This volume deals with the sultanate of Banten from the outbreak of the rebellion of 1750-52 to the launching of the Cultivation System in 1830. After the suppression of the rebellion by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), local society showed considerable vitality. The introduction by the VOC of forced exploitation of the pepper cultivation did not lead to a significant increase in production, but enabled the local elites to augment their power. In the late 18th century Asian traders (many Bugis and Chinese) and English country traders integrated Banten and its Sumatran territory Lampung into a vibrant inter-regional trading network. This trade pattern, which involved the exchange of pepper and the maritime and forest products demanded by the China market for opium, contributed to the emergence of a new economic order in insular South-East Asia. This study shows how the the society of Banten was in a state of constant transformation in reaction to the Western presence and the shifts of the world economy during the period from 1750 to 1830.

Written by two experienced teachers with a long history of research, this textbook provides students with a detailed overview of developments in early modern Southeast Asia, when the region became tightly integrated into the world economy because of international demand for its unique forest and sea products. Proceeding chronologically, each chapter covers a specific time frame in which Southeast Asia is located in a global context. A discussion of general features that distinguish the period under discussion is followed by a detailed account of the various sub-regions. Students will be shown the ways in which local societies adapted to new religious and political ideas and responded to far-reaching economic changes. Particular attention is given to lesser-known societies that inhabited the seas, the forests, and the uplands, and to the role of the geographical environment in shaping the region's history. The authoritative yet accessible narrative features maps, illustrations, and timelines to support student learning. A major contribution to the field, this text is essential reading for students and specialists in Asian studies and early modern world history.

This case study of the tea trade of the Dutch East India Company with China deals with the most profitable phase of the Dutch Company's China trade, focusing on the question why and how the tea trade was taken out of the hands of the High Government in Batavia and put under the supervision of the newly established China Committee in 1757. Various factors which contributed to the phenomenal rise of this trade and its sudden decline are dealt with in detail. Filling in lacunae left open by previous research and this monograph contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the VOC trade with Asia.

This study examines the colonial intervention in Sri Lanka at the end of the eighteenth century, when British rule replaced Dutch rule on the island. It focuses on the local reforms in the Dutch administration and policymaking on the island prior to the take-over and the various ways in which the British colonial government dealt with the Dutch legacy. Native agency in the colonial state formation process, the influence of the revolutions that swayed Europe at the time and changes in Dutch and British colonial exploitation are addressed respectively in an effort to characterize the transition of colonial regimes in Asia during this revolutionary era.

In Hinterlands and Commodities: Place, Space, Time and the Political Economic Development of Asia over the Long Eighteenth Century, well-known economic and social historians examine important questions concerning temporal and spatial relationships among central places, hinterlands, commodities, and political economic developments in Asia and the Global economy over the long eighteenth century. These timely essays engage hinterlands and commodities providing novel foci on historical impacts maritime trade on political economic developments involving place, space, and time in Asia, thereby furnishing historical background for current conditions. They contribute to discourse concerning historical interactions among indigenous Asian merchant activities and European commercial counterparts. Contributors are: George Bryan Souza, Dennis O. Flynn, Marie A. Lee, Ghulam A. Nadri, Bhaswati Bhattacharya, Tsukasa Mizushima, Tomotaka Kawamura, Atushi Ota, Ryuto Shimada, and Ei Murakami.

This study analyses how in early colonial times, the peasant society of Sri Lanka underwent fundamental changes in the land tenure system as it faced the arrival of the Dutch East India Company administration's merchant capitalism.

In Environment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia: A Longue Durée Perspective, eleven historians bring their knowledge and insights to bear on the long Braudelian sweep of Southeast Asian history. In doing so they seek both to debunk simplistic assumptions about fragile traditions and transformational modernities, and to identify real repeating patterns in Southeast Asia's past: clientelistic political structures, periodic tectonic and climatic disasters, ethnic occupational specializations, long cycles of economic globalization and deglobalization. Their contributions range across many centuries: from the Austronesian expansion to the Aceh tsunami, and from the Sanskrit cosmopolis to the Asian financial crisis. The book is inspired by, and dedicated to, Peter Boomgaard, a scholar whose work has embodied the Braudelian spirit in Southeast Asian historiography. This title is available online in its entirety in Open Access.

Javanese literature is one of the world’s richest and most unusual literary traditions yet it is little known today outside of Java, Indonesia, and a handful of western universities. With its more than a millennium of documented history, its complex interactions over the centuries with literature written in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Malay and Dutch, its often symbiotic relationship with the performing arts of puppetry and dance, and its own immense creativity and insight, this vastly understudied literature offers a lens to understanding Java’s fascinating world as well as human ingenuity more broadly. The essays in this volume, Storied Island: New Explorations in Javanese Literature, take a fresh look at questions and themes pertaining to Java’s literature, employing new theoretical and methodological lenses.

In the early modern age more people traveled farther than at any earlier time in human history. Many returned home with stories of distant lands and at least some of the objects they collected during their journeys. And those who did not travel eagerly acquired wondrous materials that arrived from faraway places. Objects traveled various routes—personal, imperial, missionary, or trade—and moved not only across space but also across cultures. Histories of the early modern global culture of collecting have focused for the most part on European Wunderkammern, or "cabinets of curiosities." But the passion for acquiring unfamiliar items rippled across many lands. The court in Java marveled at, collected, and displayed myriad goods brought through its halls. African princes traded captured members of other African groups so they could get the newest kinds of cloth produced in Europe. Native Americans sought colored glass beads made in Europe, often trading them to other indigenous groups. Items changed hands and crossed cultural boundaries frequently, often gaining new and valuable meanings in the process. An object that might have seemed mundane in some cultures could become a target of veneration in another. The fourteen essays in Collecting Across Cultures represent work by an international group of historians, art historians, and historians of science. Each author explores a specific aspect of the cross-cultural history of collecting and display from the dawn of the sixteenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the essays attest, an examination of early modern collecting in cross-cultural contexts sheds light on the creative and complicated ways in which objects in collections served to create knowledge—some factual, some fictional—about distant peoples in an increasingly transnational world.

This is an open access book. The 3rd Universitas Lampung International Conference on Social Sciences (ULICoSS) 2022 (ULICoSS) 2022 is an international conference organized by the Institute for Research and Community Services, Universitas Lampung, Indonesia. The event took place on 6th – 7th September 2022 in Bandar Lampung City, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. This event will adopt a hybrid working model, combining an in-person event with an online meeting via Zoom. Attendees and presenters are expected to interact in this way, using technology to connect to global networks. As has been widely stated in the literature, a number of reports and papers have examined the pandemic’s negative effects, with the majority of work to date focusing on COVID-19’s negative impact on psychological well-being. Thus, social adjustment is required for resilience in order to adapt to and change in the face of adversity. In other words, it is clear that social adjustment, which includes the specific behaviors and abilities that people use to deal with daily problems and adapt to changing circumstances, is critical for global resilience today. As such, this international conference, which will feature five invited keynote speakers from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Indonesia, and Japan is intended to serve as a forum for the dissemination of specific alternative and significant breakthroughs in rapid social adjustments for global resilience, with an emphasis on global society, social welfare and development, and innovative communication, among other topics. Therefore, we invite scholars, academics, researchers, experts, practitioners, and university students to participate and share perspectives, experiences, and research findings by submitting papers on a variety of topics relevant to the conference’s theme and scope. All abstracts and papers submitted for consideration will undergo a double-blind peer review process to ensure their quality, relevance, and originality.