Chinese Circulations

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

“Collectively, the chapters provide a longue durée view of how Chinese circulations have historically shaped the economic landscape and buoyancy of the Southeast Asia region. By tracking disparate flows of actors, objects, ideas, and practices, the authors show how the kinship-based commercial capitalism originating in China cumulatively created conditions for meeting the challenges of European industrial capitalism and, more recently, contemporary globalization.”—Aihwa Ong, author of Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality and co-editor of Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, “Focused exclusively on Chinese commodity trades in Southeast Asia, Chinese Circulations is a pioneering investigation of an important region.”—Peter C. Perdue, author of China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia, “The authors have used their great professional skills to paint a picture of extensive and precarious trading activity that illuminates the underpinnings of Southeast Asian economic development for the last millennium. It is their success in doing so that recommends this collection to all who wish to understand why the region is what it is today.”—Wang Gungwu, from the foreword, “On the whole, this well-written book will be an important reference not only to those who are interested in Sino-Southeast Asian studies, but will also attract readers exploring the historical development of globalization, particularly from the perspective of how commodity, information, capital and human beings have been circulating and intertwining together for many centuries. Moreover, I am confident that this book will have particular value given the increased interest in studying China’s rise at present, on the basis of enormous amounts of exported commodities and millions of emigrants, which has affected and will further affect Southeast Asia and the wider world.”, “This collection of essays offers the most comprehensive and updated examination of the flow of commodities, capital, and people between China and Southeast Asia…. [W]ith unmatched breadth and depth, [it] sheds new light on the dynamic and complex trade relations between China and Southeast Asia.”

Eric Tagliacozzo is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier and co-editor of The Indonesia Reader: History, Culture, Politics, also published by Duke University Press.Wen-Chin Chang is an Associate Research Fellow at the Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan.