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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
What won them widespread Western appreciation, even from the early seventeenth century, were their skills. In the Philippines, one Spaniard ruefully noted their absence in 1603, after one of the six massacres Chinese there suffered between 1600 and 1750. He wrote, "As there are no Chinese, there was nothing to eat and no shoes to wear."52 The overseas Chinese, mostly the Fujian men from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, came to dominate virtually every aspect of the commercial and artisan sectors of the local economy of these countries. "The international trade of these [Southeast Asian] states was therefore dominated by Chinese throughout the eighteenth century."53 Perhaps because they had seen how back in Fujian profit had lain not in land but in money and trade, they spread their efforts beyond agriculture to include everything else as well. They built city walls, dug ditches, carried packs as porters, sailed ships as navigators, did translation work, and provided the whole gamut of jobs and services the far more commercialized life of Fukien had required of their ancestors.54 They secured control of virtually every stage in the production of some commercial products from agriculture, such as sugar.55 But their influence was felt more keenly in trading and transport than in production. Organizing the trade from villages to burgeoning periodic markets and market towns, they made contact with producer households as few Westerners ever did.56 They became peddlers, moneylenders, and eventually pawnbrokers. Along the coasts of Southeast Asia they ran much of the interregional trade; for instance, between 1722 and 1786 Chinese-owned vessels rose from 7 to 39% of all arrivals in Makassar. In 1700, there were still more Malay and Javanese than Chinese vessels in the trade of the north Java coast, but by 1731 Chinese owned 62% of the vessels reaching Batavia from this region.58 In the cities, waterways, markets, and even gambling houses, they also ran the tax farming operations set up by the Europeans from the eighteenth century in Batavia and other Dutch ports, then Siam, and Java, thus persuading even the most suspicious of these colonial governments that they were indispensable for the fiscal well-being of these states.59

Perhaps nowhere in southeast Asia did the Chinese attain such a pre-eminent commercial and political position as in Siam. Rightly suspicious of European meddling in their politics, successive Siamese governments relied almost exclusively on Chinese to help handle the royal trade with China. Overseas trade from Siam was a monopoly of the Siam monarchy, and that with China was meant to be conducted under the Chinese tribute system.

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