Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865-1915 Book

Eric Tagliacozzo applies Fernand Braudel's sense of geography as history to the maritime border between the Dutch and English colonial aspirations in Southeast Asia (one of those lines drawn in the capitals of Europe, like the Afghan-Pakistan border, or the states of the Middle East, which in part explains why they are perpetually boiling over). In rough terms, the Dutch ambitions created what became Indonesia, perhaps the most linguistically and culturally diverse part of the world, and the British created Malaysia across the straits (except where they split the island of Kalimantan, known in the West as Borneo). This is the world of Conrad's early works, a shoreline of rivers and inlets, a trader's paradise and a smuggler's. For all the spice that made its way east to Europe, Tagliacozzi documents the lively trade in guns, drugs, counterfeit money and humans. The early, more theoretical chapters are slow going, but it moves more quickly as Tagliacozzo focuses more on the ships--Chinese, Arab, Malay or even American--their polyglot crews and their cargo. The British and Dutch called their outposts empires but huddled in their trading towns, which became Jakarta and Singapore, while the illegal trade carried around them.