Ulbe Bosma is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History, the Netherlands, and Professor of International Comparative Social History at VU University, the Netherlands. His main fields of interest are the histories of labour and commodity production and international labour migration. His most recent monograph is The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia: Industrial Production, 1770-2010 (2013).Anthony Webster is Professor in History at Northumbria University, UK. His main fields of interest are British business history in Asia in the 19th century, and the history of the British and global co-operative movements. His most recent publications are The Twilight of the East India Company (2009) and Building Co-operation (2013) with John Wilson and Rachael Vorberg-Rugh.

“The essays constituting this volume offer fresh perspectives on Asian maritime trade, which may urge both current and historical debates forward. One of the most valuable contributions of the volume towards global and Asian economic history is its chronology … . opens the field for a wider study of multiple historical interactions that have helped form the Asian maritime economy up to the present day.” (Wim De Winter, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 90 (1), December, 2017)

• 1. Commodities, ports and Asian maritime trade since 1750: The foundations of the modern Asian 'economic miracle'?; Ulbe Bosma and Anthony Webster 2. Asia in the growth of world trade: A reinterpretation of 'The Long Nineteenth Century'; Kaoru Sugihara 3. Outside engagements: Makassar's mercantile networks and traders, eighteenth totwentieth centuries; Heather Sutherland 4. The Port of Semarang circa 1775, an early modern regional emporium under colonial rule; Gerrit Knaap 5. Bombay, and the port complex of Gujarat: Merchants and the political economy of Western India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; Ghulam A. Nadri 6. Western merchants in East Asian treaty ports (c. 1850-1890); Ferry de Goey 7. Neglected orphans and absent parents: The European mercantile houses of mid-nineteenth century Java; G. Roger Knight 8. Building intra-Asian and transcontinental mercantile networks in the age of the British East India Company: The rise and fall of the house of John Palmer; Anthony Webster 9. The invisible circulation of capital among Hong Kong, Taishan and North America: An analysis of the remittance business of Ma Tsui Chiu, 1900s-1940s; Pui-Tak Lee 10. British overseas banks and Southeast Asia's regional economy in the late nineteenth century; Tomotaka Kawamura 11. Transcending the Empire. Western merchant houses and local capital in the Indian cotton trade (1850s-1930s); Christof Dejung 12. Liverpool shipping, gentlemanly capitalism and intra-Asian trade in the twentieth century; Nicholas J. White and Catherine Evans 13. Pursuit of profit in the shadow of decolonization: Indonesia in the 1950s; Thomas Lindblad 14. The Chinese and Indian Corporate Economy: A Radical Construction of Law, the State, and Corporations; Raj Brown