6 Boundaries and Beyond
or peddlers; (2) the regional layer of transferring the merchandise to
the transshipment center or entrepôt; and (3) the linkages between the
transshipment center and the end-market that were operated by other
groups of maritime merchants and inland traders. In short, the whole
process involved a multitude of trading groups and complex operations.^16
The Asian Waters by the Fifteenth Century:
The Nanhai Factor
For many centuries, the maritime trade of East Asia thrived, teeming
with activity carried out on a sustainable level. The southern segment
of maritime East Asia, known as the Nanhai (the South Seas, or Maritime
Southeast Asia) in the ancient Chinese texts, played an indispensable
role in the long-distance trade in Asian waters throughout the period
in question. For some 1,500 years, this trade was a considerable factor
in contributing to the successive emergence in the Nanhai of various
maritime and regional powers, characterized by their ability to exert
dominance over large areas within their sphere of inβluence and control
their strategic maritime trade routes.
Catalyst of Long-distance Trade: Commodities and Markets
As Anthony Reid observes, “Southeast Asia’s products found their way
into world markets very early.”^17 Among its major exports were cloves,
nutmeg, pepper, aromatic woods, gums, resins, products of forest-
dwelling fauna and the harvest of the sea.^18 From China came handicraft
products, including silks, ceramics and metal-ware. In K.N. Chaudhuri’s
words, the medieval trade of Asia was really founded by the demand for
- Not only the long-distance trade along the sea routes experienced the multi-
layered structure and a multitude of participants; one sees a similar structure
in inland long-distance trade. One example is the case of eighteenth-century
China. William T. Rowe mentions the four-level structure of the commodity
circulation. See his “Domestic Interregional Trade in Eighteenth-century
China”, in On the Eighteenth Century as a Category of Asian History: Van Leur
in Retrospect, ed. Leonard Blusse and Femme Gaastra (Aldershot, England:
Ashgate Publishing Co., 1998), pp. 186–7. - Anthony Reid, “Humans and Forests in Pre-colonial Southeast Asia”, in Nature
and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia, ed.
Richard H. Grove, et al. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 112. - Ibid., pp. 112–3.
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