In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries profound changes took place in the political order in all Southeast Asian countries. A main feature of these changes was the foundation of European-style state administrations within territories formally defined by European imperialism. Colonial rulers created centrally controlled and functionally organized bureaucracies to govern regions which were delineated with little or no regard for indigenous conceptions of political or cultural boundaries. The personalistic and quasi-feudal complex of arrangements which had been the hallmark of earlier political systems was overridden and often eliminated.

The change was one that began slowly and then began accelerating with almost blinding rapidity as European industrialism and nationalism remade the entire world. At the beginning of the nineteenth century much of the region remained outside the control of any European power. Only Penang, Melaka (Malacca), Java, some of Maluku (the Moluccas), and part of the Philippines could really be said to be under European control. By 1850, the European advance was limited to a few British footholds in Malaya, the beginnings of a French presence in Indochina, a few Dutch treaties and the British occupation of Arakan and Tenasserim. During the next three decades, much of the region was divided into spheres of influence among the various European powers, and the political boundaries which characterize the region today had been fixed. Actual control of population, however, was limited to a few metropolitan centres: elsewhere it was exercised through treaties with otherwise autonomous chiefs or through loosely governed intermediaries. European rule was little more than claims of sovereignty and the rights to certain revenues and economic privileges.