Southern Seas - Chinese Migrant Worlds in the Age of Global Empire

Stretching from the Chinese provinces of Fujian and Guangdong to the Malay Peninsula, Java and the Philippines, the Southern Seas have long been a space of movement, encounter, and exchange. While divided by multiple languages and competing colonial regimes, the Southern Seas have also historically been bound together by dense Chinese networks of family, religion, trade, politics, and education. Yet histories of these migration have too often been framed as a simple story of mercantile diaspora—of Chinese communities scattered globally but linked emotionally and financially to an imagined homeland.

Southern Seas recasts this view, revealing how Chinese intellectuals, migrants, and political actors in the 19th and 20th centuries navigated a world of competing empires, shifting borders, and uncertain futures. Tracing the many ways in which being Chinese in the Southern Seas was imagined, institutionalized, and contested, it shows that overseas Chinese communities were not simply drawn back to a notional homeland but were invested in a wide range of regional, global and personal futures beyond China—futures that were ultimately constrained and then obscured by the rise of modern nation-states.

With vivid storytelling and fresh perspectives, Southern Seas creates a memorable and surprising new history of Chinese worlds in Southeast Asia—one that speaks to enduring questions of migration, identity, and the making of the modern world.