Un-Atlantic Economic History: The Economies Bordering the Indian Ocean and the China Seas, 1000-1950

Economics professor Brad DeLong of UC Berkeley is putting together a book of readings on Asian economic history:

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Brad DeLong: "It is a fair criticism that we Berkeley Economics people think Economic History is Atlantic Economic History, and overwhelmingly North Atlantic Economic History.

Well, now I have a new course's worth of readings to compile--and I know I will have read only an appallingly small portion of it:

Un-Atlantic Economic History: The Economies Bordering the Indian Ocean and the China Seas, 1000-1950

Where to start? Where to start? Start with what I have read and know:

* Fernand Braudel, The Structure of Everyday Life (Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century)

* Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350

* K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750

* Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India 1857-1947

* "Un-Atlantic Economic History: The Economies Bordering the Indian Ocean and the China Seas, 1000-1950."

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My contribution, so far:

1. To make economic history less dry try: Brook, Timothy. (1998) The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China. Berkeley: University of California Press.

2. Ian Brown at SOAS wrote the best overview economic history of modern Southeast Asia: "Economic Change in South-East Asia, c.1830-1980." (1997, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford UP)

3. That labor markets were rather rigidly built into the very fabric of Southeast Asian social structure is conveyed in: Reid, Anthony ed. Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia. 1983.

4. For the administrative incompetence that led to the Bengal Famine of 1943-44 see Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper "Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia 1941-1945." (2004)

5. To complement the discussion of Russian serfs and peasant mobility in the classic Domar this article is worth looking at: Peter Perdue (1996) "Military Mobilization in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century China, Russia, and Mongolia”, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 30.4, p.757-93.

6. This is also a classic favorite that challenges the popular notion that all Indian moneylenders in Burma were bad: Adas, Michael. The Burma Delta: Economic Development and Social Change on an Asian Rice. Frontier, 1852-1941. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1974. .