front cover of Brunei
Brunei
From the Age of Commerce to the 21st Century
Marie-Sybille de Vienne
National University of Singapore Press, 2015
Now an energy-rich sultanate, for centuries a important trading port in the South China Sea, Brunei has taken a different direction than its Persian Gulf peers. Immigration is restricted, and Brunei’s hydrocarbon wealth is invested conservatively, mostly outside the country.


Today home to some 393,000 inhabitants and comprising 5,765 square kilometers in area, Brunei first appears in the historical record at the end of the 10th century. After the Spanish attack of 1578, Brunei struggled to regain and expand its control on coastal West Borneo and to remain within the trading networks of the South China Sea. It later fell under British sway, and a residency was established in 1906, but it took the discovery of oil in Seria in 1929 before the colonial power began to establish the bases of a modern state.


Governed by an absolute monarchy, Bruneians today nonetheless enjoy a high level of social protection and rule of law. Ranking second (after Singapore) in Southeast Asia in terms of standards of living, the sultanate is implementing an Islamic penal code for the first time of its history. Focusing on Brunei’s political economy, history and geography, this book aims to understand the forces behind Brunei’s to-and-fro of tradition and modernisation.
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front cover of The Chinese in Maritime Southeast Asia
The Chinese in Maritime Southeast Asia
Trade and Merchant Communities in 17th-century Insulindia
Marie-Sybille de Vienne
National University of Singapore Press, 2025
An in-depth exploration of the Dutch East-India Company and what its history reveals about the Chinese community in the Dutch East Indies.

Connections between Asian and European markets increased dramatically in the seventeenth century, indicating a turning point in the global history of trade.  The Dutch East-India Company (or VOC) was central to this process; however, counter to the VOC’s aims, the winners of the game in maritime Southeast Asia were often Chinese merchants. As this book shows, at the time, these merchants were the only economic agents capable of trading both in major Southeast Asian commercial hubs and developing exchanges with China and Japan. The Chinese operated with a flexibility of means and a fluidity of management that allowed them to react rapidly and quickly gain returns on investment. In Batavia, as in other Southeast Asian emporiums, the increasingly numerous and diverse Chinese elites assumed direct responsibility for the management of their community; this made them the most important non-European free community in the city during the second half of the seventeenth century.

The Chinese in Maritime Southeast Asia tells this remarkable story through an examination of the VOC’s abundant sources, which record relations between the Chinese minority and the Dutch rulers who relied upon them.
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