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The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New Historyby David Chandler, Norman G. Owen, William R. Roff, David Joel Steinberg, Jean Gelman Taylor, Robert H. Taylor, Alexander Woodside, David K. Wyatt
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| Blurb & images | Contents | Excerpts |
Maps and Tables, 10
Preface, 13
Changing Names, 17
Introduction: Places and Peoples, 26
Part 1: The Dynamics of the Eighteenth Century
1. Southeast Asian Livelihoods, 43
2. Inner Life and Identity, 60
3. The Struggle for Political Authority, 80
Part 2: New Choices and Constraints
4. Dynasties and Colonies, Boundaries and Frontiers, 106
5. Myanmar Becomes British Burma, 116
6. Siam: From Ayutthaya to Bangkok, 130
7. Vietnam, 1700-1885: Disunity, Unity, and French Conquest, 147
8. Cambodia, 1796-1884: Politics in a Tributary Kingdom, 162
9. Realignments: The Making of the Netherlands East Indies, 1750-1914, 171
10. The Malay Negeri of the Peninsula and Borneo, 1775-1900, 188
11. The Spanish Philippines, 203
Part 3: Economic, Political, and Social Transformations
12. Globalization and Economic Change, 218
13. Modes of Production, Old and New, 241
14. Consolidation of Colonial Power and Centralization of State Authority, 267
15. Living in a Time of Transition, 295
16. Perceptions of Race, Gender, and Class in the Colonial Era, 322
17. Channels of Change, 334
18. Depression and War, 355
Part 4: Passages Out of the Colonial Era
19. The Philippines, 1896-1972: From Revolution to Martial Law, 371
20. Becoming Indonesia, 1900-1959, 290
21. British Malaya, 311
22. British Burma and Beyond 325
23. Vietnam, 1885-1975: Colonialism, Communism, and Wars, 343
24. Siam Becomes Thailand, 1910-1973, 365
25. Cambodia, 1884-1975, 380
26. Laos to 1975, 394
Part 5: Coping with Independence and Interdependence
27. Industrialization and Its Implications, 402
28. Human Consequences of the Economic "Miracle," 429
29. Malaysia since 1957, 447
30. Singapore and Brunei, 459
31. Indonesia: The First Fifty Years, 471
32. The Kingdom of Thailand, 496
33. The Philippines since 1972, 506
34. Vietnam after 1975: From Collectivism to Market Leninism, 524
35. Cambodia since 1975, 542
36. Laos since 1975, 558
37. Burma Becomes Myanmar, 568
Afterword, 578
Notes, 580
Index
About the Authors, 593
Although we would like everyone to read this book from cover to cover, we realize that very few people will actually read it (or any other general history) straight through. We would therefore like to point out some features of its organization that may help readers in approaching it.
Those who do read the book from start to finish will find it oscillating between general thematic chapters, primarily on social, economic, and cultural change, and "country" chapters emphasizing developments, mostly political, within specific areas. The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia is concerned as much with the processes of historical transformation as with the chronological narrative of events.
Readers interested in synoptic analyses of developments that do not fit easily into conventional chronology and are not unique to a single country may wish to focus primarily on the "general" chapters. Part 1 introduces the eighteenth-century world, when colonialism was still marginal to most of Southeast Asia, and the first chapter of part 2 ushers in imperialism. Part 3 examines change in the era of direct Western domination in the region, roughly from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. The first two chapters of part 5 are about the social and economic transformation of Southeast Asia over the last half century.
Readers primarily interested in a particular society may follow its history in the "country" chapters in parts 2, 4, and 5. (Vietnam, for example, is the topic of chapters 7, 23, and 34.) Beyond the facts and interpretations presented, readers might note that the periodization of these national histories often diverges from more conventional patterns, even those employed in earlier versions of this book. They should remember, however, that much information on these countries--particularly on social, economic, and cultural change--can also be found in the "general" chapters and located there through the index.
In "Changing Names" (below) we briefly describe how the countries and peoples of Southeast Asia came to be called what they are today--which is rarely what they were called in the past. A short list of recommended "Further Readings" appears at the end of each chapter; many of the works cited contain substantial bibliographies. The sources of most of the quotations in the text can be found in the notes at the back of the book.
"Cambodia" is the English-language rendering of a Sanskrit word usually transliterated as "Kambuja" and pronounced "Kampuchea" in modern Khmer. The word, which means "born of Kambu," a mythical, semidivine forebear, was part of the name Kambujadesa (Cambodia-land), which the empire of Angkor, centered in what is now northwestern Cambodia, gave itself after the tenth century C.E. The nomenclature remained in use after the abandonment of Angkor in the sixteenth century.
Under the French colonial protectorate (1863-1954) the kingdom's name came to be written "Cambodge" in French but was still written and pronounced in Khmer as "Kampuchea." The transliteration "Kampuchea" reappeared briefly in documents written in French in March 1945, when Cambodia was told to declare independence by Japanese forces occupying the region, and it renamed itself the Kingdom of Kampuchea. By November 1945, when the French returned to power, the kingdom's name in French had reverted to Cambodge (Cambodia for English speakers).
In 1970, following a coup against Norodom Sihanouk, the country named itself the Khmer Republic. When the Republican regime was defeated by local communists five years later, the Marxist-Leninist government that took power called the country Democratic Kampuchea. A Vietnamese invasion in December 1978 drove this regime from power and the newly established, pro-Vietnamese government came to office under the name of the People's Republic of Kampuchea. When the Vietnamese withdrew their forces in 1989, the ruling party remained in power, but its leaders renounced Marxism-Leninism and renamed their country the State of Cambodia. This name lasted until 1993, when Sihanouk, who had abdicated the throne in 1955, became king for a second time, and the country restored its pre-1970 name, the Kingdom of Cambodia.
The word "Khmer" refers to the major ethnic group in Cambodia, comprising perhaps 90 percent of the population, and also to the language spoken throughout the country. The etymology of the word is obscure, but it has been in use to describe the inhabitants of the region for over a thousand years. In general the terms "Khmer" and "Cambodian" are interchangeable, and in conversation most Cambodians refer to their country as sruk Khmer (Khmer-land).
The term "Indonesia" was first used in 1850 by the British anthropologist J. R. Logan to designate islands called the "Indian Archipelago" by other Western writers. For Logan, "Indonesia" did not designate a political unit but a cultural zone that included the Philippines. The forebears of today's Indonesians had no term for the region or concept of a single political unit linking communities across seas. From ancient times Java had been known by that single name, but most of Indonesia's islands derive their names from European labeling. Early European traders at the port of Samudera named the entire island Sumatra, and visitors to the sultanate of Brunei called the whole island Borneo.
The Dutch named their colonial possessions Indië (the Indies). Initially the Indies meant Java and a few ports scattered across the archipelago. Between 1850 and 1914 Dutch power engulfed over three hundred separate sultanates and communities, and welded them into a single administrative unit called the "Netherlands Indies." Subjects were called "Natives," a legal category alongside "Europeans" and "Foreign Orientals" (local Chinese and Arabs), replacing the terms "Moor," "Christian," and "Heathen" used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Associations in the early years of the twentieth century identified themselves by geography and generation, such as "League of Sumatran Youth" and "Ambonese Youth." As ideological identities developed, parties took the colonial unit as their geographic marker but opted for Logan's "Indonesia" instead of the Dutch "Indies." The first to do so was the Communist Party of Indonesia, founded in 1921. Opponents of the Dutch understood "Indonesia" as both a political and a cultural entity; they adopted as a common language a variant of Malay spoken in Sumatra, already widely used as a lingua franca, and called it the "Indonesian language" (Bahasa Indonesia). The political unit they eventually won was the Dutch colony stretching from Sabang Island off northern Sumatra to Merauke on the border with Papua New Guinea, but many wanted the cultural definition of "Indonesia"--Islamic and Malay-speaking--translated into a state that would include Malaya, southern Thailand, the southern Philippines, all of Borneo, and Portuguese East Timor.
Following independence Indonesian place-names were substituted for the Dutch. Batavia became Djakarta; Buitenzorg, Bogor; and Borneo, Kalimantan. Indonesian spelling was revised in 1972, making Djakarta Jakarta and Atjeh Aceh. In this book Indonesia designates the state established by Sukarno on 17 August 1945; for the period before 1945, it is used as a shorthand for the islands constituting today's republic.
The word "Laos" was first used by European missionaries and cartographers in the seventeenth century to pluralize the word "Lao," the name of the country's predominant ethnolinguistic group. In the Lao language, which is closely related to Thai, there is no orthographic distinction between plural and singular nouns. In Lao, Laos is known as pathet lao or muang lao, both meaning "Lao country" or "Lao-land," along the lines of prathet thai (Thailand).
The French used the term "Laos" as the name for their protectorate in the colonial period. After independence in 1954, the country became known as the Kingdom of Laos. In 1975, when the communists came to power and the monarchy was abolished, it was renamed the Lao People's Democratic Republic.
The name "Malaysia" is derived from the term "Malay," long applied by locals and foreigners to the Malay Peninsula in recognition of the predominance there of Malay-speaking peoples (whose geographic extent, however, also includes much of Sumatra and other islands of the archipelago). The peninsula became widely known from the late eighteenth century simply as "Malaya" and, in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when its individual states fell under British colonial rule, as British Malaya. British Malaya also included the three Straits Settlements on the fringe of the peninsula: the islands of Penang and Singapore and the small west coast state of Melaka (Malacca). When the Malay states (including Penang and Melaka but not at that time Singapore) became independent in 1957, they did so as the Federation of Malaya. In 1963 a larger federal unit called Malaysia was formed, bringing together the Federation of Malaya, Singapore, and the British-ruled protectorates of Sarawak and Sabah in northern Borneo. The oil-rich protectorate of Brunei, situated between British North Borneo and Sarawak, declined to join Malaysia, and Singapore was expelled in 1965.
Much of Malaysia has been the recipient during the past two centuries of immigrants of other than indigenous stock (which is held to include local Malays, the aborigines or orang asli ["original people"] of the peninsula, the tribal peoples of the Borneo states, and immigrants from Java, Sumatra, and elsewhere in Indonesia). The largest immigrant group was "Chinese," a term used for individuals hailing originally from many different parts of south China, often speaking distinct local languages. Those immigrants referred to as "Indian" included Muslims as well as Hindus from Tamilnadu in south India, Bengalis, and others, in addition to many from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). One political result of the large immigrant influx has been the coining of a term that seeks to distinguish between Malaysians who are of Malay or other local descent and those who are not (no matter whether locally descended or long resident): bumiputera ("son[s] of the soil"), which confers constitutionally derived advantages of various sorts. The Malay language, now the national language of Malaysia, is known either simply as Malay or as Bahasa Melayu.
The military government of what is now officially known as Myanmar Naingngan (State of Myanmar) abandoned the older and more familiar English name of the country, Burma or the Union of Burma, in 1989. As a result of the authoritarian nature of that regime, the United States and many European countries have refused to recognize the change in nomenclature, as have some of the domestic political opposition to the military government, in particular the National League for Democracy.
This controversy masks a number of more complex issues. During the colonial period (1824-1948), "Myanmar," a traditional term for the territory under the dominion of the kings of the central Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) valley (possibly related to the Chinese name for the area, mian), fell from use. Rather, in line with the European idea of a nation-state where ethnicity and territory are seen to be coterminous, "Burma" became the common name for the area governed by the monarchs reigning at Inwa (Ava), Amarapura, and Mandalay and their British successors. The name derived from the idea of the territory of the Bama or Burmans, the majority people of the area, whose language, Burmese or Myanmar, is the official language of the country. Linguistically, "Burma" and "Myanmar" can be linked by substituting a "b" sound for an "m" sound and an "r" sound for a "y" sound, common phonetic shifts.
By the late colonial period the term "Myanmar" had largely fallen from common usage. Rather, as ethnicity rose to dominate nationalist debates, and the structures of colonial society privileged ethnicity over other forms of social and economic differentiation, "Bama" or Burman/Burmese came to be more frequently used. For example, most of the leaders of the nationalist elite that eventually took power in 1948 had previously been members of the Do Bama Asiayon, or We Burmans Association. English-medium historians largely forgot the term "Myanmar," though it had been used in the 1920s as the title of the leading nationalist organization of that period, the Myanma Athin Chokkyi, usually translated as the General Council of Burmese Associations, and in the 1940s by Prime Minister Ba Maw's Myanmar Wunthanu Aphwe, or Myanmar Nationalist Organization.
The 1948 constitution of Pyihtaungsu Myanmar, or the Union of Burma (the official English name at the time), was an attempt to create a modern, plural society and federal political system out of the many ethnic divisions of the country, the most significant of which was the difference between the majority, lowland Bama and the upland minority peoples, such as the Shan, Kachin, Chin, Kayin (Karen), Kayah (Karenni), Wa, Pao, Palaung, and so on. "Myanmar" might then have become the collective name for all the ethnic groups and territories of the country, rather as "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" is the collective term for England, Scotland, Wales, and Ulster. However, because the term did not come back into usage by non-Myanmar speakers until the controversial period of the military government in 1989, it remains contested. In this book "Myanmar" will be used except for the period of British rule and the postwar "Union of Burma."
The Philippines was named by Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century for the prince who would become King Philip II of Spain. The national language, adopted from Tagalog in the twentieth century and spoken by most inhabitants of the capital city, Manila, has been called at various times Pilipino or Filipino. All of the indigenous languages are linguistically related to Malay, although many Spanish, Chinese, and English loan words have been incorporated.
The Spanish called most of the indigenous inhabitants indios (Indians) using the term "Filipino" only as an adjective or to describe Caucasians born in the archipelago. These were white-skinned, not brown: creoles, of European ancestry but born in the empire rather than on the Iberian Peninsula. Since the late nineteenth century the term "Filipino" has been transformed to describe any person born in the archipelago who chose to owe allegiance to the Philippines, while the term indio is generally considered derogatory. "Mestizos" (literally people of "mixed" ethnic ancestry) may have Caucasian and indio blood, Chinese and indio heritage, or a combination. In sharp contradistinction to many other places throughout Southeast Asia and the world (where the comparable term "half-caste" is a pejorative), to be mestizo in the Philippines carries no negative connotation or constraint.
There are many Hispanic names in the Philippines, but after the United States took over, most Filipinos began to abandon the use of accent marks on these names. We will follow this practice and omit accent marks on the names of persons living after 1898.
The Spanish referred to the various Muslim peoples of the south, such as the Tausug and the Magindanao, as "Moros" (Moors), a term they brought with them from their long encounters with the Muslims of North Africa. This term, which was originally rejected by Filipino Muslim communities as a slur, has recently been embraced by them as a marker of their separatist dream.
The polity now known as Thailand was generally referred to as "Siam" for many centuries. Nationalists renamed it in 1939 in an attempt to be more inclusive of people, particularly in the north, northeast, and south, who had never considered themselves "Siamese" (i.e., indigenous subjects of the state centered on Ayutthaya or Bangkok) but might be persuaded to think of themselves as "Thai." After World War II "Siam" briefly was restored as the country's name in 1946, but little more than a year later "Thailand" became permanent.
The term itself is a neologism, combining the traditional ethnic identity "Thai" with "land" (prathet in Thai). As the word "Thai" also means "free," some people translate the country's name as "Land of the Free," but it is unlikely that that was the original meaning. Many other peoples speaking closely related languages live nearby in Myanmar, China, Laos, and Vietnam; for purposes of convenience, linguists and other scholars sometimes label all of them, along with the Thai, as "Tai" (without the "h").
There is wide variation among systems of transliteration of Thai into the Western alphabet, but in general place-names in this book follow those adopted by the Board on Geographic Names, as used on most published maps.
"Vietnam" is a relatively recent name for the kingdom of the "Viet" people. ("Viet" is cognate with the Chinese "Yue," a generic term for ethnic groups in what is now southern China and beyond.) Its official use began only in the nineteenth century. From the eleventh century to 1800, Vietnamese rulers usually called their country as a whole the "Great Viet" (Dai Viet) domain.
Of the other premodern names for the country, "Annam" is probably the most familiar. This Chinese colonial term emerged in the late seventh century, when the Tang empire named its colony in northern Vietnam the "Pacified South" (Chinese: Annan) protectorate. Vietnam stopped being a Chinese colony in the tenth century, but the Chinese continued to refer to their now independent southern neighbor as "Annam" until the end of the 1800s, rather as if the British were to continue to call Zimbabwe "Rhodesia" for the next nine centuries. Many Westerners picked up on this locution and referred to the country as "Annam" (and its people as "Annamites" or "Annamese"), although Vietnamese generally did not appreciate this terminology. The nomenclature was further confused when the French, in dividing Vietnam administratively into three parts, called the middle one (centered on Hue and Danang) "Annam," as distinct from "Tonkin" to the north and "Cochinchina" to the south.
In the early 1800s the new Nguyen dynasty tried to secure international (i.e., Chinese) recognition of a new name for the country: "Nam Viet." But to the rulers of China the term (Nan Yue in Chinese) conjured up memories of an ancient state of that name, founded by a dissident Chinese general, which had existed in modern Guangdong and Guangxi between 203 and 111 B.C.E. Chinese rulers feared that their acceptance of the term "Nam Viet" might signal approval of resurrected Vietnamese claims to south China. They therefore reversed the components of the proposed new name to detoxify it politically, and thus "Viet Nam" (Vietnam) came into existence. Nineteenth-century Vietnamese rulers, not liking it, privately preferred to refer to their country as the "Great South" (Dai Nam).
A first-time visitor to Southeast Asia will be captivated by the brilliance of the light, the profusion of exotic wildlife, the scents of tropical flowers mingling with the pungent odors of a spice market. Travel on any national airline and flight attendants will be in ethnic dress. The menu will include "native" items, and local beers on the beverage cart--Singha, Tiger, San Miguel, or "333"--may be labeled in various scripts. The newspapers routinely distributed may be written in Chinese, Indonesian, Thai, or Vietnamese as well as English. But the sanitized, denatured quality of any international airline can only hint at the hot, dynamic, dense, noisy, polluted, fascinating universe on the other side of the airport customs area.
Conjure up arriving in Malaysia and landing at Kuala Lumpur, although the experience would be similar at Jakarta, Manila, or Bangkok. Perusing the map in the back of the airline's monthly magazine, you can see that the plane is traveling between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, flying over the Strait of Melaka (Malacca), one of the most important maritime passages in the world, linking the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea. On one side of the strait is Sumatra, an island of the Republic of Indonesia; on the other, looking much the same, is the plane's destination, a peninsula described by Ptolemy two millennia ago as the "Golden Chersonese" for its legendary (but long since depleted) gold deposits.
On both sides of the strait rise high mountainous ridges, volcanic in origin, seemingly blanketed by tropical rainforest, which are sliced by rivers running down to the sea. As the plane crosses over the Malaysian coastline in its initial descent, it becomes increasingly apparent that not all the land is covered by this dense foliage. Indeed parts of the mountains are barren, brown, and stripped of timber, evidence of the tin sluicing and dredging once so important in Malayan history. The plane passes through enormous cloud formations, tens of thousands of feet high, periodically producing violent thunder and rain but usually brilliantly white against an azure sky. As the plane descends in preparation for landing, it becomes possible to see that parts of the forest are planted row upon row in rubber trees, from plantations first established during the colonial era to make automobile tires. At this lower altitude it also becomes easier to see rice paddies--especially beautiful when the fields are flooded with lush green young rice shoots--and villages, clusters of bamboo huts, and tin-roofed factories. There are ribbons of roads crisscrossing this landscape, linking hamlets to cities and Malaysia to the world.
The capital, Kuala Lumpur, like most of the capitals of Southeast Asia, is not an ancient city. In the late nineteenth century it was still a tiny town at the confluence of two streams (the name means "muddy estuary"). Today the visitor sees a vast, sprawling city under a pall of gray pollution with a skyline that juxtaposes traditional wood and palm-thatched buildings, squat cement structures painted garish pastel colors, air-conditioned shopping malls, and a cluster of soaring high-rise buildings, including the Petronas Twin Towers, at the millennium the tallest buildings in the world.
How did this small outpost, created by Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth century, become a city of 1.5 million people? Who planted those rubber trees and built those staggeringly tall buildings? Why and how were the great royal capitals of Southeast Asia--Ava, Ayutthaya, Yogyakarta, Melaka--not only replaced by modern cities but relegated to economic and political obscurity? And why are Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, apparently similar in so many ways, now in separate countries with distinct governments, priorities, and identities? It is around questions such as these, as well as the narratives of individual country histories, that this book is organized.
It is not only the physical reality that has changed over the past several centuries. Ideas, institutions, cultural priorities, and social values have also evolved. Consider what time and space mean in the twenty-first century: scientifically anchored and universally accepted norms. In eighteenth-century Southeast Asia, as in much of the world at that time, such definitions were far more fluid; almost every country had its own calendar and its own way--or variety of ways--of calculating distance. Today the whole world is measured in kilometers or miles and every country marked the same millennium. Everyone counts the years off a European, Christian calendar. The satellite dish and the computer, along with other technological marvels, have altered fundamentally the concept of borders and boundaries, made migration and mobility easier, and identified the metropolitan city as a portal to opportunity, a seductive beacon of aspiration well within reach by bus, train, or plane.
In this process much has been lost as well as gained. Intimacy, familial obligation, piety, and cultural identity have been challenged by foreign values and modern ideas. It is easy to equate change with progress and to see the eighteenth-century world as "backward," because it lacked such modern comforts as plumbing or electricity. The benefits of modernity are seductive to people the world over, and yet the price paid for development may be far higher than either individuals or societies realize.
Change has produced some wonderful gains (life expectancy in Southeast Asia is up dramatically, education is nearly universal, standards of living have improved unevenly but significantly) but also has spread dislocation, pain, and misery. Technology means helicopter gunships and government surveillance as well as jet travel and computer games. The environment has been polluted, natural resources savaged. Ruthless exploitation, the lack of appropriate government regulation, war, colonialism, and human greed and stupidity have all played a part. Yet our aim is not to tell a morality tale but to describe and analyze the profound transformation of Southeast Asia in the modern era.
We will thus be reflecting on how the "modern"--in contradistinction to the "traditional"--came about in Southeast Asia, while understanding that "modern" and "traditional" are never absolutes, simple concepts that can be completely isolated from each other. This book attempts to chronicle the diverse stories that created the societies and nation-states of the region. It details the impact of global forces of change, including Islam and Christianity, mercantilism, colonialism, imperialism, and the industrial revolution, and traces the spread of secular ideological systems such as capitalism, communism, socialism, and nationalism. It examines local adaptations of international influences: food that looks Chinese, for example, may not be; ancient Sanskrit tales become twenty-first-century Indonesian shadow puppetry; Filipinos use cell phone "texting" to organize a popular revolution. It tries always to be comparative, both globally and regionally, as when we contrast the modern history of Siam (now called Thailand) with that of Myanmar (which some still call Burma).
We start our story in the eighteenth century, when we can discern fundamental shifts in the patterns of life of peoples living within the region. Historiographically this starting point is arbitrary, but it is defensible, even though no two "country" histories begin (in this volume) at the exact same moment. The cusp of change revealed itself unevenly, as it has done throughout human experience.
Southeast Asia is that part of the world located south of China, east of India, and north of Australia. Known to the Chinese and Japanese as the "South Sea" (Nanyang or Nampo), the region was first widely described as "Southeast Asia" during World War II, when the term was assigned to the allied zone of war commanded by a British Admiral, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Initially a military shorthand, the name now is accepted as referring to a region with unique characteristics and shared customs. The total land area of Southeast Asia is slightly more than 1.5 million square miles, a little smaller than the Indian subcontinent. Just over half of the territory is a peninsula jutting from the Asian mainland, while the rest is an archipelago or series of archipelagos, unevenly divided among the contemporary states of Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia (whose eastern half incorporates part of the vast island of Borneo), Brunei, and East Timor (Timor Leste, Timor Loro Sa`e).
Throughout Southeast Asia, there are recurring similarities of flora and fauna, of climate, and of cultivation methods. The region is tropical, straddling the equator; one of the first impressions most Westerners have on visiting Southeast Asia is of the oppressive heat that strikes them the moment they leave the air-conditioned airport or hotel. Photographs in National Geographic hint at an exotic environment of fertile soil; rice paddies, coconut palms, banana plants, and the rainforest itself all reinforce this impression.
Yet except where the earth is fecund because of volcanic loam, as in Java, or by alluvial deposit, along the major river valleys, there is a precarious ecological balance in the rainforest. Plants compete to live through photosynthesis rather than soil chemistry. Often there are only a few inches of topsoil, so trees do not develop the deep taproots characteristic of richer soils and more temperate climates. Instead the great banyan trees of Angkor, in Cambodia, which must grow tall to maximize their access to rain and sun, stretch their roots out laterally, like veins in a hand, seeking nourishment from decomposing plant and animal matter on the forest floor all around. If the forest is burned or felled, the hammering of torrential rains has disastrous consequences for the now exposed thin layer of soil, which is swiftly eroded and vanishes into the rivers and out to sea. Melaka, once a great port of call for ships from all over Asia, is today some distance from the navigable coastline of Malaysia because of centuries of siltation.
The destruction of the tropical rainforest is a reality in every Southeast Asian nation. Some denudation happened through "slash-and-burn" agriculture, some from government-authorized cutting. The rest has been from illegal logging and forest fires--often set by loggers--which have on occasion cast a pall of smoky haze over much of the region. Indonesia, Vietnam, and other nations may be effectively stripped bald of timber in another decade, as much of Thailand and the Philippines already has been. (In the Philippines, 60 percent of the land was forested in 1960, but by 2000 only 10 percent was still covered by timber.) Crop loss and other physical damage far exceed the market value of this cut timber; because of indiscriminate cutting, the floods in Cambodia in 2000 were the worst in seven decades. The depletion of the fishing stock of the region is a similar sorry tale, equally serious because so many Southeast Asians get most of their protein from fish.
While the languages and architecture change from place to place, both "wet rice" farming and slash-and-burn (or swidden) agriculture exist, and have long existed, from Myanmar to Nusatenggara (the Lesser Sundas). Rice is for most Southeast Asians the staff of life, though in a few districts people live on corn or root crops like taro or cassava. In upland clearings, on the one hand, the existing vegetation is first slashed, then burned, and a passable harvest of rice and other crops can be produced with minimal labor. Wet rice cultivation, on the other hand, is more labor-intensive. It is virtually a type of hydroponics; the soil of the "paddies" in which it is grown--essentially mud basins to hold water, seed, and nutrients--rarely supplies much nourishment, which instead must come from systems of irrigation, simple or intricate, and fertilizers, natural or chemical. Some early Southeast Asian techniques for cultivating rice were so advanced that they were exported to China. Under the demographic and technological circumstances that have characterized most of human history, wet rice yields the highest caloric output per area of land of any grain.
The seasonal growing cycle of wet rice shapes the calendar throughout rural Southeast Asia. Knowing when the rain will start and end or when the river levels drop is vital for farmers, who have always been at the mercy of nature. If it rains too much or too little, if the rains arrive or depart too early or too late, a crop can be ruined, bankrupting the farmer. The growing cycle carries constant risk, especially in dry areas like east Java, Madura, and Upper Myanmar.
Virtually all of Southeast Asia experiences the monsoon, although different localities have their wet and dry seasons at different times in the calendar. The word "monsoon" itself comes from the Arabic mawsin (in Malay, musim), which means season. The existence of these wet and dry monsoons--prevailing strong southwest or northeast airflows--creates the seasons. During the summer months in the northern hemisphere, the great Asian continental landmass heats up far more than the surrounding oceans. In the winter months that landmass cools more than the sea. This heating and cooling, along with the rotation of the earth, determines prevailing wind flows that, in turn, determine whether the wind carries moisture from the sea onto the land or dry air from the land out across the sea. For any given locale a variety of factors help shape the onset of the rainy season, the timing of which is thus relatively predictable--but never guaranteed. These annual rains, which can reach above 200 inches a year, fall with ferocity. Although there is real winter in the upper Red River Valley of northern Vietnam and a temperate climate in the mountains of Myanmar and Luzon, for most Southeast Asians hot, rainy, tropical weather is the everyday reality.
The prevailing wind flows caused by the monsoons have also had a major impact on transportation, especially in the age of sail. The great maritime city of Melaka (Malacca), for example, was an essential port of call where ships could not only refit and resupply, but also wait for the prevailing winds to shift. Only then could a junk, prau, or carrack that had sailed through the Strait of Melaka or the Sunda Strait proceed onward or homeward on the next leg of its journey. It was not until the introduction of steam power in the mid-nineteenth century that most warships and cargo vessels could travel readily against these prevailing winds.
In many other ways geography and ecology have also shaped Southeast Asian history. On the mainland, the landscape is dominated by several great rivers, which begin near each other high in the Himalayas, carrying water, silt, and people from a mountainous interior down through fertile valleys to broad, swampy deltas, shaping political boundaries and cultural dynamics. The Mekong River, for example, flows from Tibet more than 4,300 kilometers (2,700 miles) through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam before reaching the South China Sea. One of the world's greatest rivers, it supplies food and water to more than 100 million Southeast Asians. Long ago, Cambodia became a major empire because the Khmer people learned how to harness floodtide water during the rainy season and its reverse flow during the dry season from the Tonle Sap (the great lake) back to the lower Mekong. The canals and reservoirs built by the medieval empire of Angkor were technological triumphs. And now, in the twenty-first century, the various competing national plans for the exploitation of the waters of the Mekong may prove to be a cornerstone of new regional development--or the spark for renewed regional conflict. The Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) and Thanlyin (Salween) rivers in Myanmar, the Chaophraya in Thailand, and the Red River in northern Vietnam, though not as majestic as the Mekong, have played similar pivotal roles in their countries' histories.
The mountainous ridges cascading from the Himalayas down the mainland also created distinct environmental niches within which Southeast Asians created distinctive ways of life. The peoples who lived in the valleys and plains and those who dwelled in the mountains have always had complex relationships. The flood plains, ideal sites for wet rice, could support greater population densities, while the hinterland usually could only support a limited number of mobile slash-and-burn cultivators. This geographic reality had dramatic sociocultural and political consequences. The great mainland agrarian kingdoms in Myanmar, Siam, Vietnam, and Cambodia generated surpluses that sustained urban centers, military power, religious institutions, and an artistic and cultural elite. But these kingdoms rarely managed to establish long-term political, economic, religious, or linguistic control over the uplands that surrounded them.
Whenever a monarch attempted to impose his will on frontier tribes, tensions increased, as such efforts threatened the delicate balance of regional power. The hill peoples, often ethnically and linguistically different from those below—today these uplanders are customarily described as "ethnic minorities"--would seek protection from the next adjoining kingdom, manipulating tribute relationships to try to sustain their security. Borders were porous--in the modern sense they did not really exist--and allegiances fluid. Only the Khmer of Cambodia, among the major sedentary wet rice societies, lacked the luxury of mountainous buffer zones, and they suffered the consequences of frequent invasions and losses of territory to the neighboring kingdoms of Vietnam and Siam.
Farther downstream, the vast southern deltas of the Ayeyarwady, Chaophraya, and Mekong split into many branches before reaching the sea through a landscape of mangrove forests and shifting sandbars. They were underpopulated until the mid-nineteenth century. Wet rice can only grow in a flooded paddy, but the grain will not ripen unless the paddy can be drained. Without modern technology--especially the steam pump--to control drainage, the fertile soil of the deltas could not be cultivated effectively; the Mekong Delta, like that of the Mississippi River, was a swampy bayou. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, the "rice bowls" of Indochina, Burma, and Siam began to feed growing populations while producing enormous surpluses exported across an interconnected world. Today they support population densities unimaginable before the modern era.
Mountain ridges not only defined mainland geography but also rippled across the ocean to form maritime Southeast Asia: the Malay Peninsula and the archipelagoes of the Philippines and Indonesia. There are approximately 7,100 islands in the Philippines and 17,500 in Indonesia. Most of them are uninhabited, since people only live where they can grow enough food. Java, extraordinarily fertile because of the nutrients spewed forth by volcanic eruptions, is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, while the far larger island of Borneo has a relatively modest population, because most of it is marginally fertile. With nearly 25,000 islands Southeast Asia has an extraordinary amount of coastline, supporting tens of thousands of fishermen and sailors. Insular fragmentation encouraged linguistic variations, and geographic isolation helped those far from political centers to minimize the domination of Java or Luzon. Even though the specific geographical causes were distinct, the historical reality, in both maritime and mainland Southeast Asia, was a dynamic tension between "center" and "periphery." Great states might form where the natural environment allowed for high population density, but though they could occasionally assemble the force necessary to conquer their smaller hill and island neighbors, they could rarely sustain effective control over them.
Nature has often been violent in Southeast Asia. Typhoons and cyclones are common, especially in the Philippines and Vietnam, and the island chains are part of the "Pacific Rim of Fire," sitting atop seismic weak spots where major tectonic plates grind against each other. The eruption of the Indonesian island of Krakatau (Krakatoa) on 26 August 1883 was the worst volcanic disaster in recorded history. Thirty-six thousand people were killed, many by huge tidal waves, the effects of which crossed the entire Indian Ocean in just twelve hours. The sound of the explosion--seven times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima--was heard nearly 3,000 miles (5,000 km) away, and the ashes circled the globe, blotting out the sun for two days in nearby Java and Sumatra, and reddening sunsets throughout the world for three years. More recently, on 9 June 1991, the Philippines' Mount Pinatubo, dormant for six hundred years, erupted with a violence that left 200,000 acres (800 sq km) covered with 9 billion tons of fine white ash and thick volcanic sludge; it killed an untold number of people, left 1.2 million homeless, and rendered much of the nearby provinces--including a major U.S. military installation, Clark Air Base--useless for agriculture. Earthquakes are also frequent in both Indonesia and the Philippines. In 1990, for example, northern Luzon was devastated by an earthquake that measured 7.7 on the Richter scale; the city of Baguio was cut off from the rest of the country for days, as bridges and roads disappeared in the devastation.
Geography also helped to determine political loyalty. Today's concept of clearly defined national boundaries, within which everyone is obliged to pay allegiance to the nation-state, did not begin to exist in most of Southeast Asia until the nineteenth century. While many wars around the world have been fought to assert or defend clearly demarcated frontiers, the Vietnamese-Lao wars of the seventeenth century were resolved wisely when the Le rulers in Vietnam and the Lao monarch agreed that every inhabitant in the upper Mekong valley who lived in a house built on stilts owed allegiance to Laos, while those whose homes had earth floors owed allegiance to Vietnam. In effect, allegiance was determined not by cartography but by cultural preference, an indigenous concept that has not survived into the twenty-first century. One angle from which to approach modern Southeast Asian history, in fact, is to see it as a long struggle by one elite or another to impose hegemony on all inhabitants--whatever their ethnicity, religion, or language--living within defined contemporary boundaries, even if those boundaries were originally imposed by European mapmakers.
Technological and scientific power developed in the West was applied to taming nature in Southeast Asia. Western colonialists, uncomfortable and fearful in the tropics but unwilling to abandon potential profits, sanitized, literally and figuratively, the natural environment. In the Klang area of Selangor, Malaya, British science eradicated the malarial Anopheles mosquito primarily to enhance the productivity of the estate workers on the rubber plantations but glorified this action on humanitarian grounds, thus claiming a medical justification for colonial conquest. Rudyard Kipling, the English poet of imperialism, urged Americans to take up "the White Man's burden," because Westerners knew how to "fill full the mouth of Famine and bid the sickness cease."
Whatever the motives of colonialists, the modern science and engineering technology they introduced to Southeast Asia effectively modified the environment, permitted the introduction of new crops, fueled a population explosion, and helped to transform where power was centered and on what basis it was legitimized. New cities rapidly grew to staff an economic and geopolitical revolution. The doctor or sanitary engineer, whether foreign or native, was an agent of change. Plant species were destroyed; subsistence crops were replaced to satisfy an export market. As we shall see, there were visible winners and forgotten losers as traditional values, cultures, societies, and states were swept into the maelstrom of modernization.
At the millennium Southeast Asia was the home of some 540 million people.
Millions of them were descended from families that had been living in the same immediate area for centuries (or even millennia), while the ancestors of millions more had migrated into the region, moved across it, or relocated into its cities in the last 250 years. Ethnically, there are people from many "races" and cultures, speaking an extraordinary array of different languages, some indigenous to the region, others brought in by immigrants.
Southeast Asia was until recently relatively sparsely populated, especially in contrast to its two giant neighbors, India and China. Historian Anthony Reid has noted that the population of Southeast Asia today is equal to approximately 40 percent of China's, but in 1800, when some 33 million people lived in the region, they represented only about 12 percent of China's population. Southeast Asia evidently experienced a much more dramatic demographic upheaval--falling mortality, rising fertility, and increasing immigration--than either China or India over the same time period. Such growth reshaped every Southeast Asian society, redistributed the people on the land, and challenged the cultural verities of an earlier time.
In the premodern era, the relative scarcity of labor gave individuals and their local communities greater bargaining power with their indigenous or imperial rulers. The scarcity made it possible to avoid onerous taxation or despotic control. There was still vacant land, which permitted minority groups or families in economic distress to seek a new beginning by moving a few miles away--a frontier that gradually disappeared during the modern era. As it did so, some governments, particularly in Indonesia and the Philippines, began to sponsor the migration of landless peasants to more distant and less populous islands, although this was rarely more than a stopgap solution to problems of overcrowding and rural discontent, and it often created new conflicts when the settlers clashed with the local inhabitants of the "transmigration" sites.
Central to modern nationalism is the assumption that economic development and social justice will improve the standard of living for every citizen, yet in the second half of the twentieth century, the population explosion seemingly inhibited economic progress, a conundrum plaguing most of the nations of the region. The population of Vietnam had been under 5 million two centuries ago; by the 1870s it had reached about 7 million, rising to 20 million just before World War II, over 50 million by 1979, and nearly 80 million twenty years later. Moreover, this growth was unevenly distributed; in 1995 the Red River delta in northern Vietnam had a population density of over 1,100 people per square kilometer, but the midlands and hill country nearby had a density less than 125.
Uneven growth among different ethnic, linguistic, or religious groups could even threaten to shift the balance of political power. Before the late nineteenth century the ethnic minority populations in the kingdom of Vietnam grew less rapidly than did the population of the ethnic Viet, but a hundred years later it was decidedly the reverse. In late-twentieth-century Singapore, the relatively low fertility of ethnic Chinese, compared with Malays and Indians, became a matter of concern for the government, which feared a shift in the social and political composition of the republic.
Population growth occurred because more babies survived and life expectancy increased. There was also a massive immigration of South Asians and Chinese, who came to Southeast Asia on a scale similar to the great migrations of Europeans to the United States or of Russians moving eastward across the land frontier of nineteenth-century Siberia. The dynamic force of these demographic changes cannot be overstated. Some families (and the groups they represented) triumphed, while others lost status, wealth, or land. Traditional values were buffeted and priorities upended. A few grew richer and many grew poorer. Tens of millions moved to the cities, while many millions more were forced to seek new ways of making a living, having lost control or ownership of land. Kinship patterns were challenged and family solidarity weakened as people made choices, both large and small, about what was essential to their lives and what could be jettisoned.
Consider the city-state of Singapore, at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. When Thomas Raffles founded this outpost as a British colony in 1819, it was a flat, swampy, malarial island with potential military value but little else. Now it has a population of 4.3 million people; three-quarters of them are ethnic Chinese, with Indians making up an additional 6.5 percent of the population. It is one of the richest, most sophisticated, postindustrial cities in the world, a global leader in shipping and electronics. Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and English are all official languages, and among the major religious groups are Buddhists, Daoists, Muslims, Christians, and Hindus. Today, less than two centuries after its founding, Singapore's gross domestic product is in excess of $100 billion annually, and life expectancy in this shiny metropolis equals that of Western Europe and exceeds that in the United States. What an extraordinary story exists behind those facts!
And yet there remain hundreds of millions of peasants still living in hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian villages. There are still dusty dirt roads and serene Thai temples that present a sharp contrast with the din and traffic congestion of modern Bangkok. But just as that isolated peasant farmer in his or her "timeless" routine may watch television programs off a satellite dish at night, so the Bangkok stockbroker may change from suit and tie at night to meditate in Buddhist tranquility in his home.
In sum, we believe that Southeast Asia can be understood by holding in focus its current realities while going back to explore conditions in the preceding two centuries (and more). We need to probe the past, noting what has been forgotten, what remains unaltered, and what has been transformed, striving to understand the discontinuities and new events, to understand how the different peoples of the region--now increasingly called "Southeast Asians"--have managed to sustain their unique values, traditions, customs, and priorities while adapting to new realities, ideas, institutions, and lifestyles.
© 2004 University of Hawai‘i Press · Modified: 26 May 2004