This substantial work explores the impact of monetization in premodern Southeast Asia from the third century BCE to the rise of Maleka in the early fifteenth century. The author explores why concepts of money developed unevenly throughout the region. He considers trade policies, price controls, exchange ratios, monopolies, variant standards of value, and the administrative structures required to support such a complex economic innovation.

The argument rests on developments such as the introduction of firearms, more intensive rice agriculture, Thai and Viet ceramic exports, Korean and Ryukyu contacts with Southeast Asia, the demise of Champa, the climax of Viet and northern Tai statecraft, the birth of Melayu-Muslim kingship in Melaka and the creation of a new Muslim Javanese civilisation on Java's north coast. Coincident with these changes, Ming China's engagement with Sourtheast Asia grew as a result of overland expansion into the Tai and Viet polities, state-sponsored maritime voyages, and private Chinese trade and migration to the region. --

This book is a study of the political economy of Java's Northeast Coast from 1743, when the VOC emerged as its ruler, until the end of the eighteenth century. The focus is on the various power-holders - namely coastal Javanese regents, Mataram rulers, Chinese merchants and Company authorities - and how they accommodated the changes brought about with the power shift, what their primary resources were and how they tried to maximize their advantages in the new politico-economic setting. This study also shows how the Company, despite being the ruler, had to compromise with these power-holders and satisfy their needs to optimize its own gains.

Vol. 1.

Arakan (Rakhaing) situated on the western part of Myanmar.

Spruyt takes an inter-disciplinary approach to explain how collective belief systems organized three non-European societies c.1500-1900, and how these polities engaged the European colonial powers.