History of Regional Trade in Southeast Asia

This book explores maritime Southeast Asia’s trade development during the long 19th century, with a focus on the role of Singapore as a regional trade hub. Classical literature attributes the trade growth in modern Southeast Asia to the progress of Western colonization and assumed Singapore’s prosperity as a result of her status as a free port-city for British economic influence over Asia. Challenging this conventional historiography, this monograph sheds fresh light on the role of Singapore as a global entrepôt.A series of quantitative and qualitative analyses reveal that intra-Southeast Asian trade grew based on Singapore’s entrepôt functions, such as its ability to act as a financial hub for multilateral trade settlements. Drawing on Singapore’s foreign trade-statistics, including statistics of monetary imports and exports, particularly of silver, and augmented with other quantitative and qualitative sources of newspapers, where available, the book provides readers with a new understanding of Singapore’s role in intra-regional trade. In addition to Southeast Asian economic historians, this book will also appeal to those working on wider themes such as global history, maritime Asian trade, and colonialism.