The last stand of South-East Asia’s independent Muslim polities took place at the turn of the twentieth century. In Malaya the British consolidated their hold on the peninsula’s disunited sultanates, completing an incremental colonisation of the mainland begun in the 1870s. In the Netherlands East Indies Dutch forces shot their way into the territories not yet part of the colony, while also mopping up the last pockets of Muslim resistance in Aceh, West Java and Sulawesi. Masters of the Philippines colony since their victory in the Spanish–American War, the Americans achieved in the first years of the new century what had eluded their Spanish predecessors for three hundred years. At a cost of several thousand Muslim lives, they subdued the south’s fractious chiefdoms and incorporated the region into an otherwise Christian Philippines.

The passing of South-East Asia’s independent Muslim polities brought a momentary halt to armed resistance to the Europeans. The colonial advance also quickened the pace of social change, in a manner that heightened Muslims’ awareness of their backwardness relative to the Chinese, Ḥaḍramīs and Europeans involved in the new colonial economy. Even where the Europeans left native rulers in place, control of the commanding heights of politics and the economy shifted into non-native hands. Territories with rich economic opportunities witnessed an influx of immigrants, often non-Muslim.