Economic History of Early Southeast Asia

In the pre-nineteenth-century world, the Southeast Asian region was eulogized as a land of immense wealth; developments there were of crucial importance to the entirety of world history in the pre-1600 period. Writers, travelers, sailors, merchants, and officials from every continent of the eastern hemisphere knew of Southeast Asia’s wealth, and by the second millennium of the Christian era, most were aware of its power and prestige. By contrast, the early history of Southeast Asia and its international significance is not appreciated in the contemporary age. In the early centuries CE Indians and Westerners called Southeast Asia the ‘Golden Khersonese’, the ‘Land of Gold’, and it was not long thereafter that the region became known for its pepper and the products of its rainforests, first aromatic woods and resins, and then the finest and rarest of spices. From the seventh to the tenth centuries Arabs and Chinese thought of Southeast Asia’s gold, as well as the spices that created it; by the fifteenth century sailors from ports on the Atlantic, at the opposite side of the hemisphere, would sail into unknown oceans in order to find these Spice Islands. They all knew that Southeast Asia was the spice capital of the world. From roughly 1000 CE until the nineteenth-century ‘industrial age’, all world trade was more or less governed by the ebb and flow of spices in and out of Southeast Asia.