Before the birth of the industrial age, long-distance trade along sea routes required someone to go abroad and become a foreigner. Over a long period of would history, trade diasporas were the dominant intuitional from in cross-cultural trade. Merchants would physically move themselves from their homeland to reside in a town on an alien shore. Some move back and forth; others settled; in some places the merchants stayed so long that they seemed almost like natives. A string of such settlements might arise, forming a trade network or to borrow the Greek word for scattering (as in the sowing of grain), a trade diaspora. Trans-shipment centers were where merchant communities clustered. British Singapore, for example, was a major node in many resident trade diasporas: Arabs, Parsees, Klings, Bugis Javanese, above all Chinese. For such Chinese merchants to the next. At each settlement, a kinsman or a fellow-countryman would act as the trader’s local agent.