Chinese circulations: capital, commodities, and networks in Southeast Asia

Chinese merchants have traded with Southeast Asia for centuries, sojourning and sometimes settling, during their voyages. These ventures have taken place by land and by sea, over mountains and across deserts, linking China with vast stretches of Southeast Asia in a broad, mercantile embrace. Chinese Circulations provides an unprecedented overview of this trade, its scope, diversity, and complexity. This collection of twenty groundbreaking essays foregrounds the commodities that have linked China and Southeast Asia over the centuries, including fish, jade, metal, textiles, cotton, rice, opium, timber, books, and edible birds' nests. Human labor, the Bible, and the coins used in regional trade are among the more unexpected commodities considered. In addition to focusing on a certain time period or geographic area, each of the essays explores a particular commodity or class of commodities, following its trajectory from production, through exchange and distribution, to consumption. The first four pieces put Chinese mercantile trade with Southeast Asia in broad historical perspective; the other essays appear in chronologically ordered sections covering the precolonial period to the present. Incorporating research conducted in Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, Malay, Indonesian, and several Western languages, Chinese Circulations is a major contribution not only to Sino-Southeast Asian studies but also to the analysis of globalization past and present. Contributors. Leonard Blussé, Wen-Chin Chang, Lucille Chia, Bien Chiang, Nola Cooke, Jean DeBernardi, C. Patterson Giersch, Takeshi Hamashita, Kwee Hui Kian, Li Tana, Lin Man-houng, Masuda Erika, Adam McKeown, Anthony Reid , Sun Laichen, Heather Sutherland, Eric Tagliacozzo, Carl A. Trocki, Wang Gungwu, Kevin Woods, Wu Xiao.

Chinese merchants have traded with Southeast Asia for centuries, sojourning and sometimes settling, during their voyages. These ventures have taken place by land and by sea, over mountains and across deserts, linking China with vast stretches of Southeast Asia in a broad, mercantile embrace. Chinese Circulations provides an unprecedented overview of this trade, its scope, diversity, and complexity. This collection of twenty groundbreaking essays foregrounds the commodities that have linked China and Southeast Asia over the centuries, including fish, jade, metal, textiles, cotton, rice, opium, timber, books, and edible birds' nests. Human labor, the Bible, and the coins used in regional trade are among the more unexpected commodities considered. In addition to focusing on a certain time period or geographic area, each of the essays explores a particular commodity or class of commodities, following its trajectory from production, through exchange and distribution, to consumption. The first four pieces put Chinese mercantile trade with Southeast Asia in broad historical perspective; the other essays appear in chronologically ordered sections covering the precolonial period to the present. Incorporating research conducted in Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, Malay, Indonesian, and several Western languages, Chinese Circulations is a major contribution not only to Sino-Southeast Asian studies but also to the analysis of globalization past and present. Contributors. Leonard Blussé, Wen-Chin Chang, Lucille Chia, Bien Chiang, Nola Cooke, Jean DeBernardi, C. Patterson Giersch, Takeshi Hamashita, Kwee Hui Kian, Li Tana, Lin Man-houng, Masuda Erika, Adam McKeown, Anthony Reid , Sun Laichen, Heather Sutherland, Eric Tagliacozzo, Carl A. Trocki, Wang Gungwu, Kevin Woods, Wu Xiao

Introduction: the arc of historical commercial relations between China and Southeast Asia / Wen-Chin Chang and Eric Tagliacozzo -- Chinese on the mining frontier in Southeast Asia / Anthony Reid -- Cotton, copper, and caravans : trade and the transformation of Southwest China / C. Patterson Giersch -- The social life of Chinese labor / Adam McKeown -- Opium as a commodity in the Chinese Nanyang trade / Carl A. Trocki -- The lidai baoan and the Ryukyu maritime tributary trade network with China and Southeast Asia, the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries / Takeshi Hamashita -- Cochinchinese coin casting and circulating in eighteenth-century Southeast Asia / Li Tana -- Import of prosperity : luxurious items imported from China to Siam during the Thonburi and early Rattanakosin periods (1767-1854) / Masuda Erika -- A Sino-Indonesian commodity chain : the trade in tortoiseshell in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries / Heather Sutherland -- From Baoshi to Feicui : Qing-Burmese gem trade, c. 1644-1800 / Sun Laichen -- Junks to java : Chinese shipping to the Nanyang in the second half of the eighteenth century / Leonard Bluss -- Chinese books and printing in the early Spanish Philippines / Lucille Chia -- The end of the "age of commerce"? : Javanese cotton trade industry from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries / Kwee Hui Kian -- The power of culture and its limits : Taiwanese merchants' Asian commodity flows, 1895-1945 / Lin Man-houng -- Rice trade and Chinese rice millers in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries : the case of British Malaya / Wu Xiao An -- Tonle sap processed fish: from Khmer subsistence staple to colonial export commodity / Nola Cooke -- Moses' rod: the Bible as a commodity in Southeast Asia and China / Jean DeBernardi -- Market price, labor input, and relation of production in Sarawak's edible birds' nest trade / Bien Chiang -- A Sino-Southeast Asian circuit : ethnohistories of the marine goods trade / Eric Tagliacozzo -- From a Shiji episode to the forbidden jade trade during the socialist regime in Burma / Wen-Chin Chang -- Conflict timber along the China-Burma border : connecting the global timber consumer with violent extraction sites / Kevin Woods.