Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. xv, 318 pp. (Illustrations.) US$100.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-137-46391-3.
Ulbe Bosma and Anthony Webster’s edited volume on maritime commodity trade in Asia since 1750 is the outcome of both a conference and an expert meeting on mercantile history, held at the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam between 2009 and 2012.
The authors have gathered a wide range of scholars to investigate the actors, agencies, and ports that played a role in a changing Asian maritime economy from 1750 up to the present. In this volume, they point out the need to review the earlier assumptions of Western historians and economists on the development of Asian economies, especially concerning the teleological sense of path development that presents the West as the harbinger of capitalism and industrialization, a notion still undergirding some debates on global history. They note that such preoccupations have been challenged from the 1980s onwards, as “reassessments of precolonial Asia showed wealthy and economically dynamic economies” (2). Summarizing the book’s purpose, the editors claim to focus on “key nodal points in the development of zones of commodity production in Asia” (4), which still lends the book a wide scope, involving multiple regions, commercial ties, and financial networks. The chapters on networks of credit, exchange banks, and transcontinental mercantile networks are especially useful in demonstrating financial capital’s historical tendency to transcend boundaries.
Kaoru Sugihara, a main contributor to the volume, offers a reinterpretation of Asia in the chapter titled “Asia in the Growth of World Trade: A Re-interpretation of the ‘Long Nineteenth Century,’” providing extensive statistical evidence and graphs on Asia’s significant role in world trade, especially in commodity transportation. Sugihara shows how Western imperialism stimulated nineteenth-century intra-Asian trade, in the creation of mercantile networks controlled by Asians as collaborative partners, who later supplanted Western interests.
Heather Sutherland considers a long chronology of East Indonesian maritime trade, while critically engaging with two models on South Asian maritime development: Reid’s model of an early modern age of commerce, built on a Braudelian analogy popular in the historiography on Indian Ocean Trade, and Jim Warren’s Sulu Zone as the portrayal of a more violent seascape focused on shipping and slave-workers. She argues that neither model does justice to an entangled economic and political world involving an extractive colonial economy. Gerrit Knaap focusses on Semarang, a colonial provincial capital and port city in eighteenth-century Java. Ghulam A. Nadri revisits the long-standing historical debate on the eighteenth-century “Decline of Surat,” with a convincing argument denying this decline, instead opting for complementarity between ports, which may move the debate on the early modern Indian economy forward. Ferry de Goey considers Western merchants in the Japanese Foreign Settlements during the latter half of the nineteenth century, when gunboat diplomacy ushered in a treaty port system in which European merchants received extraterritorial rights and became exempt from native jurisdiction. He shows how this helped found firms which in turn expanded to Europe and North America, some of which still operate today.
Roger Knight investigates European mercantile houses in nineteenth-century Java which functioned relatively independently from overseas control, pointing to interpersonal networks beyond state enterprise. Anthony Webster addresses the specific case of John Palmer’s agency house, showing how transcontinental mercantile trust networks developed from intra-Asian institutions involving free merchants, who developed complex forms of business which combined banking, investment in shipping trade, shipbuilding, and transcontinental partnerships involving intermediaries from local communities. Pui-Tak Lee considers linked networks of credit, through the case of Ma Tsui Chiu’s financial operations in Hong Kong during the first half of the twentieth century. Lee provides a glance into Chinese bookkeeping practices, revealing how businesses relied on kinship networks, client relations, and expatriate communities, through which capital shifted between multiple interlinked firms. Also in the financial realm, Tomotaka Kawamura looks at British exchange banks in the international trade of Asia from 1850 to 1890.
Colonial banks played a key role in risk management and financed commodity flows between Britain and Asia, and were involved in colonial plantations and mining throughout Asia and the Pacific. Christof Dejung focusses on Western merchant houses and local capital in the Indian cotton trade (1850−1930), showing the complex interactions between European traders, colonial bureaucrats, Indian capitalists, and peasants. Nicholas J. White and Catherine Evans investigate Liverpool shipping and gentlemanly capitalism in twentieth-century Asian trade, which faced increased Japanese industrialization from the 1970s onwards. J. Thomas Lindblad presents intriguing research into the pursuit of profit in the shadow of Indonesian decolonization in the 1950s, depicting the retreat of Dutch mining and plantation businesses from Indonesia in the movement of economic decolonization. Finally, Rajeswary Ampalavanar Brown compares the Chinese and Indian corporate economies as constructions of law, state, and corporations. He shows contrasts in legal traditions and differences in state versus private capitalism. For both contexts, Brown claims law often played a role in “providing a veil behind which to hide corruption” (278).
A common thread throughout the volume is how most authors point to a more complex, entangled approach in Asian maritime economies, involving both locally entrenched actors as well as the mobility of capital. Together, the essays constituting this volume offer fresh perspectives on Asian maritime trade, which may urge both current and historical debates forward. One of the most valuable contributions of the volume towards global and Asian economic history is its chronology: while mostly focusing on the nineteenth century, its contributors opt for a clear continuity with both earlier and later dynamics, transcending conventional demarcations such as the classic divide between modern and early-modern periods. This approach reveals long-standing continuities involving agencies and networks in the development of business. Although the presence of Western imperialism remains a crucial factor throughout the volume’s historical themes, it no longer serves as a hegemonic explanatory force, but opens the field for a wider study of multiple historical interactions that have helped form the Asian maritime economy up to the present day.
Wim De Winter
Gent University, Ghent, Belgium
pp. 777-779