Linking Destinies: Trade, Towns and Kin in Asian History

Description

Trade flows, cities and kinship relations can all be seen as elements of complex networks. In this collection of essays, all of which deal with Asia, we argue that there are good reasons to envisage them as various dimensions of the same networks. Nevertheless, it is fairly rare to find trade, cities and kinship relations as intimately linked as we have portrayed them in this volume, because they are usually classified within different sub-disciplines of history, whose practitioners are all too often not inclined to talk to people outside their own field. The Australian born historian Heather Sutherland, who recently retired from the VU university in Amsterdam, is an exception in this respect because most of her work gravitates towards an approach which aims to integrate this trinity of topics. This collection of essays, written by a number of her students and close colleagues, has taken its cue from her approach. It is not the case that all the contributions deal with all three topics but they as a collective demonstrate how flows of trade, cities—both as urban centres and nodes in wider networks—and kinship relations hang together, and how the study of one topic opens new vistas on the other two, revealing causal links that otherwise would have remained hidden. Thus, the essays in this collective volume support the idea that trade, towns and kin—although often dealt with quite separately—can be viewed as various aspects of the same networks, connecting people, places and commodities. Cover LINKING DESTINIES LINKING DESTINIES Copyright Contents Preface PETER BOOMGAARD and HENK SCHULTE NORDHOLT Connecting people, places andcommodities PETER BOOMGAARD Early globalization Cowries as currency, 600 BCE-1900 WILLEM VAN SCHENDEL The Asianization of indigo Rapid change in a global trade around 1800 OSCAR SALEMINK Trading goods, prestige and power A revisionist history of Lowlander-Highlander relations in Vietnam I GDE PARIMARTHA Contextualizing trade in East Nusa Tenggara, 1600-1800 GERRIT KNAAP Maritime trade in small-town Java around 1775 The cases of Tegal and Pekalongan ALEXANDER CLAVER Struggling for justice Chinese commerce and Dutch law in the Netherlands Indies, 1800-1942 REMCO RABEN Cities and the slave trade in early-modern Southeast Asia PETER KEPPY Keroncong, concours and crooners Home grown entertainment in early twentieth-century Batavia FREEK COLOMBIJN Kampong improvement in colonial Indonesia A contest on paper and in the field ELSBETH LOCHER-SCHOLTEN Family is where one starts from Exploring family history in the historiography of colonial Indonesia KWEE HUI KIAN Cultural strategies, economic dominance The lineage of Tan Bing in nineteenth-century Semarang, Java SONG PING Traditional lineages in transnational spaces WU XIAO AN Family divided, property disputed The collapse of a wealthy Nanyang Chinese patriarch About the authors DICK KOOIMAN Short biography of Heather Sutherland Inge M. Tromp Bibliography of Heather Sutherland