Looks at the role of Chinese merchants in the transit of a number of commodities through Southeast Asia from pre-colonial to modern times.

List of Maps ixForeword / Wang Gungwu xiIntroduction: The Arc of Historical Commercial Relations between China and Southeast Asia / Wen-Chin Chang and Eric Tagliacozzo 1Part I. Theoretical/Longue DuréeChinese on the Mining Frontier in Southeast Asia / Anthony Reid 21Cotton, Copper, and Caravans: Trade and the Transformation of Southwest China / C. Patterson Giersch 37The Social Life of Chinese Labor / Adam McKeown 62Opium as a Commodity in the Chinese Nanyang Trade / Carl A. Trocki 84Part II. PrecolonialThe Lidai Baoan and the Ryukyu Maritime Tributary Trade Network with China and Southeast Asia, the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries / Takeshi Hamashita 107Cochinchinese Coin Casting and Circulating in Eighteenth-Century Southeast Asia / Li Tana 131Import of Prosperity: Luxurious Items Imported from China to Siam during the Thonburi and Early Rattanakosin Periods (1767-1854) / Masuda Erika 149A Sino-Indonesian Commodity Chain: The Trade in Tortoiseshell in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries / Heather Sutherland 172Part III. Early ColonialFrom Baoshi to Feicui: Qing-Burmese Gem Trade, c. 1644-1800 / Sun Laichen 203Junks to Java: Chinese Shipping to the Nanyang in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century / Leonard Blussé 221Chinese Books and Printing in the Early Spanish Philippines / Lucille Chia 259The End of the "Age of Commerce"?: Javanese Cotton Trade Industry from the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Centuries / Kwee Hiu Kian 283Part IV. High ColonialThe Power of Culture and Its Limits: Taiwanese Merchants' Asian Commodity Flows, 1895-1945 / Lin Man-houng 305Rice Trade and Chinese Rice Millers in the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries: The Case of British Malaya / Wu Xiao An 336Tonle Sap Processed Fish: From Khmer Subsistence Staple to Colonial Export Commodity / Nola Cooke 360Moses' Rod: The Bible as a Commodity in Southeast Asia and China / Jean DeBernardi 380Part V. PostcolonialMarket Price, Labor Input, and Relation of Production in Sarawak's Edible Brids' Nest Trade / Bien Chiang 407A Sino-Southeast Asian Circuit: Ethnohistories of the Marine Goods Trade / Eric Tagliacozzo 432From a Shiji Episode to the Forbidden Jade Tree during the Socialist Regime in Burma / Wen-Chin Chang 455Conflict Timber along the China-Burma Border: Connecting the Global Timber Consumer with Violent Extraction Sites / Kevin Woods 480Contributors 507Index 509