History of Regional Trade in Southeast Asia

This book explores maritime Southeast Asia’s trade development during the long nineteenth 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 colonisation 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 reveals 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 appeal to those working on wider themes such as global history, maritime Asian trade, and colonialism.