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. 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.