The Rise and Fall of Revenue Farming: Business Elites and the Emergence of the Modern State in Southeast Asia

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Until the 1900s colonial and indigenous governments of Southeast Asia farmed out the right to run opium, gambling and other monopolies. Yet by about 1920 all of the major farms had been abolished and the collection of revenue brought under direct bureaucratic control. This book tries to explain the rise and sudden fall of revenue farming to trace the changing fortunes of the Chinese businessmen who held the major farms and to use the study of revenue farming to examine the emergence of the modern state in Southeast Asia and the great economic changes of this period.