ABSTRACT
Among a myriad of “historiographical gaps” which seriously challenged the so-called “new historiography”’1 in Vietnam, the question of the “unprecedented” commodity economy expansion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remained unanswered. Over the past half a century, Vietnamese historians mentioned this economic phenomenon as fact.2 None could, however, explain in detail why this phenomenon could have taken place, how far the country’s commodity expansion had developed, and, as a matter of fact, how deep this transformation had actually influenced overall socio-economic development in early modern3 Vietnam. During the past decades, the common view has been that the “self develop-
ment” of the country’s export commodities such as silks and, to a lesser extent, ceramics, lacquers, and so forth attracted foreign merchants from different corners of the world to come to trade in Vietnam. This “internal” viewpoint undoubtedly helps explain a number of “internal factors” such as the privatization of land, the demographic boom, etc. Yet, it inevitably downplays the impact of such “external causes” as the dynamism of itinerant merchants, regional and global trading networks upon the socio-economic expansion of the country during these transitional centuries.4 This “revisionist” article, taking on this still-controversial theme, argues that the commodity economy expansion in seventeenth-century Vietnam could have taken place only on the basis of the transformation of regional and global trade during the early modern era.5
