This is a good book, which will interest scholars working in several fields. For readers interested in Southeast Asia, Chew presents a study that does something too few scholars do: he places the Southeast Asian experience into a well-documented wider context that makes both more intelligible, and he does so by exploring connections and interplays that cross regions, cultures, and systems of governance and economics. Gun-running is an activity as old as the production of firearms, so many readers will not be surprised by some of the conclusions Chew draws from this careful study of the arms trade in the wider Indian Ocean world, particularly in the nineteenth century. Chew argues that the arms trade formed part of a triangle of trade, including slaves and drugs, that reconstructed networks which wove together state formation from East Africa through Southeast Asia, sub-state challenges to that process, and escalating indigenous political crises throughout the wider region — all of which facilitated increasing European penetration into very old and well-established Indian Ocean systems of political economy. This trade mirrored, in some ways, the triangular Atlantic or Columbian Exchange that drove European expansion into the New World. But this African and Asian world, the latter in particular, played a much more active and assertive role in redefining these new networks. Focusing on small arms and ammunition, Chew argues that the arms trade both spurred and reflected crises in governance and security. Efforts to control or regulate the traffic generally displaced the flow of guns, rather than deterring or halting it. Technological developments generally produced a cascading effect, as now obsolete weaponry found its way into the hands of willing customers in East Africa, the Persian Gulf, the Northwest Frontier of India, Burma, Sumatra, and the Moluccas.

Chew makes a salient point very effectively: it is not possible to understand the evolution of systems of political economy and governance in the wider Indian Ocean world, from the coming of the Europeans, without following the gun-runners. This traffic brought together pressures and agendas of commerce, security, empire-building, local resistance, and state formation, into one powerful dynamic. Following a traffic which itself did much to define concepts of legality and sovereign authority, Chew argues that the arms trade can generally be seen as the supply of arms provided by a producing European metropolis to a consuming Indian Ocean periphery — but the devil lay very much in the detail, with impacts varying widely across time, space and circumstances. At least, that is, until the technological revolution marked by the mid-nineteenth century development of the steel breech-loading magazine fed weaponry and ammunition; but even then, the cascading effect, plus the wider context in which military conflict unfolded, made the process of building imperial networks turbulent and contested. That context included local will and motivation to resist, strategic geography, climate and culture, and local modes of warfare, among other things. Chew draws distinctions between the broad experience of a Western and an Eastern Indian Ocean zone. The crucial differentiating factor was the absence, in Southeast Asia, of any effective or robust horizonal imperial power, such as the Safavid, Mughal and Maratha polities in the Western zone. The dynamics of regional and subregional politics shaped both the nature and the impact of arms trading within and through both zones, for all concerned.

Chew's particular focus is on British arms production and trading. Although not ignoring French, German, Dutch and Belgian production and trading, Chew identifies the British arms industry, and British imperial agendas, as the paramount forces that shaped the trade, and its impact, in the nineteenth-century age of global empire, on either side of the technological revolution. This is not an unreasonable argument, and Chew's discussions of such developments as the structure of British armaments production, the evolution of a Birmingham-based craft industry for small arms, the competition with Belgian-based producers, and the great reliance on customers abroad, are all insightful and relevant. It does however point towards the connection between Chew's research design and the next step: just because it is indeed best to see the arms trade as part of this wider process of reshaping political economy in changing Indian Ocean systems, it is therefore important to reinforce a study like this with work that draws also on French and Dutch archival sources, at least, to flesh out the broader picture. To be fair, Chew himself notes the point, and the case for British centrality in the nineteenth century is hard to undermine. The close discussion of the role of Singapore in this most volatile of trading commodities is a case in point, albeit one certainly playing to the strength of a Singaporean scholar.

Chew is right to draw our attention to the need to place the study of Southeast Asia in a wider context, and to explore what he refers to as activity ‘betwixt and between the interstices of state power’. The story he tells is not without colour, but wisely relies on following the money as much as the men. The book derives from reworking the author's doctoral dissertation, but would do credit to a more established scholar. Linking well established literatures on the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asian experiences together, by studying a surprisingly under-examined topic, Chew makes a strong case that we need to place the rifle next to the poppy as a commodity trade we must understand, if we are to think through the evolution of an Indian Ocean world order that never ceased to weave Southeast Asia into a larger web of political economy.