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Abstract
Between the 1870s and World War II, falls in world shipping costs and Western industrialisation gave rise to export-led Southeast Asian growth and specialisation in a narrow range of primary commodity exports. A linked development was the emergence of a few dominant Southeast Asian urban centres, typically primate and always ports. Drawing on historical census data, this article uses rank-size distributions and transition matrices to investigate the influence of commodity specialisation and exports on urban systems development in the region. It is argued that different commodities produced different spread effects, resulting in variation in degrees of urban concentration in the region. However, geography, path dependence and infrastructure also shaped urban systems development. The main cities that emerged during this period became the ‘gateways’ that connected frontier Southeast Asia to the global economy. Cities dominant in 1939 retain this status in today's Southeast Asia.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Luis Angeles, Campbell Leith, Jack Parr, David Weiman, two anonymous referees and the journal editors, for extensive and detailed comments on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks also go to Mike Shand who drew the maps. Research was carried under the auspices of ESRC grant RES-062-23-1392 and a grant from the Southeast Asia Research Committee, British Academy, both of which are gratefully acknowledged.
Notes
1. Malaya consisted of the Malay peninsula, Penang and Singapore. Indochina included today's Vietnam (over four fifths of colonial Indochina's population) Cambodia and Laos. Netherlands India is now Indonesia. To avoid the confusion of this colonial archaism, I refer to this area as Indonesia. Siam became Thailand in 1939 and, after a brief period as Siam from 1945 to 1949, again in 1949.
2. Previous studies of 1870–1940 urban Southeast Asia include McGee (Citation1967), Spate and Trueblood (Citation1942), Murphey (Citation1957), Bennett (1967), Ullman (Citation1960), Sternstein (Citation1984), Doeppers (Citation1984), Abeyasekere (Citation1987), Huff (Citation1994), Papin (Citation2001), Dick (Citation2002), Huff and Angeles (2011) and Vo (Citation2011).
3. The classic study is Burghardt (Citation1971). Studies which apply the gateway concept include Meyer (Citation1980), Vance (Citation1970), Weiman (Citation1988, 1995) and Cronon (Citation1991).
4. Urban is defined as an unbroken concentration of 10,000 inhabitants or more. Although necessarily a somewhat arbitrary definition, it satisfies the criteria of an urban settlement being big enough to yield sufficient data and avoiding mistaking villages as towns.
5. Sources for all tables, figures and maps can be found in a detailed data appendix in Huff (2012).