Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian History

Norman Owen, Norman G. Owen, Norman Owen, Norman G. Owen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415587259
• eBook ISBN: 9781317643784
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: History

The study of the history of Southeast Asia is still growing, evolving, deepening and changing as an academic field. Over the past few decades historians have added nuance to traditional topics such as Islam and nationalism, and created new ones, such as gender, globalization and the politics of memory. The Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian History looks at the major themes that have developed in the study of modern Southeast Asian history since the mid-18th century.

Contributions by experts in the field are clustered under three major headings - Political History, Economic History, and Social and Cultural History – and chapters challenge the boundaries between topics and regions. Alongside the rise and fall of colonialism, topics include conflict in Southeast Asia, tropical ecology, capitalism and its discontents, the major religions of the region, gender, and ethnicity.

The Handbook provides a stimulating introduction to the most important themes within the subject area, and is an invaluable reference work for any student and researcher on Southeast Asia and Asian and World history.

1 Introduction

In search of Southeast Asian history

Norman G. Owen

DOI: 10.4324/9780203763117-1

Southeast Asia comprises the modern states of Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand (Siam), Timor-Leste (East Timor), and Vietnam, distilled from a myriad of earlier, mostly smaller, polities. It is home to more than 600 million people and hundreds of different ethnicities and languages: an anthropologist’s paradise or nightmare. It contains the state with the largest number of Muslims in the world (Indonesia) and another with the largest number of Theravada Buddhists (Thailand), as well as the largest Christian country in Asia (the Philippines). Whatever we say about the region is likely to be true somewhere and yet also false, or at least misleading, somewhere else.

The region has been populated by Homo sapiens for many tens of thousands of years – much longer (over a million years) for expanded versions of “humans.” But if we define “history” as that past recoverable, at least in part, by written texts, most of Southeast Asian history only goes back about 2,000 years, and modern history, the subject of this handbook, is only 2–3 centuries old.

In the late 1960s, a group of then-young historians based in North America came together to write a pioneering collective history of the modern era entitled In Search of Southeast Asia (Steinberg et al. 1971). It became a standard textbook in the field for the next generation, not only because of the scholarship of the individual authors, but also because of the effort they put into tying the region’s history together thematically. The title itself was both provocative and memorable, if not always successful; one senior scholar quipped that although the authors had searched for Southeast Asia, they had failed to find it. Yet that was exactly what resonated with readers – the belief that “Southeast Asia” existed, but was hard to locate intellectually. What made it more than the part of the globe “south of China and east of India”? A common mantra of those years was the Indonesian motto “Unity in Diversity,” implying that visible differences among societies and cultures not only did not negate their underlying coherence, but in some sense actually contributed to it. It was an assertion of faith as much as an empirical proposition.

To some extent this reflected the insecurities of an academic field that was still relatively new and professionally marginalized in comparison with the far more ancient histories of its neighbors. The men who wrote In Search of Southeast Asia had not themselves been trained in “Southeast Asian studies,” because no such field was recognized when they were formally educated; they were still trying to establish and justify it when they wrote. Due to the Vietnam War, there had been a minor boom in Southeast Asian studies in the few years before this venture, but this, they knew, was a precarious base on which to build a scholarly superstructure.

They were also still trying to define the region geographically, justifying the inclusion in Southeast Asia of Vietnam itself (rather than in “East Asia,” where it resided at Harvard) and also the Philippines, despite the paucity of “Indianization” there, which had led to its omission by earlier scholars such as D.G.E. Hall (1955) and George Coedès (1964). Political considerations, too, had to be finessed – thus the western half of New Guinea (West Papua/Irian Jaya) was included because it was part of Indonesia (as a Dutch acquisition in the era of high colonialism), whereas the eastern half, controlled by the British and Germans, was not. Hainan and Sri Lanka, with their strong ecological similarities to much of Southeast Asia, were excluded by political boundaries, as were those inhabitants of the highlands that Scott (2009) calls “Zomia” who happened to live beyond the borders of Vietnam, Laos, and Burma. Yet these quibbles were ultimately no more significant than questions as to whether Turkey and Greenland belong to “Europe.”

The past four decades have seen numerous changes, not just in the region itself, but in how we deal with its past. With the end of the Vietnam War, interest in Southeast Asian history fell steeply, at least in the US, but it never disappeared entirely. Funding continued under various “national defense” pretexts in the US, and those scholars who survived the winnowing out of the field managed to create and sustain centers of study that have now lasted into second and third generations. The whole concept of “Southeast Asia” became institutionalized, written into the structures of universities and broader organizations such as the Association for Asian Studies. It also was increasingly internationalized, as the idea of looking at “Southeast Asia” as a whole – rather than simply at certain parts of it to which there was some traditional link – also crystallized in Europe, Australia, and Asia itself.

Almost simultaneously, actual Southeast Asia (as distinguished from the virtual “Southeast Asia” of the mind) was beginning to come together in new ways. ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), founded in 1967 from the wreckage that had once been Maphilindo and the Association of Southeast Asia, bypassed the increasingly irrelevant Cold War relic SEATO (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) and started to evolve into a meaningful regional organization. At first seemingly little more than an excuse for the occasional get-together – in which golf tended to feature prominently – among selected leaders of anticommunist states, it gradually turned, over the years, into a forum for policymakers from the entire region, capable of considering questions of great political and economic subtlety. It now includes all of Southeast Asia except, for the moment, Timor-Leste.

At about the same time, the economic miracle of modern Southeast Asia was beginning, first in Singapore, which became one of the “Little Dragons” of Asia, and then in Thailand, Malaysia, and most of the rest, even former communist states such as Vietnam. Although still in the shadow of China, and with many problems to resolve, the region as a whole has flourished, and has come to be seen not just as a victim of imperialism and “dependency” but as an independent force on the global scene. (Any thought that this process was the automatic consequence of political independence and economic globalization should be banished by consideration of Africa.) The resultant prosperity and expansion of the previously negligible middle class had as one of its incidental results an increase in the funds available for universities, conferences, libraries, and archives, as well as travel within the region. More Southeast Asians than ever before have had the opportunity to learn about countries other than their own.

What did all of this mean for “Southeast Asia”? The concept itself was frequently critiqued, especially from post-colonial perspectives. We were reminded that the term and the study of the region as a “region” were inextricably implicated in Cold War intellectual and political structures. It was suggested that “Southeast Asia” was more real in the West than in Southeast Asia itself; more meaningful in the US than in Indonesia; more alive at Cornell University than anywhere. All of this was, in a sense, true, yet it did not seriously undermine “Southeast Asia,” which was sustained both by institutional continuity in the West and by prosperity and steps toward integration within the region itself.

Even today most Southeast Asians – at least outside of Singapore – are not particularly conscious of themselves as “Southeast Asians.” Yet neither do most people in the US think of themselves as citizens of “the Americas,” as emblematized by the Organization of American States. While scarcely comparable to the European Union of today, ASEAN bears certain resemblances to the “Europe” of a few decades ago, and it has helped bring the idea of “Southeast Asia” alive within Southeast Asia itself. It remains true that most scholarship within the region still tends to be country-specific rather than comparative or regional, but this is in part attributable to major differences in language, culture, and access to sources, rather than simple parochialism.

So “Southeast Asia” appears to be here to stay, unless it somehow, someday, is enfolded into a larger “Asian” identity as yet unrealized. And to that extent it is no longer necessary to search for it or seek to validate its very existence. Nor, at the same time, do we need to critique it into oblivion, pointing out ways in which it is an imperfect framework for understanding or analysis. It is not natural, it is not perfectly self-contained, it is not “real”: but then neither is Asia, or Malaysia, or Metro Manila, or Modjokuto, or Bang Chan. Nothing less than the totality of humankind is all-encompassing; yet we persist in trying to understand our world through arbitrary groupings, flawed as they are. Their validity lies in what they help us to understand, not in their precise conformity to a putative reality.

Because “Southeast Asia” has been, for many decades now, one of the major groupings that people have deployed in trying to understand the world, it has attracted a lot of attention. Scores of scholars have turned their minds to its history, trained in its study, rubbed up against each other in conferences and seminars, and produced both new information and new ways of looking at old evidence. This introductory chapter suggests some of the ways in which the study of Southeast Asian history has evolved over the past 40 years or so; the chapters that follow will elaborate on this.

A glance at the contents will indicate that conventional approaches to regional history have by no means disappeared. Political history remains central, with the transition for most Southeast Asian societies from independence to colonial rule and then back to independence again setting the basic framework for modern history. We know now far more than we did half a century ago, when the “modern” era was still defined in some quarters as beginning in 1824, the date when the British and the Dutch signed a treaty in London establishing spheres of influence in maritime Southeast Asia that persist, mutatis mutandis, up to the present. We know now that “traditional” states, far from being timeless and unchanging before the “impact of the West,” were evolving their own versions of “modernity” well before they were set upon by the likes of Sir Stamford Raffles, and thus we tend to date the modern era from the mid-eighteenth century, or even earlier. We also have a few more decades of postindependence history to study, so are much better positioned to see beyond the immediate legacies of colonialism, anti-colonialism, and the Cold War.

The economic history of Southeast Asia has been influenced by various theories over the past half-century, including the vagaries of development economics and the opening up of ecological history, but major gains in the field have primarily arisen from painstaking empirical work in the archives and chronicles. We now know not just the simple fact that rice, sugar, and tobacco were exported from the region, but in many cases who actually grew these crops, who transported them, and who marketed them to the wider world. We understand far more than we once did about where and how governments (both indigenous and foreign) raised revenues and where and how entrepreneurs (both foreign and indigenous) created new industries. And we are beginning to get a greater sense for how economic changes in Southeast Asia affected both human society and the physical environment.

Social and cultural history have probably been the areas of greatest expansion over the past half-century, here as elsewhere. Again, we can see this as resulting from both new theoretical models and exhaustive empirical research, much of the latter based on sources in indigenous, rather than colonial, languages of the region. The richness of the results of this research and analysis can barely be hinted at in this handbook.

When we look back at the history of “Southeast Asian history” over the past 40–50 years, we can discern, however, two major trends (plus a third, truncated rival) that distinguish it from much of the pioneering scholarship of earlier generations – toward which, however, we remain eternally grateful. These are the effort to write total history and the insistence on trying to write autonomous history, with Marxist and Marxian approaches failing, in the longer run, to keep pace.

Total history

Over the past generation or two there has been a conspicuous broadening of the bounds of what constitutes Southeast Asian history to include topics – like gender, demography, ecology, and popular culture – and groups – like minorities and marginalized underclasses – that had previously been neglected, if not entirely omitted, within the field. (“Women” and “gender,” for example, did not even constitute index categories in Hall [1964 edition] or Steinberg et al. [1985 edition].) No longer was history seen as just about national and international elites, the political and economic making of nations. Instead it was to include any and all aspects of the Southeast Asian past that we could re-create, using whatever evidence and tools lay at our disposal.

This idea owes much to developments in the writing of history elsewhere, particularly France, where the scholars behind Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations had a worldwide impact in the postwar period with the articulation of their concept of histoire totale. Nor was France the only intellectual progenitor of this movement. Many Southeast Asianists came under the spell of the “Subaltern School” of South Asian studies (Ranajit Guha et al.), inspired by Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci, while others were nudged in this direction by work in other fields, from Chinese to Latin American history. I myself found a spark in early modern English history as studied by the Cambridge School of Population and Social Structure.

At the same time, there were characteristics within Southeast Asian studies that made it peculiarly susceptible to this tendency. One was the fact that at many universities outside the region a historian of Southeast Asia would likely find himself or herself the only member of her or his department with any real knowledge of the area. This meant that meaningful conversations about Indonesia or Cambodia could only be held with Southeast Asianists in other departments: anthropologists, linguists, geographers, and the like. Interdisciplinarity was forced upon us, and we became, far more than historians of the US or England or France, conversant (at least superficially) with other disciplines, particularly in the social sciences. We co-taught “area studies” courses with members of other departments; we ran seminars together; we discussed fieldwork and sometimes even led field trips with them. Over time, it is not surprising that a few of their ideas rubbed off on us.

Our reading, too, was often more multidisciplinary than that of historians of the West or the “great civilizations” of Asia, who had a much greater wealth of existing historical scholarship on their subject areas to wade through. We read whatever we could find that expanded our understanding of Southeast Asia; among our gurus were political scientists James C. Scott and Benedict Anderson, a host of anthropologists (headed by Clifford Geertz), and various economists, geographers, sociologists, and experts on Southeast Asian arts.

In addition, Southeast Asia itself, to those of us not native to the region, was so “full of a number of things” – so saturated with variety, not just in its historical records, but in its landscape, its cuisine, its agriculture and handicrafts, its religious practices, its everyday rituals and special-occasion ceremonials – that we were ineluctably drawn into wondering about them even as we plodded ahead with our quotidian research. The draw of “total history” was almost irresistible once we began to stumble our way through the immense swamp of apparent sourcelessness. A pioneering study like Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution: popular movements in the Philippines (1979) inspired generations of historians not just with its conclusions, but with its insight into evidence drawn from material previously thought unpromising, such as the songs and slogans of peasant rebels. And who would have thought the coroner’s court could provide the rich detail that James Warren (1986) dug out in his Rickshaw Coolie: a people’s history of Singapore? Such works made us feel that we were perhaps a little bit closer to comprehending the mystery that lay all around us.

But these speculations as to origins are not the point; it is the fact of “total history” that matters. This handbook can only provide a small sampling of the kinds of topics that historians of the region are now addressing, including wild horses and rubber plantations, Japanese prostitutes in Singapore and Chinese tax farmers in Java, novels in colonial Vietnam and deforestation in post-colonial Myanmar, baseball in the Philippines and spir...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: in search of Southeast Asian history
• Part I Political history
• Part II Economic history
• Part III Social and cultural history
• Glossary
• Index