Commodities, Ports and Asian Maritime Trade Since 1750

Commodities, Ports and Asian Maritime Trade Since 1750 explores how British, European and Asian commercial networks interacted in the period from 1750 to today. Its central theme is the way in which these processes affectively created an 'Asian Commercial World' based on trading and financial linkages across the region, and movements of commodities. It also looks at the way in which merchants from different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds negotiated barriers of language and business culture to establish effective working relations and to create a unique and dynamic regional environment, which laid the foundations for the 'Asian economic miracle' of the latter twentieth century.

Ulbe Bosma is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History, the Netherlands, and Professor of International Comparative Social History at the Free University of Amsterdam, 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.