The Organization of Production in the Pre-Colonial Southeast Asian Port City

Abstract

Much of the writing on Asian port cities in recent years, including the present volume, has been devoted to understanding the functioning and role of European colonial port cities-'beachheads of an exogenous system ... peripheral but nevertheless revolutionary'. 1 These colonial ports in Asia were indeed revolutionary, chiefly because they became in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the channel through which the industrial revolution and finance capitalism began to transform Asia. They first undermined and finally overwhelmed the older cities which had always been at the centre of Asian life. To understand how and to what extent they did so, it is necessary to understand how the traditional Asian port city functioned, and how it related to the political and cultural life of its surroundings. One of the neglected aspects of this prominence of the port city in Southeast Asia is the extent of industrial activity carried on in them which, in producing for both local and overseas markets, significantly added to commercial and maritime entrepot functions. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the organisation of this production