Economic and social change in Southeast Asia in the period from around 1800 to the out break of World War II flowed essentially from the unprecedented impact of international commerce on the economic and political structures of the region. Such commerce had long exerted a major role in shaping the nature of Southeast Asian politics and society but, driven by the imperatives of developing Western capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, particularly after about 1850, its global reach and irresistible dominance in this century-and-a-half transformed Southeast Asia with an astonishing thoroughness, rapidity and finality. In a sense, it created the modern state system in Southeast Asia, and in so doing gave rise to the attendant panoply of social change.

STATES AND SOCIETIES IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

Around 1800, the transformative role of this new form of global commerce was still in its infancy; Southeast Asia, accordingly, retained much of its political, economic and social integrity and dynamism. Through most of lowland riverine Southeast Asia, Indic-inspired elites of varying sizes and power, centred on a ruler of prestigious person and impeccable lineage, presided over patterns of social and economic organization that valued control and augmentation of manpower rather than territory or capital. Organized in bonded relationships, formal and informal, with their patrons, most of the subjects of these élites lived in thickly settled clumps which contrasted sharply with the sparsely populated and heavily forested landscape of most of Southeast Asia. ‘State’, indeed, is a rather grandiose title for what was essentially a knotting together of the leading ends of strands of vertically-shaped personal relationships.

The period from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries in Southeast Asia was one of increased turmoil concomitant with intensified European penetration, political consolidation by the dominant states, and the economic transformation of the countryside. European records of this period evidence a multitude of resistance movements, popular rebellions, acts of insubordination and other assertions on the part of the colonial ‘other’. Since wars and rebellions have always been the stuff of which traditional histories have been written, it should be of no surprise that many of the charismatic leaders and their movements in the present study have already been mentioned in the general histories of Southeast Asia. But, in general, they have not been treated in their own terms; they figure as momentary interruptions of the grand sagas of colonial conquest, nationalism, modernization or state construction. In colonial records these phenomena are simply ‘disturbances’, sometimes ‘aberrations’, their perpetrators reduced to the status of dacoits or fanatics often led by crazed monks, popes, and prophets. Post-colonial writers, on the other hand, have appropriated such movements for their narratives of nationalist opposition to colonial rule.

More recently, such movements have been viewed as primitive precursors of modern, more successful, sociopolitical movements. Harry Benda must be credited with establishing a hierarchy of types that has provided subsequent scholars with a persuasive means of classifying the otherwise confusing and regionally-diverse data. The most primitive form of peasant movement, of which the 1890s Samin movement in Java is cited as an example, is characterized as rural-based, backward-looking, lacking organization, spontaneous and irrational.

Throughout Southeast Asia, the early twentieth century produced reformist activity directed toward altering established practices, whether indigenous or colonial in origin. This modernist impulse accepted the need for change, recognized benefits to be gained from some of the new arrangements introduced under colonial régimes or by Western advisers, and generally worked within the framework of bureaucratic systems of administration, creating organizations and promoting principles that owed little or nothing to indigenous traditions and much to ideologies and techniques introduced from outside the region. Many modernist reformers had Western educations and held ideas concerning how governments ought to be run that were similar to the views of the officials whose régimes they opposed. They often had somewhat less in common with the mass of the people, for the most part semi-literate peasants, in whose name they professed to act.

One strain of modernist activity led to the formation of governments for the states that succeeded colonial régimes after 1945, and part of the task of this chapter is to explain the role of modernist political movements in events leading up to the creation of these successor states. Such movements are conventionally called nationalist, but most of them represented nationalism of a particular sort, based on territories containing heterogeneous populations rather than on groups of people with shared cultural characteristics. A second strain of political activity represented the interests of collectivities with good nationalist credentials. The members of these groups thought of them selves as part of a larger whole sharing a common language, religion, or culture (‘imagined communities’ in the terminology of Benedict Anderson, but they did not form independent states and their unsatisfied nationalist aspirations would remain a source of political conflict in post-colonial Southeast Asia.

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.

Writing a history of Southeast Asia as a region presents many challenges: the diversity the region displays in so many fields of human endeavour makes its history exciting but intractable. But if this is true throughout, the period since World War II presents the historian with special problems. By contrast to much of the earlier history, the period is copiously covered in written and printed documents. But they tell only part of the story. The period is, too, relatively recent, so that, in assimilating and analysing the material, it is hard to be sure that the right themes have been chosen. Even determining the date at which to stop is fraught with difficulty. The authors of this part have accepted that their approach must be tentative. At times they must content themselves more with narrative than interpretation.

The period indeed opens with an event the impact of which is still clearly being felt, the Japanese invasion and the collapse of the European empires. This is the subject of Chapter 6. Once more the fortunes of Southeast Asia were profoundly affected by forces outside the region. Once more its peoples reacted in a variety of ways. The colonial regimes were destroyed. In the Japanese phase new social and political opportunities were opened up for some, new constraints placed on others. The economy of the region, damaged in the Great Depression, was profoundly dislocated. Parts of it were fought over, parts not. The attempts of the colonial powers to return were again variously successful. Nationalist movements contended for power. They faced not only returning colonial rulers, but new local rivals. Their success was also partly dependent on the impact of changes outside the region, the decline of British and the rise of US power, the Cold War, the triumph of Chinese communism, the independence of India.

For Southeast Asia the immediate postwar years (1945–8) were a time of change and turmoil. Dominating this era were problems of rehabilitation and aspirations for independence in the face of returning colonial régimes. The Philippines and Burma, along with India, Pakistan and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), parted from their paramount powers in a comparatively amicable way, and guidelines were laid down for an orderly advance to independence by Malaya and British Borneo; but there was little prospect for a peaceful transfer of power in Indonesia and Vietnam, and decolonization was to come to those countries through violence.

Between 1949 and 1959, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Malaya attained independence, while Singapore acquired internal self-government, but these years coincided with the Cold War’s spillover into Asia. While this was cold war between the superpowers, there were active war and revolution in many parts of Southeast Asia, where countries were often aligned with Western or communist blocs and faced internal struggles which moulded them according to rival ideological models. Intense power-bloc rivalry in Southeast Asia added to the strains of newly won independence. This contest led to the formation of the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), backed by the United States, on the one hand and to Russo-Chinese support for left-wing movements on the other. Superpower competition accentuated internal divisions between radicals and traditionalists, subversives and constitutionalists. It also deepened rifts between states: communist and anti-communist, ‘non-aligned’ and ‘neo-colonialist’. While the 1955 Afro-Asian Bandung conference was a significant step in the emergence of the non-aligned movement, in which Third World nations attempted to develop an independent stance in international affairs, this failed to spread harmony in Southeast Asia.

The writing of Southeast Asian history, as distinct from the history of its several parts, is a comparatively recent development. The first major history of the region as a whole, D. G. E. Hall’s A History of South-East Asia, appeared only in 1955. Hall’s work, though describing itself as ‘a bare outline, perilously compressed and oversimplified in many parts’, was a massive achievement, basing itself on the detailed work of other scholars and reflecting a knowledge of the critical issues of debate amongst them. Apart from urging that Southeast Asia be studied as an area ‘worthy of consideration in its own right’ and not as an appendage of India, China or the West, it offered no new conceptual or methodological approaches of its own. But in bringing together the fruits of existing scholarship it provided a kind of stocktaking of the state of that scholarship.

Since then the suitability of the region as a whole as an object of study has been more readily accepted. Cornell University had already established, in 1950, its Southeast Asia Program, and a number of other institutions in various countries followed suit. And, increasingly, comparative works focused on the region as a whole. Charles Fisher’s social, economic and political geography (London, 1964) was entitled simply South-east Asia, and other works with a similar ambit followed: John F. Cady’s Southeast Asia: its Historical Development (New York, 1964) and his Post-War Southeast Asia (Athens, Ohio, 1974) and Nicholas Tarling’s Southeast Asia: Past and Present (Melbourne, 1966) are but a few examples.

In the pre-nineteenth-century world, the Southeast Asian region was eulogized as a land of immense wealth; developments there were of crucial importance to the entirety of world history in the pre-1600 period. Writers, travelers, sailors, merchants, and officials from every continent of the eastern hemisphere knew of Southeast Asia’s wealth, and by the second millennium of the Christian era, most were aware of its power and prestige. By contrast, the early history of Southeast Asia and its international significance is not appreciated in the contemporary age.

In the early centuries CE Indians and Westerners called Southeast Asia the ‘Golden Khersonese’, the ‘Land of Gold’, and it was not long thereafter that the region became known for its pepper and the products of its rainforests, first aromatic woods and resins, and then the finest and rarest of spices. From the seventh to the tenth centuries Arabs and Chinese thought of Southeast Asia’s gold, as well as the spices that created it; by the fifteenth century sailors from ports on the Atlantic, at the opposite side of the hemisphere, would sail into unknown oceans in order to find these Spice Islands. They all knew that Southeast Asia was the spice capital of the world. From roughly 1000 CE until the nineteenth-century ‘industrial age’, all world trade was more or less governed by the ebb and flow of spices in and out of Southeast Asia.

This section of the work gives an account of the region up to the fifteenth century of the Christian era. The opening chapter, drawing on archaeological, anthropological and linguistic evidence, is concerned with the prehistory of its peoples. The next three have parallels in subsequent sections of the work. An account of the political structures of the region is followed by accounts of its economic and social history, and of its religious experience and popular beliefs.

Chapter 2 considers the environment of the region through time and it then attempts to integrate data from a range of disciplines in order to deal with a broad range of hypotheses on its prehistory. It discusses the extent of distributional correlation among human biological groupings, cultures and languages before the rise of the first historical states.

This is the subject of Chapter 3. It begins with an account of the Vietnamese polity and of its unique relationships with the Chinese empire. It then considers the development of other Southeast Asian polities. A comparative approach is attempted, limited by the relative paucity of material. But that in itself is connected with the attitude to history prevailing in the several polities concerned, and in turn that is a guide to understanding their nature. Champa, it is concluded, is not a kingdom in the conventional sense of the word. The Khmer polity at Angkor, dependent on ricefields, differed again. Pagan is compared with Angkor. In the Irrawaddy basin, more culturally diverse and competitive, the need to affirm the ethical nature of political authority was the greater. Both polities came to an end at the time of the advent of the Tai peoples into lowland Southeast Asia. Tai polities emerged, including Lan Na, Lan Sang and Ayutthaya, the last of which was the most enduring.

STATE RIVALRY AND CYCLICITY

Geographical, cultural and ethnic diversity renders any overview of Southeast Asia’s history a difficult task. The same problems of diversity are met even in the study of individual components of the region, given, for example, the differences between Shan and Mon in Burma, Vietnamese and Khmer in the Indochinese peninsula, Tagalog and Moro in the Philippines, and coastal Malay and hill Batak in north Sumatra. What cultural and historical identity obtained between or within particular segments was, to a large extent, the dictate of geography. A Confucianist Vietnam and a Christian Philippines on Southeast Asia’s fringes confirm the significance of geographical location. Beneath the striking overlay of differences, Southeast Asian societies shared a substratum of distinct traditions of lineage patterns, social structuring and belief systems which were related to the overarching concern over resource management within their particular environment. In time, the accommodation of these features with varying degrees of external influences added a second dimension to the identity of pre-modern societies. Burmese and Thai responses to Theravāda Buddhism were different, as were the responses to Islam in Java and in the Malay world. The European element added a third dimension to the evolution of these societies. European penetration has, in fact, been considered a watershed, with its earlier inroads into the maritime regions constituting a further distancing between developments there and the mainland. To what extent was this dichotomy between colonial and indigenous administrations real in terms of social impact?

The historical record for Southeast Asia begins with the arrival of Chinese soldiers and officials along the shores of the South China Sea towards the end of the third century BC. Archaeological evidence reveals the existence of many polities distributed across the terrain of Southeast Asia at that time.

VIETNAM

The one most directly encountered by record-keeping Chinese officials lay in the plain of the Hong (Red) River, in what is today northern Vietnam. Han Chinese armies conquered this area in the first century CE and, by the end of the third century, the efforts of Chinese frontier administrators and leading local clans had produced a relatively stable provincial polity, sensitive to Chinese imperial interests while at the same time representing a local system of power capable of taking initiative on behalf of its own interests when Chinese dynastic power was weak or in transition.

In the sixth century, provincial leaders renounced the overlordship of feeble Chinese dynasties, but in the early seventh century they gave no effective resistance to the arrival of Sui and Tang dynastic authority. During the seventh and eighth centuries, Tang administrators established the Protectorate of An Nam in northern Vietnam; the Protectorate was a type of frontier polity designed for remote, strategic areas inhabited by non-Chinese peoples. Establishment of the Protectorate of An Nam was accompanied by the absorption of the local ruling class into the hierarchy of imperial officialdom. So long as Tang dynastic power remained strong, the region remained relatively peaceful.

The immense cultural diversity of Southeast Asia and the linguistic skills required to approach the sources have tended to encourage localized rather than general studies of the region. The yawning gaps in our knowledge, the difficulties in interpreting information and the very real differences within even the larger divisions of ‘island’ and ‘mainland’ do not facilitate efforts to draw the Southeast Asian past together. What can the highly literate, Sinicised élite of seventeenth-century Vietnam have in common with the more oral, Muslim courts of the Malay states? Is it possible to conceive of a Shan community in the hills of upper Burma as sharing in any sense the same world as villagers on a small isolated island in eastern Indonesia? At times it seems that the more closely one approaches the material, the more elusive a common history becomes. Yet the longer view may make the task less formidable. From a contemporary vantage-point the most significant development of the pre-modern period is the slow movement towards the larger political groupings which were to form the bases of later nation-states. This movement was by no means irrevocable, nor was it everywhere apparent. But whereas throughout Southeast Asia the ‘states’ at the beginning of the sixteenth century only generally approximate those we know today, three hundred years later the current shape of Southeast Asia is clearly discernible. It is the process which brought this about which we shall now examine.

The world of Southeast Asia presents a variegated cultural pattern. Geographically, the area can be divided into mainland and maritime Southeast Asia with the Malay peninsula as the dividing line, the southern part of which belongs to the island world, whereas its northern part is more continental in nature. As to maritime Southeast Asia, the motto of the modern Republic of Indonesia: Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, freely translated as Unity in Diversity, can be applied to the area as a whole. For, although numerous different languages are used in this vast area, they all belong to the family of Austronesian languages—apart from small pockets of tribal areas. Culturally, too, there is an underlying concept of unity despite the astounding diversity in almost every aspect. The conception of Indonesia as a ‘field of ethnological study’, as formulated by Dutch anthropologists, can be applied to the entire area.

As far as religion is concerned, the diversity is less pronounced since Islam strongly predominates in Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and the southern Philippines, and Catholic Christianity in the major part of the Philippines. In mainland Southeast Asia, on the other hand, Theravāda Buddhism is the established religion of all states except Vietnam, where both Mahāyāna Buddhism and Confucianism predominate. Yet Hindu-Buddhist religion prevails in Bali, and tribal religions have persisted almost everywhere in the more remote areas. Moreover, the great religions have been influenced by earlier tribal beliefs. It is the task of the historian to describe and, if possible, to elucidate the religious developments in order to enable us to look at the present conditions against their historical background.

The second part of this work covers the period from the late fifteenth century to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of the Christian era. The opening chapter places the region in an international context, affected by changes of which the advent of the Europeans was only one. The three chapters that follow outline the political, economic and social, and religious changes that Southeast Asia underwent. A fifth chapter surveys the region on the eve of the phase in which it came almost entirely under European political control.

In the period 1500-1800 Indians and Chinese, who had visited Southeast Asia since the early Christian era, came in far greater numbers. In the seventeenth century the Japanese became involved in Southeast Asian trade for the first time. But the latest and most formidable arrivals were the Europeans. Chapter 6 deals with the arrival and establishment of these groups in the region. It also deals with the interaction between the foreign and Southeast Asian communities, and the innovations and adaptations that resulted. These included the establishment of European-controlled cities and the emergence of mestizo communities. The chapter also discusses developments in shipbuilding and firearms technology that had important repercussions for Southeast Asian societies.

It has been conventional to assume a new era began in Southeast Asia in 1500 with the arrival of Europeans, if for no better reason than that the sources become much richer and more accessible at this point. If one looked back from the age of high imperialism it was also obvious that the expansion of European empire in Asia began with Vasco da Gama and the discovery of a sea route from Europe to India. If we take our viewpoint from Southeast Asia, on the other hand, it is clear that the rapid social changes transforming the region were already in full flight before 1500, with the upsurge in international commerce of which the arrival of the Portuguese was a consequence, not a cause. The explosion of energy from the new Ming dynasty in China a century earlier is a more appropriate starting point for this new era of economic expansion, since it had some causal relation with a new dynasty in Vietnam, the decline of the ‘classical’ empires of Angkor and Majapahit, and their replacement by a string of new maritime city-states. Although most evidence about economic and social matters comes from a later period, we will therefore have to go back to 1400 in tracing the reasons for many of the changes.

POPULATION

To understand the impact of the major economic trends in the period it is necessary to have some impression of population levels. Contemporary estimates of population are extremely unreliable, but a combination of the more plausible of them with backward projection from somewhat more reliable and abundant nineteenth-century estimates yields roughly the order of population in 1600 shown in the table on page 463.

The present chapter, which continues the account of religious developments in Southeast Asia from about 1500, is divided into five sections. The first draws on the European source material that becomes available in the sixteenth century to survey important features of indigenous beliefs as they were practised in areas then little touched by the world religions. An examination of the advance of Islam and Christianity, destined to have such fundamental effects on the evolution of island Southeast Asia, makes up the second and third sections. It will become apparent that the manner in which these newer religions adapted to the local context in many respects resembles the previous infusion of Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian ideas already discussed in Chapter 5. The fourth section therefore takes up several themes common across the region as the world religions extended and consolidated their position. The chapter closes with an overview of the eighteenth century, identified as a time when unprecedented pressures, both internal and external, created new demands in Southeast Asia’s religious environment.

INDIGENOUS BELIEFS

An important contribution to our understanding of indigenous beliefs comes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as European missionaries began to move into areas of eastern Indonesia and the Philippines which had to this point been relatively isolated from external religious ideas. Despite their obvious cultural bias, the accounts missionaries compiled provide the historian with the first sustained contemporary descriptions of native religious customs outside a court environment.

Two ideas came together in the project for a Cambridge History of Southeast Asia. One was the concept of the Cambridge Histories themselves. The other was the possibility of a new approach to the history of Southeast Asia.

In the English-speaking and English-reading world the Cambridge Histories have, since the beginning of the century, set high standards in collaborative scholarship and provided a model for multi-volume works of history. The original Cambridge Modern History appeared in sixteen volumes between 1902 and 1912, and was followed by the Cambridge Ancient History, the Cambridge Medieval History, the Cambridge History of India and others.

A new generation of projects continues and builds on this foundation. Recently completed are the Cambridge Histories of Africa and Latin America. Cambridge Histories of China and of Japan are in progress, as well as the New Cambridge History of India. Though the pattern and the size have varied, the essential feature, multi-authorship, has remained.

The initial focus was European, but albeit in an approach that initially savoured rather of the old Cambridge Tripos course ‘The Expansion of Europe’, it moved more out of the European sphere than the often brilliant one-author Oxford histories. But it left a gap which that course did not leave, the history of Southeast Asia.

Southeast Asia has long been seen as a whole, though other terms have been used for it. The title Southeast Asia, becoming current during World War II, has been accepted as recognizing the unity of the region, while not prejudging the nature of that unity.