Introduction: Natural Resources and the Shape of Asian History, 1500–2000

Historians of Southeast Asia have often ignored the question of natural resources, mainly accepting them as a given and passing on to what they identify as the central issue, trade. Anthony Reid’s important two-volume revisionist history of the region even goes so far as to classify the early modern period as “an age of commerce,” emphasizing exchange as the economic activity of significance (Reid 1988–93). Yet exchange is only one aspect of a process that includes both the market destination and the production source as part of a global commodity chain. And while it is certainly not our intention to ignore any of these components, the focus of this volume is on the way the extraction and export of natural resources affects the development potential of the societies and locations wherein they lie (Bunker 1984). Southeast Asia has never been just an entrepôt, simply a “gate to China” through which goods produced elsewhere passed. It has also been an important supplier of raw and semiprocessed materials. It has historically been part of a worldwide, if bounded, network of exchange that predates 1500 and that tied the region closely to India, China, and Japan (Abu-Lughod 1989). That this network evolved over the past five centuries into a global commodity system in no way lessens the significance of the preexisting ties and their effects on the peoples and environments of the region.