Globalization and labor market integration in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Asia

This article uses a novel data set to analyze labour market integration between 1882 and 1936 in an area of Asia stretching from South India to Southeastern China and encompassing the three Southeast Asian countries of Burma, Malaya and Thailand. We find that by the late nineteenth century globalization, of which a principal feature was the mass migration of Indians and Chinese to Southeast Asia, gave rise both to an integrated Asian labour market and period of real wage convergence. Integration did not, however, extend beyond Asia to include core industrial countries. Asian and core areas, in contrast to globally integrated commodity markets, showed divergent trends in unskilled real wages.