Rahul Goswami :
They were Annam and Tonkin, the kingdom of Lan Xang (or Pathet Lao, modern Laos) and the kingdom of the Sukhothai (around which is arrayed modern Thailand), they were the Malay states and the Indonesian archipelago (several thousand wondrously diverse islands enormous and tiny) and the Philippines (a congeries of fantastic ‘barangays’) and the hydrologically gifted Khmer. And at the same time they were the farther reaches of both China and India, in ways that resound today too.
Before the turbulent sixteenth century, migratory movements between the kingdoms and vassal states of what we today call South-East Asia were common, though much smaller in scale and limited in geographic reach. There was undoubtedly a vibrant (at times risky) mercantile or religious movement of goods and peoples from both China and India to the medieval South-East Asia, and such movement predated the arrival of European commercial interests by many centuries. That is why Chinese and Indian traders were prominent in South-East Asia’s leading regional entrepôt centres.
The trade grew, kingdom wrestled with kingdom using armies and tariffs (much as they do today), out of the hubbub of fishing villages arose much larger and no less chaotic harbours for schooners and merchantmen, moneylenders and insurance agents formed an intervening (avowedly parasitic, as they are today) layer of financial services, and through the 17th and 18th centuries, the Chinese settled in South-East Asia in sizeable numbers, especially in places where there were favourable economic opportunities: Chinese were active in tin mining in Banka and Belitung, and in gold mining in Kalimantan.
The Indians, like the Chinese, came from a land with a long history of manufacturing, a sophisticated economy (which they sought to reproduce in their new surroundings, never mind the inferior quality of betel-nut), and thriving commerce. Gujarati and Chulia merchants exchanged textiles for spices in a trading network that linked the ports of India with the eastern shore of the Bay of Bengal – modern Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia. This trade, migration, settling and inter-mingling was a source for the transmission of ideas, new products and techniques, and people.
And what people they were, for ‘trader’ did not mean, as we may popularly but erroneously picture, scruffy bands of men with valuable cargoes. There were women aplenty, and little wonder for the women of South-East Asia dominated the lower levels of commerce. In that world (quite possible not as violent and inhumane as ours of today) there were limits to how far female traders could go, and the biggest and most influential traders tended to be either foreigners or rulers, usually male. But the historical records of those kingdoms and states do show that there were both aristocratic and royal women sending ships and cargoes out on voyages, and a good number of common women who reached a similar position using rural wit and countryside acumen.
As Anthony Reid (of the National University of Singapore) mentioned in ‘Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce’, one of the leading commercial lights of Grisek, a harbour in East Java later replaced by Surabaya (which is a large and bustling Indonesian city today) was Nyai Pinateh, a Sino-Indonesian woman and pioneer of Islam, who in around 1500 was sending her trading ships as far as Maluku (the Moluccas, or ‘Spice Islands’) and to the Khmer kingdoms – the Mekong delta. The very illuminating volume, ‘Women, Gender, and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia’, edited by Barbara Andaya, and the insightful ‘Woman’s Role in Agricultural Development’ by Ester Boserup also help us see the gender complexity that lies behind those whom we call ‘traders’.
No less impressive, in the kingdom of Cochinchina (from whence this column takes its name) in 1602 a Dutch mission negotiated with what they described as “a great merchant woman” over the price of the pepper they wanted to buy, she having travelled from the capital in southern Vietnam for the purpose.
Likewise, in the then Siam a woman named Soet Pegu formed a commercial relationship (and the records hint at the connexion being more than commerce) with three successive Dutch ‘factors’ (as they were then called, trading agents) and astutely used these connections to assist the foreign trade of the wives of a number of prominent Siamese officials. So clever was Soet Pegu that by mid-17th century she controlled all transactions between the Dutch and the Thai court. No mere Helens of famed Troy, these women of old South-East Asia, content to cause vessels to take to sea, but builders of kingdoms and shapers of destiny.
(The author is an expert on intangible cultural heritage with UNESCO and studies agricultural transformation in South Asia)
