Contributing to Globalisation from the Shadow

Piracy and Overseas Chinese before 1684

Bibliographic Data

ID21181986
AuthorsHung Tak Wai (0000-0001-8108-9809, Waseda University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume2025
Issue4
Publication date2025-12-30
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe World of the Orient (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1608-0599 • E-ISSN: 1682-5268
PublisherNational Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Co. LTD Ukrinformnauka) (Publications) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.15407/orientw2025.04.023
OpenAlexW4417182486
LanguageEN
References cited19

This article revisits the entangled relationship between piracy, migration, and early globalisation by foregrounding the role of the overseas Chinese before 1684, the year the Qing court formally lifted its maritime ban and authorised private overseas trade. While dominant narratives of globalisation emphasise the role of formal empires and state-led expansion, this study shifts focus to informal, often stateless actors – pirates, smugglers, and migrant merchants – who operated beyond the official gaze of the state. Drawing on sources in Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Southeast Asian languages, the article examines how Chinese settlements in Malacca, Patani, Nagasaki, Manila, and other littoral spaces contributed significantly to the formation of transregional linkages long before Qing maritime liberalisation. The central argument asserts that the overseas Chinese were not merely victims of imperial maritime restrictions, but strategic actors who created resilient, mobile, and adaptive networks that transcended political boundaries. Rather than viewing piracy as a threat to order, the article reinterprets it as a functional and often necessary mechanism of connectivity. Piratical and commercial activities overlapped with diplomacy and religious exchange, facilitating the movement of people, capital, and knowledge across maritime Asia. The study contends that these interactions formed a decentralised yet coherent infrastructure of early global exchange. By comparing case studies across the East and Southeast Asian maritime sphere, the article challenges linear assumptions about Chinese migration, which often begin with 19th-century diaspora or Qing reform. Instead, it reveals a longer and more complicated history in which Chinese actors shaped regional transformations through alternative and often extra-legal means. In highlighting these contributions from the periphery, the article argues for a revised understanding of globalisation – one that emerges not solely from imperial centres, but also from the shadow networks sustained by non-state Chinese agents across maritime Asia

China · Diaspora · Diplomacy · East Asia · Foregrounding · Globalization · Narrative · Politics · Asian Studies and History · Chinese history and philosophy · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

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