Dutch Commerce and Chinese Merchants in Java describes the vanished commercial world of colonial Java. Alexander Claver shows the challenges of a demanding business environment by highlighting trade and finance mechanisms, and the relationships between the participants involved.

This volume undertakes the important task of envisioning a regional history of Asia based on its unique internal characteristics, going beyond the usual West/non-West dichotomy. The “regional trade zone of modern Asia” was debated in the 1980s. Since then, Japanese historians of the socioeconomic history of Asia have explored how the traditional trade relations that had developed over the centuries in Asia responded to the so-called Western impacts in the mid-nineteenth century, including the opening of ports and tariff reduction under free trade regimes and the advance in transportation technology. Against this academic background, the four chapters in this volume examine how overseas Chinese, some of the key actors in regional and local trade, dealt with their Western counterparts, and how Asian commodities penetrated other parts of the world through the newly created web of global commerce. The book reviews discuss theoretical issues to explore various connections among and comparisons of the economies in the region. This volume provides readers with critical insights into the Asian region in the past and present by investigating the long-term trajectory of its linkages to the global economy.

The exceptional commercial success of many Southeast Asians of Chinese origin has generated much contemporary debate about the cultural or social basis of that success. This book shows that those questions have long roots in Indonesia. Dutch colonial officials in the nineteenth century expressed alarm over the rural economy. In the twentieth century more detached assessments sought to describe and explain Chinese business methods and the crucial networks they established through the Archipelago. An indispensable volume which appeared under the name of J.L Vleming used the resources of the Duth colonial taxation service to explain the nature of Chinese commercial and credit systems. This volume contains a selection of the most important writing in Dutch (by prominent lawyer Phao Liong Gie as well as by Dutch officials) that has been translated for the first time. These extracts cover the period from 1850 to 1936, though half the volume is taken from the 1926 book edited by Vleming. Basic demographic data and the revenues drawn from Chinese-held farms are presented in a statistical supplement.

"Sugar, Steam and Steel is about cane sugar and the transformation of an Indonesian island into the 'Oriental Cuba' during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Between the 1830s and the 1880s, sweetener manufacture in Dutch-controlled Java - the crown jewel of the erstwhile Netherlands Indies - drew decisively away in matters of technology and sugar science from other Asian centres of production which had once equaled or, more often, surpassed it in terms of both output and know-how. Along with its larger and altogether more famous Caribbean counterpart, Java's industry came to occupy a position at the apex of the trade in what had become by this date a key global commodity. Along with the beet sugar producers of (post-1870) Imperial Germany, Cuba and Java accounted for a little over one-third of the world's recorded output of the industrially manufactured kind of sugar usually referred to as 'centrifugal'. While Cuba held the position of the world's largest supplier of cane sugar to international commodity markets, 'Dutch' Java emerged from almost nowhere to take second place. The island had begun the nineteenth century as one of a number of centres - in fact, a rather minor one - of pre-industrial sugar production located in tropical and sub-tropical Asia from the Indian sub-continent through to the southernmost islands of Japan. It ended the century not only as by far the largest of Asia's producer-exporters of sugar but also - critically - as the sole example of the sustained and successful large-scale industrialisation of sugar manufacture anywhere in 'the East'. Sugar, Steam and Steel sets out to explain how and why this happened - and what its implications were for the long-term trajectory of the Java sugar industry in the international sugar economy."--Cover description.

This fascinating study of early cinema in the Netherlands Indies explores the influences of new media technology on colonial society. The Komedi Bioscoop traces the emergence of a local culture of movie-going in the Netherlands Indies (present-day Indonesia) from 1896 until 1914. It outlines the introduction of the new technology by independent touring exhibitors, the constitution of a market for moving picture shows, the embedding of moving picture exhibitions within the local popular entertainment scene, and the Dutch colonial authorities’ efforts to control film consumption and distribution. Dafna Ruppin focuses on the cinema as a social institution in which technology, race, and colonialism converged. In her illuminating study, moving picture venues in the Indies—ranging from canvas or bamboo tents to cinema palaces of brick and stone—are perceived as liminal spaces in which daily interactions across boundaries could occur within colonial Indonesia’s multi-ethnic and increasingly polarized colonial society.

This set examines a vast range of topics covering all experiences of business and economics from across Asia. Dealing with early banking systems in China; the industrialisation of Korea and Taiwan; the evolution of Japanese business practices; economic development; protectionist policies; industrial investment; trade; tourism; and a host of other topics, the books collected here form a vital reference resource across a wide subject area.