ABSTRACT
Asia, linked by busy sea networks and so less dependent on difficult overland routes like those used in Peru and Mexico, had much more active private trading. Agents of the Dutch East India Company took Malay, Javanese, Filipina, and especially Balinese wives to implicate themselves in the local market and society. While most of the other trading diasporas were purely urban, Fujian also sent millions of its children to clear land and grow crops elsewhere: from the Chinese interior to Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and California. When nineteenth-century Europeans came banging on the gates of China, one of their most vociferous demands was the abolition of the "tribute system", in which foreign trade was licensed as part of an elaborate set of diplomatic exchanges in Beijing. Enjoying a diaspora of co-religious Indians located in various Yemeni market towns as well as major commercial ports on the Indian Ocean, they provided commercial intelligence and the services banks would later supply.
