Southeast Asia's Incorporation into the World Rice Market: A Revisionist View

The story of Southeast Asia's incorporation into the "world" -- or, more properly, Western -- rice market is well known.(1) Indeed, this story is sufficiently familiar so as almost to invite employment of the presumptuous "as every schoolboy knows" rhetorical conceit. Briefly put, the region's incorporation into this market is said to have coincided with the "New Imperialism", more or less as defined by Hobson and Lenin: the period between about 1860 or 1870 and 1900 or 1910. From small-scale beginnings in the 1850s and 1860s, Southeast Asia's extra-Asian rice trade is said to have grown dramatically in the years after 1870, quickly transforming a situation of market equilibrium into one of disequilibrium.(2) It is argued that disequilibrium resulted from the supply response in the Irrawaddy-Sittang, Chao Phraya, and Mekong river deltas to altered market conditions. These alterations are generally construed as exogenous in nature, concomitants of a number of extraregional factors and influences. The "market-opening" imperial thrusts into Southeast Asia by the British and the French in the 1850s and 1860s are accorded causal primacy. If attention is generally focused on key episodes and events such as the British annexation in 1852 of the Burma Delta, the Bowring Treaty in 1855 between Britain and Siam, and the French seizure of Saigon in 1859, it is the general degree to which imperial penetration had succeeded by 1870 that is important in the story about rice. Such penetration was encouraged, of course, by other external factors as well. The American Civil War and, more importantly, the demise of slavery in its aftermath, are said to have diminished, if not destroyed the export competitiveness of the U.S., the West's leading rice supplier, just as demand for small grains in the West was surging as a result of rising population and income, as well as urbanization and industrialization. Moreover, two key developments in the transport sector -- the advent of the steamship and the opening in 1869 of the Suez Canal -- led to a sizable reduction in transoceanic shipping costs, and, in so doing, further enhanced Southeast Asia's competitive position in world rice markets in the period after 1870. Taken together, these factors were powerful indeed, at once altering the world rice market to a considerable degree, and creating conditions necessary and sufficient for Southeast Asia's incorporation into that market.(3) Or so we long have been told in any case. There are any number of temporal and contextual problems with the conventional story. In my view, however, it has four key weaknesses, which together limit its analytical power and compromise its narrative integrity. The conventional story: (1) starts too late; (2) treats incorporation as a rather abrupt "event", representing a radical disjuncture in earlier trading patterns, rather than as part of a long-term process; (3) erroneously equates Southeast Asia with mainland Southeast Asia, and, then, compounds this error by failing adequately to differentiate the terms and timing of incorporation in various parts of the mainland; and (4) gives too much explanatory weight to exogenous, or at least extra-Asian, variables relating to trade and exchange rather than to endogenous factors relating to rice production in Southeast Asia itself. The goal of this essay is to retell the story in a way that overcomes these objections. First, however, a word or two about why the conventional story has had such staying power over the years. Here, we can offer several suggestive possibilities. One glance at export data from the late nineteenth century reveals, for example, that a tremendous amount of rice was, in fact, being exported from Southeast Asia to non-Asian areas in the post-1870 period. Exports to Europe from Lower Burma alone averaged 682,000 tons of clean rice equivalents annually between 1881 and 1890, while exports from Burma, Siam, and Cochinchina to areas other than Asia averaged almost 1. …