The Chinese in Maritime Southeast Asia: Trade and Merchant Communities in 17th-Century Insulindia

An in-depth exploration of the Dutch East-India Company and what its history reveals about the Chinese community in the Dutch East Indies.

Connections between Asian and European markets increased dramatically in the seventeenth century, indicating a turning point in the global history of trade. The Dutch East-India Company (or VOC) was central to this process; however, counter to the VOC’s aims, the winners of the game in maritime Southeast Asia were often Chinese merchants. As this book shows, at the time, these merchants were the only economic agents capable of trading both in major Southeast Asian commercial hubs and developing exchanges with China and Japan. The Chinese operated with a flexibility of means and a fluidity of management that allowed them to react rapidly and quickly gain returns on investment. In Batavia, as in other Southeast Asian emporiums, the increasingly numerous and diverse Chinese elites assumed direct responsibility for the management of their community; this made them the most important non-European free community in the city during the second half of the seventeenth century.

The Chinese in Maritime Southeast Asia tells this remarkable story through an examination of the VOC’s abundant sources, which record relations between the Chinese minority and the Dutch rulers who relied upon them.

Marie-Sybille de Vienne is a professor at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilisations, INALCO, Paris, in the Faculty of Southeast Asian Studies.