The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian Commercial History is as an expansive, authoritative, and trusted resource for scholars and students whose interests touch upon economic and commercial history. With a temporal coverage stretching from antiquity to today, the encyclopedia includes essays on such themes as commercial institutions and urban markets; agricultural labor and local modes of production; the interrelations between local, regional, and international markets; and examinations of such key commodities as spices, porcelain, tea, silk, cotton, livestock, slaves, medicinal herbs, paper, weaponry, and many other iconic articles of trade. The encyclopedia is divided into seven sections, each of which is dedicated to a particular Asian region and each of which is introduced by the editor responsible for assembling the contents of that section. The regions are: East Asia, edited by Xing Hang; Northeast Asia (Korea and Japan), edited by Steven Ericson; mainland and archipelagic Southeast Asia, edited by Derek Heng; South Asia, edited by Tirthankar Roy; the Indian Ocean, edited by Lakshmi Subramanian; the Middle East, edited by James Gustafson; and Central and Inner Asia, edited by Scott Levi.

One of the project's unifying themes is inter-regional connectivity across Asia, and between Asia and other regions of the world. The essays illustrate not just mechanisms for connectivity but how regional dependencies drove those connections, and how connectivity shaped the historical trajectories of Asian societies.