Under Mo Tianci, The Port continued to thrive as a resource exporter, emporium, and monetary center. In fact, it expanded beyond its immediate surroundings of the water world and Cochinchina, stimulated by commercial growth, social change, and official policies within the regional powers of China, Japan, and the VOC. As a result, The Port played an essential role in the offshoring of the Chinese economy, attracting surplus laborers from China to Southeast Asia and supplying them with goods from Guangzhou. The Port’s expanded jurisdiction after the late 1750s also allowed for a greater specialization of functions. Bassac and other minor ports handled trade with maritime East Asia and received support from the Hong merchants of Guangzhou. The urban center focused more on finance, influencing the money supply of Cochinchina and becoming a center for copper and silver in Southeast Asia. The Port’s fortunes got a further boost when the fall of Ayutthaya to the Myanmar forces removed a major competitor along the Gulf of Siam littoral.

Although Mo Tianci maintained the ties of vassalage that his father had forged with the Nguyễn, Cochinchina only constituted one important foundation of his rule. He continued The Port’s traditional subordination to Cambodia and actually increased his involvement in the kingdom. He backed a ruler that leaned toward Cochinchina’s rival, Siam. After a succession struggle during the mid-1750s, Tianci emerged as the real power behind the throne. He forged a partnership with Batavia, presenting himself as an Austronesian principality within the sphere of influence of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). He also integrated The Port with the Chinese community of Batavia. The grandson of the city’s Chinese kapitan took charge of the Qing merchants at The Port, and a translocal justice system ensured the smooth conduct of trade across maritime East Asia The secret to Tianci’s ability to juggle simultaneous identities and allegiances lay in his understanding and manipulation of the conventions of the Sinosphere and the Southeast Asia mandala system. As a result, he achieved outside recognition of the autonomous status of his realm without the need to declare a formally independent state.

Although Chinese creoles formed the core of The Port’s identity, Mo Tianci came to preside over a tremendously diverse population additionally consisting of Qing sojourners and immigrants, Viet, Khmer, Siamese, Austronesians, and Europeans. They were multiconfessional, practicing Confucianism, Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity. He preserved the Cambodian noble hierarchy and official positions, while selectively adopting and adapting Sino-Viet institutions. In addition, he utilized religions and ethical systems, and devised some of his own practices for specific situations and depending on his constituency. Ultimately, he aimed to achieve two interrelated objectives: territorial expansion into the resource-rich hinterlands and the recruitment and retention of the population necessary to open up the new acquisitions.

What makes the chapters on Monsoon Asia unique is the analysis of the Dutch Empire from the point of view of Asian societies. First of all, it is stressed that, from a global point of view, the rise of the Dutch seaborne empire is part of a much wider and earlier coastal turn, which in Asia has been described as an Age of Commerce. It is not only European, but also Chinese and Islamic, expansion that characterises this phase of increasing maritime globalisation. Those Eurasian empires that continued to exploit the nomadic horsepower of the Eurasian Arid Zone were soon able to incorporate this maritime dynamic. In these empires, the Dutch retained a marginal presence as meek merchants subject to the whims of indigenous brokers and local governments. In other, more tropical parts of Asia, the aggressive operations of the Dutch prevented indigenous states such as Mataram and Kandy from incorporating the booming coastal regions of Java and Ceylon, respectively. In these insular areas, the Dutch were able to create territorial power and impose their monopoly on the production and sale of cloves, nutmeg, mace and cinnamon. In Maluku we can even speak of a Dutch ‘heart of darkness’ as much of its population was decimated, to be replaced by colonists and slaves. In almost all cases, the Dutch could sustain territorial power only with the help of overseas Chinese communities which offered both a vital urban middle class (primarily in the Dutch colonial headquarters of Batavia) and access to extensive commercial networks. So far completely ignored is the case of Ceylon. In this early-modern laboratory of colonial rule, the reformist policies of enlightened Dutch governors had a deep impact on the local society through mapping, law and education. One of the first revolutionaries in the late eighteenth-century Netherlands was a Tamil intellectual raised in Dutch schools in Ceylon.

Calvin’s theology and ecclesiastical practices reached the shores of Asia by way of the Dutch and their efforts to monopolize spice trading in the South and Southeast Asia regions starting from the late sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Following the Union of Utrecht of January 1579,1 the two northern provinces of the Netherlands, Holland and Zeeland, acknowledged only one branch of Protestantism, namely Calvinism, as the accepted form of religion. While the other five provinces declared that people were free to choose their own form of religion, in practice, the Reformed church became the privileged church in the Dutch Republic. When the Dutch under the leadership of Cornelis de Houtman arrived in Banten (or Bantam) in the northwest corner of Java in 1596 to begin their exploration of monopoly of spice trading, they paved the way for Calvinism to be introduced to the majority of the Southeast Asian regions.