Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1350-1800

Ooi Keat Gin, Hoang Anh Tuan, Ooi Keat Gin, Hoang Anh Tuan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138476264
• eBook ISBN: 9781317559184
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

This book presents extensive new research findings on and new thinking about Southeast Asia in this interesting, richly diverse, but much understudied period. It examines the wide and well-developed trading networks, explores the different kinds of regimes and the nature of power and security, considers urban growth, international relations and the beginnings of European involvement with the region, and discusses religious factors, in particular the spread and impact of Christianity. One key theme of the book is the consideration of how well-developed Southeast Asia was before the onset of European involvement, and, how, during the peak of the commercial boom in the 1500s and 1600s, many polities in Southeast Asia were not far behind Europe in terms of socio-economic progress and attainments.

Part I

Diplomatic and inter-state relations

“Diplomacy is to do and say the nastiest things in the nicest way.”

Isaac Goldberg (1887–1938), American journalist

1 Status and security in early Southeast Asian state systems

Nicholas Tarling

Introduction

Historians distrust other historians, as well as practitioners of other disciplines, when they divide up time and label their periodization. Do the dates really mark “turning points” or are they arbitrarily imposed upon a continuity? Can an era effectively be labelled as one of “violence” or an age one of “imperialism” without degrading a story that can meaningfully be told only in all its “detailed glory”?¹ As Herbert Butterfield argued, the answer, of course, is one of convenience. It is impossible to compose a book without a theme or analyse a situation without an assumption.

Is international order in modern times rightly described, as by students of IR (International Relations), in terms of “anarchy”? Is to be contrasted to a preceding order based on hierarchy? And if there was such a shift, can it be marked off by dates, even if they are striking or symbolic?

Recognising the convenience of such a contrast, particularly for a work of what Butterfield called “abridgement”, the historian will also wonder if the orders, hierarchy and anarchy, are quite rather different in practice as they seem to be in definition, quite so sharply distinguishable. For they have to do with common problems that continue over many centuries, even though the nature of the states that make up the order may change, their capacities advance, their wealth increase, their population grow.

Both orders have, for one thing, to deal with the fundamental issue of inter-state relationships, the disparity of power and its shifting distribution. The hierarchical system handles that by an explicit recognition of disparity that is also mutual: if the lesser know their place, they may be able to preserve or even enhance it. The characteristic relationship in such a system may be a lord–vassal or patron–client relationship, and/or the rendering and reception of tribute, always with the assumption that there is an element of obligation on the part of the superior as well as the inferior, that submission is counterparted by protection.

The equivalent in anarchy is far less specific, but it is surely there. States are theoretically equal in their sovereignty, but they are grossly unequal in power. The system works only because in practice the powerful moderate the exercise of their power, and the weaker their aspirations to equality. A range of supplementary options may help: the making of alliances, the pursuit of a balance of power, the creation of regional organizations. Tensions come with change, often leading to conflict, even wars, big or small.

Both systems are closely related to matters of allegiance or control. In the ancient system the state did not have the power that the modern state has and seeks. It might be content with a diminished allegiance at least outside its core and with indefinite frontiers. It might control its people loosely, exercising symbolic rather than actual control, its officers exemplifying rather than enforcing appropriate behaviour. It might allow “foreigners” more or less to rule themselves, rather than attempting to assimilate them, or even use them as an instrument of control over others. The modern state looks for more: it seeks definite frontiers, within which citizens or subjects owe it services and taxes, and “minorities” have such rights as an entity ruled by or based on a “majority” sees fit to allow them.

In both systems what we may call “diplomacy” is at work. In our system we are aware of the functions of ambassadors, the use of “summits”, the manipulation of the media, the pursuit of intelligence: we know of the processes, even though we may know little of their content. There has been something of a tendency not to think of the ancient systems in a similar way, but rather to assume that they were a kind of semi-celestial clockwork. Yet surely they also were operated by men with schemes and ambitions, and their systems, symbolic though they might be, were also subject to manipulation. They not only worked: they might be worked. The Balinese king was not simply an icon, as H. Schulte Nordholt points out, but “a charismatic leader of flesh and blood who had to overcome constant threats to his position”.² The idea that spectacle was not for the state but what the state was for would have seemed odd to Elizabeth I and Louis XIV, but odd, too, to the courtiers of Sultan Agung of Mataram, who, as Merle Ricklefs says, “thought that the state was for getting rich and powerful while avoiding enemy plots and treasons”.³

Dealing with similar problems, the systems were in some ways similar, less distinctive than a schematic approach suggests, less cut-and-dried. Nor can the chronological divisions be so sharp as dates or labelling imply. Hierarchy did not prevail throughout the period of hierarchy, nor did it entirely disappear in the period of anarchy. Nor, on the other hand, did “anarchy” emerge full-blown as Minerva from the mind of Jupiter. In Europe itself, it came to prevail only over two centuries and more, and what is often called the Westphalia system was not simply established with the treaty of 1648 that labels it.

Beyond Europe, several further changes occurred before the Westphalia concept was established throughout the world. European powers established trading posts and built colonies and protectorates that both borrowed from and displaced the hierarchy of the past and projected some features of the European system and not others: few scholars have attempted to analyse that peculiar, if not indeed paradoxical structure, the colonial state. Only with the decolonization that followed the end of the Second World War (1939–45) could it be said that “anarchy” extended across the world and the colonial phase itself be seen as one of transition, with Europeans operating two different systems. The states that emerged were so disparate in power, however, that their mutual accommodation at times prompted observers and prophets to recall the days, if not of empire, then indeed of hierarchy. But perhaps the “ASEAN way” is something different again.

Tackling these issues with a regional approach, and including Southeast Asia as a region, are welcome strategies, and, it may be shown, profitable ones. In the past, neither public nor scholarly debate was ready to identify it as a region, and even in recent works of generalization or popularization it tends to be by-passed. When it was distinguished in the past, it was often labelled in a misleading way: it was “Further India”, the Nanyang, the Nan-yo. Public events – the Second World War in particular – led to the wider adoption of a more neutral geographical labelling, and it was filled out by both political and academic activities. Histories of “Southeast Asia” appeared in the 1950s – magisterially led by D.G.E. Hall’s – and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) – its leaders, conscious of the past as well as the present – was inaugurated in 1967. It was a diverse region, but that was not a reason for not seeing it as a region either for action or for study. Rather the reverse.

Students of the region, as well as statesmen, both sought commonalities, however, and it may be that it still retains, albeit in modified form, practices inherited from a past that temporally is after all not so distant, even if in the interim the region has been the scene of unprecedented change. One feature of the last 150–200 years is its shift from demographic immaturity: perhaps there were only 30 million people in Southeast Asia in 1830. Certainly in the more remote past what counted among the state-builders of Southeast Asia had been men rather than land, and the attitudes that established arguably help to account for the contemporary strength of patron–client relationships.

Whether the Southeast Asian past is peculiar in this may be doubted. What may be special about the Southeast Asian region – though still helpful in comparative studies – is its cultural diversity. It was penetrated by a range of peoples, but also subject to the influence of two great neighbours, India and China. What the process of that influence was has been disputed among historians. The generally accepted conclusion is that state-builders in the region borrowed from these cultures, in particular from India. At times, if not more generally, China, however, asserted its primal claim: exceptionally, in the Vietnamese case, in the form of political dominance, more usually in the form of a pattern of tributary relationships.

It is the product of this mix, neither hierarchy nor anarchy, with which Europeans came into contact from the early sixteenth century. To understand their approach and their impact requires a fuller analysis of it and of the states of which it was made up.

Herman Kulke suggests that there were three phases or levels in state formation in Southeast Asia: the local, the regional, and the “imperial”. “Very generally speaking, the first step always had to be the successful establishment and consolidation of a solid local power within a limited territory.” This he characterizes as “chieftaincy”. Next might come the conquest of one or more neighbouring nuclear areas, incorporated not by annihilation nor by administrative unification, but by the establishment of more or less regular tributary patterns. These were the somewhat precarious “early kingdoms”. From the early ninth century a small number of what Kulke calls “imperial” kingdoms emerged, beginning with Angkor, which unified two or even several core areas of former early kingdoms.⁴

That word “mandala” was deployed by Stanley Tambiah and in particular by Oliver Wolters, drawing from the Indian political literature and practice that influenced Southeast Asia. The former analysed Kautilya’s Arthashastra, the only complete work of the brahmanic politico-economic literature to be preserved, made notorious for its alleged Machiavellianism by Max Weber.⁵ It deals inter alia with the maintenance of “state sovereignty” and the conduct of diplomacy, making alliances, making war, according to the mandala strategy, in which successive “circles of kings” formed enemies and allies in actuality or in potentia.

Tambiah also analysed the Buddhist texts. In them dharma, righteousness, is an absolute imperative. Its symbol in political life was the wheel, cakka, not the sceptre, danda. In his past lives the Buddha admitted that, as a wheel-turning raja, he used violence. “The Cakkavarti [sic] is depicted as a cosmocrator whose conquest proceeded through the continents at each of the four cardinal points, and whose rule radiated out from a central position either identified or closely associated with the central cosmic mountain of the Indian traditions, Mount Meru.” The cakkavatti grants their domains back to the conquered kings when they submit to the basic moral precepts of Buddhism: “in a sense the king must let the conquered rulers keep their thrones, since only as a king of kings is he a world monarch.” The Emperor Asoka embraced the model, and he was in turn the model for many Southeast Asian Buddhist monarchs.⁶

Before he turns to them Tambiah describes the empire of their exemplar. Asoka’s Mauryan state “was not so much a bureaucratized centralized imperial monarchy as a kind of galaxy-type structure with lesser political replicas revolving around the central entity and in perpetual motion of fission or incorporation. Indeed, it is clear that this is what the much-cited cakkavatti model represented: that a king as a wheel-rolling world ruler by definition required lesser kings under him who in turn encompassed still lesser rulers, that the raja of rajas was more a presiding apical ordinator than a totalitarian authority between whom and the people nothing intervened except his own agencies and agents of control.” The model was “a closer representation of actual facts than has usually been imagined by virtue of misreading the rhetoric”.⁷

It was the concept of mandala, Tambiah tells us that led him to invent the label “galactic polities”. In a common Indo-Tibetan tradition, man...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgement
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Introduction
• Part I: Diplomatic and inter-state relations
• Part II: Interactions and transactions
• Part III: Kingship and state systems
• Part IV: Indigenizing Christianity
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index