The Indo-Pacific is often framed as a contest for hegemony. But history suggests that domination has never been the secret to Asia’s stability. For nearly two millennia, Asia prospered without a single dominant power.

Asia is re-emerging at the centre of the global economy. China’s rise gets the headlines. But India and Indonesia are climbing too, if less dramatically. Furthermore, Japan and Asia’s “tiger economies”—South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong—got there first, decades before China’s recent rise to prominence.

American hegemony is fading, too. The U.S. will remain a major power for decades. But the U.S.-led order is passing. Some fear disorder. Others fear Chinese hegemony instead. Neither fear is warranted: China is far from the only power reshaping the region and the world. And hegemony, after all, has never guaranteed peace. In world politics, order means stability, not peace per se. American post–Cold War hegemony persisted despite the numerous wars that accompanied it, some of America’s own making. Therefore, the absence of hegemony, Chinese or American, is hardly cause for despair. Maritime Asia’s long history, stretching back well before Western ascendancy and the colonial period that eventually produced America’s post–Cold War hegemony, points to another possibility: stability without hegemony, built collectively by large and small powers alike. This history is worth revisiting in detail. It shows that hegemony-free stability is not a hopeful abstraction, but Asia’s historical reality, and its most likely future.