Community Networks in Trade and Industry in South and Southeast Asia

Avner Greif’s pioneering work on the role of community networks in international trade in the eleventh century focused on the Jewish Maghribi traders operating in the Islamic Empire of the Mediterranean. The repeated interaction of traders within the community and social sanctions that could be used as punishment ensured contract enforcement. This chapter highlights its wider relevance in fostering trade in different parts of Asia. Asian merchants in South and Southeast used ethnic, regional, and religious connections to increase trade in the Indian Ocean and beyond, in the absence of legal and political institutions guaranteeing contract enforcement. The chapter explores if community-based trading networks survived in the longer run and what were the avenues of occupational mobility, when community involvement in trade declined.