Available From UC Press

A sweeping new history of Chinese diasporas in Southeast Asia.

Lying at the center of trade routes connecting China to the Indian Ocean, the Southern Seas have always been a cauldron of diasporas. For centuries, Chinese migrants have crossed these waters. We know them chiefly as protagonists of trade and commerce—and also as a people defined by their ties to a distant homeland.

In Southern Seas, historian Rachel Leow tells a different story. Through the lives of intellectuals, feminists, poets, and exiles, she recasts this vibrant region as an incubator of ideas and alternative politics. Adopting the many languages of the Malay world, these figures imagined futures that were bound to neither the nation-state nor a politics of blood and ancestry. 

Today, as the rise of China reconfigures what it means to be Chinese, this book recovers a more fluid history of migration and belonging—one in which Chinese migrants did not simply look back toward a homeland but created new communities, identities, and possibilities wherever they went.

Rachel Leow is Associate Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia.

“A pathbreaking study of the historical experiences of overseas Chinese in the region known today as Southeast Asia. Based on a prodigious amount of primary research, Rachel Leow offers a strikingly original interpretation of the Chinese diasporic imaginations that envisioned a global future not shackled to the telos of the modern nation-state.”—Sugata Bose, author of Asia after Europe: Imagining A Continent in the Long Twentieth Century

“Southern Seas is an expansive history, deeply researched and enlivened with the stories of Chinese, Malays, Filipinos, and others who traversed the waters along the eastern shores of continental Asia. Leow challenges the China-centric histories of the Nanyang and offers refreshing new insights about Qing and Republican China as a colonizing power and the demographic explosion that followed the migration of Chinese women and families in Southeast Asia in the 1920s.”—Mae Ngai, author of The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes, Chinese Migration, and Global Politics