Southeast Asia. Arming the periphery: The arms trade in the Indian Ocean during the age of global empire By Emrys Chew London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. 309. Maps, Appendices, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Abstract

Arming the periphery: The arms trade in the Indian Ocean during the age of global empire By EMRYS CHEW London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. 309. Maps, Appendices, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S002246341400068X This is a good book, which will interest scholars working in several fields. For readers interested in Southeast Asia, Chew presents a study that does something too few scholars do: he places the Southeast Asian experience into a well-documented wider context that makes both more intelligible, and he does so by exploring connections and interplays that cross regions, cultures, and systems of governance and economics. Gun-running is an activity as old as the production of firearms, so many readers will not be surprised by some of the conclusions Chew draws from this careful study of the arms trade in the wider Indian Ocean world, particularly in the nineteenth century. Chew argues that the arms trade formed part of a triangle of trade, including slaves and drugs, that reconstructed networks which wove together state formation from East Africa through Southeast Asia, sub-state challenges to that process, and escalating indigenous political crises throughout the wider region--all of which facilitated increasing European penetration into very old and well-established Indian Ocean systems of political economy. This trade mirrored, in some ways, the triangular Atlantic or Columbian Exchange that drove European expansion into the New World. But this African and Asian world, the latter in particular, played a much more active and assertive role in redefining these new networks. Focusing on small arms and ammunition, Chew argues that the arms trade both spurred and reflected crises in governance and security. Efforts to control or regulate the traffic generally displaced the flow of guns, rather than deterring or halting it. Technological developments generally produced a cascading effect, as now obsolete weaponry found its way into the hands of willing customers in East Africa, the Persian Gulf, the Northwest Frontier of India, Burma, Sumatra, and the Moluccas. Chew makes a salient point very effectively: it is not possible to understand the evolution of systems of political economy and governance in the wider Indian Ocean world, from the coming of the Europeans, without following the gun-runners. This traffic brought together pressures and agendas of commerce, security, empire-building, local resistance, and state formation, into one powerful dynamic. Following a traffic which itself did much to define concepts of legality and sovereign authority, Chew argues that the arms trade can generally be seen as the supply of arms provided by a producing European metropolis to a consuming Indian Ocean periphery--but the devil lay very much in the detail, with impacts varying widely across time, space and circumstances. At least, that is, until the technological revolution marked by the mid-nineteenth century development of the steel breech-loading magazine fed weaponry and ammunition; but even then, the cascading effect, plus the wider context in which military conflict unfolded, made the process of building imperial networks turbulent and contested. …