Chinese Circulations

Chinese merchants have traded with Southeast Asia for centuries, sojourning, and sometimes settling, during their voyages. These ventures have taken place by land and by sea, over mountains and across deserts, linking China with vast stretches of Southeast Asia in a broad, mercantile embrace.Chinese Circulationsprovides an unprecedented overview of this trade, its scope, diversity, and complexity. This collection of twenty state-of-the-art essays foregrounds the commodities that have linked China and Southeast Asia over the centuries, from fish, jade, metal, textiles, and cotton, to rice, opium, timber, books, and edible birdsrs" nests. Human labor, the Bible, and the coins used in regional trade are among the more unexpected "commodities" considered. In addition to focusing on a certain time period or geographic area, each of the essays explores a particular commodity or class of commodities, following its trajectory from production, exchange and distribution, to consumption. The first four essays in the collection put Chinese mercantile trade with Southeast Asia in broad historical perspective; the other essays appear in chronologically ordered sections covering the precolonial period to the present. Incorporating research conducted in Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, Malay, Indonesian, and several Western languages,Chinese Circulationsis a major contribution not only to Sino-Southeast Asian studies but also to the analysis of globalization past and present.