Gang Zhao. The Qing Opening to the Ocean

Globalization theory has forced many historians of Asia to rethink the continent's recent, and increasingly also the not-so-recent, past. This applies as well to historians of Chinese maritime trade. This subject has traditionally been studied by students of John King Fairbank, largely on the basis of archival documents from the Chinese bureaucracy and within the framework of China's tributary relationship with the surrounding world. Yet as early as the 1950s, the Chinese anthropologist and historian Tian Rukang published two pioneering articles about the relative importance of Qing-era private traders whose overseas ventures had nothing to do with the policies of the court. His writings have inspired a number of historians of early modern Southeast Asian trade, including Jennifer Cushman on Siam, Li Tana on Vietnam, George Souza on Macao, and me on Chinese trade with the Indonesian archipelago. In the maritime history field, new studies have appeared that, based on a mix of Western and Asian sources, focus on the Chinese junk trade with the Nanyang and seek to explain the growing Chinese presence all over the Nanyang from the late sixteenth century onward. These studies also show how, in contrast to state-supported early modern European enterprise in Asia, Chinese overseas trade was organized exclusively around private enterprise, with very little overseas intervention by the Chinese imperial government before the close of the nineteenth century.

Ancient history · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

• The Blue Frontier

  Ronald C Po•Blue Frontier•2018

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