The Premodern Economy

Abstract

This chapter will range widely in time, but will focus primarily on the period between the rise of the Melaka sultanate (c. 1400–1511) and the first permanent British footholds in the Malay Peninsula in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The aim is to identify the salient features of the premodern economy, and to see to what extent these were undergoing secular change prior to the emergence of the export economy under colonial rule in the nineteenth century.