Ulbe Bosma is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History, the Netherlands, and Professor of International Comparative Social History at VU University, the Netherlands. His main fields of interest are the histories of labour and commodity production and international labour migration. His most recent monograph is The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia: Industrial Production, 1770-2010 (2013).

Anthony Webster is Professor in History at Northumbria University, UK. His main fields of interest are British business history in Asia in the 19th century, and the history of the British and global co-operative movements. His most recent publications are The Twilight of the East India Company (2009) and Building Co-operation (2013) with John Wilson and Rachael Vorberg-Rugh.

1. Commodities, ports and Asian maritime trade since 1750: The foundations of the modern Asian 'economic miracle'?; Ulbe Bosma and Anthony Webster2. Asia in the growth of world trade: A reinterpretation of 'The Long Nineteenth Century'; Kaoru Sugihara3. Outside engagements: Makassar's mercantile networks and traders, eighteenth totwentieth centuries; Heather Sutherland4. The Port of Semarang circa 1775, an early modern regional emporium under colonial rule; Gerrit Knaap5. Bombay, and the port complex of Gujarat: Merchants and the political economy of Western India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; Ghulam A. Nadri6. Western merchants in East Asian treaty ports (c. 1850-1890); Ferry de Goey7. Neglected orphans and absent parents: The European mercantile houses of mid-nineteenth century Java; G. Roger Knight8. Building intra-Asian and transcontinental mercantile networks in the age of the British East India Company: The rise and fall of the house of John Palmer; Anthony Webster9. The invisible circulation of capital among Hong Kong, Taishan and North America: An analysis of the remittance business of Ma Tsui Chiu, 1900s-1940s; Pui-Tak Lee10. British overseas banks and Southeast Asia's regional economy in the late nineteenth century; Tomotaka Kawamura11. Transcending the Empire. Western merchant houses and local capital in the Indian cotton trade (1850s-1930s); Christof Dejung12. Liverpool shipping, gentlemanly capitalism and intra-Asian trade in the twentieth century; Nicholas J. White and Catherine Evans13. Pursuit of profit in the shadow of decolonization: Indonesia in the 1950s; Thomas Lindblad14. The Chinese and Indian Corporate Economy: A Radical Construction of Law, the State, and Corporations; Raj Brown

This book examines the role of mercantile networks in linking Asian economies to the global economy. It contains fourteen contributions on East, Southeast and South Asia covering the period from 1750 to the present.