This impressive collection of research papers is a major contribution to recent efforts to break down a dysfunctional barrier between the study of the history of China and that of the history of Southeast Asia. The editors and a number of contributors note the importance that center-periphery models of state, society, and economy have had in Chinese studies, and the ways in which they have been increasingly supplemented by attention to networks and circulations along them of people and goods. This shift is reinforced by studies of Southeast Asia, where centers and peripheries are not of much use in dealing with a mind-boggling range of geographies, from the edge of the Himalayas to the Spice Islands. The circulations of people are largely of Chinese, with one important study of the great days, c. 1400–1600, of the seaborne connections of the Ryukyu Kingdom (modern Okinawa), in which some of the active participants may have been émigré Chinese. In a striking variety of settings, from about 1400 to 2010, circulating and settling Chinese are seen serving as intermediaries for capital flows, facilitators of the growth of commodity chains, and skillful negotiators with local rulers, only occasionally involved in the sweaty work of production, here most strikingly in the Malayan tin mines. Circulating Chinese combined organizational and computational skills with knowledge of what would sell in the huge market of the unified Chinese empire, an ever more detailed knowledge of goods available in Southeast Asia, and a cultural heritage that esteemed persuasion and complexity and found heroism in dependent ministerial roles.

One of the best essays in this big volume breaks with this China-centeredness to show that the decline of Javanese demand for Indian cotton textiles in the 1700s was a result not of Javanese impoverishment or Dutch interference but of the growth of production of high-quality cotton cloth in Java, some of it centered on the courts of the rulers, which usually have been thought of as centers of elaborate ceremony and mysticism, not productive specialization and quality control.

On both sides of China's mountainous land frontier with modern Vietnam, Laos, and Burma, Chinese have sought sources of gold, silver, copper, lead, and jade. Often they have had to deal with powerful local peoples who want to control trade and mining for themselves and avoid control by either the Chinese state or the larger states of the Southeast Asian river valleys. China's Yunnan Province takes up much of this southern border, and its people have had an enduring interest in trade and adventure across these borders; in this volume, one essay ranges from a famous account of these connections in a work compiled about 100 BCE to interviews with adventurous border crossers today, another describes the shift in the 1700s in Chinese taste in jade from a variety mined in the northwest of the Qing Empire to another mostly imported from Burma/Myanmar, and yet another draws on recent NGO work to analyze the political economy of huge recent growth in the extraction via China of timber from the Burmese border areas. That elegant hardwood coffee table you just bought may have had its origin in the devastating deforestation of a Burmese mountainside; once the timber is processed in China, it passes from there as Chinese, with no regard to global loss of forest cover or prohibitions on trade with Myanmar.

Chapters on trade with maritime areas of Southeast Asia give us rich accounts of the provision of some very strange ingredients for Chinese gourmet soups, especially trepang (sea cucumber, bêche de mer) and swallow nests harvested from high on the walls of caves. In the 1700s the growth of demand for trepang, fairly easy to harvest in shallow seas, kept a lot of seafarers on the move in small craft, sustaining a Southeast Asian role in the far more chancy business of catching big sea turtles and selling their beautiful shells. Smoked and dried fish of course found many markets, in China, in Southeast Asian ports, and at the low end to feed miners and agricultural workers. There was even an immense and sophisticated fresh water fishing industry on the Tonle Sap Great Lake in modern Cambodia; one essay draws on French colonial sources and recent fieldwork, and tells us that Cambodia ranks number four in the world today in fresh water fish production. Here too the Chinese market is important, and another esoteric and expensive soup ingredient comes up, dried fish bladders.

In the 1700s Chinese demand for tin increased rapidly, fuelled by a growing population's desire to propitiate gods and ancestors by burning “spirit money” made partly of tinfoil, and also by the use of tin to line the chests in which tea was exported, and by the use of tin as an alloy in copper coinage. Miners from south China with special skills for separating metals from alluvial gravel became the labor force in tin mines on and near the Malay Peninsula and in gold mines in northeast Borneo; it is possible that some of them and their techniques were involved in the California and Australia gold rushes. Sales of opium from India grew rapidly in these settlements of men with aching muscles and no women, at the same time that they were growing in China; the volume has a lucid summary. Another mega-issue to which the volume contributes is the nature of the currency crisis around 1800 as the copper coins used by most people in China in daily transactions were steadily debased in weight and alloy so that it took more of them to exchange for a given volume of unminted silver; profits for the minter, anger from the little man whose wages or payment for goods is worth less than he thought. We are still puzzling over this problem in Chinese studies, and now we find an excellent account of the ways in which the minting of debased coins in “Cochin China” (the Nguyen realm of southern Vietnam) became part of the big Chinese problem and was part of a complicated trend of debasement that reached all the way to Java.

So we have here an excellent big volume that gives much food for thought and that contributes very substantially to our understanding of the multiple circulations of people and commodities that made the early modern world.