Ulbe Bosma, The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter of Labor

Abstract

Moving away from the established conventions of comparing indices and data to understand the ‘reversal of fortunes’, this book focuses rather on the questions of labour and the processes involved in the turbulent world of commodity production to explain the peripheralization of Island Southeast Asia. The book is interesting in the sense that instead of looking at how the ‘West’ moved forward, it looks at how Island Southeast Asia got stuck (to put it crudely) and became a major exporter of la...