Chinese and Arab overseas migrations never produced creole parallel communities

Evidence

The novelty of all these conditions is suggested by the contrast they afford with the great (and roughly contemporaneous) Chinese and Arab migrations into Southeast Asia and East Africa. These migrations were rarely ‘planned’ by any metropole, and even more rarely produced stable relations of subordination. … The last great wave of overseas migration took place in the nineteenth century as the dynasty disintegrated and a huge demand for unskilled Chinese labour opened up in colonial Southeast Asia and Siam. Since virtually all migrants were politically cut off from Peking, and were also illiterate people speaking mutually unintelligible languages, they were either more or less absorbed into local cultures or were decisively subordinated to the advancing Europeans. … As for the Arabs, most of their migrations originated from the Hadramaut, never a real metropole in the era of the Ottoman and Mughal empires. Enterprising individuals might find ways to establish local principalities, such as the merchant who founded the kingdom of Pontianak in western Borneo in 1772; but he married locally, soon lost his ‘Arabness’ if not his Islam, and remained subordinated to the rising Dutch and English empires in Southeast Asia, not to any power in the Near East. In 1832 Sayyid Sa’id, lord of Muscat, established a powerful base on the East African coast and settled on the island of Zanzibar, which he made the centre of a flourishing clove-growing economy. But the British used military means to compel him to sever his ties with Muscat. Thus neither Arabs nor Chinese, though they ventured overseas in very large numbers during more or less the same centuries as the Western Europeans, successfully established coherent, wealthy, selfconsciously creole communities subordinated to a great metropolitan core. Hence, the world never saw the rise of New Basras or New Wuhans. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 718

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that pre-nineteenth-century Arab migrants ‘lost their Arabness’ without a metropole is directly relevant to the Islamophobia field’s treatment of contemporary Muslim diaspora identity and its imagined core.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the ‘no metropole, no creole nationalism’ thesis survive scrutiny of Arab trading diasporas elsewhere, e.g., Zanzibar or the Swahili coast after 1832?