Hong Kong must not forget its place in Asia's sea trade

Any consideration of how Hong Kong should try to be in the future should start with a good look at the past. That does not mean, as is usually supposed, the recent colonial past. It is the past two millennia and the role places like Hong Kong have played in Asian history, especially commercial history. It is the past before modern nation states, when an over-arching political authority was less important than the links provided by trade, religion and other shared interests.

The British and other Europeans were simply part of a continuum, albeit from distant lands. Even for these arch-imperialists, Hong Kong in many ways fitted an earlier era, not imperialism at its zenith in the late 19th century.

It was not a colony in the traditional sense of a place where Britons would settle or even one whose minerals they could exploit. It offered almost nothing in the way of preferences to British goods. It was not even of much strategic importance for a nation whose wars in the region had very limited, mostly trade, objectives.

Hong Kong was one of a string of ports, including fellow free ports Singapore, Melaka and Penang, which existed to further trade generally on the assumption of what was good for trade was good for an island nation such as Britain, whose empire was until its latter stages a mercantile, private-sector one. Even its great cities in India, Chennai and Kolkata, were originally trading entrepots which expanded into ruling territory in search of stability and sources of goods.

But the British did not invent the pan-Asian trade story. They were astute enough to recognise what was already there, albeit sometimes only in embryo, and some of the complex reasons why trading cities rose - and fell. For the history of two millennia is as much about those who fell as those who rose in that seaborne system, which was centred in island and peninsula Southeast Asia but which connected that mostly Malay region to coastal eastern India and coastal southeast China and ultimately to Persia, Arabia and Europe.

Penang was the successor to ports on the Kra isthmus which provided links between India and China and the spice islands of eastern Indonesia either via the Malacca straits or by land between Andaman sea and Gulf of Thailand ports. The Andaman and Sumatra coasts were important in the spread of Indian culture and writing throughout Southeast Asia.

Hong Kong itself was simply a British version of the southern China international trade hub, a successor to Guangzhou which itself was a successor to Quanzhou in Fujian. Singapore was not created by Raffles. It had its origins as a trading post created by a prince from Sri Vijaya, the mercantile empire based in Palembang, Sumatra, that was the biggest player in regional trade, and connections to India and China for 500 years.