What explains Island Southeast Asia's “reversal of fortune” from one of the precolonial world's most economically thriving and populated areas to one of today's largest exporters of surplus cheap labor? In The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter of Labor, social historian Ulbe Bosma searches for the “pre-colonial and colonial roots of postcolonial global inequalities” by complicating dependency and world-systems theories (19). These theories blame Southeast Asia's underdevelopment on its peripheralization and status as a commodity exporter for capitalist and industrializing countries in western Europe and North America. By contrast, Bosma argues that the roots of Island Southeast Asia's reversal of fortune can be found in the region's history of high and sudden demographic growth and its modes of labor control, specifically bonded labor embedded within patron-client relationships.This reversal of fortune happened not in the seventeenth century, as suggested by historian Anthony Reid and others, but two centuries later. After demographic and economic decline between 1600 and 1750, Bosma shows, nineteenth-century demographic growth in the northern Philippines, Java, and parts of the Malay Peninsula matched Great Britain's during the Industrial Revolution (32). Smallpox vaccination played a large role in this demographic boom, but improved health conditions, food availability, economic incentives, and a decline in piracy also played a role. By the mid-nineteenth century, these vaccinated children were healthier adults who began migrating in large numbers to the commodity frontiers, or plantation peripheries, of Java, Luzon, and the Visayas.Bosma's argument unpacks the ahistorical homogenization of peripheries by showing us the varying ways Java and the northern Philippines developed into and functioned as plantation peripheries. In Indonesia, the mid-nineteenth-century colonial government enacted measures to “curb swidden agriculture and to recast a rural society dominated by personal bonds between peasants and local lords into a territorially anchored peasantry” controlled through a system of restrictive travel permits and head taxes (73). Workers had the double burden of laboring for the colonial government through its Cultivation System, while still performing customary service to the local nobility. In the northern Philippines, local family networks developed into a national landowning class, and by the mid-nineteenth century this hacendero class had transformed into a nationwide oligarchy that grabbed large tracts of land worked by sharecroppers. Both situations created a plantation belt where poverty and malnutrition were rife, especially during the early twentieth century.Outside of the northern Philippines and Java, however, a process of “incomplete peripheralization” developed, which, Bosma argues, provides evidence of Southeast Asia's uneven and diverse forms of engagement with global markets. Wherever corporate estate enterprises were not in control, such as Indonesia's Outer Islands and some eastern provinces in the Philippines, “the rural economy benefited from its incorporation in the global commodity market” (100). Most corporate mining and plantation operations needed heavy support from colonial governments, as they were consistently outperformed economically by smallholdings and small-scale mining. In fact, smallholders exercised considerable economic autonomy through swidden food-crop cultivation and most were able to spread their risks through crop diversification. Smallholder commodity production allowed local economies to retain more of the profits derived from cash-crop production. Other forms of cottage manufacturing, much of it performed by women—such as spinning, weaving, pottery, gathering forest products, and other handicrafts—also constituted important by-employment for many smallholder households (137). By the twentieth century, workers in the plantation sector were at a disadvantage compared to smallholders, benefiting less from the commodity boom of the 1920s and suffering more from the global depression of the 1930s.Small holders and plantation workers toiled alongside other types of laborers including Chinese kongsis (labor gangs), indentured contract workers, and enslaved laborers. Bosma estimates that the number of enslaved people in Southeast Asia, a figure grossly underestimated in colonial records, totaled between 701,500 and 970,500 during the early nineteenth century (55). Debt pawnship was tolerated in most Malay societies, and many enslaved people were victims of usury and other forms of deceit actively meant to enslave them. Incorporation into global commodity markets played a role here; in smaller communities “mechanisms of credit and debt usually stayed within the bounds of the patron-client relationship, but when the debtor-creditor relationship became less personal and societies more market oriented, the frequency of labor bondage and enslavement increased” (59). Such debt slavery could easily be inherited by one's relatives and offspring.While colonial powers prided themselves on a gradual enforcement of abolition, slavery actually became obsolete in many regions of Island Southeast Asia due to patron-client relationships that made the practice of sharecropping more cost-effective; “rulers of territories did not need to own people [the required supervision of whom was often cost-prohibitive] to extract labor from them” (61). Meanwhile, areas outside colonial control and those able to resist colonial expansion, such as Indonesia's Outer Islands, saw demand for slave labor actually increase after the global movement toward prohibition of the slave trade during the mid-nineteenth century. In British Malaya and elsewhere, colonial attempts at regulating debt bondage through labor contracts with penal sanctions—meant to regulate recruiting practices and keep them from deteriorating into outright slave trafficking—had become “toothless because of labor scarcity and the growing power of the labor gangs” (118–19).Many of the same patterns of coercive labor recruitment and human trafficking seen in colonial and even precolonial times are still found in today's extensive flow of Island Southeast Asian migrants. While the remittances of over 10 million Filipinos, Indonesians, and Malaysians who currently live abroad constitute an important form of income for many Island Southeast Asian households, most remittances in Indonesia and the Philippines cover day-to-day expenses and do little in terms of sustained development or providing long-term economic gains to these migrants and their communities (177). In The Making of a Periphery, Bosma reminds us that understanding how the destructiveness of plantations was emmeshed with demography and modes of labor control can give us insight into today's labor migration. As Bosma notes, the “sad lesson to be learned from this is that trafficking and deceit moved with the economic cycles: they existed before colonialism, alongside the colonial domain, and would outlive colonialism” (129).