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Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750-1880
Water Frontier focuses principally on southwest Indochina (from modern southern Vietnam into eastern Cambodia and southwestern Thailand), which it calls the Lower Mekong region. The book's excellent contributors argue that, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this area formed a single trading zone woven together by the regular itineraries of thousands of large and small junk traders. This zone in turn formed a regional component of the wider trade networks that linked southern China to all of Southeast Asia. This is the "water frontier" of the title, a sparsely settled coastal and riverine frontier region of mixed ethnicities and often uncertain settlements in which the waterborne trade and commerce of a long string of small ports was essential to local life. This innovative book uses the water frontier concept to reposition old nation-state oriented histories and decenter modern dominant cultures and ethnicities to reveal a different local past. It expands and deepens our understanding of the time and place as well as of the multiple roles played by Chinese sojourners, settlers, and junk traders in their interactions with a kaleidoscope of local peoples.
216 pages, Paperback
First published July 28, 2004
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January 5, 2015
This book of essays continues the pioneering work of economic history begun by Li Tana in Nguyen Cochinchina, which focused on the central region of Vietnam in 16th and 17th centuries. As with any book of essays there is a mix of abilities and concerns but the era and region are so little known, and the thesis so provocative, that every one of them is essential. The thesis is that in this period there was a thriving culture that stretched from modern day Saigon to Singapore, rooted in both local and long distant trade. This culture was multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic, and under the control of no single state actor. It could appear as an interregnum, between a region dominated by a few trading states and by large, powerful inland empires, and an era of colonial control. It is an era of transition, but also a tantalizing glimpse of what the global market economy looked like in the early modern era. It also marks a transition in scholarship, away from nationalist histories, fulfilling patriotic wishes, (and largely countering colonialist histories), and toward a regional studies model rooted in economics, linguistics and culture. It is a brief period where a vacuum in power is filled by opportunists, exiles, freebooters, pirates, and itinerant traders.
The essays in this book are rich in detail. Anthony Reid supplies an overview of the Chinese role. There are essays on the pioneers who moved into frontier areas to farm, mine, fish and trade, on official policies toward these communities, on shipbuilding and other industries. Li and the other authors often focus on the complex linguistic realities and how dominant languages and court histories can create an illusion of nationalist unity where none exists yet. The whole question of nationalism is a vexed one. This is the era of rising nationalisms, and strong arguments can be made that the Vietnamese in particular had a powerful sense of ethnic, linguistic and national unity. Yet it existed in a context that is far from simple, linear or ideal. It would not be until the 19th century that the country was unified with its modern borders, and that unity was short lived as the French conquered Vietnam a mere 50 years later. Vietnamese identity was as much a northern court ideal as anything else, and the farther from the northern capital the Vietnamese moved, the more like their neighbors they became.
Carl A. Trocki’s final essay in the volume concerns the attempt of Chinese merchants who controlled the opium trade to unify and create a monopoly. One amazing fact mentioned in the essay was the use of trademarks, or logos, for opium packages. People looked for brands of opium, and brand names apparently have a long history in China, as Trocki cites a 1989 article by Gary Hamilton and Chi-kong Lai, with the stunning title, “Consumerism without Capitalism: Consumption and Brand Names in Late Imperial China” (in The Social Economy of Consumption, ed. Henry J. Rutz and Benjamin S. Orlove, 1989).
The essays in this book are rich in detail. Anthony Reid supplies an overview of the Chinese role. There are essays on the pioneers who moved into frontier areas to farm, mine, fish and trade, on official policies toward these communities, on shipbuilding and other industries. Li and the other authors often focus on the complex linguistic realities and how dominant languages and court histories can create an illusion of nationalist unity where none exists yet. The whole question of nationalism is a vexed one. This is the era of rising nationalisms, and strong arguments can be made that the Vietnamese in particular had a powerful sense of ethnic, linguistic and national unity. Yet it existed in a context that is far from simple, linear or ideal. It would not be until the 19th century that the country was unified with its modern borders, and that unity was short lived as the French conquered Vietnam a mere 50 years later. Vietnamese identity was as much a northern court ideal as anything else, and the farther from the northern capital the Vietnamese moved, the more like their neighbors they became.
Carl A. Trocki’s final essay in the volume concerns the attempt of Chinese merchants who controlled the opium trade to unify and create a monopoly. One amazing fact mentioned in the essay was the use of trademarks, or logos, for opium packages. People looked for brands of opium, and brand names apparently have a long history in China, as Trocki cites a 1989 article by Gary Hamilton and Chi-kong Lai, with the stunning title, “Consumerism without Capitalism: Consumption and Brand Names in Late Imperial China” (in The Social Economy of Consumption, ed. Henry J. Rutz and Benjamin S. Orlove, 1989).
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