Abstract
Boundaries and Beyond is a collection of fourteen essays written by Ng Chin-Keong, a well-known senior scholar and historian of the maritime history of China and its world, primarily, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth, and late eighteenth into the first half of the nineteenth centuries. Two of the fourteen essays were written in the 1970s, prior to Ng’s completion of his pioneering study, Trade and Society: The Amoy Network on the China Coast, 1683–1735 (Singapore, 1983), which dealt with southeastern China’s maritime trade. The others span the rest of his professional career from the 1990s and on until 2015, when the last essay that is reproduced was published.
This volume, as a consequence, is a well-deserved presentation and a summary of some of his writings over an illustrious academic career. Ng is one of the earliest and most prominent of China’s maritime historians to advocate for the integration of that states’ rich maritime past and traditions with its history as an agrarian-based society and imperial economy. His work and contributions are of significance to the development of this field. His scholarship, as these essays attest, has been of an extraordinarily high standard. Although there is still much work to be done on this topic, Ng’s writing is of crucial importance to our understanding and visualizing how all components and participants on land and on and over water interacted in late imperial Chinese society and economy.
Organizing a volume of this type has its difficulties. Issues can appear when strictly adhering to a chronological framework, which he has done, based on the date that an essay was published. The author indicates that no effort, as is customary, was made to re-work any of these essays. Hence, to be fair in our evaluation of this work, the reviewer should be consciously aware of the date in which any specific essay appeared and not the actual present-day state of the field. The literature and materials that Ng consulted at the time that he wrote these essays was on the cutting-edge. But, without some revision of the text, there is some tedious repetition of arguments. There are, of course, additional organizational considerations regarding the selection and organization of essays that have been written over the past 40 odd years. The most important of these for the author to surmount is, arguably, the potential disparity in the coherence and cohesion in the themes and arguments that have been presented.
Ng, in general, has been successful in handling and dealing with those issues. He chose to use Boundaries and Beyond as ‘the two contesting forces of continuities and discontinuities that characterized China’s maritime southeast in late imperial times’, (p. ix) to interconnect some of the more disparate arguments that he has made in these 14 essays to a general, compelling, overarching theme. He then chose to sub-divide his presentation of these essays into four parts: 1) Maritime East Asia in Historical Perspective; 2) Between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’; 3) Pushing the Traditional Boundaries; and 4) Transcending Borders. This decision was skilful as well as fortuitous. Part 1 serves as an Introduction to the volume and, as its sub-title suggests, the two essays that are presented orient the reader as to what the state of the field or the history of maritime China was in the 1970s. The sub-theme for the next five essays that comprise Part 2 is his depiction of ‘the orthodox perceptions of viewing and responding to the changes or challenges’ (p. x) with particular reference to Chinese perceptions of their maritime world and the empire’s place in and control over it. In the next five essays that comprise Part 3, Ng focuses his attention on a wide-range of actors (e.g. gentry-merchants, peasant-peddlers, administrators, and coolies) and their activities that changed southeast China’s land- and seascapes. Finally, in the last three essays in this volume that comprise Part 4, Ng ‘examines the transnational movements crossing the borders, altering the status quo and creating new types of boundaries’ (p. x).
Ng’s organization and presentation of his essays in Boundaries and Beyond, as I have already mentioned, generally works well. Each individually and all of them collectively are substantial contributions and should be read and consulted with the purpose of comprehending what have been some of the issues and significant developments in the field of the maritime history of China and its world over the past 40 years. However, I do have some minor observations about Ng’s research, which cannot be construed as weaknesses or serious detractions from the collective impact and importance of this volume. Ng’s chronological coverage tends to focus, primarily, on events and developments in the history of maritime China in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth, and late eighteenth into the first half of the nineteenth centuries. Although he mentions Blussé’s and Reid’s discussions of the ‘Chinese Century’, I was hoping that he had written an essay that developed his own thoughts and/or engagement with this argument in much greater detail about the centrality and the importance of the junk trade in the development of maritime Southeast Asia over the 1740s to the 1840s – period of time in which British and other ‘country’ or intra-Asian maritime activities were conterminously active in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
Regardless of these minor observations and lamentations, the readers of IJMH, in my opinion, have much to thank Ng and National University of Singapore Press for in Boundaries and Beyond. The author’s writings aided in opening and developing the field of China’s maritime trade and world and NUS supported his efforts to collate them from relatively difficult to locate sources. Their presentation, here, in one volume is welcome and they are of use to general and specialist readers, alike, that want to know more about how this field came about from one of its earliest proponents.