Cross-Border Traders in Northern Laos

Mastering Smallness

Simon Rowedder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040789902
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Business

Northern Laos has become a prominent spot in large-scale, top-down mappings and studies of neoliberal globalisation and infrastructural development linking Thailand and China, and markets further beyond. Yet in the common narrative, in which Laos appears as a weak victim helplessly exposed to its larger neighbours, attention is seldom paid to local voices. This book fills this gap. Building on long-term multi-sited fieldwork, it accompanies northern Lao cross-border traders closely in their transnational worlds of mobilities, social relations, economic experimentation and aspiration. Cross-Border Traders in Northern Laos: Mastering Smallness demonstrates that these traders' indispensable but often invisible role in the everyday workings of the China-Laos-Thailand borderland economy relies on their rhetoric and practices of 'smallness'—of framing their transnational trade activities in a self-deprecating manner and stressing their economic inferiority. Decoding their discursive surface of insignificance, this ethnography of 'smallness' foregrounds remarkable transnational social and economic skills that are mostly invisible in Sino-Southeast Asian borderland scholarship.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps and Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Language and Transliteration
• Introduction
• 1 “We Are All Tai Lue”: International Trade Fairs as Local Ethnic Affairs
• 2 “Normal Fruits for Laos, Premium Fruits for China”: Transnational Flows of National Differences
• 3 “Thailand: High Quality; China: Low Price”: “Banal Cosmopolitanism” in Local Marketplaces
• 4 “I Didn’t Learn Any Occupation, so I Trade”: Narratives of Insignificance
• 5 “No Matter What, We’ll Find a Way”: Uncertain (Chinese?) Futures
• Conclusion: Large Insights from Smallness
• Bibliography
• Index