1 Definitions
To start with definitions may seem trite, but it is necessary. The necessity may be less pressing with one term in the title of this book than with the other. ‘Southeast Asia’ has come to be accepted at least as a satisfactory geographical term for a region that encompasses the territory of the contemporary mainland states, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, and the archipelago states of Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia and East Timor. Few would agree, however, that it covered the Andaman and Nicobar islands, though geography would suggest it, while most would accept that it covered the Indonesian territory of West Irian, though geography would be more equivocal.
In other discourses, too, Southeast Asia has been, and remains, a contested term. Well before ‘deconstruction’ became fashionable, philosophers warned about ‘reification’. ‘Words like ‘‘Southeast Asia’’ and ‘‘unicorn’’ enable us to discuss topics about which we would not otherwise be able to hold a conversation’, J. R. E. Waddell wrote in 1972, ‘but we should be wary of attributing any more solidity to these concepts than the facts will allow.’1 In an article published in 1984, Donald K. Emmerson quoted this alongside Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ ‘Some names’, wrote Emmerson, ‘like ‘‘rose’’, acknowledge what exists. Others, like ‘‘unicorn’’, create what otherwise would not exist. In between lie names that simultaneously describe and invent reality. ‘‘Southeast Asia’’ is one of these.’2
Seeing the region as a region has always been more the habit among outsiders than among those who dwell there. For the Chinese it was nanyang, for the Japanese nanyo, the southern seas. If they saw it as a region, the Europeans struggled to find a word for it. ‘Further India’ was one attempt, but they were conscious of its diversity. Establishing territorial control in parts of it made them still less disposed to see the region as a whole, and naming it not even desirable. The sense of Southeast Asia as a region – whatever name might be given to it – was more frequent among Germans and Austrians, who did not possess colonies in the region, than among other Europeans who did.
In the 1930s the usage became somewhat more common, but it was the Second World War that gave it currency, and literally put it on the map. Conflicting among themselves, the outside powers named the region where they conflicted. ‘‘‘Southeast Asia’’ turned out to be an aggregate of nations – individually distinct and collectively a battleground in, first, the Pacific War, then the Cold War, including two Indochina wars, and finally, in Cambodia, a Sino-Soviet ‘‘proxy war’’.’ Creating ‘a need to talk about the region’, Emmerson suggests, international conflicts ironically ‘underwrote the popularity of the name in the very act of undermining its empirical prospects’.3 It may also, however, be argued that the outsiders exaggerated the sense of region, and, in so doing, even led themselves and their policies astray. The countries had not been made less diverse by their colonial experience.
Indeed Emmerson himself had a political objective. He pointed to the neutrality of the term. ‘Unlike the ‘‘Near’’ and ‘‘Far East’’, the name does not betray the location of an outside namer. Because it is not a reminder of dependence, the term is easier for the region’s inhabitants to use’: it did not have the imperialist overtones of ‘Orientalism’.4 He wanted them to use it, and so make it more of a reality. In general, however, scholars from Southeast Asia have not taken up the challenge. Their focus has been ‘national’ rather than regional.
Scholars outside the region, however, have begun to give its history as a region more meaning. At first it was a matter, it seemed, of making virtue out of necessity. The present author’s Southeast Asia Past and Present, published in 1966, suggested that the region had ‘a unity in its very diversity’.5 Later scholarship has made the regional approach more positive. In his masterly Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce Anthony Reid suggested ‘that treating Southeast Asia as a whole makes it possible to describe a number of areas of life which would otherwise remain in the shadows’. For each cultural area sources for his period, the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are fragmentary; but studying them together offers ‘a coherent picture . . . of the life-styles of the region as a whole’.6 The process put ‘Southeast Asians’ on the stage, though none of the actors would have recognised themselves as such.
Other historians outside Southeast Asia have, however, begun to wonder whether they are not over-emphasising the commonalities in the experience of its peoples, and at the same time cutting that experience off from the experience of peoples in other regions of the world. Vic Lieberman had been particularly concerned that the history of mainland Southeast Asia has been skewed as a result, and deprived of the benefits of a comparative approach. There were advantages, he argued, in putting the history of mainland Southeast Asian states in the context of other states in the ‘early modern’ period. Nor should those states be confined to Asia: the comparisons and contrasts should be on a ‘Eurasian’ basis.7
Lieberman did not seek to dislodge the regional thrust in the historiography of Southeast Asia. Indeed he argued that it could go further. He suggested, for example, ‘that the closest archipelagic analogies to Burmese, Thai and Vietnamese integration can be found in the early history of the Spanish and Dutch colonial systems’. Comparing them, he added, might oblige us ‘to lay aside our recent distaste for colonial, as opposed to indigenous, history’.8 At the same time, he wished to bring Southeast Asia into the mainstream of historiography. Regionalism must not ghettoise its history, nor obscure the variety of experiences it contained.
It is this concept of Southeast Asia that the present book adopts. Its regional distinctiveness should not obscure its diversity. Nor should it prevent a comparative approach: the region may be compared with other regions, and any part of it with any other part of the globe. Indeed it would be difficult to adopt a different approach in a study of imperialism in Southeast Asia. In itself it offered commonalities and diversities of experience to a region already marked by both. What it offered other regions, or other parts of the world, is also relevant, for imperialism was both differentiated and global in its compass.
If, however, it is necessary to consider one term in the title of this book, it is even more necessary to consider the other. ‘Southeast Asia’ is a contested term, but retains a meaningful utility. Some may doubt that in respect of ‘imperialism’, for the definitions of it that have or may be offered are so various. When considering its role in Southeast Asia, it may be necessary to give preference to one definition, while holding alternatives in mind. The study of a particular region may help to bring about a consensus on the most useful general definition, even if it is unlikely to displace others.
One difficulty is that ‘imperialism’, though used by historians, is not used by them alone. ‘Imperialism is no word for scholars’, Sir Keith Hancock wrote. ‘The emotional echoes which it arouses are too violent and too contradictory.’ The Marxist view he thought useful, in that it focused on governments and on forces which move governments. It offered ‘a useful sign-post for the working historian’, but it was not ‘precise’ as to time-phase. ‘Let others labour to split the ism. It is no task for the historian.’9 Hancock’s criticism is of ‘imperialism’ both as an instrument or framework of historical study and as a subject of study. Clearly, however, it can be the latter. It may also, it seems, have uses in respect of the former meaning. The present author’s aim is to pin it down as a subject and draw out its uses as a means of study. If that is useful to the historian, it may also be useful to others who use the term or, indeed, reject it.
Essentially the terms ‘Southeast Asia’ and ‘imperialism’ both emerged from public affairs rather than scholarly investigation. They did not, of course, emerge simultaneously. ‘Southeast Asia’ came into common use only when the European ‘empires’ there were being broken up. ‘Imperialism’ was a much older coinage. It had indeed passed through several phases in which its meaning had shifted, and it continued to do so.
Initially, it seems, the word did not apply to the non-European world in the way it characteristically came to apply. Instead it was used to describe the ambitions of the Emperor Napoleon III, which, though they came to involve Indo-China and Mexico, focused more on Europe, where Napoleon I had built his empire. That empire was designed to recall the greatest empire Europe had known, the one that gave it its name, the empire of the Romans, and it dislodged the long-standing claimant, the Holy Roman Empire. Though both Rome and its medieval successors had built an empire on the far shores of the Mediterranean, they did not range beyond the Mediterranean and ‘Asia Minor’. Only after Napoleon III’s realm had been destroyed by what became the German empire was the term ‘imperialism’ invoked to describe the extension of territorial control in Asia and Africa in which the European states engaged themselves. ‘It is only in quite late times within my own memory’, Edward Freeman wrote in 1885, ‘that the word ‘‘empire’’ has come into common use as a set term for something beyond the kingdom.’10 Proudly endorsed by some, ‘imperialism’ was increasingly defined by its critics.
‘The notion of a number of competing empires is essentially modern’, wrote J. A. Hobson in his famous Imperialism: A Study.11 The work first appeared at the conclusion of the Anglo-Boer war, and it had a political purpose, ‘to alert the British public to the new plutocratic phenomenon that was hijacking British foreign policy’.12 Indeed Hobson tended to adopt a conspiratorial view. ‘Aggressive Imperialism, which costs the taxpayer so dear, which is of so little value to the manufacturer and trader, which is fraught with such grave incalculable peril to the citizen, is a source of great gain to the investor who cannot find at home the profitable use he seeks for his capital, and insists that his Government should help him to profitable and secure investments abroad.’ Big moneylenders and speculators were ‘the prime determinants of imperial policy. They have the largest definite stake in the business of Imperialism, and the amplest means of forcing their will upon the policy of nations.’ Finance was not the ‘motor-power’ of imperialism, but it was ‘the governor of the imperial engine. . . Finance manipulates the patriotic forces which politicians, soldiers, philanthropists, and traders generate.’13
In some sense, however, Hobson belonged to the Radical tradition associated with Richard Cobden earlier in the century. Cobden’s was a benign capitalism, and his conspirators were conquerors and military men who dazzled a mistaken public. ‘No conqueror ever returned to our shores after enlarging our territorial sovereignty without a triumph.’14 Hobson’s were financiers and speculators, but he was not attacking capitalism as such. It should be reformed, not overthrown. What was wrong was ‘under-consumption’. ‘If the consuming public in this counry raised its standard of consumption to keep pace with every rise of productive powers, there could be no excess of goods or capital clamorous to use Imperialism in order to find markets.’ ‘The economic root of Imperialism is the desire of strong organized industrial and financial interests to secure and develop at the public expense and by the public purse private markets for their surplus goods and their surplus capital.’15 A better distribution of income at home would cut imperialism off at the roots.
‘Hobson’s conclusions have provided the basis for three-quarters of a century of neo-Marxist rhetoric.’16 Marx himself did not use the word ‘imperi-alism’, ‘nor is there anything in his work that corresponds at all exactly to the concepts of imperialism advanced by later Marxist writers’.17 Aware that a world market was being created, he did, however, ‘discuss the need of capitalism for expansion’.18 Capital was sent abroad when it could not find employment at home. A high rate of earning was not necessarily the result of exploitation: it might, he suggested, be the result of transitory monopoly profits.19
Lenin acknowledged Hobson. Indeed he adopted his approach. ‘Of course, finance capital finds most ‘‘convenient’’, and derives the greatest profit from, a form of subjection which involves the loss of the political independence of the subjected countries.’ ‘The more capitalism is developed, the more strongly the shortage of raw materials is felt, the more intense the competition and the hunt for sources of raw materials throughout the whole world, the more desperate the struggle for the acquisition of colonies.’20 But Lenin rejected Hobson’s under-consumptionist argument, which implied that imperialism could be abolished by reforming capitalism. His pamphlet, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), also initiated the process, as Bill Warren puts it, ‘through which the view that capitalism could be an instrument of social advance in pre-capitalist societies was erased from Marxism’.21 Imperialism was capitalism in the monopoly stage. Neither the backward countries nor the workers at home would benefit, though the latter might be bribed. The capitalists would appropriate the benefits. The only solution to the end of imperialism was the end of capitalism. ‘The capitalist delays the day of doom by reallocating his resources on a world scale.’22
It was a view that resembled Karl Kautsky’s: colonialism was a ‘necessity’ for the capitalist class, a ‘powerful tool’ for postponing the collapse of its rule.23 The two had, however, come to differ. Before the war Kautsky came up with the concept of ‘ultra-imperialism’: major powers would agree to exploit the world jointly, rather than fight over it. When war among ‘the imperialist powers’ broke out in 1914, he thought that its result might be ‘a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race . . . it is not impossible that capitalism may still live through another phase . . .: a phase of ultra-imperialism.’ 24 For Lenin, too, the 1914 war was ‘imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory, war of plunder) on both sides’.25 Kautsky’s theory, however, was a ‘most reactionary method of consoling the masses with hopes of permanent peace being possible under capitalism . . . and directing it towards illusory prospects of an imaginary ‘‘ultra-imperialism’’ of the future’.26
In Lenin’s view the war offered an opportunity to bring to an end not only imperialism but capitalism itself. His April 1916 theses, ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-determination’, envisaged an alliance between workers in the metropolitan countries and bourgeois-democratic nationalists in colonial and semi-colonial countries, such as China, Persia and Turkey. Socialists must demand the immediate liberation of colonies;...
