Until the early 1900s governments of Southeast Asia farmed out the right to run opium, gambling and other monopolies. Yet by about 1920 all of the major farms had been abolished and the collection of revenue brought under direct bureaucratic control. This book explains the rise and sudden fall of revenue farming, traces the changing fortunes of the Chinese businessmen who held the major farms, and uses the study of revenue farming to examine the emergence of the modern state in Southeast Asia.

This collection brings together twenty-one articles that explore the diverse impact of modern empires on societies around the world since 1800. Colonial expansion changed the lives of colonised peoples in multiple ways relating to work, the environment, law, health and religion. Yet empire-builders were never working with a blank slate: colonial rule involved not just coercion but also forms of cooperation with elements of local society, while the schemes of the colonisers often led to unexpected outcomes. Covering not only western European nations but also the Ottomans, Russians and Japanese, whose empires are less frequently addressed in collections, this volume provides insight into a crucial aspect of modern world history.

Rewriting Hong Kong's history from the bottom up, the chapters investigate vital, but hitherto obscured, aspects of the colony's rise. They cover the Chinese collaboration with the colonial regime, legal discrimination and intimidation, rural politics, social movements, government-business relations, industrial policy, flexible manufacturing and colonial historiography. Drawing together contributions from historians, sociologists and political scientists, the book highlights the role played by a variety of social actors in Hong Kong's history and differs both from recent celebrations of British colonialism and anti-colonial Chinese nationalism.

Opium Regimes draws on a range of research to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation, but involved Chinese merchants and state agents, and Japanese imperial agents as well.

This innovative book rethinks the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century history of coastal and riverine southwest Indochina, the 'water frontier' of the title. It repositions old state-centered histories to reveal the region as a single, multiethnic economic zone knit together by the itineraries of junk traders and by the activities of many southern Chinese, settlers, sojourners, and merchants, whose local significance it explores. In so doing, it pioneers a new, nationally-neutral way of perceiving this dynamic region.