Review by Choice Review
Ellen's closely reasoned and elegant study of maritime trade and associated cultural life, based on two years of fieldwork and extensive archival research, shows "... how exchange in a small archipelago in eastern Indonesia must be understood against the backdrop of regional trade and participation in a global system of commerce that goes back more than two thousand years." The book focuses on the past half-millennium, when Banda trade reached from western New Guinea to Java and beyond. Ellen (Univ. of Kent at Canterbury) uses ethnographic and historical data so that each augments the other. Thus, his excellently illustrated account of local boat types interconnects with key structural features of harborage, islands, and sailing conditions that shaped Banda trade routes over centuries. Through selected contemporary biographies, he analyzes why outsiders became, and remain, the main long-distance traders. Ellen's nuanced and penetrating theoretical analyses include "central place" reconsidered; shifting centers and peripheries; trade as a spatially distributed process; and concomitants of interarticulation with regional and global trade. With a good index, 57 black-and-white photos, 14 figures, and tables, this deeply original work will stimulate much intense new thought and analysis. ^BSumming Up: Essential. Indonesian and economic anthropology collections; highly recommended, upper-division anthropology and third-world business collections. L. A. Kimball Western Washington University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
