J Bioecon https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-018-9274-2 BOOK REVIEW Janet Tai Landa: Economic success of Chinese merchants in Southeast Asia: identity, ethnic cooperation and conflict: integrating the social sciences with evolutionary biology Springer-Verlag Berlin Heiderlberg, 2016, 371 pp., ISBN 978-3-64254018-9 Kjell Hausken 1 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Janet Tai Landa’s (2016) book—with 14 chapters and a Foreword by Nobel Laureate in Economics Ronald Coase (December 31, 2012)—enhances our insight into Chi- nese merchants in Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore and Malaysia. The book is divided into four parts. Part I (pp. 2–41), chapter 1, “Introduction,” provides exten- sive overviews of each chapter. In addition, Landa (pp. 16–18) sets the priority record straight in three cases: her theory of the “ethnically homogenous middle- man group”—EHMG—(Landa 1981) vis-à-vis Avner Greif’s (1993) theory of the “Maghribi trading coalition”; her introduction of “identity” into economics (Landa 1981) vis-à-vis Akerlof and Kranton’s (2000) claim that they introduced identity into economics; and her theory of social norms embedded in ethnic trading networks which introduced trust into social relations (Landa 1981) vis-à-vis sociologist Mark Gra- novetter’s (1985) embeddedness theory of trust in social networks. Part II (pp. 45–101) consists of two empirical chapters. Chapter 2 describes how immigrants from Fukien and Kwangtung provinces in China adapted their tradi- tional kinship and lineage organizations to form five dialect communities (Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, etc.) within which mutual aid and cooperation takes place. Chap- ter 3, based on Landa’s fieldwork in Singapore and Malaysia, describes Hokkien traders’ marketing network of smallholders’ rubber and the various mutual aid arrange- ments they made among themselves, such as enforcement of contracts through mutual trust, extension of credit to each other, etc. This chapter forms the basis for Landa’s (1981) theory of the EHMG (Chap. 5). B Kjell Hausken kjell.hausken@uis.no 1 Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stavanger, 4036 Stavanger, Norway 123