor, Joya Chatterji.