A History of Southeast Asia

Critical Crossroads

Anthony Reid

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118512937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

2016 PROSE Award Honorable Mention for Textbook in the Humanities

A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads presents a comprehensive history of Southeast Asia from our earliest knowledge of its civilizations and religious patterns up to the present day.

• Incorporates environmental, social, economic, and gender issues to tell a multi-dimensional story of Southeast Asian history from earliest times to the present
• Argues that while the region remains a highly diverse mix of religions, ethnicities, and political systems, it demands more attention for how it manages such diversity while being receptive to new ideas and technologies
• Demonstrates how Southeast Asia can offer alternatives to state-centric models of history more broadly

Part of The Blackwell History of the World Series

The goal of this ambitious series is to provide an accessible source of knowledge about the entire human past, for every curious person in every part of the world. It will comprise some two dozen volumes, of which some provide synoptic views of the history of particular regions while others consider the world as a whole during a particular period of time. The volumes are narrative in form, giving balanced attention to social and cultural history (in the broadest sense) as well as to institutional development and political change. Each provides a systematic account of a very large subject, but they are also both imaginative and interpretative. The Series is intended to be accessible to the widest possible readership, and the accessibility of its volumes is matched by the style of presentation and production.

[1] People in the Humid Tropics

Benign Climate, Dangerous Environment

Both the diversity and the coherence of the Southeast Asian story begin with its geology. Its scatter of islands and rivers emerged from the collision of continental plates. The northward-moving Australian and Indian plates, and the westward-moving Pacific plate, pushed up the chain of volcanic mountains that almost surround the region. Within these mountains lies the relatively stable Sunda shelf, which united Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and the Philippines with the Mainland during periods of global cold temperatures and low water levels. During the latest of these, in the ice age that preceded the global warming that made possible humanity’s ascent in the last 10,000 years, Southeast Asia’s equatorial environment must have been one of the world’s most habitable, and the land bridges then carried the larger Eurasian mammals such as elephant, tiger, rhinoceros, monkey, deer, pig, and buffalo, as well as man, into all of the vast area now divided by the Java Sea and southernmost South China Sea. As the world’s largest area of monsoonal humid tropics, Southeast Asia shared a pattern of rainforest and water that provided a background for human economic and social activity.

The region lies almost wholly within the tropics, and enjoys relatively even daytime temperatures around or a little below 30 degrees centigrade throughout the year. The exceptions are the northernmost parts of the region that do experience a mild winter in December/January when temperatures can fall below 20 degrees. Except in the dry zone of the upper Irrawaddy valley, rainfall is everywhere generous, between 100 and 400 cm a year, though with a variability that caused difficulties for settled agriculture. Although Southeast Asia’s climate has been benign for humans, it is unusually prone to natural disasters in the long term, which may be a factor reversing population growth at certain periods. The great arc of mountains formed by the subduction of the northward-moving Australian plate beneath Sumatra, Java and the Lesser Sunda Islands curves northward to Sulawesi, Maluku, and the Philippines where the tectonic pattern is more complex. Farmers were attracted by the rich volcanic soils, giving most volcanically active Java and Bali the densest population in the region and non-seismic Borneo the sparsest. Yet periodic mega-eruptions darkened the skies, poisoned the water, and covered the land with ash, causing crops to fail and populations to plummet.

Earthquakes wrought havoc on stone temples, but caused relatively little damage to houses built overwhelmingly of wood and thatch until modern times. The tsunamis that followed the worst events were a different matter, capable of wiping out coastal settlements and ports, and small-island populations. The destructiveness of the 2004 tsunami that claimed over 200,000 lives in Sumatra (chiefly), the Peninsula, and beyond, has been shown to have regular precedents every few centuries. Typhoons wreak havoc on coastal settlements in the Philippines and modern-day Viet Nam. El Niños having severe effects on Island Southeast Asia have been documented as far back as those of 1618, 1652, and 1660, and appear to have recurred with varying severity and periodicity at least once in a decade. They caused rainfall as low as a third of normal levels, and prolonged dry seasons that drove people out of settled areas in search of water and food. Despite the severity of these El Niños for the region (as demonstrated by the modern ones of 1982/3 and 1997), the smaller proportion of the Southeast Asian population dependent on settled rice agriculture rendered it somewhat less exposed to the severest El Niño famines than China and India. As discussed below in this chapter, the periodic volcanic eruptions of the island arc between Sumatra and Luzon devastated the populations dependent on a seasonal crop cycle, and thereby prolonged a balance with hunter-gathering and shifting agriculture that had disappeared elsewhere.

Seasonality in these humid tropics is marked above all by the monsoon winds. The warming and cooling of the great landmass to the north creates dependable winds from the northeast across the South China Sea in November–March, but in the opposite direction in the middle of the year. In the Bay of Bengal the winds are easterlies in November–March, and westerlies in the middle of the year. This dependable pattern of alternating wind-flows was highly favorable for sailing within Southeast Asia and the whole of the equatorial Indian Ocean, making this area the world’s major cradle of commercial navigation. The same monsoonal alternation governs the variable patterns of rainfall.

The center of the region – its long central peninsula, southern and eastern Sumatra, Borneo, and western Java – as well as the eastern Philippines, has predictable high rainfall all year round (Map 1.1). This non-seasonal climate supported a lush growth of evergreen forest, through which the sun seldom penetrated. For human settlement it was in general discouraging, especially in the coastal marshes. The soils in this region are clays of poor fertility except where improved by recent volcanic activity – as in Java and west Sumatra. The nutrients falling as leaves are more quickly broken down in tropical conditions, and recycled through the forest biomass rather than building up topsoil suitable for agriculture. The equilibrium of these forests is therefore precarious, and removal of the canopy can quickly lead to leaching of the remaining nutrients and subsequent erosion by the combined effect of sun and torrential rain. Such forests also contain relatively few edible wild plants and suitable game. Without a dry season, clearing and burning the forest presented a major obstacle, and many crops could not ripen satisfactorily. Until the late eighteenth-century era of immigration and commercial agriculture, therefore, most of this central equatorial zone remained very thinly peopled.

Map 1.1 Climate and rainfall.

In most of the Mainland, on the other hand, there is a marked dry season around January–April. In the mountainous parts of this region the streams continue to run through the dry season, because the mountains attract more rain and groundwater returns to the streams as their level drops. The dry season and the cooler temperatures provide a more open forest pattern with lower bushes, ferns, and grasses suitable for a variety of larger mammals. The higher land of these Mainland dry-season zones supported a large population of deer, pigs, elephants, tigers, and rhinoceros, as well as smaller animals. To a much greater extent than in the equatorial forests of perennial rain or the smaller islands, these Mainland regions provided both meat for hunters and deerskins, ivory, and rhinoceros horn for the export trade.

In the deltas of the great rivers of this zone, the land dries out completely during the dry season except in immediate proximity to the great rivers themselves. These deltas provide excellent conditions for rice-growing, as the alluvial soil is annually enriched by flooding and the wet season provides abundant water for one or even two crops. At least since the sixteenth century, large surpluses were garnered from varieties of rice which grew two or three meters tall as the flood waters rose each year in the flood plains of the Mekong, Chao Phraya, Salween, and Irrawaddy Rivers.

Unfortunately these deltas are not so suitable for human settlement. In the wet season vast regions disappear completely under water. A million hectares are annually flooded in the Chao Phraya delta alone. In the dry season there is no fresh water at all. Only along the natural banks of the rivers was settlement convenient before the era of modern drainage and irrigation methods. What population there was in these deltas before 1800 was concentrated almost wholly along the riverbanks.

Only the Vietnamese mastered the difficult task of intensive delta agriculture before the nineteenth century. Applying similar techniques to those used in many Chinese deltas, Vietnamese began already to tame the Red River delta at least a thousand years ago, building dykes along the river to prevent flooding, and a complex pattern of irrigation that enabled them to grow rice during the dry season.

The eastern part of Java and the Lesser Sunda Island chain to its east experience an even more marked dry season from May to September, in places extending to more than six months. The volcanic soil of some of these islands is highly suitable for agriculture, and in Bali and Lombok in particular there are streams and springs flowing throughout the year which have for many centuries been directed into bunded rice fields on the sloping foothills of the mountains. Further east, rice is more difficult to sustain in the progressively drier terrain, and the eastern Indonesian islands subsisted chiefly on tubers, sago, or millet until the advent of American maize. For commercial crops such as cotton, however, the prolonged dry season was a distinct advantage.

While the eastern Philippines facing the Pacific experiences year-long rain comparable to Malaya and Sumatra, the western areas of that archipelago have a pattern similar to the Mainland with a marked dry period between December and March. The volcanic soils and the gently sloping terrain of the central valley of Luzon provided excellent conditions for rice-growing in river-fed bunded fields, and traces of rice husks have been found in the Cagayan Valley from the second millennium BCE. This has led Bellwood (2005) to hypothesize that it was the earliest Austronesian-speakers to migrate southward from Taiwan to Luzon and beyond more than 3,000 years ago who introduced rice cultivation to the islands.

Forests, Water, and People

For most of the 60,000 or more years in which Homo sapiens inhabited these humid tropics, the dense forests and warm shallow seas and waterways provided the sole livelihood and context for life. While forest-dwelling and seaborne foragers have proved unusually able to retain some of these lifestyles even amidst modern changes, it is a mistake to equate the modern “tribal” peoples of the Peninsula and elsewhere with the original pre-agricultural populations of 8,000 years ago. Anthropologists have carefully documented the intense interactions of survival strategies, languages, and cultures between agricultural and non-agricultural people. Since foraging was always more rewarding around the fecund coastlines and the forest fringes than in the dark primary forest, hunter-gatherers have never been isolated. Southeast Asia is uniquely penetrated by water among major world zones, most of its land surface being within 200 km of tidewater. Canoeing around rivers and coastal waters probably pre-dated agriculture as a necessary aid to foraging. The tropical forest had unique assets in terms of plant resources and refuge from attackers coming usually by water. But for ancient as for modern populations, dwelling wholly in the deep forest was not undertaken by choice.

Some things can be deduced about the past, however, from studies of contemporary forest-dwellers. Firstly, that the humid forests of year-round rainfall in Central Southeast Asia were difficult but not impossible for human populations, which probably first settled areas of less dense forest in the northern Mainland and the eastern islands. It was also in areas of a significant dry season and open forest that fire became useful as a tool in taming the forest, and that the earliest domestication of plants and animals took place. The primary forest did, however, provide one key tool for pre-metal hunter-gatherers in the blowpipe, and the dart dipped in vegetable poisons to stun the monkeys, mouse-deer, or other small prey of the forest. Many types of rattan and palm of the forest also provided the equipment for fish-traps and baskets for the abundant sea life of the coasts.

Secondly, hunter-gatherer and beach-foraging societies tended to remain small-scale as long as they did not make the shift to agriculture. Any large concentration of population could quickly impoverish the coastal or forest food stocks on which hunter-gatherers depended. Hence there was always high mobility, as particular kin-groups either moved as a whole in search of resources, or split up as the younger families sought their own territories to exploit elsewhere. Agriculturalists and hunter-gatherer societies have coexisted and interacted in Southeast Asia for at least 5,000 years, and the choice of means of livelihood was as much about the scale of social unit particular communities preferred to operate in, as about the technologies involved.

Prior to the Holocene warming of 10,000–12,000 years ago, the occupants of Southeast Asia were chiefly what Bellwood calls Australo-Melanesians, occupying a territory much less watery than it became with the glacial melting. There remained even in the glacial period the deep trench of the “Wallace line” to the east of Borneo and Bali, which they somehow crossed to populate also the easternmost islands including New Guinea and Australia. In New Guinea they independently developed tuber-based agriculture while in Australia they retained a hunter-gatherer lifestyle better adapted to the environment. These pre-Holocene settlers in Southeast Asia are presumed to be the ancestors of modern groups labeled negritos by earlier ethnographers on the basis of their dark skin, crinkly hair, and short stature. They had succeeded, in the Philippines and the Peninsula, in avoiding conquest or absorption by incoming agriculturalists by clinging to a stateless hunter-gatherer lifestyle, though their interaction with the agriculturalists was extensive enough that they adopted Austronesian languages in the Philippines and Mon-Khmer ones in the Peninsula, followed by a recent Malay overlay.

In the Philippines, where they are estimated to have comprised as many as 10% of the population around 1600, a Spanish chronicler described them as:

A barbarous race who live on fruits and roots of the forest. They go naked, covering only the privies with some articles … made from the bark of trees…. They have no laws or letters, or other government or community than that of kinsfolk…. The Spanish call them Negrillos because many of them are as much negroes as are the Ethiopians themselves, both in their black colour and in their kinky hair … In one of the large islands there are so many of them, that it is for that reason called the island of Negros. Those blacks were apparently the first inhabitants of these islands, and they have been deprived of them by the civilized nations who came later by way of Sumatra, the Javas, Borneo, Macassar (Colin 1663, cited M...