As its introduction suggests, Chinese circulations: Capital, commodities and networks in Southeast Asia is a broad survey of the scholarship on the activities of the Chinese in Southeast Asia. Spanning the fourteenth century up to the present, the chapters represent a wide variety of approaches, including commodities studies, and the accompanying business and ethnic studies anchored in sociological premises. In addition, the studies represent the increasing exploitation of a wide variety of sources, going beyond the traditional and already well-mined textual sources, such as Chinese company and organisational records, Chinese textual accounts and European sources including those of the Dutch East India Company, to include archaeological and numismatic data, ethnographic accounts, and non-governmental organisation reports. It showcases the approaches and methodologies developed and being used by scholars over the last two decades.
Consisting of 20 chapters, the volume is divided into five sections. Section one deals with a number of the key paradigms that have framed the study of the economic history of the overseas Chinese thus far, and include summaries of the primary theses of research by such scholars as Anthony Reid and Carl Trocki. Section two looks at the precolonial era (up to the early eighteenth century), and provides case studies on the organic nature of the dynamics of the overseas Chinese economic activities in Southeast Asia in the absence of more formal or institutional, transregional structures. Necessarily, the chapters in this section deal with themes pertaining to the nuts and bolts of trade, including competing systems of trade (Takeshi Hamashita), notions of currency circulations and cross-border usage (Li Tana) and of socio-economic ‘value’ as products move from source to market (Heather Sutherland), and the dynamics of the supply chain process (Masuda Erika). Sections three and four explore the early and high colonial eras, respectively, and provide vivid case studies on the negotiation and facilitation of economic activities in the face of changing, and increasingly rigid, transregional imperial structures. Finally, section five looks at the postcolonial era, and the economic activities of the Chinese in Southeast Asia, both in terms of the diasporic groups over the last 700 years, and the newly arrived Chinese in the post-independence and post-Deng reforms period.
The volume largely achieves its stated objective — providing an overview of the field through showcasing the work of an assemblage of scholars, from the freshly graduated to the established. The reader is provided with a layering of differing research parameters and new frameworks making their first foray into a well-researched and well-defined historical field.
To place this in perspective, the study of the Chinese in Southeast Asia has hitherto focused on four major premises — the periodisation of migratory patterns of the huashang (merchant), huagong (labourer), huaqiao (overseas Chinese citizen) and huayi (the Chinese overseas re-migrant); the roles of Chinese social institutions and associations; patterns of migration and social linkages as a means of understanding transregional exchanges and interaction; and the brokering of political-economic space and opportunities in Southeast Asia by key Chinese migrants. This volume showcases scholarship that goes beyond, and even subverts, these familiar paradigms.
The study of commodities, for example, includes the transference of print culture and the production of print material (Lucille Chia and Jean DeBernardi's chapters), the procurement of raw materials and production of finished products (Kwee Hui Kian and Nola Cooke's chapters), and the development of markets and supplies in products of intrinsic value (Sun Laichen and Wen-Chin Chang's chapters). While commodities studies are well established in Southeast Asian economic history, including works by Paul Wheatley, O.W. Wolters and Roderich Ptak, this volume illustrates that the overseas Chinese had significant input that ultimately determined the nature of products marketed both in Southeast Asia and beyond.
Second, a number of chapters illustrate scholarship analysing Chinese economic activities as a process of exploiting existing social networks built along ethnic and dialect lines. These include the creation of vertically integrated networks in critical, and not just niche, economic sectors. These are illustrated in the chapters by Wu Xiao An on the rice trade and industry in British Malaya, and by Nola Cooke on the production of processed fish in Cambodia. While such studies have been carried out on the production and trade of products historically regarded as Chinese consumer items (such as gambier and pepper), these contributors include economic sectors traditionally regarded as the purview of indigenous economic players and power brokers.
Third, the volume explores Chinese trade in Southeast Asia as an intraregional activity. Herein, the traditional approach is premised on the dependence on China as the ultimate demand and even supply market upon which almost all Chinese economic activities in Southeast Asia were based. This volume shows that the tide of scholarship is slowly subverting this basis, and instead premising the shifts in market practices as a series of responses to changes in demand and supply factors, and political developments, within Southeast Asia. In short, the economic history of the Chinese in Southeast Asia can be studied in its own right, and not solely along the old paradigm of ‘greater China’ and its linkages.
Finally, the chapters on the post-independence era provide the reader with an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, it is apparent that the four chapters in this section were conceptualised to explore how the economic activities of new groups of Chinese in the region may be juxtaposed against historical paradigms over the longue durée. Yet the contributors have held back from unequivocally declaring these postcolonial case studies as representative of established patterns of Sino–Southeast Asian interaction. This cautionary note is important given a tendency amongst historians to cast the last three decades of Sino–Southeast Asian socio-economic relations as part of a two-millennia-old cycle. The Bandung declaration of 1955, Cold War confrontations in East Asia, and the still largely experimental nature of Chinese economic and social policies, as opposed to the philosophical orthodoxies that have by and large anchored Chinese statecraft over the last millennium, suggest that there may be a need to allow some time to lapse before longer cyclical comparisons can be effectively made.
Perhaps two criticisms may be levelled at this point. First, the chronological span should have been expanded: there is a growing body of scholarship that demonstrates that Chinese commercial and social activities in Southeast Asia had its genesis around the tenth century AD (Song dynasty). Indeed, many commercial and social practices of the Chinese in Southeast Asia outlined in the chapters on the early colonial and even high colonial eras may be traced to that earlier time. Second, attempts to de-centre China should not automatically translate to reversing the direction of civilisational influence from a Sinocentric perspective to one that emanates from Southeast Asia. While it may be easier to argue for intrinsic Southeast Asia-based contributions to China in such areas as the trade in products and the transmission of material culture, the same has thus far not been apparent in the area of culture, both Southeast Asian or from the West. In this regard, such topics as the spread of religion and the dissemination of cultural content through print culture into China have to be examined in much greater depth.
These criticisms should not detract from this volume's importance as a showcase of the study of the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, and, as such, the editors and authors should be congratulated.
