Asian Merchants and Businessmen in the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. Edited By Denys Lombard and Jean Aubin. New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 375 pp. $35.00 (cloth) (original) (raw)
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Southeast Asian history has seen remarkable levels of mobility and durable connections with the rest of the Indian Ocean. The archaeological record points to prehistoric circulations of material culture within the region. Through the power of monsoon sailing, these small-scale circuits coalesced into larger networks by the 5th century BCE. Commercial relations with Chinese, Indian, and West Asian traders brought great prosperity to a number of Southeast Asian ports, which were described as places of immense wealth. Professional shipping, facilitated by local watercraft and crews, reveals the indigenous agency behind such longdistance maritime contacts. By the second half of the first millennium CE, ships from the Indo-Malayan world could be found as far west as coastal East Africa. Arabic and Persian merchants started to play a larger role in the Indian Ocean trade by the 8th century, importing spices and aromatic tree resins from sea-oriented polities such as Srivijaya and later Majapahit. From the 15th century, many coastal settlements in Southeast Asia embraced Islam, partly motivated by commercial interests. The arrival of Portuguese, Dutch, and British ships increased the scale of Indian Ocean commerce, including in the domains of capitalist production systems, conquest, slavery, indentured labor, and eventually free trade. During the colonial period, the Indian Ocean was incorporated into a truly global economy. While cultural and intellectual links between Southeast Asia and the wider Indian Ocean have persisted in the 21st century, commercial networks have declined in importance.
Maritime Southeast Asia offers a fascinating paradox for scholars interested in the emergence and development of a more connected and 'globalised' world over the course of the last two millennia. The region's products have flowed through, and indeed often been absolutely central to, networks of global commerce for several thousand years. As the major source of commodities for the world's spice trade, Maritime Southeast Asia has enchanted and enticed sailors, merchants and kings from the far corners of the known world, spurring voyages of exploration, acquisition and exploitation for over a thousand years. Insular Southeast Asia is famous not only for its spices and other forest and marine commodities though, but also for the maritime skills of its inhabitants. Austronesian languages are spoken in Maritime Southeast Asia but also throughout the Pacific and as far west as Madagascar -indeed the Austronesian language family was the most widely distributed of any linguistic fan1ily in pre-colonial times, established across a watery world where it was carried by some of the most skilled sailors of the pre-modern global stage. Southeast Asians are accordingly suggested to have played an importapt role not only in procuring commodities for the pre-modern marketplace, but also in 111obilising and transporting them, carrying them across and between islands, and even out into the wider world. 205 206 TO M H O O GE RVOR ST A ND N I C O LE BOI V IN D espite the extraordinary importance of Maritime Southeast Asia in shaping patterns of early global maritime trade, however, Southeast Asians feature minimally in m ost accounts of ancient commerce and Indian O cean trade.
History Without Borders: The Making of an Asian World Region, 1000-1800
2011
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 nd themselves awed. Still we are perplexed as to how this historical region, boasting internationally known trade emporia, dropped off the center stage of world history. Did colonialism and imperialism turn the tide against indigenous agency? Or was stagnation an inevitable feature of life? Indeed, is it even desirable to write an autonomous history of a broader East-Southeast Asian region? We acknowledge that a discussion of maritime trade in the development of modern economies in Southeast Asia is still controversial, especially with respect to the mix of social, economic, and cultural in uences. But we seek to go further by asking a series of interrelated questions, as to whether nascent capitalism ever developed in this region, or whether the region remained peripheral to the European (and Chinese) core? We also wonder about the timing and nature of change called up by the European intervention. We wish to identify local production centers, such as for metallurgy, porcelain, and textiles, just as we seek to investigate the exchange dynamics between indigenous and foreign merchant communities? Allowing for an "age of commerce" red up by the European intervention, can we adduce a 17th-century crisis in the broader East
Ports of the Ancient Indian Ocean. Proceedings of the Kolkata Colloquium 2011 (Median Project). , 2016
This essay seeks to write a broader ‘event history’ of South Asia in the maritime trade of the western Indian Ocean over the tenth to twelfth centuries CE and in so doing to explore the problems that this exercise in a particular type of history and historical time poses for South Asian sources. As the western seaboard of India and Sri Lanka formed the main interfaces with West Asia, it is on these coastal regions, from Sind to southern Sri Lanka, that this discussion centres. In order to streamline the discussion, my focus is on the West Asian trade communities which feature so prominently in a number of these sources. I use them as a prism through which to explore the challenges of working with these pluridisciplinary data sets and the different timespans of history that they present. Taking its cue from the original brief to write a ‘histoire événementielle’, this essay explores more broadly how these sources also contribute to histories of ‘conjonctures’ and the ‘longue durée’.
Maritime Asia, 1500-1800: The Interactive Emergence of European Domination
The American Historical Review, 1993
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