Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Globalization in Southeast Asia over la Longue Duree 9789812306487

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TIME’S ARROW, TIME’S CYCLE

Department of History, National University of Singapore The Department of History is one of the oldest departments in the National University of Singapore. Its roots can be traced to 1929, when history was made part of the curriculum of the newly founded Raffles College. Over the years, the Department has grown in size as well as in its research and curricular range. It currently has 23 full-time faculty members and each year approximately 5,000 undergraduates enrol in its modules. The Department’s expertise lies primarily in the history of Asia, with special emphasis on Southeast and East Asia, but there is also a strong selection of offerings in European and American History, Art History, Military History and Historiography. Modules cover a wide range of topics, including maritime history; economic, social and cultural history; science and technology; and Asian business history. Traditionally, the Department has emphasized providing undergraduate education to prepare its students for their future careers, and this task remains a major commitment. However, graduate studies in history are now a priority area for expansion, and the Department currently has a sizeable population of MA and PhD candidates, with a comprehensive graduate curriculum. Raffles Visiting Professor The Raffles Chair in History, last filled in 1983, has been reconstituted as the Raffles Visiting Professorship in History. Scholars invited to fill this position will be distinguished figures in the field of Asian history, in keeping with the focus of the Department and in the spirit of the historical interests of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles. The second holder of the Raffles Visiting Professorship in History was Professor Peter A. Coclanis of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was in residence at the Department in 2005. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies was established as an autonomous organization in 1968. It is a regional centre dedicated to the study of socio-political, security and economic trends and developments in Southeast Asia and its wider geostrategic and economic environment. The Institute's research programmes are the Regional Economic Studies (RES, including ASEAN and APEC), Regional Strategic and Political Studies (RSPS), and Regional Social and Cultural Studies (RSCS). ISEAS regularly copublishes book on topics related to its research programmes.

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PETER A. COCLANIS TIME’S ARROW, TIME’S CYCLE Globalization in Southeast Asia over la Longue Durée

The

Ra les Lecture Series

INSTITUTE OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES Singapore

First published in Singapore in 2006 by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies 30 Heng Mui Keng Terrace Pasir Panjang E-mail: [email protected] Singapore 119614 Website: http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg for the Department of History National University of Singapore 11 Arts Link Singapore 117570 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, for the Department of History, NUS. © 2006 Department of History, National University of Singapore. The responsibility for facts and opinions in this publication rests exclusively with the author and his interpretations do not necessarily reflect the views or the policy of the Department of History, the University, the Institute, or their supporters. ISEAS Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Coclanis, Peter A. Time’s arrow, time’s cycle: globalization in Southeast Asia over la longue durée. 1. Globalization—Economic aspects—Southeast Asia—History. 2. Southeast Asia—Economic conditions. I. Title. HC441 C66 2006 ISBN 981-230-375-8 ISSN 0219-8177 Typeset in Singapore by Superskill Graphics Pte Ltd Printed in Singapore by Photoplates Pte Ltd

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CONTENTS Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Globalization in Southeast Asia over la Longue Durée 1 Notes 57 About the Author 75

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This lecture was delivered on 26 October 2005 by Peter A. Coclanis, Associate Provost for International Affairs and Albert R. Newsome Professor of History and Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Raffles Visiting Professor in the Department of History, National University of Singapore. It was the second Raffles Lecture, organized by the Department of History, National University of Singapore.

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TIME’S ARROW, TIME’S CYCLE: Globalization in Southeast Asia over la Longue Durée Peter A. Coclanis

Westerners like myself, it seems, cannot help but to observe that the greatest port in this part of the world is marked by impressive levels of wealth, low taxes, a favorable business environment, sophisticated commercial practices, amazing heterogeneity, a dazzling array of trade partners, and, alas, occasional problems with pirates in the Straits of Malacca. To be sure, this observation will not bring about frissons of excitement

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among people who have grown up here, especially since they’ve heard this before from globe-trotting Westerners such as Saskia Sassen and Thomas Friedman. Since I employed a metaphor in the title of my talk, let me use a simile here, an economic simile at that: coals to Newcastle, for that’s what the observation with which I began must seem like to Singaporeans. I wonder if it also seemed that way to Southeast Asians in the early sixteenth century, for the opening observation did not originate with the Westerner who wrote this paper, but with another one, the famous Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires, discussing the port of Malacca in his classic travel account Suma Oriental, penned between 1512 and 1515 CE.1 Despite his fame among the initiated, not many non-historians today have heard of Pires, who, like us, lived during an age of globalization, albeit one in which the world was decidedly not flat. Not many non-historians have heard much about this earlier phase of globalization either, 2

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although Friedman has recently acknowledged it, subsuming it into a sketchy periodization scheme anachronistically labeled Globalization 1.0 lasting from 1492 to 1800.2 What I hope to do in this paper is to focus a bit of attention on the genealogy — the prehistory, as it were — of today’s bout of economic globalization in Southeast Asia, for memory is, pace Salvador Dali, elusive rather than persistent, and time itself marked rather less by fixity than multiplicity. In so doing, I hope not only to recover the concept of globalization, but to uncover it as well, to burst asunder its integument, as another famous writer on globalization, Karl Marx, might say. Ironically, although historians have always held implicit assumptions about time, it took them a long while to get explicitly interested in questions of temporality. Beginning with Braudel, however, things began to change, and today they are all over the subject. Some historians now implicate theoretical heavyweights ranging from Bakhtin to 3

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Elias in their temporal plots, and references to abstruse philosophical dichotomies such as that between absolute and relational time and that between so-called A and B series abound.3 As an economic historian — and, thus, a member of a sub-specialty oft accused of lowly, if not vulgar materialism — my aims are more modest: to explore how linearity and cyclicity play out in the economic history of Southeast Asia. Indeed, the rather loose and modest, even rudimentary nature of my analysis of temporality is revealed in my use or perhaps misuse of Braudel’s concept of la longue durée in my title.4 That is to say, whereas some would restrict the concept to the abysms of the past, to geological time — deep time in John McPhee’s words — and use another Braudellian concept, conjuncture, instead, I employ the concept of durée only to suggest that in my analysis of economic globalization in Southeast Asia I’m not sticking to the contemporary period — Friedman’s Globalization 3.0 — nor even to what Friedman refers to as 4

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Globalization 2.0, which is to say the period from 1800 to 2000 CE. Rather, I’m going further back, back before Globalization 1.0, before 1492 and all that.5 Now back to my title: Arrows and cycles. Why use these dichotomous metaphors with respect to time? As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in his famous 1987 book about the discovery of geological time, neither dichotomies nor metaphors are true or false, but useful or misleading.6 Is it useful or misleading to refer to time’s arrow and time’s cycle? More to the point, are the nouns linearity and cyclicity useful or misleading in periodizing and punctuating historical time, particularly historical economic time, in Southeast Asia? Fair questions, both. The origins of the linear conception of time — time’s arrow, so to speak — are associated, of course, with the three great monotheistic revealed religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All three of these religions adhere to robust forms of temporal directionality, and view history 5

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in teleological terms as “an irreversible sequence of unrepeatable events” leading ultimately to one or another eschatological end. According to this view, all events are directional, and are susceptible to linkage and sequencing. When the proper events are properly linked and sequenced, we can tell compelling directional stories, whether religious stories relating to crucifixions and resurrections, or — it is important to note — to desanctified, secular stories relating, for example, to the establishment of the English East India Company, the rise and fall of the Kingdom of Ayutthaya, or the creation of an integrated world market in rice.7 Conversely, the cyclical view of time, associated historically with my kinsmen, the ancient Greeks, other leading world religions — Hinduism and Buddhism, most notably — and, until relatively recently, pretty much everyone else in the world, assumes no directionality. Everything is immanent. Things may appear to move, but said movements are at once non-purposive, without causal 6

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meaning, and part of endlessly repetitive cycles.8 Obviously, I’m reducing things here, hopefully not ad absurdum. The JudeoChristian tradition contains cyclical elements — just take a look at Ecclesiastes 1: 5–9 or listen to an old Simon & Garfunkel album — and one can argue that there are loose forms of directionality in both Hinduism and Buddhism as well. I won’t even start to parse the various conceptions of linearity and cyclicity about which eminent scholars have written with great erudition. At the end of the day, though, the above generalizations seem reasonable, and should be viewed as what economists and other social scientists call stylized facts. Time’s arrow and time’s cycle then, the two ends of the temporal spectrum. Until the modern era, most people adhered to one or another variant of the cyclical view of history. Certain ideational concomitants of modernity, however — the privileging of what we call reason, more volitional views of individual 7

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agency, and Whiggish ideas about human progress to name but the most obvious — gradually underwrote changes in the way most people came to think about time. As a result, linear, directional views of history, cropped for the most part of eschatological moment and meaning, have increasingly carried the day.9 And so, most of us today, sufficiently possessed of, if not always brimming with confidence, are content to brave a world of linear time, a world of distinct, irreversible and unrepeatable episodes, the meanings of which are mutable and contingent. Such a world — a world bereft of ordination and consignment, as it were — would have shocked and horrified most men and women throughout history. Indeed, not for nothing did Mircea Eliade label the last chapter of The Myth of the Eternal Return, his great work on the history of religions, “the terror of history,” for to “traditional” peoples in many parts of the world terror or intense fear is what historical contingency and unmodulated human agency connoted.10 8

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So where does this leave those of us interested in historical time? Tracing the arc of time’s arrow or forever in temporal orbit? Or maybe history has ended altogether, as Francis Fukayama contended in 1989 and again in 1992, leaving us all nestled snugly in liberal democracy’s tender embrace. Let us hope not. In this regard, Voltaire’s famous line in Candide — “If this is the best of all possible worlds … what can the rest be like?” — is well taken.11 To my way of thinking, then, history has not ended in a Fukayaman sense — or in a Nietzschean “last man” sense for that matter — and neither linearity nor cyclicity is alone fully sufficient either. 12 We clearly need to consider both ends of the temporal spectrum as well as points in between. What I’ll do in the remainder of this paper, to use an image from jazz, is to riff on temporality in Southeast Asian economic history. That is to say, I shall make use of an ostinato (persistent, repetitive) phrase (or theme) — cyclicity, in this case — to comment, succinctly and, hopefully, 9

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wittily as a good riff should, on Southeast Asia’s economy today. In demonstrating certain cyclical dimensions of said history, moreover, I hope in particular to help to historicize and contextualize the current cycle or phase of globalization. And make no mistake about it, a cycle or phase is what it is, whatever certain presentminded pundits and scribes might have us believe. To be sure, the historical cycles I shall discuss are not completely identical, much less monozygotic, but the very existence and relative robustness of such cycles should give at least a bit of pause to even the most vigorous time archers among us. At the drop of a hat — or given my theme, perhaps I should say in a “New York minute” — any Southeast Asianist could come up with a half dozen examples of historical cyclicity of one kind or another in the region. Cycles of invasion from without, whether by Mongols, Westerners, or the Japanese, which cycles were often followed by cycles of imperialism and/or colonization. Cycles of 10

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waxing and waning Sinic and Indic influence, one such cycle is waxing again today. Demographic cycles of one type or another — whether of fertility, mortality, or migration — and cycles of political consolidation and decentralization, or of peasant unrest and rebellion. All of these are interesting and worthy of study, but what I shall focus on here is something else: economic cycles, indeed, economic cycles of a particular type. The study of economic cycles has long been a passion, of course, amongst economists, and economic historians, as well as historically-minded social scientists. A number of research centers are devoted to such study, and individual researchers specialize in economic cycles of varying lengths: seasonal cycles, shortterm (3–5 year) business-inventory or Kitchin cycles; fixed-investment or Juglar cycles, typically running about 7–11 years; and Kuznets long-term investment cycles lasting somewhere between 15–25 years. Some scholars and forecasters believe in the existence of longer cycles still. 11

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So-called Kondratiev or “wave” cycles supposedly running about 48 to 60 years, for example, but cycles of longer duration as well, lasting up to several hundred years, according to such scholars as François Simiand, Rondo Cameron, and Graeme Snooks, and a full five-hundred years, according to recent work by Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills. 13 Although the types of cycles in which we are most interested here, cycles of economic globalization in Southeast Asia, by definition are recurring, they do not appear at least to me to be of fixed duration nor regular, much less modelable or predictable. To be sure, chaos theorists, complexity theorists, or other theorists working on non-linear dynamical systems may ultimately prove otherwise, but until such time let us opt for a certain degree of indeterminacy and contingency rather than for axiomatic predictability in this case. For globalization is still pretty elusive quarry, as we soon shall see. Globalization, as Martin Wolf has recently put it, “is a hideous word of 12

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obscure meaning, coined in the 1960s, that came into ever-greater vogue in the 1990s”. 14 Over the past decade or so, particularly during the go-go ’90s, many writers, particularly journalists, wrote sloppily and ahistorically on globalization, never specifying whether they believed globalization to be a process or a condition, and writing as though, whether process or condition, it represented something entirely new. Writing on globalization has improved a bit since then, though much of what has been written on the subject can still be characterized as “globaloney,” as Paul Krugman, recycling a coinage used much earlier by Clare Booth Luce, puts it.15 What, then, do we mean by globalization? Now I’ll be the first to admit that this isn’t the easiest term to define precisely. Since I likened this talk to a jazz riff earlier on, I’m tempted at this point to take the easy way out and invoke the great trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who, when asked what jazz was, famously responded, “if you gotta ask, you’ll never 13

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know”. Let me at least take a shot at definition, first, by making it clear that I’m limiting my purview to economic globalization and, secondly, by stating emphatically that I view globalization as a process — a series of actions leading or conducing toward an end — rather than a condition, that is to say, a state of being.16 The former is perforce incomplete, the latter a mode or status fully realized. Many economists would employ narrow quantitative criteria in defining economic globalization, stressing changes in the absolute size of transnational flows of one type or another — flows of goods, services, labor, or capital, most notably — or, more fruitfully, changes in the relative importance of such flows. If the rate of growth of such transnational flows is greater over a sustained period of time than the growth rate of total output of goods and services, the labor force, or the capital stock, then economic globalization can be said to be taking place.17 If world trade grows at 4 per cent annually over a twenty-year period, and world output 14

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grows at a rate of 2.5 per cent per annum over the same period, one could say that economic globalization — or at least trade globalization — is taking place. However illuminating is this rather parsimonious approach — and it is illuminating — it seems to me better as a first approximation, a rough cut toward a definition of economic globalization, necessary, but insufficient for a deep appreciation of the process. Here’s where the qualitative dimension comes in. In order fully to understand economic globalization, words as well as numbers are called for — particularly as we go further back in time. Economic globalization, in other words, is as much about states of mind and changes in behavior, and about perceptions of challenges, problems, and opportunities, as it is about ratios, growth curves, and absolute or relative flows. And for “softer” insights of this sort, we must look elsewhere, to historians, to qualitative social scientists, to cultural critics, and even to certain journalists. 15

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Some such authorities focus, for example, on the radical “compression of space and time” associated with economic globalization, while others, including two icons we have already invoked — the great French historian Fernand Braudel and the celebrated New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman — emphasize the changes in human values and experiences as people begin to feel the pressures and sense the opportunities attending the integration of economic life along transnational lines.18 Referring specifically to our present cycle of economic globalization, social theorist Manuel Castells stresses interdependence, scale, scope, and simultaneity, arguing that today’s globalizing economy is one that increasingly “works as a unit in real time on a planetary scale”.19 Clearly, no one writing about Southeast Asia in the eleventh century C.E. or the region in the period between, say, 1450 and 1630, or even during the period of high imperialism in the late nineteenth century could make a serious case that whatever type of 16

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economic globalization was taking place corresponds very closely to Castells’ criteria. Here, though, another distinguished contemporary authority, Anne Krueger — an economist no less — can offer guidance, for she views economic globalization, even today, in a less formal and stringent way. According to Krueger, economic globalization is “a phenomenon” — I would say process — “by which economic agents in any given part of the world are much more affected by events elsewhere in the world [than before].”20 To be sure, there is a lot of slack in the comparative words “than before”, but Krueger’s commodious approach does allow us to accommodate the historical facts on the ground, which is to say, the fact that economic globalization has taken different forms in different places at different times, has ebbed and flowed over the centuries, has had various causes, and diverse attendants, results, and implications, few if any of which were predictable, much less modelable even in retrospect. 17

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For the better part of a century now, scholars have written on what Simiand and Marc Bloch famously labeled the “idol of origins”, the tendency of our tribe to fixate on the origins of one or another process or phenomenon rather than focusing on that process or phenomenon when it was most important.21 I certainly do not want to be seen as an American idolator in this regard, but perhaps a few words regarding origins are in fact called for. First, one thing (and maybe only one thing) is clear about the “origins” of the globalization cycle in the region: economic data for what might tentatively be called “ancient Southeast Asia” — nomenclature that, admittedly, can be considered anachronistic — are far too scanty to say anything for sure. On the one hand, we could take the path of least resistance at this point, and, following Anthony Reid’s lead, point out that “[c]ommerce has always been vital to Southeast Asia …,” and say that, as a result, “the lands below the winds naturally responded to every

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quickening of international maritime trade.22 To be sure, to do so would be a bit of a cop out, but I’m not totally persuaded by Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills’s argument that the region was enmeshed in a “world system” of some type 2500 years ago, nor by Samir Amin, who dates the beginning of the region’s enmeshment into a “tributary world system” at 300 BCE.23 Around 200 BCE or a little before, however, with the establishment of the Han, Maurya, and Parthian dynasties, and with solid evidence for the commercial linkage of the regions ruled by these dynasties both to other parts of what O.W. Wolters referred to as the “single ocean” — that is, the Indian Ocean extended — and to the Hellenistic world, we can state with some confidence that a real cycle of economic globalization in Southeast Asia had begun.24 Whether or not it was the first is still open to question, but it seems apparent that transnational economic flows, particularly trade flows, emanating

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to/from Southeast Asia after 200 BCE were greater in comparative terms, ahem, than before. Thank you, Anne Krueger. Here’s the Greek historian Polybius, who lived from 203 to 120 BCE, on the linkage: Now up to this time the world’s history had been, so to speak, a series of disconnected transactions, as widely separated in their origins and results as in their localities. But from this time forth History becomes a connected whole: the affairs of Italy and Libya are involved with those of Asia and Greece, and the tendency of all is to unity.25

Sounds a lot like John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge of The Economist, writing about globalization today, doesn’t it, rather than like the adopted grandson of Scipio Africanus writing in The Histories about the period from 220–146 BCE?26 In any case, what we see happening, beginning about 200 BCE, is the establishment of a new, multi-layered, 20

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long-distance trade axis stretching from the Mediterranean to China. The axis, which was brokered, underwritten, and secured by the Hans, Parthians, and Romans respectively, was connected by both land and sea routes, most notably the famous Silk Road land route across central Asia, and various water routes through the “single ocean”. It should be noted, too, that both the Southeast Asian mainland and the archipelago were integrated fully into this axis via India and China, with traders on the Kra isthmus between present-day Thailand and Malaysia playing a crucial role as commercial middlemen distributing Chinese, Indian, and Southeast Asian trade articles all over Asia both by land and sea.27 Although this vast Eurasian, or, more accurately, Afro-Eurasian trade axis shrunk for a time in a geographical sense after the fall, first of the Han Dynasty, then the Roman Empire, it is unclear whether overall Eurasian trade itself actually declined or merely flowed in different directions. By the seventh or 21

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eighth century CE, however, it is clear that the Eurasian landmass and parts of Africa were again linked commercially, this time via the offices of the Tang emperors and the Abassids of the Caliphate of Baghdad, the second great Sunni dynasty in the Middle East, which dynasty came to power after defeating the Umayyads in 750 CE.28 Moreover, according to some recent writers — John Hobson, most notably — a “global economy”, albeit one without much presence in Europe per se, came into existence even earlier, that is to say, in the sixth century CE. This economy, centered in Asia, marks the beginning of the era of what Hobson terms Oriental globalization, lasting from about 500 to 1800 CE.29 To be sure, Hobson’s definition of, and criteria for globalization are rather loose. According to Hobson, the great grandson of the radical anti-imperialist J.A. Hobson: … globalisation can be said to exist prior to (and indeed after) 1500 insofar as significant flows of goods,

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Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle resources, currencies, capital, institutions, ideas, technologies and peoples flowed across regions to such an extent that they impacted upon, and led to the transformation of societies across much of the globe.30

I for one would like a bit more precision and specification here: When do flows become “significant”, for example? What does “to such an extent” mean? What does “transformation” entail? Nonetheless, Hobson’s approach seems downright rigorous and exacting in comparison to Robert Holton’s relaxed, “free and easy” view of things. According to Holton, “… [t]he minimum that is required for us to be able to speak of a single global connecting thread is that tangible interconnections exist between distinct regions, leading to interchange and interdependency.” 31 Tangible interconnections? In this view, almost anything — a few mosques, a trade factory or two, maybe some commenda contracts could be construed to signal globalization. 23

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What about relational considerations, particularly relative changes? Shouldn’t these be integral to any solid conception of globalization, even in pre-modern times? To paraphrase Poe in his famous poem The Raven: Quoth Anne Krueger, Than Before. In any case, not too long after the fall of the Hans and the Romans, another long distance, cross-cultural trade network had emerged in Eurasia, which network, organized loosely under Tang and Abassid auspices, linked most of Afro-Eurasia by the eighth century CE. Note that both South and Southeast Asia — at least maritime portions of the latter — were deeply enmeshed in this network, with the state of Srivijaya, centered in eastern Sumatra, of course, playing a central commercial role in the latter region. Note, too, that during this period, Muslim merchants, boosted by Abassid power, spread Islam and Islamic culture across broad swaths of the Eurasian ecumene.32 Although with the demise of the Tang dynasty and the decline of the Abassids, 24

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this vast Afro-Eurasian trade network, like its predecessor, broke down, cross-border trade boomed all over Asia in the period from the eleventh century CE until at least the late thirteenth century CE. Most scholars, quite rightfully, attribute the boom in large part to the amazing dynamism of China under the Sungs, but maritime Southeast Asia — and, to a lesser extent, the consolidating mainland polities of Pagan, Angkor, Dai Viet, and Champa — also played roles in facilitating the expansion of trade.33 According to many scholars, moreover, trade continued to grow in parts of Asia during the ensuing era of Mongol hegemony, in large part because the Mongols provided the safeguards and security necessary for the reestablishment and reconfiguration of the vast Afro-Eurasian trading system organized first under the Hans, Parthians, and Romans, and, later, under the Tangs and the Abassids. However, during the Mongol phase of the system, a phase made famous in the West, of course, because of 25

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the travels of a certain celebrated Venetian merchant, Asia generally and Southeast Asia specifically did not seem to enjoy robust, much less broadly diffused commercial growth. Scholars as different as Andre Gunder Frank and Anthony Reid, mirabile dictu, agree on this point. Although archipelago populations linked closely to the Javan trade empire of Majapahit may have benefited economically during the Mongol period, trade as a whole in the extended Indian Ocean seems to have slowed down, even stagnated in the fourteenth century CE, perhaps because Mongol commercial priorities and commitments lay chiefly with overland “Silk Road” trade routes across central Asia rather than with the maritime routes to the south. And certainly the collapse of all of the key polities on the Southeast Asian mainland during the fourteenth century couldn’t have helped trade either.34 Things changed for the better in Southeast Asia beginning around 1400 or 1450 CE, the start of a period Anthony 26

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Reid has called the Age of Commerce, but which more importantly for our purposes, can be seen as well as a period of sustained globalization.35 Whether the profound economic and social changes affecting Southeast Asia during this period (a period which lasted for roughly two hundred years) should be interpreted primarily as expressions of a China-led “Oriental globalization” or of the rebound of population across the Eurasian ecumene after the demographically disastrous fourteenth century or of the quickening economic tempo worldwide associated with the “long sixteenth century” — or perhaps to some combination of all three of these factors — it is now pretty well established that for Southeast Asia the period meant sustained export-led economic expansion, and, speaking in a formal economic sense, possibly even export-led economic growth.36 Southeast Asia’s export trade during this period was at once multi-focal and multi-faceted. Although much scholarly attention has been paid to the European 27

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dimensions of this trade — spices, the Vasco da Gama Epoch and all that — Southeast Asia’s trade with China, India, and the Middle East (particularly Persia), along with its burgeoning intraregional trade was apparently by far more important if less well documented. Most of this long-distance trade was conducted via sea routes, but, from the fifteenth century on, overland routes to south China via Yunnan and Guangxi were increasingly significant as well.37 In the main, Southeast Asia’s long-distance trade consisted of agricultural products and raw materials: spices, of course (cloves, nutmeg, mace, and, increasingly after 1550, pepper), various tropical woods, resin, sugar, lacquer, pearls, deerskins, raw cotton, and tortoiseshells, most notably. In return, Southeast Asia’s imports consisted largely of textiles, especially from the Coromandel coast of India, manufactures, chinoiserie, metals, and bullion. The oft-overlooked intraregional trade was dominated by foodstuffs, sent both to port towns and from surplus to 28

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deficit areas in the region, by other Southeast Asian raw materials collected, bundled and shipped around the region, and by the distribution of imports from without.38 Robust external demand during the “Age of Commerce” pulled Southeast Asian resources, including under utilized land and labor, into service, acting more or less in accordance with “vent-forsurplus” principles to spur economic expansion and, likely, even modest economic growth. Moreover, dynamism sparked in large part by the export sector increased market size, leading in Smithian fashion to greater specialization and reduced transactions costs. Such factors in turn produced important multiplier effects within the region, generating both urban growth and, most unusually, urbanization, that is, a relative increase in the urban proportion of the population of Southeast Asia, as well as the intensification of commerce and commercial life in interior areas of the archipelago and the mainland alike. 29

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Economic globalization during this period of Southeast Asia’s history — like economic globalization in other periods — also had numerous non-economic or extraeconomic dimensions, most notably in this case, the rise of Islam and Christianity, the progress of Theravada Buddhism, cultural florescence (particularly evident in Court culture), and the acceleration both of state formation, integration/consolidation, and absolutism in parts of the region.39 Sometime during the mid-seventeenth century — in Reid’s view perhaps a bit earlier — the worm turned, as it were, and we find evidence, stronger in some parts of the region than others, of deglobalization, de-globalization which lasted for some time. Although the terminology we are employing here — deglobalization — is relatively new, the situation and period to which it refers have been the subjects of considerable study. Indeed, scholarly debates have flared up intermittently over the past half century regarding the nature of a series of local and regional economic crises in the 30

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seventeenth century and over the question of the degree to which such crises may have coalesced into a more or less “general crisis” worldwide. This question still remains open, but in my view at least sufficient evidence has been marshaled to suggest a relationship or association of some kind between the appearance of serious economic problems and dislocations (problems and dislocations that often had demographic, social, and political manifestations as well) in parts of Europe, China, the Americas (particularly Spanish America), South Asia, and Southeast Asia in the midseventeenth century. Various explanations have been advanced to account for the “general crisis”: climatic change — that is to say, global cooling during the so-called little ice age — the intensification of Malthusian population pressures, instability brought about by violent forms of regime change in various locales, the decline of silver exports from Spanish America, and the turbulence attending the purported onset of a new mode of 31

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production, capitalism, come immediately to mind in this regard. Whatever the cause or causes, we find considerable evidence of a pronounced slowdown, if not reversal of secular economic and demographic growth trends characteristic of many parts of the world during the “long sixteenth century”.40 In Southeast Asia per se the effects of the crisis were powerful, but uneven, readily apparent in some places, in others difficult to interpret or even to detect. Insular Southeast Asia — the archipelago — suffered most, it seems. Available data suggest that many of the most important export trades declined drastically beginning in the mid-seventeenth century — the spice trade to Europe, most notably — with key import trades such as those in silver and Indian textiles following suit. As a result at least in part of the trade crisis, numerous port cities in the region stagnated or declined, too, and indigenous shipping was adversely affected, often severely compromised, and in the case of the Mons brought nearly to complete ruin.41 32

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To be sure, parts of the mainland seemed to fare better, as Victor Lieberman has forcefully pointed out, but even there economic expansion slowed considerably, when it did not die out. Admittedly, much remains unclear about the nature of the crisis in Southeast Asia. Internal institutional weaknesses and impediments may have played a more prominent role than external factors, for example, and we still are not completely sure about the degree to which some of the alleged decline in long-distance trade may merely have reflected its redirection — overland to China, or, in the case of Siam/Ayutthaya, from Europe to China and Persia. This said, the weight of the evidence is currently such that it seems not merely reasonable but responsible to make the case for crisis and de-globalization, however qualified and variable.42 After one hundred years of deglobalization, if not quite solitude, the economies of the Southeast Asian archipelago began to expand rapidly again, which expansion was due largely to 33

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renewed export growth. The economies on the mainland appear to have begun expansive phases even earlier, in the 1710s and 1720s, after a half century or so of economic setbacks, disappointments, and reverses. Considering the region as a whole, we find trade-led expansion and, arguably, per capita growth, once reignited, extending well into the nineteenth century, perhaps as late as 1850 in the archipelago, the date often used to mark the beginning of both the age of high imperialism and modern globalization in the so-called periphery.43 During this period, particularly the period between 1780 and 1850, we see, again, according to Reid, export growth “in excess of 4 percent a year”, an extraordinarily high figure for the premodern era. Since this rate far exceeded the annual rate of population growth in Southeast Asia during the period in question, which was below one per cent per annum, export income per capita in all likelihood grew in many parts of the region, but especially in the most export34

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oriented areas: Siam, southern Vietnam, and throughout the Malay archipelago.44 To be sure, one must use these figures with caution before jumping to the conclusion that per capita income/output was rising at a rate similar to exports per capita: we don’t know much about so-called export/ output ratios anywhere in the region, and even a small shift in the same would perforce significantly affect estimates of income/output growth. This said, from all indications, some growth in per capita income/output must have taken place. What was being traded? Whence did imports come and exports go? As was the case during earlier periods of globalization in Southeast Asia, trade flowed hither and yon, but mostly to/from South Asia, Europe, and especially China. Indeed, so important was Southeast Asia’s trade with China that some have gone so far as to label the period 1740–1840 the “century of China”. The principal imports into the region were textiles, manufactured goods, and, alas, opium, while the leading exports consisted of coffee, sugar, pepper, and rice. 35

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By the latter part of this period, Southeast Asia was not only the world’s leading supplier of coffee and sugar, but of rice as well, as my own research among others has shown. Not surprisingly, in light of the intensification of long-distance trade, intraregional trade grew apace, and withal urbanization, and the usual backward and forward linkages, commercial spillovers, and multiplier effects.45 Here we are at roughly 1850 then. Regarding globalization in Southeast Asia, let us invoke Churchill (when in doubt always invoke the Bible, Shakespeare, or Churchill): “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”.46 And so it was, for around the middle of the nineteenth century Southeast Asia enters a period that it often labeled the “Age of High Imperialism”, wherein the major European colonial powers intensified their longstanding titular control of the archipelago and increasingly consolidated and formalized their imperium on the mainland. 36

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This period lasted until about 1914, give or take a few years, and it is considered by leading economic historians such as Harvard’s Jeffrey G. Williamson to be perhaps the most intense period of globalization in the history of the world.47 Indeed, by many standards — world trade as a proportion of world GDP, transnational capital flows as a proportion of total world capital, the rate of transnational migration worldwide vis à vis the rate of world population growth, for example — the world was more “global” in 1914 than it has been even in recent decades, as Paul Krugman among others has often pointed out.48 Moreover, for the first time in world history, insofar as such things can be measured at least, we see in a formal economic sense evidence of commodity price convergence worldwide — the emergence of the “law of one price”, as it were — the economist’s sine qua non for talking about market integration.49 According to many, with this development, globalization, for better or worse, reached a new level of magnitude. 37

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Although we don’t quite see evidence of economic globalization in the contemporary Castellsian sense mentioned earlier in this paper — that is to say, globalization establishing an economy that “works as a unit in real time on a planetary scale” — transportation innovations “shrunk” the world dramatically and reduced transport costs substantially over the course of the period, and the so-called Victorian internet (the transoceanic telegraph cable) linked together the world in hitherto unthinkable ways, in so doing, allowing, in principle, for economic actors (among others) to communicate instantaneously.50 Largely because of these changes in transportation and communications, we see by the end of the period modern integrated markets coming into existence for agricultural commodities and raw materials, markets wherein prices for such commodities and raw materials moved in concert worldwide along increasingly narrow bands. This development was not necessarily a boon to all producers or producing areas — 38

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think for a second of the multifarious effects, traumas, and dislocations the integration of manufacturing and services is having on many people, industries, and regions today — but it was of monumental importance nonetheless.51 What about the results of this period or phase of globalization in Southeast Asia specifically? First, it is interesting to note that unlike the earlier transitions — cycles, if you will — that we have discussed, this period of globalization did not follow a period of de-globalization, but a period of globalization in a less intense form. Accordingly, in the analytical schemes of a range of prominent scholars — Immanuel Wallerstein, Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, and C.A. Bayly among them — the period between 1780 and 1914 is basically subsumed into one lengthy period of globalization.52 For our purposes, it makes sense to divide this period into two, for globalization’s effects in Southeast Asia proved quite different between 1780 and 1850, on the one hand, and between 1850 and 1914, on the other. 39

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Whereas the fortunes of both Southeast Asia and Southeast Asians seem to have improved during the first of these sub-periods, as we have seen, neither the region nor its inhabitants were as fortunate during the second. Indeed, according to a number of distinguished economic historians — Williamson, Angus Maddison, Peter Boomgaard, and Anne Booth come immediately to mind in this regard — GDP per capita stagnated or grew only very slowly in the region in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century, despite, or, more ominously perhaps, because of the global boom.53 In many ways, of course, Southeast Asia can be seen — and, in fact, long has been seen — as the posture child for, the Platonic ideal of an open, export-oriented region during the period between 1850 and the Great War. Think Burma, Malaya, and Siam here as exemplars, cases in point. In this regard, it is instructive to note that Jonathan V. Levin focused his analysis on two areas, Peru and Burma, in his classic study, The Export Economies, one of the 40

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most famous works in economic development of the postwar era.54 In any case, the master narrative of the 1850–1914 period in Southeast Asian history emphasizes the inflow of outside capital and labor from East Asia, South Asia, and Europe and the outflow of Southeast Asian commodities and raw materials such as rice, sugar, coffee, tobacco, tin, and rubber to other parts of the world.55 The counter-hegemonic form of this same narrative, however, emphasizes as well the importance during the period of extra-economic power and authority, political coercion, and the projection of military force — the arrows in the imperial quiver, as it were — to structure and channel trade in certain ways. According to some scholars, these extra-economic factors substantially reduced the possibility that the surge of transnational trade between 1850 and 1914 would prove beneficial to the region’s economies. They typically argue that the rich, dense, diverse trade networks and matrices of the previous 41

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period were increasingly reduced and simplified, rendering the economies of Southeast Asia more and more into export platforms, or better yet, into conveyer belts — controlled by outsiders — for the shipment of agricultural commodities and raw materials out of the region and the shipment in of extra-regional manufactures from East Asia and especially from Europe. If FDI poured into the region, it went largely to support and sustain the export sector and the transportation and communications infrastructure related thereto. As concomitants of these changes, moreover, the once robust indigenous shipping industry of Southeast Asia was gutted, invisible trade earnings from warehousing, brokerage, finance, and insurance increasingly concentrated in the hands of outsiders, and intraregional commercial, and, indeed, social and cultural contacts and communications sacrificed on the altar of imperial needs. Southeast Asia, once reduced and simplified, had been transformed into a 42

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dependent, peripheral area by an emerging, overwhelmingly Western core, which during the period pulled further and further ahead of Southeast Asian economies.56 A sardonic bumper sticker reading “Life sucks, and then you die”, used to be quite common in the United States, and invoking it is apropos here, for from Southeast Asia’s perspective, the period that followed the stagnation of “the Great Boom” of globalization between 1850 and 1914, in economic terms at least, turned out to be even worse. For over the course of the period between 1914 and 1945 — the period of the “Second 30 Years’ War” as Marxist scholars sometimes label it — the world economy essentially deglobalized again, with factor and product markets, as a result, becoming increasingly destabilized, dysfunctional, and delinked. In economic terms, for Southeast Asia this was a period of overproduction, debt crises, land-tenure problems, declining markets, falling income levels, and peasant revolts — 43

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book-ended by wars, the first, only indirectly damaging to the region’s economy, the second, profoundly destructive economically and catastrophic in human terms.57 Globalization like a diamond has many facets, and ironically, or, perhaps more accurately, dialectically, some noneconomic attendants of globalization, surfacing first in Southeast Asia during the “Great Boom,” were to prove central to the region’s subsequent history. The diffusion, appropriation, and transformation by certain Southeast Asian elites of “Western” ideologies — anti-colonialism, nationalism, liberalism, socialism, and communism, most notably — and the transgressive use and subversive reconfiguration and redeployment of “Western” knowledge systems and “high modernist” practices, whether found in colonial schools, imperial bureaucracies, or military establishments, helped at once to make political independence imaginable and via praxis to render it possible, particularly 44

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once a cataclysmic war was thrown into the mix.58 As Southeast Asia decolonized in the aftermath of the Second World War — and this process was as variegated as it was complex — the area found itself operating within a new liberal trade regime, the key institutions for which (the World Bank, the IMF, and GATT) had been established in large part by the new hegemon, the United States.59 This regime, not surprisingly, reflected the hegemon’s understanding and interpretation of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and U.S. geopolitical and economic preferences and priorities. To simplify matters and cut to the chase, such preferences and priorities reflected the U.S. concern for world prosperity and stability as bulwarks against communism, and a belief that prosperity and stability could best be ensured through the creation under GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) of an open, multilateral trading system wherein international flows of capital and products would be supported and encouraged.60 45

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The liberalism embodied in this regime, along with rapid productivity growth in manufacturing, and stunning innovations in transportation, communications, and finance, helped to usher in another phase of globalization, one in which, allowing for some bumps and bruises in the 1970s and some ebbing and flowing since then, we are still in today. It is this phase that focused the attention of the chattering classes on the international economy, and that forty odd years ago, as Martin Wolf has documented, brought the G word into our vocabulary. Although war in Vietnam long stymied efforts to stabilize Southeast Asia, large parts of this export-oriented region have benefited greatly from the current phase of globalization and from the liberal trade regime created in the 1940s under U.S. auspices, particularly once individual nation-states were free to set their own economic policies after independence. Indeed, the world economy as a whole has grown faster and in a more sustained manner in the fifty-five years since 1950 46

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than at any equivalent period in world history, no place more so than Southeast Asia, which in this period again successfully positioned itself as a desirable export platform, and, thus, as a magnet for FDI. Over the course of this period, particularly the thirty years from the mid60s to the mid-90s, the six principal economies of the region — Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam — grew much faster than did major economies in other parts of the developing world, whether in Latin America, Africa, or South Asia, with Southeast Asia’s lead over economies in these other areas growing over time. Figures from the World Bank demonstrate, for example, that with the exception of the Philippines — the “sick man” of Southeast Asia — which itself grew modestly, the other Southeast Asian economies mentioned above all enjoyed very rapid growth rates in the 1980–1990 period and the period from 1990 to 1997, much higher than other parts of the developing world or the world as a whole. The region’s 47

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growth, moreover, was based on a diverse portfolio of exports: raw materials, agricultural commodities, and low-valued added manufactures, most notably. Regarding manufactures: One of the key transitions of the period, in fact, was the shift out of agriculture and into industry by millions of Southeast Asians, particularly in the “Big Six”. Because productivity was higher in manufacturing than in agriculture, this shift alone explains a part of the region’s rising levels of wealth. Note that the case of Singapore is somewhat different. Even in an exportheavy region, its export-dependence stands out: the annual value of exports in the island nation was and is generally far greater than GDP, for example. Moreover, compared to its neighbors, Singapore is much more oriented toward services, entrepôt activities, and manufacturing exports requiring increasingly greater skill.61 To be sure, since 1997, the region has experienced rather more difficult times. Parts of Southeast Asia, particularly 48

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Thailand and Indonesia, took major hits with the crash of 1997–98 — which Paul Krugman wryly suggests was triggered by “bahtulism”. FDI has plunged dramatically in the region from the heights achieved in the mid-90s, foreign portfolio investment, particularly in equity markets, has proved disappointing, and, as a political bloc, ASEAN remains weak. At the same time, moreover, the region has had to face the formidable task of developing strategies to deal with the reality of sustained and historically rapid growth in two huge economies to its north and west, China and India. This said, the prospects for Southeast Asia in the foreseeable future seem relatively bright. The rise of China and India presents economic opportunities to Southeast Asia, even as it poses challenges and problems. Southeast Asia is home to roughly 575 million people, the region is blessed with a plethora of natural and human resources, and a good mix of unskilled and skilled labor — both sorts available at competitive prices. In recent years, we’ve 49

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seen some tentative moves toward democratization, greater transparency in business matters, and improved corporate governance. If Southeast Asia can find ways to enhance the productivity of its workers, and to grow domestic demand — ironically, the region, with its huge dependence on exports, even today, may be too global for its own good — there would appear to be some wind left in Southeast Asia’s economic sails yet.62 Or so it seems to me at this particular date in this particular phase of globalization. For as we have seen in this quick romp through Southeast Asian economic history over la longue durée, it is extremely risky to make categorical, dare I say, global statements about globalization, that most recalcitrant and ornery economic beast. Indeed, even as I write, some would point out, quite rightfully, that certain cultural expressions of — or more accurately, reactions against — economic globalization in Southeast Asia must also be factored into the equation. Such

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expressions/reactions are already visible in Southeast Asia, it is claimed: in malignant form, in acts of Islamic terrorism, and, in more benign form, in the embrace of localism and regionalism among some segments of the Southeast Asian population. In other words, we must keep in mind, always, the globalizationinduced trade-off between Lexuses and olive trees, the globalization-induced struggle between Jihad and McWorld.63 Fair enough. So where does this leave us at the end of the day? First of all, if I leave you with anything at all from this exercise I hope it is the sense that economic globalization is not new, notwithstanding the glib assertions of various and sundry poohbahs and pundits writing, seemingly authoritatively, on the subject, always on the look-out, as they are, for what the journalist Michael Lewis has famously called the “new new thing”. Nor, I might add, is economic globalization irreversible, much less inevitable, and it is certainly

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not unconditional. It has assumed different guises, moved at changing velocities, pressed down with varying intensity, and cycled through over different intervals of time. Throughout history — let me qualify that, over the past twenty-three hundred years at least — it has made for winners and losers amongst individuals, classes, sectors, interests, countries, regions, etc. What globalizationinduced market integration makes possible in one area that is to say, in others, such market integration often taketh away. In my work on the international rice market, for example, I have analyzed the way in which the great globalization waves of the nineteenth century created a unified world market for rice, in so doing, rendering it possible for Southeast Asian rice not only to penetrate, but soon to dominate Western markets, at the expense of other traditional suppliers such as northwestern Italy, and to the ruination of the rice industries in northeastern Brazil and in the southeastern part of the United States.64 And this is just one commodity and one 52

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segment of one market during one period of time we are speaking of. To assess the “global” effects of economic globalization across space and over time is perforce to up the stakes exponentially. Time. We started with time, and so shall we end. But what shall we say? Perhaps all we can do — this is a lecture, after all, not a dissertation — is to riff a bit more. Time’s arrow. Time’s cycle. Dichotomous metaphors for two conceptions of history. In this paper I have in a sense combined them, tracing for the various parts of Southeast Asia what Victor Lieberman has usefully called “linear-cum-cyclic trajectories”. Linear cum cyclic. The phrase is infelicitous, but useful nonetheless, particularly in thinking about economic patterns over la longue durée. For however infelicitous, it captures something that empirical economists have long noted: that many stochastic times series in economics — trade/GDP on the X-axis, time on the Y-axis, for example — are, in fact, cyclical, but with an upward trend, at least to some 53

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asymptote, over time.65 There, a bit of rigor — and directionality — for the social scientists in the house! We have something for the humanists, too, relating not to “linear-cum-cyclic trajectories” — many humanists would find that phrase off-putting, if not repellent — but to cycles per se. In this regard it is revealing (and, admittedly, a bit disturbing) to note that Marx claimed in a famous passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) that history often repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. I couldn’t help but be reminded of this quote in working on this talk. Knee-deep into the writing, on 28 September to be exact, an article appeared in The Straits Times announcing that a pilot project to re-establish the Silk Road route between China and Europe — yes, that Silk Road route — had been launched, and that a convoy of trucks was already on its way west from Beijing. The next day, however, another, much shorter article appeared in the same newspaper, announcing, somewhat sheepishly, in an about face that 54

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“[t]he famed Silk Road will not be reopened until next year”, apparently because the “infrastructure required for trading on the Chinese side is not complete …”66 Farce, anyone? “Too early to tell”, as Zhou Enlai, Premier of the PRC, supposedly replied to Henry Kissinger when asked in the early 1970s what he thought the impact of the French Revolution had been. A more powerful geological metaphor regarding time’s cycle in Asia — time’s deep cycle in Asia — was captured graphically during Sir Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Mount Everest in 1953. When Hillary and his team finally reached the summit, they found that the top of the highest mountain on earth was comprised of marine limestone formed eons ago twenty thousand feet beneath the ocean’s floor.67 And, of course, the limestone on this summit and others like it in the Himalayas will in time erode, too, much of it ending up in the deltas of the Mekong and Irrawaddy rivers in Southeast Asia. 55

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Time’s arrow, time’s cycle, then, is my message. In thinking about the current phase of globalization in Southeast Asia, let us cycle back one more time, to eighteenth-century Germany, the Enlightenment, and Immanuel Kant, as historian David Armitage has recently suggested we do. In a famous 1784 essay, “What is Enlightenment?”, Kant wrote “If it is now asked whether we at present live in an enlightened age, the answer is: No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.”68 Similarly, I might have called this essay “What is Globalization in Southeast Asia?”, and written: “If it is now asked whether we in Southeast Asia at present live in a globalized age, the answer is: No, but we do live in an age of globalization.” For what I have tried to do here — among other things, but perhaps above all else — is to make the case that globalization is a process, not a condition, a process that has a long, tangled, 230-year history in Southeast Asia, a process that is not linear, not inevitable, not irreversible, not 56

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unconditional, and not complete by a long shot. NOTES 1. Tomé Pires, Suma Oriental … translated by Armando Cortesão, 2 vols., Hakluyt Society, Second Series, no. LXXXIX (London: Printed for The Hakluyt Society, 1944), 2: 254–55, 262, 264, 268–78. 2. Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). 3. See, for example, Lennart Lundmark, “The Historian’s Time”, Time and Society 2 (January 1993): 61–74; Eviator Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). An older essay by A.J. Gurevich is still very useful as well. See Gurevich, “Time as a Problem of Cultural History”, in Cultures and Time, by Louis Gardet et al. (Paris: The Unesco Press, 1976), pp. 229–45. Also see M.M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press Slavic Series, No. 1 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84–258; Norbert Elias, Time: An Essay, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Oxford, U.K. and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992).

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Peter A. Coclanis 4. Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences”, in Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe: Essays from Annales, edited by Peter Burke (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 11–42. Note that Braudel’s essay originally appeared in Annales ESC as “Histoire et sciences sociales: la longue durée” in 1958. 5. See Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences”, pp. 13–21 especially; Friedman, The World is Flat. The concept of “deep time” is drawn from John McPhee, Basin and Range (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981). 6. Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 8–19. 7. Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, pp. 10–11. 8. Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, pp. 10–16; Gurevich, “Time as a Problem of Cultural History”. 9. On the basic conceptions of time in the religious traditions mentioned in the text, see, for example, the essays by Raimundo Panikkar, G.E.R. Lloyd, André Neher, Germano Pàttaro, and Louis Gardet in Gardet et al., Cultures and Time. Also see Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, translated by Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005; originally published in French in 1949), pp. 115–17 and passim. 10. See Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, Chapter 4. 11. The famous line appears at the end of Chapter VI in Candide. 12. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and

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Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992). Fukuyama’s original formulation of the thesis appeared in the journal The National Interest in summer 1989 under the title “The End of History?” His discussion of “the last man” addresses the issue of spiritual atrophication raised initially by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Fukuyama is concerned over whether the end of history brought about by the triumph of liberal democracy will ultimately impoverish and stultify the human spirit. 13. Theories of economic cycles have been prominent in economics since the interwar years, when economists such as Wesley C. Mitchell and Joseph A. Schumpeter received lots of attention for their work in this area. See, for example, Mitchell, Business Cycles, the Problem, and Its Setting (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1927); Schumpeter, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, 2 vols. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939). Mitchell’s 1927 volume actually extended and revised a study he originally published in 1913. One can find discussions of most of the cycles mentioned in the text in any dictionary or encyclopedia of economics. On the very long-term cycles mentioned, see François Simiand, Recherches anciennes et nouvelles sur le movement général des prix du XVIe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Domat Montchrestien, 1932); Rondo Cameron, “The Logistics of European Economic Growth: A Note on Historical Periodization”, Journal

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14. 15.

16.

17.

of European Economic History 2, no. 1 (1973): 145–48; G. D. Snooks, The Dynamic Society: Exploring the Sources of Global Change (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Barry K. Gills and Andre Gunder Frank, “World System Cycles, Crises, and Hegemonic Shifts, 1700 BC to 1700 AD”, in The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand?, edited by Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 143–99; Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in an Asian Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 347–51 especially. Martin Wolf, Why Globalization Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 3. Paul Krugman, The Accidental Theorist and Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), p. 73. For two excellent attempts to historicize and periodize globalization, see A.G. Hopkins, “The History of Globalization — and the Globalization of History”, in Globalization in World History, edited by A.G. Hopkins (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), pp. 12–44, 266–76; Jurgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History, translated by Dona Geyer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). On this useful distinction, see David Armitage, “Is There a Pre-History of Globalization?”, in Comparison and History: Europe in CrossNational Perspective, edited by Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 165–76. See, for example, Krugman, The Accidental Theorist, p. 73.

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Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle 18. See Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, translated by Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), p. 59 and passim. Also see Peter A. Coclanis and Tilak Doshi, “Globalization in Southeast Asia”, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 570 (July 2000): 49–64. 19. Manuel Castells, “European Cities, the Information Society, and the Global Economy”, New Left Review, No. 204 (March– April 1994): 18–32, p. 21 esp. 20. Anne Krueger, “Trading Phobias: Governments, NGOs and the Multilateral System”, John Bonython Lecture, 10 October 2000, Melbourne, Australia, http:// esvc000833.wic012u.server-web.com/Events/ JBL/JBL00.htm, p. 2. 21. On the “idol of origins”, see, for example, Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, translated by Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954), pp. 29–35. 22. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988–1993), 2: 1. 23. See Gills and Frank, “The Cumulation of Accumulation”, in The World System, pp. 81– 114; Gills and Frank, “World System Cycles, Crises, and Hegemonic Shifts”, ibid., pp. 143– 99; Samir Amin, “The Ancient World-Systems Versus the Modern Capitalist World-System”, ibid., pp. 247–77. 24. See, for example, Philip D. Curtin, Cross-

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25.

26.

27.

28.

Cultural Trade in World History (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 90–108; Gills and Frank, “World System Cycles, Crises, and Hegemonic Shifts”; Amin, “The Ancient World-Systems Versus the Modern Capitalist World-System”; Wang Gungwu, The Nanhai Trade: Early Chinese Trade in the South China Sea, 2nd ed. (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2003), pp. 7–14 esp. On Wolters’ concept “the single ocean”, see O.W. Wolters, “Towards Defining Southeast Asian History”, in History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspective, by Wolters, Southeast Asia Program Publications, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, in cooperation with The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore (Ithaca, New York: SEAP, 1999), pp. 41–57. Polybius, The Histories, translated from the text of F. Hultsch by Evelyn S. Shuckburgh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), 1: 3. See John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, A Future Perfect: The Essentials of Globalization (New York: Crown Business, 2000). Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, pp. 101–106; Gills and Frank, “World System Cycles, Crises, and Hegemonic Shifts”, pp. 162–71; Wang, The Nanhai Trade, pp. 7–42. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, pp. 101–106; Gills and Frank, “World System Cycles, Crises, and Hegemonic Shifts”, pp. 171–76; John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge and London:

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29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 29– 44; Wang, The Nanhai Trade, pp. 43–115. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation. For Hobson’s definition of this concept, see pp. 2–3. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, p. 34. Robert J. Holton, Globalization and the NationState (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, U.K.: Macmillan, 1998), p. 28. See, for example, K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 34–62; Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, pp. 103– 108; Kenneth R. Hall, “Economic History of Early Southeast Asia”, in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, edited by Nicholas Tarling, 2 vols. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1: 183– 275; Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, pp. 29–44; Peter Boomgaard, “Economic Growth in Indonesia, 500–1990”, in Explaining Economic Growth: Essays in Honour of Angus Maddison, edited by Adam Szirmai, Bart van Ark, and Dirk Pilat (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1993), pp. 195– 216, esp. pp. 197–202. On the spread of Islam, see Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in PreModern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 89–100, 117–31. On the trade boom of this period, see

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Peter A. Coclanis especially Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). On Southeast Asia specifically, see Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, pp. 109–35; Hall, “Economic History of Early Southeast Asia”; Boomgaard, “Explaining Economic Growth in Indonesia”, pp. 197–202; Timan Frasch, “Coastal Peripheries during the Pagan Period”, in The Maritime Frontier of Burma: Exploring Political, Cultural and Commercial Interaction in the Indian Ocean World, 1200–1800, edited by Jos Gommans and Jacques Leider (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002), pp. 59–78; Michel JacqHergoualc’h, “The Mergui-Tenasserim Region in the Context of the Maritime Silk Road: From the Beginning of the Christian Era to the End of the Thirteenth Century AD”, in The Maritime Frontier of Burma, pp. 79–92; David K. Wyatt, “Relics, Oaths, and Politics in Thirteenth-Century Siam”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32 (February 2001): 3–66, esp. pp. 5–6; Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 23–27, 88–112, 216–37, 362–65. For some excellent quantitative data on exports, see David Bulbeck, Anthony Reid, Tan Lay Cheng, and Wu Yiqi, comps., Southeast Asian Exports since the 14th Century: Cloves, Pepper, Coffee, and Sugar (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies for ECHOSEA, 1998).

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Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle 34. See the works cited in note 33 above. On the slowdown in world trade per se during the “Mongol” period, see Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, passim; Bentley, Old World Encounters, pp. 163–64; Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 2: 10–12; Gills and Frank, “World System Cycles, Crises, and Hegemonic Shifts,” pp. 179–80, 187–91 esp.; Frank, ReOrient, pp. 255–57. 35. Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680. See especially volume 2 of this two-volume study. 36. Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, 2: passim; Reid, “Economic and Social Change, c. 1400–1800”, in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, 1: 460– 507, esp. pp. 463–72, 476–88; Reid, “Global and Local in Southeast Asian History”, International Journal of Asian Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 5–21; Om Prakash, “Coastal Burma and the Trading World of the Bay of Bengal, 1500–1680”, in The Maritime Frontier of Burma, pp. 93–105; Leonard Y. Andaya, “Interactions with the Outside World and Adaptation in Southeast Asian Society, 1500–1800,” in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, 1: 345– 401, esp. pp. 345–61; Boomgaard, “Economic Growth in Indonesia”, pp. 197–203; Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, pp. 74–96. 37. See the works cited in note 36 above. On the overland trade to Yunnan and Guangxi specifically, see Lieberman, Strange Parallels, p. 47 and passim.

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Peter A. Coclanis 38. On trade patterns during the “Age of Commerce”, see the works cited in note 36, particularly Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, 2: 1–67; Andaya, “Interactions with the Outside World and Adaptation in Southeast Asian Society, 1500– 1800”. 39. See the works mentioned in note 36 cited above, particularly Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, Vol. 2, passim, and Lieberman, Strange Parallels, passim. On urban growth and urbanization in particular, see Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, 2: 62–131; Reid, “Economic and Social Change, c. 1400–1800”, pp. 472–76; Andaya, “Interactions with the Outside World and Adaptation in Southeast Asian Society, 1500–1800,” pp. 361–72. On growth forces in Southeast Asia during this period, see Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450– 1680, pp. 11–31; Lieberman, Strange Parallels, pp. 44–54; Boomgaard, “Economic Growth in Indonesia”, pp. 197–202. For a more general discussion of the process, see Jack A. Goldstone, “Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’ and the Industrial Revolution”, Journal of World History 13 (Fall 2002): 323–89. 40. On the seventeenth century crisis in Southeast Asia, see Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, 2: 285–325; Reid, “Economic and Social Change, c. 1400–1800,” pp. 488–93; Reid, “Global and Local in

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Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle Southeast Asian History”, pp. 12–18. Andre Gunder Frank sees a shorter-term crisis in Southeast Asia in the mid-seventeenth century, while Victor Lieberman denies that mainland Southeast Asia experienced any crisis at all during the seventeenth century. See Frank, ReOrient, pp. 231–48; Lieberman, Strange Parallels, pp. 15–21, 44–54 and passim. Jack A. Goldstone makes a case for a crisis in various parts of Eurasia in the middle of the seventeenth century. See, Goldstone, Revolutions and Rebellions in the Early Modern World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). For an excellent collection on the question of a general crisis, see Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith, eds., The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Note that there are several pieces on Asia specifically in this collection. Also note that Modern Asian Studies 24 (October 1990) is devoted to the question of whether or not there was a general crisis in Asia in the seventeenth century. 41. See Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, pp. 67–77, 285–325 especially. As stated in note 40 above, Victor Lieberman denies that mainland Southeast Asia experienced any crisis in the seventeenth century. See Lieberman, Strange Parallels, pp. 15–21, 44–54, and passim. For Reid’s response to Lieberman, see Reid “Global and Local in Southeast Asian History”, pp. 12–18. 42. See the works mentioned in note 41 above.

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Peter A. Coclanis 43. See Anthony Reid, “A New Phase of Commercial Expansion in Southeast Asia, 1760–1850”, in The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies: Responses to Modernity in the Diverse States of Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750–1900, edited by Anthony Reid (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), pp. 57–81; Lieberman, Strange Parallels, pp. 15–23, 44– 54 and passim; Robert E. Elson, “International Commerce, the State and Society: Economic and Social Change”, in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, 2: 131–95. 44. Reid, “A New Phase of Commercial Expansion in Southeast Asia”, pp. 71–78. 45. Reid, “A New Phase of Commercial Expansion in Southeast Asia”; Elson, “International Commerce, the State and Society”; Peter A. Coclanis, “Southeast Asia’s Incorporation into the World Rice Market: A Revisionist View”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 24 (September 1993): 251–67; Coclanis, “Distant Thunder: The Creation of a World Market in Rice and the Transformations It Wrought,” American Historical Review 98 (October 1993): 1050–78. 46. Churchill delivered these famous lines in a speech given at the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon, Mansion House, London, 10 November 1942. 47. See Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999); Williamson, “Globalization, Factor Prices, and Living Standards in Asia Before 1940”, in Asia Pacific Dynamism 1500–2000, edited by A.J.H.

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48.

49.

50.

51.

Latham and Heita Kawakatsu (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 13–45. Krugman, The Accidental Theorist, p. 73. For a more systematic look, see Paul Bairoch, “Globalization Myths and Realities: One Century of External Trade and Foreign Investment”, in States Against Markets: The Limits of Globalization, edited by Robert Boyer and Daniel Drache (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 173–92. See Williamson, “Globalization, Factor Prices, and Living Standards in Asia Before 1940”, pp. 13–18 esp. For data on the trend toward price convergence in one particular commodity, rice, see Coclanis, “Distant Thunder”, pp. 1072–75. O’Rourke and Williamson, Globalization and History, pp. 29–55; Williamson, “Globalization, Factor Prices, and Living Standards in Asia Before 1940”, pp. 13–18. On the revolutionary role of the telegraph, see, for example, Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers (New York: Walker and Co., 1998). For a more sober view, see Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). W. Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations 1870–1913 (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1978); Williamson, “Globalization, Factor Prices, and Living Standards in Asia Before 1940”; A.J.H. Latham and Larry Neal, “The

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Peter A. Coclanis International Market in Rice and Wheat, 1868– 1914”, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 36 (May 1983): 260–80; Coclanis, “Distant Thunder”; Coclanis, “Back to the Future: The Globalization of Agriculture in Historical Context”, SAIS Review 23 (Winter–Spring 2003): 71–84. 52. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern WorldSystem, 3 vols. thus far (New York and London: Academic Press, 1974–), 1: 10–11; O’Rourke and Williamson, Globalization and History; C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780– 1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, U.K. and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004). Note that Bayly distinguishes here between “archaic globalization” and “early modern globalization”, on the one hand, and “modern globalization” — beginning at the onset of “the long nineteenth century”, on the other. See Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, pp. 27–83 esp. Osterhammel and Petersson employ a slightly different temporal breakdown: 1750–1880 (“Imperialism, Industrialization, and Free Trade”) and 1880– 1945 (“Global Capitalism and Global Crises”). See Osterhammel and Petersson, Globalization, pp. 57–80, 81–111. 53. Williamson, “Globalization, Factor Prices, and Living Standards in Asia Before 1940”; Angus Maddison, “Dutch Income in and from Indonesia, 1700–1938”, Modern Asian Studies 23 (October 1989): 645–70; Boomgaard, “Economic Growth in Indonesia, 500–1990”, pp. 209–12; Anne Booth, “The Economic

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54.

55.

56.

57.

Development of Southeast Asia: 1870–1985”, Australian Economic History Review 31 (March 1991): 20–52, esp. pp. 22–25. Jonathan V. Levin, The Export Economies: Their Pattern of Development in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960). See, for example, Booth, “The Economic Development of Southeast Asia: 1870–1985”; Ian Brown, Economic Change in South-East Asia, c. 1830–1980 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 15–62, 114–59. Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations, 1870–1913, pp. 158–245 esp.; Coclanis, “Distant Thunder”; Williamson, “Globalization, Factor Prices, and Living Standards in Asia Before 1940”. On FDI and its composition in Southeast Asia between about 1900 and 1941, see J. Thomas Lindblad, Foreign Investment in Southeast Asia in the Twentieth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 11–23, 37–95. Booth, “The Economic Development of Southeast Asia: 1870–1985”, pp. 22–25 esp.; Pierre van der Eng, “Indonesia’s Growth Performance in the Twentieth Century”, in The Asian Economies in the Twentieth Century, edited by Angus Maddison, D.S. Prasada Rao, and William F. Shepherd (Cheltenham, U.K. and Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2002), pp. 143–79; Norman G. Owen, “Subsistence in the Slump: Agricultural Adjustment in the Provincial Philippines”, in The Economies of Africa and Asia in the Inter-war Depression, edited by Ian Brown (London and New York:

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58.

59.

60.

61.

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Routledge, 1989), pp. 95–114; Brown, Economic Change in South-East Asia, pp. 47– 62; Paul H. Kratoska, ed., Food Supplies and the Japanese Occupation in South-East Asia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) and especially Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). The concept “high modernism” is drawn from the latter study. Also see Reid, “Global and Local in Southeast Asian History”. For an excellent recent collection on decolonization in the region, see Marc Frey, Ronald W. Pruessen, and Tan Tai Yong, eds., The Transformation of Southeast Asia: International Perspectives on Decolonization (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004). Coclanis and Doshi, “Globalization in Southeast Asia”, pp. 55–62. Also see Norman G. Owen, “Economic and Social Change”, in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, 2: 467–527, esp. pp. 467–503; Lim Chong Yah, Southeast Asia: The Long Road Ahead, 2nd ed. (Singapore: World Scientific, 2004), passim. Ibid. Also see Lindblad, Foreign Investment in Southeast Asia in the Twentieth Century, pp. 23–36, 96–204; “In Search of Elusive Domestic Demand,” The Economist, 15 October 2005, pp. 27–28. Ibid. Krugman’s reference to “bahtulism” appears in Paul Krugman, The Return of

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Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle Depression Economics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), p. xi. On the decline in FDI in Southeast Asia since the crash, see Nick J. Freeman and Frank L. Bartels, The Future of Foreign Investment in Southeast Asia (London and New York: RourledgeCurzon, 2004). On the contemporary situation regarding portfolio investment in the region, see Freeman’s essay, “The Future of Foreign Portfolio Investment in Southeast Asia”, in the above-named volume (pp. 188–200). The population figure in the text is drawn from July 2005 estimates by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. See CIA, The World Factbook, 2005, [on-line edition]: http://www.cia.gov/publications/factbook. Economists Alwyn Young and Paul Krugman, writing in the early/mid-1990s, famously argued that Southeast Asia’s growth performance during the most recent global boom was due rather more to large increments of capital than to TFP: total factor productivity. See Young, “A Tale of Two Cities: Factor Accumulation and Technical Change in Hong Kong and Singapore”, in NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1992, edited by Olivier J. Blanchard and Stanley Fischer (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), pp. 13–54; Krugman, “The Myth of Asia’s Miracle”, Foreign Affairs 73 (November/December 1994): 62–78. Note, however, that Nobelist Joseph E. Stiglitz and others have challenged Young and Krugman on this question. See Stiglitz, “From Miracle to Crisis to Recovery: Lessons from Four Decades of East Asian Experience”, in

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67. 68.

Rethinking the East Asia Miracle, edited by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Shahid Yusuf (New York: Oxford University Press/World Bank, 2001), pp. 509–26, esp. pp. 510–12. See Tong Chee Kiong and Lian Kwen Fee, “Cultural Knowledge, Nation-States, and the Limits of Globalization in Southeast Asia”, in Globalization in Southeast Asia: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives, edited by Shinji Yamashita and J.S. Eades (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), pp. 42–61; Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree; Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Times Books, 1995). Coclanis, “Southeast Asia’s Incorporation into the World Rice Market”; Coclanis, “Distant Thunder”. The reference to the “new new thing” is from Michael Lewis, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000). The author would like to thank his sometime collaborator Tilak Doshi for this insight. An asymptote is a straight line associated with a given curve whose distance to that curve tends toward zero. The Straits Times [Singapore], 28 September 2005, p. 8; The Straits Times, 29 September 2005, p. 11. McPhee, Basin and Range, pp. 182–83. Armitage, “Is There a Pre-History of Globalization?”, pp. 165–66.

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About the Author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter A. Coclanis is Associate Provost for International Affairs and Albert R. Newsome Professor of History and Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2005, he was Raffles Visiting Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. He took his Ph.D. at Columbia University and has taught at Columbia and Harvard in addition to UNC-Chapel Hill. He is an economic historian and is the author of many works in this field, including The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South 75

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About the Author

Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920, which won the Society of American Historians’ Allan Nevins Prize. He is currently completing a study on the international rice trade over the past 300 years. He is past president of the Historical Society and the Agricultural History Society, and in 2001 was awarded concurrent professor status by the Chinese Agricultural History Society in Beijing for his lifetime contributions to agricultural and economic history.

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