The Asia-Pacific region has seen great social, environmental and economic change across the past century, with great acceleration of change in the last 20 years, leading to dramatic changes in the health profiles of all populations represented in South East and East Asia, Pacific Islands and the islands of Melanesia. This volume considers recent evidence concerning prehistoric migration, and colonial, regional and global processes in the production of health change in the Asia-Pacific region. Notably, it examines ways in which a health pattern dominated by under-nutrition and infection has been displaced in many ways, and is being displaced elsewhere by over-nutrition and the degenerative diseases associated with it. This book presents a cohesive view of the ways in which exchange relationships, economic modernisation, migration and transnational linkages interact with changing rural subsistence ecologies to influence health patterns in this region.