Introduction

Many Western accounts of South East Asian economic and social structures are both distorted and highly selective. The colonial powers fostered the view of backward, changeless societies with weak, ephemeral political structures, despotic, often rapacious, rulers, endemic disease, almost uniform poverty and internecine warfare. This view remained implicit in much of the development literature of the 1950s and 1960s. For advocates of ‘modernisation theory’ the traditional societies of the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods were static, bounded and conservative. In the more extreme views such societies were presented as lacking economic logic (Rostow, 1960). Others, such as Foster (1965), accepted that traditional societies had their own logical basis. Similarly, Schultz (1964: 36–57) described traditional agricultural production as, within its own terms of reference, containing few ‘allocative inefficiencies’.

For adherents to these views, pre-colonial South East Asia was dominated by communal, village-based production, over which weak centralised state structures had limited control and made limited demands. Production was dominated by agriculture to which craft activities were merely annexed. Such communities both aimed at, and largely achieved, self-sufficiency with little contact with the outside world (Murray, 1980: 6–7).

Over the last twenty years work by Western and Asian scholars has substantially undermined the picture of a static, undifferentiated, communal society. Increasingly it has been recognised that there was considerable variation within the region in the degree to which communal, individual and state structures had evolved. Insufficient attention is still paid to the processes of change.