175 The Impact of Imitation Ceramic Industries and Internal Political Restrictions on Chinese Commercial Ceramic Exports in the Indian Ocean Maritime Exchange, ca. 1200–1700 Rahul Oka, Laure Dussubieux, Chapurukha M. Kusimba, and Vishwas D. Gogte absTRaCT Trading ports in the Indian Ocean are characterized by transoceanic similarities in elite tastes and preferences for prestige ceramics. The ceramic wares in highest demand among Indian Ocean port elites were celadon and blue-and-white porcelains, manufactured in China from the tenth to the eighteenth century. However, the great demand for these ceramics also led to major attempts at imitation by potters in southeast asia and the Middle East almost as soon as exports from China were introduced. While some of these potters developed their own unique styles, many scholars suggest that non-Chinese products suc- cessfully competed with Chinese exports through imitation and by taking advantage of frequent Chinese imperial embargoes against foreign export and commerce between the thirteenth and seventeenth century. In this paper, we present the results of high-resolution and minimally invasive laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry analysis on the glazed surfaces of celadon and blue-and-white porce- lains excavated from the ports of Mtwapa, Kenya, and Chaul, India. Through major element analysis (al and Na), we will show that despite the competition from southeast asian and Middle Eastern industries and the imperial embargoes, Chinese celadon and blue-and-white porcelains were actively traded in the western Indian Ocean and remained the preferred prestige wares for the elites in these ports. The results suggest that the overseas demand for Chinese products drove the Chinese commercial export economy toward greater resilience to external competition and internal regulation. Introduction Trade networks show tremendous capacities for adapta- tion and resilience; they have outlasted states and empires and have expanded across political and ethnic boundaries (Cohen 1971). as the managers of these networks, trad- ing specialists played signiicant roles in the management and execution of economic activities, including distribu- tion and entrepreneurial investment in production, and have done so since the very irst socially complex urban polities (Dercksen 1999; stein 1999). The aims and goals of the trade specialists were sustainability of business practices in both favorable and unfavorable conditions. These conditions included sociopolitical stability, and/or trade-friendliness or, conversely, sociopolitical strife and/or trade unfriendliness (Oka and Kusimba 2008). In this paper, we examine broader socioeconomic and anthropological hypotheses about the responses of trading specialists to external and internal restrictions on their activities by focusing on the speciic case of Chinese entrepreneurs and traders, ca. 1200–1700, to answer the larger question of how traders managed to respond successfully to trade-unfriendly political conditions and competition. To address this question, we conducted provenance analysis on prestige ceramics recovered from Indian Ocean ports in western India and East africa to see whether Chinese merchants maintained their market share in the export of ceramics in the face of internal restrictions and external competition. The general proposition we present here is that, when faced with excessive restrictions on commercial activities, entrenched trading groups responded to market demands by using their resilient networks to continue or expand their business activities through investment in the informal or underground economy (Ferman et al. 1987; Lomnitz 1988). This response entailed two actions: (1) modifying the estab- lished distribution networks, and (2) co-opting existing con- trol mechanisms of the state. Studies show that the informal economy beneited from the state economic infrastructure and sustained sociopoliti- cal stability even as it undermined the eficiency of the state