Book Review: G. Roger Knight. Trade and Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Southeast Asia: Gillian Maclaine and His Business Network. Roydon, UK: Boydell Press, 2015. xiv + 193 pp. ISBN 978-1-78327-069-9, £65 (cloth).

Roger Knight G. . Trade and Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Southeast Asia: Gillian Maclaine and His Business Network . Roydon, UK : Boydell Press , 2015. xiv + 193 pp. ISBN 978-1-78327-069-9, £65 (cloth).

Reviews

This fine-grained study by an accomplished economic historian of Southeast Asia will be most welcome to all those interested in the way nineteenth-century commerce operated. Knight is the kind of careful scholar to leave no archival stone unturned, and he has consulted the usual archives in the Netherlands and London as well as the published literature on British commerce of the period. The additional treasure is the voluminous private correspondence of his principal subject, surprisingly preserved in the state archives of Scotland and of Gloucestershire, as well as in private family hands.

Gillian Maclaine was unique in his role in Java, and yet beautifully representative of the kind of pioneering enterprise that several generations of educated Scotsmen brought to Asia. His roots were firmly Scottish Highlands and Presbyterian, although his career was extremely cosmopolitan. He exemplifies the working trust among his fellow Scots in London and later in Batavia, much as Weber described it in nineteenth-century American chapel-goers, or more modern analysts in the networks of same-village and same-surname associations in the Chinese merchant diaspora. In reassuring his mother about his risky credit arrangements with other Scots traders, Maclaine praises one as "a regular Highlander" in his common sense and warm heart, while another "maintains his strict Presbyterian principles" (65). His coffee concession in the Javanese princely districts (vorstenlanden) survived amid the storms of the Java-Dutch War, because his Javanese...