A new Cochinchina was beginning to take shape in the waters of the Mekong Delta and its surrounding coastline. The Chinese shipping network laid the basis for much of the new system of Dang Trong, centred in merchant houses of Canton’s Hong merchants and by the 1760s operating on a grander scale than ever before. The ports and commercial enterprises of the delta and its water frontier depended on a continuous circulation of commodities, primarily rice, cash crop, and a variety of transshipped goods such as tin, gold, and rattan for its prosperity and growth. Tensions grew. The Tay Son rebellion destroyed both the kingdoms of Dang Trong and Dang Ngoai, decimated the kingdom’s population, and obliterated the old Canton trade. The Tay Son’s strength grew out of, and reacted to, 200 years of Nguyen rule. The thirty-year civil war was fought ultimately between the two rival southern powers of Dang Trong (Cochinchina), while the northern power Dang Ngoai (Tongking) had little say about its outcome. Its eventual conquest of Dang Ngoai brought an end to that region’s political economy and commenced the process whereby southern power would come to ascendance on a territory that by 1802 to be known as Viet Nam.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

Even if the trend of chinoiseries reached its peak in the eighteenth century, in Latin America it persisted and gained new overtones through Modernismo. While in Europe this was a strictly foreign aesthetic found in Asian luxury exports and artifacts mass-produced for a consumer audience, in the Americas it became a racial phenomenon as well. Together with consumer goods, Chinese laborers started migrating to the region, complicating orientalist impressions of China imported from Europe. This chapter reexamines characterizations of Modernismo’s Asian imaginaries as a mere aesthetics of evasion, and instead reads them as a political critique of Chinese labor. While it acknowledges the prominence of the cultural politics of orientalism in the movement’s transcultural imaginaries of chinoiserie, it shows that the portrayal of the China trade opens a discussion on the global division of labor, nineteenth-century migrations, and the desire over foreign bodies.

During the interwar period, Chinese networks in the Nanyang developed within the trajectories of Chinese mass labor migration, which had begun in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as that of Chinese nationalism. Organizational forms circulated within international Chinese revolutionary anti-imperialist networks in Europe, the United States, and Southeast Asia. The indigenizing efforts of the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Guomindang, and the Comintern’s making of a world revolution overlapped in Southeast Asia. The early days of Chinese communist organizations in Malaya were shaped by ideas of Asianism as well as by the indigenization and internationalism of the Guomindang, expressed in the idea of a regional International of Nationalities. The indigenization and internationalization trends of the two Chinese parties, the GMD and the CCP, were shaped by the interwar global moment and contributed to the establishment of an independent Malayan communist organization. The MCP leaders promoted organization by three ethnic parties, Chinese, Malay, and Indian, which was not only logical for the Malayan multiethnic environment but was also built on the American communist experience.

Chinese immigrant communists who were members of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) invented the national discourse of a multiethnic Malayan nation in 1930 through the medium of a semantic slippage of the Chinese word minzu (nation, nationality, ethnic group). The MCP, which mixed elements of a traditional Chinese association and a Bolshevik party, was a product of the ideological and organizational hybridization common to anti-imperialist organizations in Southeast Asia in the interwar global moment. The Malayan nationalism of the MCP built on the official nationalism of the British government and was shaped by Comintern ideas concerning the internationalism of national communist parties and by the need for political inclusion of immigrants in the Malayan body politic. This idea of a Malayan nation wherein nationalism and internationalism did not contradict each other was a derivative discourse originating in colonialism, though it became central to the Malayan nation after independence. The heterogeneous origins of the Malayan national concept highlight the ambiguities of nationalism and help us understand why this concept is still under debate today.