Organizer: C. Pat Giersch, Wellesley College

Chair: John E. Wills Jr., University of Southern California

Discussant: Alexander Woodside, University of British Columbia; John E. Wills Jr., University Southern California

Studies of commerce provide powerful insights into historical interconnections that transcended Asia’s national and regional boundaries. Nevertheless, modern national and disciplinary boundaries still hamper historical analysis as do other spatial concepts including the idea of Chinese "macroregions" and the binary conception of trade as "maritime" or "overland."

Our panelists seek to overcome these limits by focusing on the circulation of goods, people and ideas across putative political and geographical boundaries. Borrowed from studies of South Asia, "circulation" is a framework for examining long-term interactions among regions, ecosystems, and communities; the goal is to understand how circulation systems are related to significant historical transformations. Wheeler employs circulation to debunk the myth of Central Vietnam’s enduring poverty. For centuries, powerful states thrived by fostering overland and maritime trade linking the Central coast to inland hinterlands; only recently did politics conspire to stifle such circulation and impoverish Central Vietnam. Sun focuses on the circulation of gems throughout Eurasia, revealing how trade was enabled by the Mongol empire’s global reach; these circulation systems outlasted the Mongols—a testament to their enduring influence on Eurasia. Giersch explains how the circulation of goods and merchants throughout late imperial China, Southeast Asia, and Inner Asia helped transform Southwest China by influencing Chinese migration and settlement patterns, indigenous cultural change, and Chinese governance.

We introduce "circulation" to reveal long-term political, economic, demographic, and cultural changes that cut across nation, region, and discipline. To stimulate participation and feedback, papers will "circulate" in advance to potential audience members.

Charles Wheeler, University of California, Irvine

Contemporary historiography generally divides Vietnam into three major regions: North, Center and South. It stereotypes their human geography as "two rice baskets on a pole" evoking two agrarian-rich "cores" North and South linked by a poor, spindly Center. Yet if the Center is so marginal, why did Viet kings try for seven centuries to conquer it? The Center’s riches, drawn not just from local production but from far-flung circulations, funded military and colonial expansion in early modern times. Without the non-agrarian Center, Vietnam as we know may never have come to be. In this paper, I will analyze trans-ecological exchange patterns within Central Vietnam, and relate them to the political economy of the dominant polity or state, comparing four 500-year segments from the beginning of the Common Era to the twentieth century. I will demonstrate that, before the twentieth century, a complex system of circulation linked the Center’s three ecozones (highland, lowland, littoral) and then integrated them into much larger trans-continental and trans-maritime streams of traffic. This trans-ecological circulation spanning deep interior to deep sea formed a non-agrarian political economy that lasted for two millennia. Cham rulers encouraged it; early Vietnamese rulers did as well. By the nineteenth century, however, natural resource depletion and the construction of political barriers drained traditional trade flows. By the 20^th century, the marginal Center as we know it had come to be.

Laichen Sun, California State University, Fullerton

The changes in types of commodities in pre-colonial trade in Asian history have been studied by scholars, notably Wang Gungwu and Anthony Reid. However, another important change has been ignored, that is, the gem (here defined as to include especially rubies, sapphires, jadeite, and nephrite or "yu" in Chinese) trade. This paper covers the broadly defined geographical region "Asia," including East Asia, especially China and Korea, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Western Asia, and traces the flow of gems along all the possible trading routes throughout this area (Western Asian gems to China via the age-old "Silk Road" and maritime route, South Asian gems to China via maritime route, Burmese/Shan gems to China and India via overland and maritime route, as well as Indian and Burmese gems to Europe via maritime route). Thus the dichotomy between overland and maritime trade is quite ignored in this research. It suggests that as a whole it was the Mongol rulers in China that started this "age of gem trade", which was vigorously continued by the Ming and Qing (as well as the Europeans) and pushed to a much higher level. Meanwhile it also promises to increase our current understanding of (and debate on) the global nature of the Mongol empire.

This paper aims to outline the broad pattern and highlight the significance of the gem trade in Asian history.

C. Pat Giersch, Wellesley College

Chinese migrants transformed late imperial Southwest China. Previous work has analyzed endogenous forces shaping migration, including state expansion, population growth, and emerging economic opportunities in the Southwest’s regional cores. Recent work demonstrates that Sino-Southeast Asian overland and maritime trade expanded rapidly, especially as migration flows peaked in the eighteenth century. Is there a relationship between interregional commerce, migration, and the transformation of Southwest China?

This paper traces the circulation of traders and commodities along routes linking Southwest China (Yunnan, Guangxi, and Sichuan) to Burma, Vietnam, coastal China, and Tibet. It will demonstrate how interregional trade in key commodities (cotton, silk, silver, salt, copper, and tea) influenced the demographic, political, and cultural transformations of Southwestern society. Patterns of Chinese migration and urban settlement were shaped by interregional commodity circulation. Deployments of imperial military and civilian installations were influenced by trade routes and the desire to control the circulation of people and products. Due to their proximity to trade routes, certain indigenous communities were exposed to disproportionately faster rates of cultural change.

By linking circulation to major social changes, the paper aims to transcend the sometimes arbitrary notions of East, Southeast, and Inner Asia, to propose a more flexible model than "macroregions" for analyzing economic relations across imperial frontiers, and to suggest that there existed powerful connections between maritime Asia’s "Chinese Century" and transformative developments throughout the inland hinterlands. The settlement and transformation of Southwest China did not evolve from internal Chinese factors alone, but was linked to wider developments.