ABSTRACT
The retreat of Southeast Asian trade in the seventeenth century has usually been explained in terms of the military and economic victories of the VOC,1 to which is sometimes added the rise of interior, agrarian-based states less interested in commerce. These factors appear specific to the historical situation of Southeast Asia and particularly to the Indonesian Archipelago, where Dutch power was concentrated and the indigenous regimes were particularly vulnerable to monopoly pressure. Yet the parallels in other parts of the world cannot be ignored. After three decades of vigorous interaction with the world outside, Japan in the 1630s forbade its people to sail overseas and limited foreign trade to Chinese and Dutch ships at Nagasaki. China experienced a drastic period of famine, population decline and internal disintegration in the 1630s and 1640s, culminating in the collapse of the Ming regime in 1644 and its replacement by the Ch’ing. England, France, Germany, Spain, and Turkey were all convulsed by ruinous civil wars in the period 1620-50, and the last three of these regions at the same time lost their former prosperity and status in the world. The population of England, which had risen at between 0.5 and 1.0 per cent per annum throughout the expansive sixteenth century, slowed markedly from 1600 and went into dramatic decline from 1656 to 1686.2 Though population movement is less well documented elsewhere, there is little doubt that it declined significantly in France, Denmark and Germany, as in China, in the second half of the century, while the setback occurred somewhat earlier in Italy and Spain. These demographic reverses in different parts of the world were accompanied by a decline in prices for grain and other essentials after a long period of price inflation.
