The global trends that have seen the dramatic rise of Asian economies suggest a turning of the wheel. Students of world history will recall that China, Japan, and India held a central place in the premodern world as producers and exporters of silks, ceramics, and cottons, while their populations and economies vastly dwarfed those of medieval Europe. The sprawling tropical zone of Southeast Asia, known as a prime source of spices and natural commodities, also boasted impressive civilizations. Visitors to the temple complexes of Angkor and Borobudur, in Cambodia and Java respectively, still find themselves awed. Still we are perplexed...

The fast-moving field of archaeological research, especially on mainland Southeast Asia, has thrown new light upon the complex evolution of early states out of Neolithic hunter and gatherer societies (Higham 1989: 2002a). As this chapter argues, the elusive unity of East-Southeast Asia may be attested by the Bronze and Iron Age societies that emerged in a prehistoric period, wedding the macro region with China, via river valleys and high passes through which filtered an array of ideas, material goods, and technologies, just as Han China (206 BCE–220 CE) imposed its control over northern Vietnam. This is not to suggest...

Having described intra-Asian state diplomacy as part and parcel of an Asian Tributary Trade System, this chapter seeks to offer a series of snapshots of these mostly mainland Southeast Asian royal centers as they existed prior to or on the cusp of their “discovery” by European agents. The story is also one of the rise and fall or reconstitution of the Southeast Asian “charter” or foundation kingdoms. Lieberman (2003) has offered a useful tripartite delineation of the mainland states: western, central, and eastern. He also makes an important distinction among the charter states, often foundering; the newer states, which proliferated...

The first Europeans to arrive in the Indian Ocean zone were obliged to deal with an array of Islamic centers and kingdoms, from Mombasa to Diu, from Calicut to the island chain of the Maldives. The experience was repeated in Southeast Asian waters, where Islamic kingdoms were well entrenched: Aceh in the west, Melaka at the core, Brunei and Sulu in the east. A complex pattern of governance existed on Java, where Islam had gained major beachheads on the pesisir coast. Even so, Islam still remained contested in west Java (Sunda) or entered highly syncretic forms, as in the Javanese...

There are large or even dominant Chinese communities in all the Southeast Asian nations today, legacies of historical trading contacts and immigration under European colonialism. Some of these communities fall into the mold of enclaves, or originated as distinct, ethnically bounded communities. Others, through intermarriage or as part of a defensive mechanism against hostile indigenes, became “creolized,” assuming complex bi- or even tri-cultural identities. The Sino-Vietnamese, Sino-Thais, and Sino-Khmers, the peranakan or baba Chinese of modern Indonesia and Malaysia — all are examples of highly indigenized communities. Then as now, Han Chinese often found themselves on the borderlands of the southward-expanding...

The identification of common currencies across East-Southeast Asia tells us much about the way that polities and their ports were linked by commerce, not only with the China seas and the Indian Ocean but with Europe and the Americas. Distinguishing between indigenous and external currencies or forms of exchange would also be telling. Not unrelated to the circulation of currencies is the broader question of trade in commodities, and their differential value across cultures and societies. Where possible we should also identify the agents of commerce and trade, indigenous or external. Such concerns mesh with long-standing debates over the inability...

If we are to accept that the Southeast Asian periphery was incorporated into the global order by the 16th century, then we should look to the mechanisms of penetration. Obviously, the creation of European outposts in East-Southeast Asia was crucial to the capture of such precociously traded commodities as spices and silk at the source, along with control over the long-distance, interocean arbitrage trade in bullion. In their times, especially during the long 17th century, Melaka, Macau, and Nagasaki under the Portuguese, Manila under the Spanish, and, at a later date, Batavia and Taiwan under the Dutch performed this role...

No sooner had the two Iberian powers established their positions as cultural and trade brokers par excellence within the Asian Tributary System than European rivals appeared over the horizon, namely in the form of Holland and England. Basing their commercial strength on long-distance trade and exploitation of the Atlantic trade in slaves, sugar, and bullion, these two northern European powers emerged as the core of what Wallerstein termed the “European world-economy” (1974: 107). This chapter traces the “hegemonic shift” occasioned by the rise of the northern European companies that would succeed — and eclipse — the Iberians in the Asian trade. The...

One of the more exotic of the Asian diasporic communities of 17th-century Southeast Asia was that of the Japanese who formed Nihonmachi (日本町), or Japantowns, in a number of court cities, Asian trading ports, and European fortified cities. In large part, these communities developed as a consequence of Japanese participation in the Shuinsen, or “red seal” trade, under which official passports were issued to select merchant groups, especially those based in such western Japanese ports as Nagasaki and Hakata. These should not be confused with the mixed Japanese-Chinese merchant-pirate groups that ranged the coasts of Korea and...

Having set down the functional aspects of the Iberian and Dutch trading systems across the East-Southeast Asian region, especially with respect to their political and ideological components, we now examine the means and terms of exchange driving this trade. It was Adam Smith (1776: 207) who signaled the global character of the bullion trade. “The silver of the new continent,” he wrote, “seems in this manner to be one of the principal commodities by which the commerce between the two extremities of the old one is carried on, and it is by means of it, in great measure, that those...

Nothing better exemplifies the linking of the East and Southeast Asian states and polities into a coherent regional complex of producers and consumers than the ceramic trade networks. The production and quality of earthenware, including ceramics, is often viewed as an index of civilization — and the esthetic and technical quality of Chinese ceramics was held as equal to none. High-fired glazed ceramics and porcelains were produced by sophisticated processes hitherto unknown in Europe. Jingdezhen was the world’s largest porcelain production site during 1350–1750. The production, marketing, and transport to local, regional, and long-distance markets engaged tens of thousands of...

It was Europe, especially Northern Europe, that first experienced an industrial revolution. Enlightenment advances in science and technology, developing upon Renaissance knowledge, gave Europe the edge, leading, seemingly inexorably, to a half-millennium advance over the rest of the world. While the gap between the “West and the rest” began to close with the rise of industrial Japan and, in our time, a Greater China industrial complex, the question of why Asia stagnated has much to do with Asia’s subsumption within European-dominated bullion trade networks. Yet, why did it appear to the first Europeans visitors that Asia lagged in certain technological...

With China at its core, East-Southeast Asia today stands with India as the new century’s global economic powerhouse. The world region that emerged out of the “first globalization” has obviously made its mark on the present-day globalized world. Such economic triumph, however, has not come without costs — rising income disparities, regional growth imbalances, major ecological damage, and the exhaustion of natural resources. The region is still subject to hiccups in the global economy; the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 struck at the most vulnerable of the globally linked economies, Thailand and Indonesia. Nor were the more globalized parts of...