Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865-1915

Yale Historical Publications Series

by Eric Tagliacozzo

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.

Genres: History

454 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Eric 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.

Reviews

[Jiaxing · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[mantareads · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.