Peddlers were an omnipresent class of people in colonial-era Southeast Asia, ranging widely over the mainland and insular parts of the region in large numbers. Itinerant peddlers known as klonthong crisscrossed the rural areas of Java, selling tradecloth, thread, and other everyday items to the local Javanese populace. In Borneo, heavy stoneware jars (martaban) and high-status export ceramics were sold to indigenous peoples of the forest, who used these vessels for storage, burial, and other rituals. On the mainland, mule and pony caravans wound their way between Yunnan (SW China), Burma, Siam, and Laos, carrying opium, cotton, cloth and gems along highland trade routes. Long-distance peddlers connected distant locales in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia, connecting peoples, cultures, and landscapes that otherwise might have remained separate.


Books:

Alfred Russel Wallace,
The Malay Archipelago,
London: MacMillan, 1869.

Alfred Russel Wallace, along with Charles Darwin, was the premier European naturalist of his time. Wallace came up with the building block theories of evolution at the same time as Darwin, quite independently, through his own travels in the Dutch Indies (Indonesia.) Wallace noted the vast maritime peddler networks in operation in Southeast Asia; Chinese, Bugis, Arab, and "Indonesian" traders all crossed paths in his descriptions.