| Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750-1880 Contributor(s): Cooke, Nola (Editor), Tana, Li (Editor), Byung-Wook, Choi (Contribution by) |
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ISBN: 0742530833 ISBN-13: 9780742530836 Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers OUR PRICE: $49.50 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: October 2004 Annotation: This innovative book rethinks the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century history of coastal and riverine southwest Indochina, the water frontier of the title. It repositions old state-centered histories to reveal the region as a single, multiethnic economic zone knit together by the itineraries of junk traders and by the activities of many southern Chinese, settlers, sojourners, and merchants, whose local significance it explores. In so doing, it pioneers a new, nationally-neutral way of perceiving this dynamic region. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | Asia - China - Business & Economics | Commerce - Business & Economics | Economic History |
| Dewey: 381.089 |
| LCCN: 2004008028 |
| Series: World Social Change |
| Physical Information: 0.47" H x 5.98" W x 9.06" (0.62 lbs) 216 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 18th Century - Chronological Period - 19th Century - Cultural Region - Chinese |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |