This book provides an original analysis of the economic success of Overseas Chinese merchants in Southeast Asia: The ethnically homogeneous group of Chinese middlemen is an informal, low-cost organization for the provision of club goods, e.g. contract enforcement, that are essential to merchants’ success. The author’s theory - and various extensions, with emphasis on kinship and other trust relationships - draws on economics and the other social sciences, and beyond to evolutionary biology. Empirical material from her fieldwork forms the basis for developing her unique, integrative and transdisciplinary theoretical framework, with important policy implications for understanding ethnic conflict in multiethnic societies where minority groups dominate merchant roles.

In Chinese and Indian Merchants in Modern Asia, the contributors put together an important and lucid study of overseas Chinese and Indian merchants and their impacts on the emerging global economy from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. In contrast to the conventional focus on the merchants’ networks per se, the chapters of this volume uncover their “networking,” the process in which they constructed and utilized linkages based on the shared concepts such as caste, kin alliances, and religion. By analyzing the interactions between the merchants and the European and Japanese empires, along with Asian states, this volume provides the critical insights into the configuration of the regional economic order in the past and at present.

Following in the tradition of generations of expatriate Chinese merchants, they began establishing small family businesses. Today, the authors show, these have expanded into conglomerate business empires. Entrusting corporate divisions almost exclusively to relatives, and dealing extensively with fellow expatriates, these entrepreneurs have formed close-knit and formidable business spheres throughout Southeast Asia - a "bamboo network."

This collection of twenty essays provides an unprecedented overview of Chinese trade through the centuries, highlighting its scope, diversity, complexity, and the commodities that have linked it with Southeast Asia.

Economic behavior is governed by two major sets of boundary conditions: environmental and technological factors on the one hand, and conditions of social organization on the other hand. Indeed, social scientists are often particularly interested in the framework of exchange relationships: exchange of goods, services, personnel, and information. Economic exchanges lend concrete manifestations to social relations that themselves may transcend the economic realm and that otherwise are often difficult to trace. Yet in social science research in Southeast Asia, the area of economic studies has lagged behind, despite the great study potential represented by the tremendous diversity of its physical and human environment. Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia attempts to take advantage of that opportunity. As a number of the contributions to this volume show, many if not most of the systems organized on very different levels of integration interact with each other. Taken as a whole, they provide evidence of the incredible diversity of economic and social systems that may be investigated in Southeast Asia.

Southeast Asia has a population of more than half a billion, yet its economy is dominated by about 40 families, most of Overseas Chinese descent. Their conglomerates span sectors as diverse as real estate, telecommunications, hotels, industrial goods, computers and sugar plantations. New Asian Emperors shows how and why Overseas Chinese companies continue to dominate the region and have extended their reach in East Asia, despite the Asian financial and SARS crises of the past decade. The authors base their conclusions on in-depth structured interviews spanning a decade with the often elusive Overseas Chinese CEOs including Li Ka-shing, Stan Shih, Victor Fung, Stephen Riady and Sukanto Tanoto, as well as on the strategic information that their companies use. The analysis of the New Asian Emperors’ present-day management techniques and practices draws on the history, culture and philosophical perspectives of the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. In the midst of today’s global economic crisis, this book also takes a fresh look at the role and management practices of the Overseas Chinese as they continue to create some of Asia’s wealthiest and most successful companies. New Asian Emperors explains: The sources and characteristics of Overseas Chinese management Whether Overseas Chinese management practices will spread in the same way that Japanese management did in the 1970s Whether Western management technologies have found themselves outmaneuvered in Asia’s post-crisis arena The Overseas Chinese managers’ strategies for the informational black hole of Southeast Asia and what Western managers can learn from them The New Asian Emperors’ unique strategic perspectives and management styles revealed through exclusive, in-depth interviews The implications for successfully co-operating and competing with the Overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia New Asian Emperors offers key insights into the Overseas Chinese and the important role that cultural roots play in their dominance of Southeast Asian business.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC-ND license. This book addresses the issue of how a country, which was incorporated into the world economy as a periphery, could make a transition to the emerging state, capable of undertaking the task of economic development and industrialization. It offers historical and contemporary case studies of transition, as well as the international background under which such a transition was successfully made (or delayed), by combining the approaches of economic history and development economics. Its aim is to identify relevant historical contexts, that is, the ‘initial conditions’ and internal and external forces which governed the transition. It also aims to understand what current low-income developing countries require for their transition. Three economic driving forces for the transition are identified. They are: (1) labor-intensive industrialization, which offers ample employment opportunities for labor force; (2) international trade, which facilitates efficient international division of labor; and (3) agricultural development, which improves food security by increasing supply of staple foods. The book presents a bold account of each driver for the transition.

The story of Penang would be incomplete without the Big Five Hokkien families (the Khoo, the Cheah, the Yeoh, the Lim, and the Tan). It was the Big Five who played a preponderant role not only in transforming Penang into a regional entrepot and a business and financial base, but also in reconfiguring maritime trading patterns and the business orientation of the region in the nineteenth century. Departing from the colonial vantage point, this book examines a web of transnational, hybrid and fluid networks of the Big Five comprising of family relationship, sworn brotherhood, political alliance and business partnerships, which linked Penang and its surrounding states (western Malay states, southwestern Siam, southern Burma, and the north and eastern coasts of Sumatra) together to form one economically unified geographical region, having inextricable links to China and India. With these intertwining networks, the Big Five succeeded in establishing their dominance in all the major enterprises (trade, shipping, cash crop planting, tin mining, opium revenue farms), which constituted the linchpin of Penang’s and its region’s economy. By disentangling and dissecting this intricate web of networks, this book reveals the rise and decline of the Hokkien mercantile families’ nearly century-long economic ascendancy in Penang and its region. "Wong Yee Tuan’s study of the five clans of Penang represents a major breakthrough in the study of the Malayan Chinese. He documents an extremely important aspect of the nineteenth-century Asian diaspora, exposing the intricate links between families, businesses, secret societies, revenue farms and public life of some of the key groups of Chinese in Penang and northern Malaya. The book weaves together the various strands of overseas Chinese life not only in Malaya, but also in the Netherlands Indies, Siam and China. Most importantly, it shows the process by which the Chinese leaders gained political, economic and social power as well as the way by which these powers were lost." -- Carl A. Trocki, Emeritus Professor, Asian Studies, Queensland University of Technology, Australia "This volume can be situated within a growing historiographical current whereby regional studies of connections, networks and interactions are gradually transcending national histories. Incorporating commercial, ethnic and social elements, the history presented can be concurrently seen as a business case study, a sociological exploration, a political economy treatise and an inquiry into Hokkien networking. Wong Yee Tuan is to be congratulated on this signal study in how local, national and broader regional histories can be integrated." -- Geoffrey Wade, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University "By aligning family, socio-political and business interests, the leading Penang Hokkien clans centralized their 'home port' as a hub of regional commercial networks, thus successfully extending the trading colonies of Chinese diaspora westward to the edge of the Indian Ocean. Wong has fastidiously researched and compellingly proven this, with a clear eye for relevant cross-cultural collaborations with indigenous and international actors. The important legacy of the 'Big Five' clanhouses is now firmly embedded in the George Town World Heritage Site, inciting further inquiry into the cultural formation of collective entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia." -- Khoo Salma Nasution, Heritage Advocate and Local Historian, Penang

40 or 50 families control the economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. Their interests range from banking to property, from shipping to sugar, from vice to gambling. 13 of the 50 richest families in the world are in South East Asia yet they are largely unknown outside confined business circles. Often this is because they control the press and television as well as everything else. How do they do it? What are their secrets? And is it good news or bad for the places where they operate? Joe Studwell explosively lifts the lid on a world of staggering secrecy and shows that the little most people know is almost entirely wrong.

In World Trade Systems of the East and West, Geoffrey C. Gunn profiles Nagasaki's historic role in mediating the Japanese bullion trade, especially silver exchanged against Chinese and Vietnamese silk. Founded in 1571 as the terminal port of the Portuguese Macau ships, Nagasaki served as Japan's window to the world over long time and with the East-West trade carried on by the Dutch and, with even more vigor, by the Chinese junk trade. While the final expulsion of the Portuguese in 1646 characteristically defines the “closed” period of early modern Japanese history, the real trade seclusion policy, this work argues, only came into place one century later when the Shogunate firmly grasped the true impact of the bullion trade upon the national economy.