Description: In The Making of a Periphery, Ulbe Bosma draws on new archival sources from the colonial period to the present to demonstrate how high demographic growth and a long history of bonded labor relegated Southeast Asia to the margins of the global economy.
Review Quotes: Not institutions but bonded labor and demography are the roots of the reversal of fortune of Island Southeast Asia (the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya); these areas are not just the periphery of the West but a crucial ring in the global commodity chain. By revisiting the major theories and analyses of dependency, Ulbe Bosma provides new insights on the long history of Southeast Asia and well beyond it, he provides an original, decentralized perspective on the rise and transformations of global capitalism.--Alessandro Stanziani, École des hautes études en sciences sociales