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Yale Historical Publications Series
Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865-1915
Over the course of the half century from 1865 to 1915, the British and Dutch delineated colonial spheres, in the process creating new frontiers. This book analyzes the development of these frontiers in Insular Southeast Asia as well as the accompanying smuggling activities of the opium traders, currency runners, and human traffickers who pierced such newly drawn borders with growing success.
The book presents a history of the evolution of this 3000-km frontier, and then inquires into the smuggling of who smuggled and why, what routes were favored, and how effectively the British and Dutch were able to enforce their economic, moral, and political will. Examining the history of states and smugglers playing off one another within a hidden but powerful economy of forbidden cargoes, the book also offers new insights into the modern political economies of Southeast Asia.
The book presents a history of the evolution of this 3000-km frontier, and then inquires into the smuggling of who smuggled and why, what routes were favored, and how effectively the British and Dutch were able to enforce their economic, moral, and political will. Examining the history of states and smugglers playing off one another within a hidden but powerful economy of forbidden cargoes, the book also offers new insights into the modern political economies of Southeast Asia.
- GenresHistory
454 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2005
About the author
Eric Tagliacozzo
47 books5 followersEric Tagliacozzo is Professor of History at Cornell University, where he teaches Southeast Asian history. He is the director of Cornell's Comparative Muslim Societies Program, the director of Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, and the contributing editor of journal Indonesia. Tagliacozzo received his B.A. from Haverford College in 1989 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1999.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
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May 14, 2026Read the intro and conclusion, and skimmed the bibliography. Quite interesting, and although it didn’t turn out to be what I was hoping for, I’ll hold onto my copy because it seems like it’d be a fascinating full read at some point in the future.
October 29, 2024
Prior to this period, the peoples of the Malay-Indonesian archipelago were deeply engaged in the practice of merantau, a form of voluntary migration or nomadism that facilitated fluid movement across the region. With the onset of colonial rule, however, European powers imposed rigid territorial boundaries and restructured social orders on the region’s peripheries, sparking certain kind of resistance.
The core of Tagliacozzo's work lies in his exploration of how these new colonial boundaries were continuously challenged by smuggling activities and how borders were strengthened at the same time. He demonstrates that smuggling was not confined to a particular social class or ethnic group; it was a practice adopted by Indigenous peoples, Chinese and Indian migrants, as well as Europeans. Tagliacozzo attributes the motivations for smuggling to a mixture of power, economic gain, and morality, reflecting the complex interplay between colonial policies and local realities.
Tagliacozzo’s study is grounded in a rich array of sources, including newspaper accounts, travel narratives, court documents, period photography, shipping records, treaties, and oral histories. Importantly, he highlights that colonial state records often document smuggling when smuggling failed, as smuggling incidents typically only appear in the archives when apprehensions were made.
This work engages with prominent theoretical frameworks, positioning smuggled goods as "containers of shifting values," drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things, where commodities are seen as embedded in contexts of value transformation. Tagliacozzo also engages with Josiah Heyman’s concept of "creation and counter-creation," suggesting that state-imposed laws inevitably create their counterparts. Furthermore, he invokes Julian Thomas's ideas about the material and spatial interactions that shape societies, arguing that colonial Southeast Asia was as much defined by objects and spaces as by people.
Tagliacozzo places Secret Trades, Porous Borders within the broader discourse on subaltern studies, contending that colonial power was far from absolute and instead represented a malleable, negotiated reality. He situates his work alongside studies of transgressive acts against evolving states in colonial Asian societies.
This book offers significant insights into illegal activities such as smuggling and human trafficking, reinterpreting these as critical lenses through which to understand the formation and permeability of borders in colonial Southeast Asia. Tagliacozzo’s analysis presents a compelling and well-substantiated argument, contributing meaningfully to discussions of resistance, nationalism, and the socio-economic landscapes of the colonial world.
The core of Tagliacozzo's work lies in his exploration of how these new colonial boundaries were continuously challenged by smuggling activities and how borders were strengthened at the same time. He demonstrates that smuggling was not confined to a particular social class or ethnic group; it was a practice adopted by Indigenous peoples, Chinese and Indian migrants, as well as Europeans. Tagliacozzo attributes the motivations for smuggling to a mixture of power, economic gain, and morality, reflecting the complex interplay between colonial policies and local realities.
Tagliacozzo’s study is grounded in a rich array of sources, including newspaper accounts, travel narratives, court documents, period photography, shipping records, treaties, and oral histories. Importantly, he highlights that colonial state records often document smuggling when smuggling failed, as smuggling incidents typically only appear in the archives when apprehensions were made.
This work engages with prominent theoretical frameworks, positioning smuggled goods as "containers of shifting values," drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things, where commodities are seen as embedded in contexts of value transformation. Tagliacozzo also engages with Josiah Heyman’s concept of "creation and counter-creation," suggesting that state-imposed laws inevitably create their counterparts. Furthermore, he invokes Julian Thomas's ideas about the material and spatial interactions that shape societies, arguing that colonial Southeast Asia was as much defined by objects and spaces as by people.
Tagliacozzo places Secret Trades, Porous Borders within the broader discourse on subaltern studies, contending that colonial power was far from absolute and instead represented a malleable, negotiated reality. He situates his work alongside studies of transgressive acts against evolving states in colonial Asian societies.
This book offers significant insights into illegal activities such as smuggling and human trafficking, reinterpreting these as critical lenses through which to understand the formation and permeability of borders in colonial Southeast Asia. Tagliacozzo’s analysis presents a compelling and well-substantiated argument, contributing meaningfully to discussions of resistance, nationalism, and the socio-economic landscapes of the colonial world.
September 13, 2017
How do you write the history of illegal things?
In "Secret Trades, Porous Borders", Eric Tagliacozzo offers an ambitious history of smuggling, by studying the distinct intensification of this activity from the 1860s to 1915, along the Dutch-British border in Southeast Asia. He argues that the meteoric growth of smuggling in this period was inextricably tied to the increasing abilities of Dutch and British authorities to construct and enforce borders.
The book is divided into 2 parts. Firstly, Tagliacozzo first establishes the contexts of his study by examining the processes by which the Dutch and British colonial states began to explore, delineate, and then enforce the boundaries of their colonial territories. Innovations in diverse fields like medicine, communications, hydrography and trannport were bent to the purposes of empire.
Yet this is only half the story. Snugglers continually outwitted authorities by utilizing various strategies to sustain these clandestine trades. He singles out for analysis how narcotics, counterfeit currencies, weapons and even human beings were ingeniously trafficked.
While Tagliacozzo leverages on some theoretical work to elucidate his thesis, the historian is admirably thorough in the presentation of evidence. Secret Trades is exhaustively researched. His ability to further weave together an eclectic, seemingly unruly array of sources and themes into a largely coherent and engaging narrative sets Secret Trades apart as an exemplary historical study.
The central strength of Secret Trades, thus, is not its ability to retell the past of any place, people or good in depth. Rather, it is in giving readers a sense of the vast scales involved. Due to the nature of available sources, many of Tagliacozzo’s conclusions remain unavoidably tentative. This book is strongest in offering possibilities; it is inevitably on more shaky ground when venturing into making more detailed conclusions. Nonetheless, this is certainly an admirable attempt to imagine colonial Southeast Asia from the vantage point of other ships, other trades, and other borders.
In "Secret Trades, Porous Borders", Eric Tagliacozzo offers an ambitious history of smuggling, by studying the distinct intensification of this activity from the 1860s to 1915, along the Dutch-British border in Southeast Asia. He argues that the meteoric growth of smuggling in this period was inextricably tied to the increasing abilities of Dutch and British authorities to construct and enforce borders.
The book is divided into 2 parts. Firstly, Tagliacozzo first establishes the contexts of his study by examining the processes by which the Dutch and British colonial states began to explore, delineate, and then enforce the boundaries of their colonial territories. Innovations in diverse fields like medicine, communications, hydrography and trannport were bent to the purposes of empire.
Yet this is only half the story. Snugglers continually outwitted authorities by utilizing various strategies to sustain these clandestine trades. He singles out for analysis how narcotics, counterfeit currencies, weapons and even human beings were ingeniously trafficked.
While Tagliacozzo leverages on some theoretical work to elucidate his thesis, the historian is admirably thorough in the presentation of evidence. Secret Trades is exhaustively researched. His ability to further weave together an eclectic, seemingly unruly array of sources and themes into a largely coherent and engaging narrative sets Secret Trades apart as an exemplary historical study.
The central strength of Secret Trades, thus, is not its ability to retell the past of any place, people or good in depth. Rather, it is in giving readers a sense of the vast scales involved. Due to the nature of available sources, many of Tagliacozzo’s conclusions remain unavoidably tentative. This book is strongest in offering possibilities; it is inevitably on more shaky ground when venturing into making more detailed conclusions. Nonetheless, this is certainly an admirable attempt to imagine colonial Southeast Asia from the vantage point of other ships, other trades, and other borders.
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July 4, 2026Smuggling is not always the act of crossing a border. Sometimes it begins when a border is drawn across people who were already moving. That is the most interesting thing I took from Eric Tagliacozzo's Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865-1915. The book is about Southeast Asian borderlands, contraband, and colonial state formation. Its academic frame can be heavy, but the question underneath is plain: why did Singapore, Penang, Malacca, and Labuan become such perfect "smugglers' paradises" in the nineteenth century? At first glance, one is tempted to explain this with ancient maritime tradition. That is too easy. Penang as a port began only in 1786; Singapore was still basically a fishing village when Raffles arrived in 1819; Labuan became a free port only in 1848. Even Malacca, though genuinely old, belonged to a specific historical configuration rather than some eternal geography of contraband.
These places did not become smuggling hubs because they carried some timeless DNA of illicit trade. They became smuggling hubs because a very specific nineteenth-century institutional arrangement made them so. The first layer is conceptual: "smuggling" is often invented by the state. Before the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 drew a line through the Malacca Strait, Chinese, Bugis, Arab, and Malay networks had already been moving for centuries across Riau, eastern Sumatra, and the Malay Peninsula. Goods, people, credit, kinship, dialect groups, and secret societies were all part of the same regional economic world. Then a line was drawn, and what had been ordinary circulation suddenly became, in law, "smuggling." The smugglers did not simply cross the border. The border fell on top of them.
This matters because the official archive is always thinner than real life. States record violations after they have first defined the line that can be violated. Historical records therefore often preserve the language of the state while losing the older logic of movement. To read a book like this well, one has to keep asking what came first: the network or the crime. In much of the Strait world, the network came first.
The second layer is economics. On one side of the Strait were British free ports: Singapore, Penang, Malacca, and later Labuan. A free port meant no customs duties, little inspection, easy warehousing, and easy re-export. Across the water, the Dutch East Indies ran a very different order: opium monopolies, salt monopolies, arms restrictions, currency controls, customs barriers, and a much more interventionist colonial state. Any basic economic instinct tells you what happens next. Where there is a price gap and a regulatory gap, and where the cost of enforcement is higher than the profit from arbitrage, logistics reorganises itself around the gap.
The British were not merely looking away. Ideologically, they did not really believe they had a duty to enforce Dutch monopolies. A free-port warehousing system naturally became a laundering machine for goods: legal to enter Singapore, legal to store, legal to sell. Where the goods went afterwards was something British customs officers often did not know, and probably did not want to know. To put it bluntly: the British wanted the money. They were not interested in taking responsibility for someone else's imperial order.
The third layer is geography, and it may be the deepest variable. In the age of sail, the Indian Ocean was not a sea one could use however one liked. Its timetable was written by the monsoon. In the northern winter, roughly November to March, the northeast monsoon blew from China and East Asia toward the southwest; in the northern summer, roughly May to September, the southwest monsoon reversed the direction. A ship could not simply complete the entire India-China route in one convenient season. The Strait therefore became a structural waiting zone. Ships had to stop for months and wait for the wind to turn.
And once ships are waiting, trade happens. Instead of keeping ship and crew idle for half a year, Indian ships could unload cargo in the Strait ports and take back return goods; Chinese ships could do the same. The anchorage became an exchange. Later, after the Suez Canal, the Malacca Strait became even more important: a choke point of Eurasian shipping in which illicit goods could hide inside the massive volume of legal trade. Inspection rates approached zero not because nobody understood what was happening, but because the cost of knowing was too high.
The fourth thing that stayed with me is the Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. They were fierce: traders, labourers, transport workers, miners, litigants, tax evaders, smugglers, secret-society members. They entered almost every hard, grey, uncomfortable space. This was not a romantic underworld story. Much of it came from poverty and the absence of real choices. But compared with many other groups in the region, Chinese communities often had family ties, dialect networks, clan associations, credit systems, and a certain cultural cohesion. That made them effective in commerce, collective action, and survival. It also made colonial rulers nervous.
Colonial authorities repeatedly encouraged resentment against the Chinese, through newspapers, rumours, and public narratives that framed Chinese people as thieves, counterfeiters, exploiters, and the reason local people were poor. Does this sound familiar? The script repeats itself in different centuries. Yet there was also a serious weakness: as a group, the Chinese were not united. Endless internal competition, factional fights, nobody obeying anybody. A huge amount of energy existed, but it did not necessarily become a coherent political force. Some underground organisations mentioned in the book are fascinating, including Chinese secret-society visions of merging Malaysia and Indonesia into one polity under Chinese management. The afterlives of groups like the Heaven and Earth Society deserve more attention.
One historical episode stayed with me. In the Guangxu period, Qing officials once warned the Dutch that the Chinese in Indonesia were Chinese subjects and were not under Dutch jurisdiction. Later, in the Republican period, Chinese envoys travelled through Indonesia giving speeches: do not be afraid, the motherland has risen, it will protect you; work hard, make money, serve the nation. In some places, the flag of the Republic of China was even raised. There is real historical depth in that scene.
Looking back, smuggling in the Southeast Asian borderlands is not just crime history. It is not just trade history either. It is a reminder that the lines drawn by states often come later than the networks people actually live in, and that the margins of order are often where history is most alive. Book: Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865-1915, by Eric Tagliacozzo.
These places did not become smuggling hubs because they carried some timeless DNA of illicit trade. They became smuggling hubs because a very specific nineteenth-century institutional arrangement made them so. The first layer is conceptual: "smuggling" is often invented by the state. Before the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 drew a line through the Malacca Strait, Chinese, Bugis, Arab, and Malay networks had already been moving for centuries across Riau, eastern Sumatra, and the Malay Peninsula. Goods, people, credit, kinship, dialect groups, and secret societies were all part of the same regional economic world. Then a line was drawn, and what had been ordinary circulation suddenly became, in law, "smuggling." The smugglers did not simply cross the border. The border fell on top of them.
This matters because the official archive is always thinner than real life. States record violations after they have first defined the line that can be violated. Historical records therefore often preserve the language of the state while losing the older logic of movement. To read a book like this well, one has to keep asking what came first: the network or the crime. In much of the Strait world, the network came first.
The second layer is economics. On one side of the Strait were British free ports: Singapore, Penang, Malacca, and later Labuan. A free port meant no customs duties, little inspection, easy warehousing, and easy re-export. Across the water, the Dutch East Indies ran a very different order: opium monopolies, salt monopolies, arms restrictions, currency controls, customs barriers, and a much more interventionist colonial state. Any basic economic instinct tells you what happens next. Where there is a price gap and a regulatory gap, and where the cost of enforcement is higher than the profit from arbitrage, logistics reorganises itself around the gap.
The British were not merely looking away. Ideologically, they did not really believe they had a duty to enforce Dutch monopolies. A free-port warehousing system naturally became a laundering machine for goods: legal to enter Singapore, legal to store, legal to sell. Where the goods went afterwards was something British customs officers often did not know, and probably did not want to know. To put it bluntly: the British wanted the money. They were not interested in taking responsibility for someone else's imperial order.
The third layer is geography, and it may be the deepest variable. In the age of sail, the Indian Ocean was not a sea one could use however one liked. Its timetable was written by the monsoon. In the northern winter, roughly November to March, the northeast monsoon blew from China and East Asia toward the southwest; in the northern summer, roughly May to September, the southwest monsoon reversed the direction. A ship could not simply complete the entire India-China route in one convenient season. The Strait therefore became a structural waiting zone. Ships had to stop for months and wait for the wind to turn.
And once ships are waiting, trade happens. Instead of keeping ship and crew idle for half a year, Indian ships could unload cargo in the Strait ports and take back return goods; Chinese ships could do the same. The anchorage became an exchange. Later, after the Suez Canal, the Malacca Strait became even more important: a choke point of Eurasian shipping in which illicit goods could hide inside the massive volume of legal trade. Inspection rates approached zero not because nobody understood what was happening, but because the cost of knowing was too high.
The fourth thing that stayed with me is the Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. They were fierce: traders, labourers, transport workers, miners, litigants, tax evaders, smugglers, secret-society members. They entered almost every hard, grey, uncomfortable space. This was not a romantic underworld story. Much of it came from poverty and the absence of real choices. But compared with many other groups in the region, Chinese communities often had family ties, dialect networks, clan associations, credit systems, and a certain cultural cohesion. That made them effective in commerce, collective action, and survival. It also made colonial rulers nervous.
Colonial authorities repeatedly encouraged resentment against the Chinese, through newspapers, rumours, and public narratives that framed Chinese people as thieves, counterfeiters, exploiters, and the reason local people were poor. Does this sound familiar? The script repeats itself in different centuries. Yet there was also a serious weakness: as a group, the Chinese were not united. Endless internal competition, factional fights, nobody obeying anybody. A huge amount of energy existed, but it did not necessarily become a coherent political force. Some underground organisations mentioned in the book are fascinating, including Chinese secret-society visions of merging Malaysia and Indonesia into one polity under Chinese management. The afterlives of groups like the Heaven and Earth Society deserve more attention.
One historical episode stayed with me. In the Guangxu period, Qing officials once warned the Dutch that the Chinese in Indonesia were Chinese subjects and were not under Dutch jurisdiction. Later, in the Republican period, Chinese envoys travelled through Indonesia giving speeches: do not be afraid, the motherland has risen, it will protect you; work hard, make money, serve the nation. In some places, the flag of the Republic of China was even raised. There is real historical depth in that scene.
Looking back, smuggling in the Southeast Asian borderlands is not just crime history. It is not just trade history either. It is a reminder that the lines drawn by states often come later than the networks people actually live in, and that the margins of order are often where history is most alive. Book: Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865-1915, by Eric Tagliacozzo.
May 2, 2011
Eric Tagliacozzo applies Fernand Braudel's sense of geography as history to the maritime border between the Dutch and English colonial aspirations in Southeast Asia (one of those lines drawn in the capitals of Europe, like the Afghan-Pakistan border, or the states of the Middle East, which in part explains why they are perpetually boiling over). In rough terms, the Dutch ambitions created what became Indonesia, perhaps the most linguistically and culturally diverse part of the world, and the British created Malaysia across the straits (except where they split the island of Kalimantan, known in the West as Borneo). This is the world of Conrad's early works, a shoreline of rivers and inlets, a trader's paradise and a smuggler's. For all the spice that made its way east to Europe, Tagliacozzi documents the lively trade in guns, drugs, counterfeit money and humans. The early, more theoretical chapters are slow going, but it moves more quickly as Tagliacozzo focuses more on the ships--Chinese, Arab, Malay or even American--their polyglot crews and their cargo. The British and Dutch called their outposts empires but huddled in their trading towns, which became Jakarta and Singapore, while the illegal trade carried around them.
August 30, 2011
Less useful than I would have hoped. Solid as a history of smuggling in the region, but does not add much theoretically.
Tagliacozzo takes some Braudellian and Scottian ideas and applies them to smuggling in the zones between English and Dutch control in maritime SE Asia. While his treatment of the differing types of illegality (some goods are by definition illegal, others are made illegal by how or where they are moved) was somewhat thoughtful, his conclusions are ultimately unsurprising.
Smugglers of polyvalent identities and allegiances plied the waters between Malaysia and Indonesia, transporting cargoes of contraband goods (drugs, guns) and people (coolies, prostitutes). As part of their colonial projects in the region, the British and Dutch authorities did their best to limit these activities through improved technologies of surveillance - mapping, patrols and registrations. For their part, the smugglers made use of local knowledge and the difficulties of terrain and currents to avoid detection. The smugglers' job was made somewhat easier (and the colonial authorities' correspondingly more complex) by the overlapping and disparate realms of control represented by the two colonial powers and their subordinate and semi-subordinate local counterparts.
Tagliacozzo takes some Braudellian and Scottian ideas and applies them to smuggling in the zones between English and Dutch control in maritime SE Asia. While his treatment of the differing types of illegality (some goods are by definition illegal, others are made illegal by how or where they are moved) was somewhat thoughtful, his conclusions are ultimately unsurprising.
Smugglers of polyvalent identities and allegiances plied the waters between Malaysia and Indonesia, transporting cargoes of contraband goods (drugs, guns) and people (coolies, prostitutes). As part of their colonial projects in the region, the British and Dutch authorities did their best to limit these activities through improved technologies of surveillance - mapping, patrols and registrations. For their part, the smugglers made use of local knowledge and the difficulties of terrain and currents to avoid detection. The smugglers' job was made somewhat easier (and the colonial authorities' correspondingly more complex) by the overlapping and disparate realms of control represented by the two colonial powers and their subordinate and semi-subordinate local counterparts.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews