ABSTRACT
Considering the historical development of Chinese trade in Southeast Asia, the question of transnationalism seems almost irrelevant, for at this time all Chinese economic activity in Southeast Asia was by its very nature international. Prior to the twentieth century, there were no nation-states in Asia. Premodern Southeast Asian states did not have borders in the sense that we understand them; thus the carriage of goods and the delivery of services between political territories was by definition foreign trade.
