comparing those cases with others from Europe and China's economic history. The contributors focus on three areas of inquiry …

Introduction: the arc of historical commercial relations between China and Southeast Asia / Wen-Chin Chang and Eric … transformation of Southwest China / C. Patterson Giersch -- The social life of Chinese labor / Adam McKeown -- Opium as a commodity … China and Southeast Asia, the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries / Takeshi Hamashita -- Cochinchinese coin casting and …

analyses the feeble state capacity of Qing China questioning the so-called “High Qing” (shèng qīng 盛清) era’s economic … compare Mediterranean and South China markets to provide new insights into both modern eras’ rising trade networks, non …-official institutions and interventionist impulses of autocratic states such as China’s Qing and Spain’s Bourbon empires. …