Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia

Furthermore, the contributors to this volume have engaged in a wide variety of studies that examine the roll of the overseas Chinese community, which demonstrates a new understanding of what is meant by capitalist oriented exchange where the trade of luxury goods is examined side by side with the analysis of the production of knowledge. Though scholarship to date has reshaped notions area studies and nationally based histories to move to include the integral roll of Chinese networks in the study of Southeast Asia, as Wang Gungwu writes in the introduction to this volume: “the studies covering the commodities in which they traded have been uneven, desultory and even fragmentary.” Chinese Circulations therefore addresses this problem with a vigor that spans theoretical problems in the field and a five-plus century long history of Chinese networks in Southeast Asia from the pre-colonial to postcolonial periods.

The theoretical approaches in the volume developed by Anthony Reid, C. Patterson Giersch, Adam McKeown, and Carl A. Trocki are as penetrating as they are broad sweeping. Here the analysis of commodities of the mining frontier of Yunnan, northern Vietnam, Laos, and Burma, combined with the markets of cotton, opium, and labor mark a distinct broadening of the understanding of Southeast Asian networks to include the mountainous terrain of what is generally thought to be outside the reach of Southeast Asian studies. Furthermore, the network of the South China Sea is drawn in connection to the East China Sea and the similarly broadened outward to the Indian Ocean as well. Finally, the combined approaches of this volume therefore move to deconstruct the notions that the study of Chinese networks in Southeast Asia ought to be limited to the region alone.

Drawing off the theoretical and geographical broadness of this compilation set out during Part I, Part II of this volume, with contributions from Takeshi Hamashita, Li Tana, Masuda Erika, and Heather Sutherland moves to reshape commonly held conceptions about the network of the South China Sea. First, Takeshi Hamashita’s work reminds scholarship of the integral roll that the Ryukyu kingdom held as a trade center within the narrative of the greater economic development of pre-colonial Southeast Asia. Li Tana’s work on Cochinchinese Coin Casting is a reminder that while cultural and commodity flows are generally studied in within the movement of a “southward” progression, the contributions of Dang Trong (Nguyen ruled) and Dang Ngoai (Trinh ruled) Vietnam were integral in the development of Chinese coinage markets. Similar to Hamashita’s addition of the Ryukyu kingdom to the South China sea network, Masuda Erika’s study of Luxurious Items Imported from China to Siam during the Thonburi and Early Rattanakosin Periods (1767-1854) reminds scholars of the important roll that the markets of the Gulf of Siam network played in the trade of stone, birds, ceramics, precious horns, and precious metals had in a movement that resulted in the Sinicization of Siam. Finally, Heather Sutherland’s analysis of tortoise shell trade by terms of A Sino-Indonesian Commodity Chain. Is evidence that the networks of the South China Sea penetrated deeply into the arteries of the Celebes and the Java Seas to the ports of Ternate, Tidore, Buton, Makassar and onward into the hinter-island regions of the South Pacific.

If Part II of this volume had not already moved to broaden the understanding of Chinese networks and commodity flows across Southeast Asia, Part III, which focuses on the Early Colonial period, moves to expand these networks and conceptual bounds even further. First, Sun Laichen’s presentation From Baoshi to Feicui demonstrates the integral connection between the ports of Burma and Chinese reliance upon the trade of gems during the Qing dynasty. Second, Leonard Blusse’s Junks to Java brings to light historical evidence of a community of Chinese traders that were recorded under Javanese names as early evidence of niche trading links. Next Lucille Chia’s study on Chinese Books and Printing in the Early Spanish Philippines merits particular recognition for its expansion on the concept of commodities to include those of intellectual production, wherein the narrative of the curious cultural intermediary, and Dominican missionary who composed in Chinese, Juan Cobo can only conjure up Brian Ostrowski’s recent analysis of the Maiorica texts of Vietnam. Finally, Kwee Hui Kian’s re-examination of The End of the “Age of Commerce”? demonstrates a convincing argument for the expansion of Anthony Reid’s classic theory into the early colonial and even, perhaps, high colonial periods.

Perhaps one of the most fundamentally engaging historical problems of Chinese Circulations is the difficulty of the task of scholars in finding a coherent definition for what is and is not “overseas Chinese.” This is the very problem that is at the root of Man-houng Lin’s chapter on The Power of Culture and Its Limits, where she concludes, “Neglecting the fact that the Taiwanese, under Japanese colonial rule, were in fact also overseas Chinese, prevents greater reflection on the concepts of the “Greater China Economic Zone” and the “Global Chinese Network.” The concept of a flexible notion of historical roots and identity becomes again relevant in Wu Xiao An’s analysis of the Rice Trade and Chinese Rice Millers where we are reminded that the “rice baskets” of the world (Thailand and Vietnam) did not emerge as centers of production until the 1850s. Similarly, Wu Xiao An argues, “In Malay, the large-scale commercial rice milling business emerged with the large influx of immigrant labor and the colonial Southeast Asian transformation in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth…Here, under the complex economic, political, and ethnic circumstances of the time, the interaction between the state and Chinese milling society was a struggle that alternated between conflict and compromise, dependence and cooperation.” In fact, it is these complex relationships between migrant laborer, local markets, and colonial governance that are the central features of the remaining two contributions to this part of Chinese Circulations. The first, by Nola Cooke, examines an understudied shift in the local production of fish from a staple crop to an export commodity in Cambodia and the second, by Jean DeBernardi provides a provocative focus on the networks of commercial and intellectual exchange that influence the production of the Bible in Christian communities in missionary circles that negotiated between the developing world systems of capitalism and Marxism.

For some scholars, five centuries of historical analysis would have been broad sweeping enough to close a volume and not consider any more contributions. However, the editors of the volume have accomplished a task of monumental proportions as they moved to include contributions from Bien Chiang, Eric Tagliacozzo, Wen-Chin Chang, and Kevin Woods on postcolonial networks of exchange. Again geographic, historical and conceptual boundaries are broadened as the Part V on the analysis of the postcolonial period moves to include narratives of the illicit trade of jade, conflicts in the timber industry, and the luxury/medicinal trade of edible bird’s nests from Sarawak. Finally, Tagliacozzo’s contribution to this volume, beyond his task as editor, draws upon a series of oral interviews and fieldwork sites that stretch from Banda in the Indonesian archipelago to Taipei and then again from Hong Kong through the straights of Malacca north to Arakan on the Indian Ocean Rim. Chinese Communities, is therefore, without a doubt, a wonderful contribution to scholars and classrooms that seek to broaden the definition of globalized exchange through the studies of sociology, economy, anthropology, and of course, history. Through broadened definitions of what is Chinese and what is Southeast Asia, this volume demonstrates the importance of the continued study of Southeast Asia to the understanding of the global community.