We can consider the ecology of disease to be the sum total of all the influences on pathogens and their hosts and, because of the interdependence of the two for disease expression, the internal structures and systems of both that bear upon a disease question. Thus we are clearly considering a structure of relations whose complexity surpasses all comprehension. Such may also be said of a single disease. No one has yet fully defined all that constitutes the expression of even one disease, and such an explanation would be its ecology. To describe the disease ecology of Europe is a task at first so daunting as to admit no possibility. Still, there are a few aspects of the ecology of disease in Europe that can be described, if without claim to completeness or ultimate value, at least with an eye to creating a target for more detailed studies and criticism.

With such cautions in mind, I should like to offer a few general comments on human disease and its expression, and then set forth a very limited number of aspects of the totality of my subject, which I feel can be discussed. For most of the sojourn of humankind on Earth, we have only skeletal remains upon which to build any concept of disease in the past. Even after the advent of agriculture and the earliest civilizations, we have little upon which to develop a coherent view. General trends are perceptible in classical times, and very sketchy numbers can be offered for population in the late medieval period.

World War II reduced the Southeast Asian economies, already weakened by the Great Depression, to their lowest levels in modern times. Warfare itself accounted for much of the destruction, particularly in Burma and the Philippines, where the Allied forces resisted longest and returned soonest. When the British retreated from Burma they blew up railways and refineries as they withdrew, and the American liberation of the Philippines employed massive concentrations of naval and aerial firepower; these operations probably accounted for most of the physical destruction in those two countries. By the end of the war Burma had lost all its oil refineries, 90 per cent of its boats, and 85 per cent of its locomotives (along with most of its rolling stock and bridges), while 70 per cent of its roads and most of its docks and factories were severely damaged. As one scholar put it, ‘both in internal transport and external trade, Burma was thrown back a century, without warning or previous preparation’. The Philippines was scarcely better off; much of the damage occurred during the 1945 liberation of Manila, in which the country’s industrial and modern services sectors—factories, ware houses, power plants, radio stations, telephone exchanges, newspapers, hospitals and universities—had been concentrated. By the end of the battle, the city was 80 per cent destroyed.

Seagoing trade made Southeast Asia a fertile meeting ground from early history, and at the close of World War II Landon aptly characterized the region as a ‘crossroad of religion’. He emphasized that up to then imported religions had been subordinated to ancestral spirit cults which were grounded in relatively autonomous villages, and noted that even the Westernized élites had adapted modern ideas with in a world-view shaped by local traditions. In the same breath he suggested that the middle of this century marked a turning point because the closing years of colonial rule and the disruptions of the war had definitively shaken the foundations of local life. Despite the range of changes since then, the region remains a site of encounter between deeply held and widely divergent world-views. A rich tapestry of ancient local traditions is still sustained with remarkable force, and significant communities derive their practices from all of the major world faiths in many of their forms. The diversity, vitality and depth of religious commitments with in the region combine so that it remains an especially rich laboratory for the exploration of religion.

The region is filled with vibrant ritual enactments, such as those in Hindu Bali, and many people routinely enter altered states through ritualized trance, as in Malaysia’s annual Thaipusam festival, touching realms of consciousness which are remote for most people in industrialized societies. Meditation practices of Javanese syncretic mystics and the Theravāda forest monastries counterpoint orthodox Islam and ritual Buddhism. Vigorous communities of new Christians exist alongside animists and some, mainly in urban contexts, who live without knowing religious meanings.

This part of the work deals with Southeast Asia between the late eighteenth century of the Christian era and World War II. The opening chapter, which is in a sense complementary to the closing chapter of the previous volume, describes and endeavours to account for the incorporation of most of the region within the frontiers of European empires. Subsequent chapters describe the political structures, the economic and social life, and the religions and popular culture of the region. A final chapter includes a discussion of nationalism and nationalist movements.

In the previous phase, Spanish and Dutch realms had been established in maritime Southeast Asia. By the end of the nineteenth century, only Siam (Thailand) stood outside the formal empires of external powers. Those powers sought to avoid conflict among themselves by settling the frontiers of their territories. In so doing they took more or less notice of the previous history and present condition of the lands and peoples over which they claimed authority. Yet the frontiers had a degree of rigidity unusual in Southeast Asia.

Chapter 1 describes this outcome. It also endeavours to describe the process by which it was reached, and in particular to take account of the role within it of the rulers and peoples of Southeast Asia as well as the Europeans. Within the emerging framework, there was further interaction in many fields of human endeavour. This is in a sense the subject of the subsequent chapters in this part, which also pursue lines of investigation that parallel chapters in the first volume. Chapter 5, too, deals with the emergence of nationalism within the colonial framework. The statecraft of the imperial period came under challenge.

Writing about recent history can be an incautious exercise. The closer the past gets to the present, the more insecure it is for the historian. The natural instinct is to withdraw from the present, which is precariously perched on the edge leading to the future, and find that comfortable distance between the writer and the brink. The aim is to gain the security that is often professionally called ‘perspective’. From the historian’s point of view, the trouble with the contemporary past is that it is still happening and there are no reliable records (‘primary sources’) to cite. Equally problematic is the possibility that the people described in the narrative may still be alive, and writing about living personalities can be notoriously insecure for the historian. Another dilemma is the fact that readers— fellow historians and others—bring to bear on that same narrative their own experiences and interpretations.

Couple these built-in disabilities in writing contemporary history to a description of the political structure of the independent states of Southeast Asia and there will emerge a veritable nightmare. So much needs to be discussed. So many themes can be presented. It is like a Balinese painter at work. He tries to depict as much as possible so that the canvas is completely covered, including the corners. The viewer then faces the task of relating the numerous features to each other. Very often, especially to the uninitiated, the end product merely registers as a patchwork of colours and shapes with no discernible message.

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.