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A History of

SoutheaSt aSia

The Blackwell hisTory of The world

General Editor: R.I. Moore

The Origins of Human SocietyPeter Bogucki

A History of IndiaSecond EditionBurton stein

A History of Southeast AsiaAnthony reid

A History of ChinaMorris rossabi

A History of JapanConrad totman

A History of Australia, New Zealand and the PacificDonald Denoon, Philippa Mein‐smith & Marivic Wyndham

A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia: Volume IDavid Christian

A History of Latin AmericaAvailable in third edition as ‘A History of Latin America to 1825’Peter Bakewell

The Birth of the Modern WorldC.A. Bayly

A History of

SoutheaSt aSiacriTical crossroads

Anthony ReId

This edition first published 2015© 2015 Anthony Reid

registered officeJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Reid, Anthony, 1939– author. A history of Southeast Asia / Anthony Reid. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-631-17961-0 (cloth : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-118-51300-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Southeast Asia–History. 2. Southeast Asia–Foreign relations. I. Title. DS525.R45 2015 959–dc23

2014040544

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Detail from a Burmese illustrated manuscript (parabaik) showing the merit-making festival of light patronized by King Mindon, in the period 1853–7, with orchestra in the foreground. British Library, Or 13681, folio 3r.

Set in 10/12pt Plantin by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

1 2015

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who shared the highs and lows

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List of Tables xi

List of Maps xii

List of Illustrations xiii

Series Editor’s Preface xiv

Preface xvii

Glossary xxii

Abbreviations xxv

1 People in the Humid Tropics 1Benign Climate, Dangerous Environment 1Forests, Water, and People 4Why a Low but Diverse Population? 6Agriculture and Modern Language Families 10The Rice Revolution and Population Concentration 13The Agricultural Basis of State and Society 16Food and Clothes 18Women and Men 21Not China, not India 26

2 Buddha and Shiva Below the Winds 30Debates about Indic States 30Bronze, Iron, and Earthenware in the Archaeological Record 32The Buddhist Ecumene and Sanskritization 34Shiva and Nagara in the “Charter Era,” 900–1300 39Austronesian Gateway Ports – the Negeri 45Dai Viet and the Border with China 47The Stateless Majority in the Charter Era 49Thirteenth/Fourteenth‐Century Crisis 53

Contents

Contents

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3 Trade and Its Networks 57Land and Sea Routes 57Specialized Production 59Integration of the Asian Maritime Markets 62Austronesian and Indian Pioneers 63The East Asian Trading System of 1280–1500 65The Islamic Network 69The Europeans 71

4 Cities and Production for the World, 1490–1640 74Southeast Asia’s “Age of Commerce” 74Crops for the World Market 76Ships and Traders 80Cities as Centers of Innovation 81Trade, Guns, and New State Forms 85Asian Commercial Organization 91

5 Religious Revolution and Early Modernity, 1350–1630 96Southeast Asian Religion 97Theravada Cosmopolis and the Mainland States 98Islamic Beginnings: Traders and Mystics 101Polarizations of the First Global War, 1530–1610 106Rival Universalisms 111Pluralities, Religious Boundaries, and the “Highland Savage” 114

6 Asian European Encounters, 1509–1688 120The Euro‐Chinese Cities 120Women as Cultural Mediators 125Cultural Hybridities 130Islam’s “Age of Discovery” 133Southeast Asian Enlightenments – Makassar and Ayutthaya 135Gunpowder Kings as an Early Modern Form 139

7 The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century 142The Great Divergence Debate 142Southeast Asians Lose the Profits of Long‐Distance Trade 144Global Climate and Local Crises 149Political Consequences of the Crisis 152

8 Vernacular Identities, 1660–1820 157Eighteenth‐Century Consolidation 157Religious Syncretism and Localization 158Performance in Palace, Pagoda, and Village 167History, Myth, and Identity 172Consolidation and its Limitations 175

9 Expansion of the Sinicized World 177Fifteenth‐Century Revolution in Dai Viet 177Viet Expansion, Nam Tien 179

Contents

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Cochin‐China’s Plural Southern Frontier 183The Greater Viet Nam of the Nguyen 185The Commercial Expansion of a “Chinese Century,” 1740–1840 188Chinese on Southern Economic Frontiers 191

10 Becoming a Tropical Plantation, 1780–1900 196Pepper and Coffee 197Commercialization of Staple Crops 198The New Monopolies: Opium and Tobacco 200Java’s Coerced Colonial Agriculture 204Plantations and Haciendas 207Mono‐crop Rice Economies of the Mainland Deltas 209Pre‐colonial and Colonial Growth Compared 211

11 The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies, 1820–1910 213Siam as “Civilized” Survivor 214Konbaung Burma – a Doomed Modernization 219High Confucian Fundamentalism – Nguyen Viet Nam 224“Protected” Negeri 227Muslim Alternatives in Sumatra 230Bali Apocalypse 233Mobile “Big Men” in the Eastern Islands 235The Last State Evaders 237

12 Making States, 1824–1940 240European Nationalisms and Demarcations 240From Many to Two Polities in Nusantara 241Maximal Burma, Viable Siam 246Westphalia and the Middle Kingdom 250Building State Infrastructures 251How Many States in Indochina? 255Ethnic Construction in the New Sovereign Spaces 256States, not Nations 260

13 Population, Peasantization, and Poverty, 1830–1940 261More People 261Involution and Peasantization 263Dual Economy and the Absent Bourgeoisie 266Subordinating Women 268Shared Poverty and Health Crises 272

14 Consuming Modernity, 1850–2000 276Housing for a Fragile Environment 276The Evolution of Foods 278Fish, Salt, and Meat 279Stimulants and Drinks 281Cloth and Clothing 284Modern Dress and Identity 286Performance, from Festival to Film 289

Contents

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15 Progress and Modernity, 1900–1940 295From Despair to Hope 296Education and a New Elite 302Victory of the National Idea in the 1930s 306Negotiating the Maleness of Modernity 314

16 Mid‐Twentieth‐Century Crisis, 1930–1954 319Economic Crisis 319Japanese Occupation 3231945 – the Revolutionary Moment 331Independence – Revolutionary or Negotiated? 341

17 The Military, Monarchy, and Marx: The Authoritarian Turn, 1950–1998 347Democracy’s Brief Springtime 347Guns Inherit the Revolutions 350Dictatorship Philippine Style 358Remaking “Protected” Monarchies 359Twilight of the Indochina Kings 364Reinventing a Thai Dhammaraja 367Communist Authoritarianism 370

18 The Commercial Turnaround, 1965– 373Economic Growth at Last 373More Rice, Fewer Babies 376Opening the Command Economies 378Gains and Losses 380Darker Costs – Environmental Degradation and Corruption 384

19 Making Nations, Making Minorities, 1945– 390The High Modernist Moment, 1945–1980 390Education and National Identity 394Puritan Globalism 400Joining an Integrated but Plural World 405

20 The Southeast Asian Region in the World 413The Regional Idea 414Global Comparisons 419

References 423

Further Reading 431

Index 436

xi

3.1 Maritime exchanges with China and Ryukyu, 1369–1509 67 4.1 Estimated growth of two key Southeast Asian exports,

1500–1649 78 7.1 Pepper and clove exports by quantity and value, 1600–1699 147 7.2 Frequency of ship arrivals from Southeast Asian ports,

1651–1724 148 13.1 Population estimates by country, 1900–2000 26316.1 GDP per capita by country, 1913–1980 32118.1 GDP per capita by country, 1913–1980 38118.2 Female life expectancy by country, 1980–2010 38219.1 Mobile phone use, 2000–2012 406

List of tabLes

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1.1 Climate and rainfall 3 1.2 Hazards of the “ring of fire” 7 1.3 Southeast Asian language groups 11 2.1 Irrigated rice and the rise of polities, 700–1300 50 3.1 Trade routes, by sea, river, and land 60 4.1 Urban populations at their pre-colonial peak 83 5.1 Muslim and Christian expansion 108 9.1 Viet expansion southward 18210.1 Export‐driven plantation agriculture in the 1920s 20412.1 The two Burmas: nationalist and “scheduled,” 1930s 25816.1 Thailand’s wartime expansion 32516.2 Allied and Japanese control at the August 1945 surrender 33216.3 Federal and Republican Indonesia in 1948 343

List of Maps

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List of iLLustrations

1.1 Dress of a Thai woman in the capital, 1680s 20 1.2 Notables of Banten in the 1670s 22 1.3 Bronze age statue of a female weaver and child, Indonesia 25 2.1 The Buddha‐like faces of the Bayon, in thirteenth‐century

Cambodia 42 4.1 Vessels of the Java coast in 1596 82 5.1 Ifugao rice terraces, Luzon 117 6.1 Makassar in 1638 137 8.1 Seventeenth‐century grave of a Sufi saint at Tembayat,

Central Java 16211.1 King Mindon’s capital in 1855 22111.2 Emperor Minh Mang in 1827 22511.3 Badung puputan of 1906 dramatized in Le Petit Journal of

Paris 23414.1 King Chulalongkorn with 11 of his sons at Eton College,

1907 28716.1 The Destruction of Manila, February 1945 32216.2 Greater East Asia Conference in Tokyo, November 1943 32816.3 Independence proclamations: a) in Jakarta, August 17,

1945; b) in Hanoi, September 2, 1945 33316.4 Aung San and family in 1947, shortly before his

assassination 33616.5 Prime Minister Pridi Banomyong in 1946 33717.1 Anti‐Malaysia demonstration in Jakarta, 1963 35417.2 President Sukarno and General Suharto, in 1967 35617.3 Zhou Enlai and Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi 37119.1 1980s Singapore. The new high‐rise apartments and offices

ousting the older shop‐houses 39120.1 a) The five original members of ASEAN, August 1967;

b) Southeast Asia’s warring countries at last united in ASEAN, 1997 418

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There is nothing new in the attempt to understand history as a whole. To understand how humanity began and how it has come to its present condition is one of the oldest and most universal of human needs, expressed in the reli-gious and philosophical systems of every civilization. But only in the last few decades has it begun to appear both necessary and possible to meet that need by means of a rational and systematic appraisal of current historical knowl-edge. Until the middle of the nineteenth century history itself was generally treated as a subordinate branch of other fields of learning – of literature, rheto-ric, law, philosophy, or religion. When historians began to establish its inde-pendence as a field of scholarship in its own right, with its own subject matter and its own rules and methods, they made it in practice not the attempt to achieve a comprehensive account of the human past but the history of the European nation‐states and of the societies created by European expansion and colonization. In laying the scholarly foundations of their discipline they also reinforced the Enlightenment’s belief in the advance of “civilization” (and, more recently, of “Western civilization”), and made it in this form, with rela-tively minor regional variations, the basis of the teaching of history almost everywhere for most of the twentieth century. Research and teaching of the histories of other parts of the world developed mainly in the context of area studies like those of ancient Greece and Rome, dominated by philology, and conducted through the exposition of the canonical texts of their respective languages.

While those approaches prevailed, world history as such remained largely the province of thinkers and writers principally interested in constructing the-oretical or metaphysical systems. Only toward the end of the twentieth century did academic historians begin to recognize it as a proper and even urgent field for the application of their knowledge and skills. The inadequacy of the tradi-tional parameters of the discipline is now widely acknowledged, and the sense is growing that a world facing a common future of headlong and potentially catastrophic transformation needs its common history. The realization of such a history has been delayed, however, by simple ignorance on the one hand – for the history of enormous stretches of space and time has until very recently been known not at all, or so patchily and superficially as not to be worth revisiting – and on the other by the lack of a widely acceptable basis upon

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which to organize and discuss what is nevertheless the enormous and enormously diverse knowledge that we have.

The first of those obstacles is now being rapidly overcome. There is almost no part of the world or period of its history that is not the subject of energetic and sophisticated investigation by archaeologists and historians. The expan-sion of the horizons of academic history since the 1990s has been dramatic. The quality and quantity of historical research and writing have risen expo-nentially in each decade, and the advances have been most spectacular in some of the areas previously most neglected. The academics have not failed to share the results of their labors. Reliable and accessible accounts are now readily available of regions, periods, and topics that even twenty years ago were obscure to everyone but a handful of specialists. In particular, collaborative publication, in the form of volumes or sets of volumes in which teams of authors set forth, in more or less detail, their expert and up‐to‐date conclu-sions in the field of their research, has been a natural and necessary response to the growth of knowledge. Only in that way can non‐specialists, at any level, be kept even approximately in touch with the constantly accelerating accumu-lation of information about the past.

Yet the amelioration of one problem exacerbates the other. It is truer than it has ever been that knowledge is growing and perspectives multiplying more quickly than they can be assimilated and recorded in synthetic form. We can now describe a great many more trees in a great deal more detail than we could before. It does not always follow that we have a better view of the wood. Collaboration has many strengths, but clarity, still less originality of vision, is rarely among them. History acquires shape, structure, relevance – becomes, in the fashionable catchphrase, something for thinking with – by advancing and debating new propositions about what past societies were like, how they worked and why they changed over long periods of time, how they resembled and why they differed from contemporaneous societies in other parts of the world, and how they interacted with one another. Such insights, like the sym-pathetic understanding without which the past is dead, are almost always born of individual creativity and imagination. Each volume in this series, therefore, embodies the work and vision of a single author. Synthesis on such a scale demands learning, resolution, and, not least, intellectual and professional courage of no ordinary degree, and we have been singularly fortunate in finding scholars of great distinction who are willing to undertake it.

There is a wealth of ways in which world history can be written. The oldest and simplest view, that it is best understood as the history of contacts between peoples previously isolated from one another, from which (as some think) all change arises, is now seen to be capable of application since the earliest times. An influential alternative focuses upon the tendency of economic exchange to create self‐sufficient but ever expanding “worlds” which sustain successive systems of power and culture. Another seeks to understand the differences between societies and cultures, and therefore the particular character of each, by comparing the ways in which their values, social relationships, and struc-tures of power have developed. The rapidly emerging field of ecological his-tory returns to a very ancient tradition of seeing interaction with the physical

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environment, and with other animals, at the center of the human predicament, while insisting that its understanding demands an approach which is cultur-ally, chronologically, and geographically comprehensive. More recently still “Big History,” led by a contributor to this series, has begun to show how human history can be integrated with that not only of the natural, but of the cosmic environment, and better understood in consequence.

The Blackwell History of the World seeks not to embody any single approach, but to support them all, as it will use them all, by providing a modern, compre-hensive, and accessible account of the entire human past. Each volume offers a substantial overview of a portion of world history large enough to permit, and indeed demand, the reappraisal of customary boundaries of regions, periods, and topics, and in doing so reflects the idiosyncrasies of its sources and its sub-jects, as well as the vision and judgment of its author. The series as a whole combines the indispensable narratives of very long‐term regional development with global surveys of developments across the world, of interaction between regions and what they have experienced in common, or visited upon one another, at particular times. Together these volumes will provide a framework in which the history of every part of the world can be viewed, and a basis upon which most aspects of human activity can be compared across both time and space. A frame offers perspective. Comparison implies respect for difference. That is the beginning of what the past has to offer the future.

R.I. Moore

SerieS editor’S acknowledgementS

The editor is grateful to all the contributors to the Blackwell History of the World for advice and assistance on the design and contents of the series as a whole, as well as on individual volumes. Both editor and contributors wish to place on record their immense debt, individually and collectively, to John Davey, for-merly of Blackwell Publishers, without whose vision and enthusiasm the series would not have been initiated, and to his successor Tessa Harvey, without whose energy, skill, and diplomacy it could not have been realized.

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Southeast Asia was and is a distinct place, but one of infinite variety. The region’s unique environment, combining a hot, wet, monsoon climate, dense forest cover and extensive waterways with periodic natural catastrophes, has preserved exceptional diversity while resisting large unifying organization. It has not been congenial to the kind of empires that elsewhere dominated and integrated substantial territories, and thereby too much dominated historical narratives. Its coherence has lain in the fact of diversity, and its genius in man-aging it. Legal‐bureaucratic states came late to the region and would dominate its history only in the twentieth century. Maintaining the balance between the two contrasting phenomena of diversity and distinctiveness without allowing the one to obscure the other is the challenge of a book such as this.

Southeast Asian history merits the attention of the people who are its heirs for all the usual reasons, and because much of that history offers a route around and beneath the brittle nationalist preoccupations of many of their textbooks. It merits the attention of the rest of the world for three crucial rea-sons, in addition to the often‐acknowledged diversity. Its dangerous tectonic interfaces can determine the world’s climate and the survival of our species; its women were more autonomous economically and socially than those in other societies whose histories are known; and its societies had other mechanisms for cultural and economic coherence than those of the states which dominate much history elsewhere. These factors help to make the region a “Critical Crossroads.”

The world’s two most destructive volcanic eruptions of modern times occurred at Tambora in Sumbawa (1815) and Krakatau (1883), situated at opposite ends of the extremely eruptive zone of Java, Bali, and Lombok, also famous for their high fertility. They darkened and cooled the whole planet and produced years without summer in Europe, though this causation has only recently been understood. The only disaster thought to have seriously endan-gered the survival of humanity (Homo sapiens) since its African origins occurred in Sumatra – the eruption that created the crater of Lake Toba 74,000 years ago and caused six years of global winter. Climate research has recently identi-fied other sudden cooling episodes causing crises in the northern hemisphere, notably in 535, 1258 (probably caused by a mega‐eruption in Lombok), and the 1580s. These probably had their origins in tropical volcanoes, which alone

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have the capacity to affect the whole planet through prevailing wind patterns. Southeast Asia’s are the prime suspects.

Southeast Asia’s gender pattern was strikingly different from that of its neighbors and trade partners in China, India, and the Middle East. Up until the nineteenth century, Southeast Asian women played economic roles equiva-lent to though different from those of men, and therefore had more latitude and agency than their European, Chinese, Indian, or Arab counterparts. They monopolized textile and ceramic production, shared agricultural tasks (domi-nating planting, harvesting, and foraging), and most importantly did most of the marketing and business. The status concerns of Southeast Asian men made them particularly inept in managing money and marketing. European and Chinese male traders dealt largely with local women, and found their own local sexual partners extremely helpful in their business.

Historians of the current post‐nationalist era are increasingly aware that their profession arose with modern nation‐states and made its principal busi-ness the chronicling of those states. Our fixation on the spectacular successes (and failures) of those states in modern times has led us to look for comparable institutions or at least ancestors in times and places where they played no such dominating role, and to marginalize themes and actors that cannot be narrated in state terms. Not only have stateless societies thereby become “people without history,” but systems of social organization based on kinship, religion, the arts and performance, or ritual and economic reciprocity are classified as primitive and doomed, when not wholly ignored. The challenge is how to do better, when the modern state has educated us since childhood and generates, classifies, and preserves our knowledge. Our globalized era, however, is one that can no longer afford nationalist history that ignores our past entanglements and present com-mon responsibility for the planet. In building a different history with other themes, Southeast Asia is an excellent place to start.

In this region of forest and water, the legal‐bureaucratic state with which we are familiar has been an alien intruder, with little purchase over its peoples until the twentieth century. The history thus far written about many areas relates only to port‐cities on the trade routes, while the population was over-whelmingly in the fertile uplands. The highlands were freer of malaria and other diseases, safer from maritime raiding and tsunamis, and easier than the densely forested lowlands to tame for both irrigated rice agriculture and the swidden pattern of shifting cultivation through burning‐off fields in rotation.

There is, however, also a political factor, whereby populations appear to have consciously opted for their own pattern of social organization through kinship and ritual, evading the trade‐based river‐states to practice “the art of not being governed,” as James Scott (2009) puts it. The argument that state-lessness was an informed choice, which I had been tentatively advancing with particular reference to the Islands, has now been powerfully made by Scott for “Zomia” – the highlands of Mainland Southeast Asia and Southwest China. His plea for acknowledging the importance of these non‐state choices was elegantly balanced by the monumental scholarship of Victor Lieberman (2003; 2009). He pointed out that Mainland Southeast Asia, like France, Japan, and other Eurasian “Protected Rimlands,” underwent its own relentless process of

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state expansion and consolidation, punctuated by ever shorter disruptions that indeed suggest “Strange Parallels” across Eurasia. He demonstrated Southeast Asia’s utility in undermining dichotomous East‐West history and ideas of European exceptionalism. I am much indebted to both these treasured col-leagues, as to an army of others. They have made it easier for me to plot a course that acknowledges both the benefits nation‐states have brought and the ingenuity and achievement of those who preferred to live outside them. History appears to be leading us beyond state‐based nationalisms toward a shared rec-ognition that non‐state histories are equally important to our evolution.

Even in Europe the mountains were a refuge of liberty and autonomy from the states, but in Southeast Asia the upland valleys were also in many ways more successful in building healthy, populous, complex societies. In the Peninsula and parts of the Philippines, aboriginal populations who rejected violence and authority, even of a kinship type, survived remarkably into the twenty‐first century by retreating into the forest cover whenever threats approached, and avoiding dependence on agriculture that was vulnerable to natural as well as political disasters.

In seeking to understand, therefore, the entrenched pluralism of Southeast Asia we must abandon assumptions from European or Chinese history (though questioned even there) about the rise in tandem of civilization and the state. Societies such as the Batak, Bugis, Tagalog, and Shan developed writing, irri-gation, metallurgy, and complex religious systems without the benefit of any unified polity. Other “kings” of culture areas not dominated by a single river system or port, like Balinese, Malays, and Minangkabaus, had a ritual and magical prominence rather than a legal‐bureaucratic one. Stateless interior societies traded extensively with the more hierarchic monarchies of the coast and even incorporated these into their myths and rituals. Yet they neither allowed themselves to be incorporated into the political hierarchies of the coast, nor even imitated them as a means of self‐defense.

Earlier scholars examining the evidence of Chinese Imperial reports, Sanskrit inscriptions, and archaeological remains were much too inclined to assume substantial kingdoms ruling over subject populations. Since this interpretation was at odds with the diffuse power structures Europeans encountered in the late nineteenth century, they resorted to presumptions of decline and deca-dence. Today’s prehistorians, informed by a wealth of careful anthropological work about the nature of political relations in more recent times, have read more critically both Chinese reports of barbarian “kingdoms” sending tribute, and the grandiloquent Indic titles of many inscriptions. In reality the polities we know by these means appear to have been characterized by a plurality of fluid centers, and an emphasis on supernatural means of mobilizing populations for war or temple‐building. Astonishing Buddhist temples like those of Borobudur in Java and Pagan on the Irrawaddy should inspire us with awe about the popu-lar piety that built them, in the absence of evidence of a coercive state.

This volume seeks not to deny the importance of charismatic and powerful individuals in shaping their times, but to correct distortions imposed by read-ing back modern concepts of state into times and places where they do not belong. Dethroning the state allows more room for environmental, religious,

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social, cultural, demographic, health, and intellectual changes, usually of greater importance to the inhabitants than the doings of kings. In particular, the third major point of interest in Southeast Asia for outsiders, its distinctive gender pattern which generally balanced the role of men and women in the economy, needs much more attention by a world which imagines itself only now discovering gender equality. The Southeast Asian pattern is one in which modernity gradually imposed patriarchy, as first the scriptural world religions, and then European models of state, corporation, and marriage, gradually become marked as “modern,” while Southeast Asian complementarity became marked as rural, poor, and superstitious.

Since we are all brought up on modern maps that divide the world into dif-ferently colored national blocks, there is a seductive pressure to use these known contemporary boundaries to describe locations in an earlier period, thereby encouraging the inappropriate reading‐back of national units into the past. When discussing the period before the nineteenth‐century European demarcation of boundaries, I will endeavor to use geographical features such as islands and river catchment areas, notably the Irrawaddy, Chao Phraya, Mekong, and Red Rivers that dominate the pattern of human settlement in Mainland Southeast Asia. When other options fail, it will sometimes be neces-sary to refer to “what is today…”. The narrow, mountainous peninsula which extends the Eurasian Mainland a further 1,300 km southward has been a ref-uge for exceptional pluralism throughout recorded history, making it particu-larly inappropriate to extend the nineteenth‐century British label “Malay Peninsula” beyond the twentieth‐century politicization of the term “Malay” (Montesano and Jory 2008). I have therefore called it the Southeast Asian Peninsula, or more frequently simply “the Peninsula.”

Ethnic terms have had a way of shifting their meanings over time, usually beginning as exonyms applied by others but often ending as politicized and emotive signifiers in the nationalist era. I have sought to use language labels where these are known to express both specific groups and large language families such as those of Austronesian (Malayo‐Polynesian) and Tai. “Thai” is restricted to those Tai further unified by the state commanding the Chao Phraya River. Ethnonyms do enter the literature before modern national iden-tities, but I have sought to illustrate the nature of their usage by quotation rather than assuming that they have independent meaning.

I use Viet for lowland speakers of the language I call Vietnamese, though their own way of distinguishing themselves from “non‐civilized” neighbors was (confusingly) as Han until the nineteenth century, while in the twentieth cen-tury Kinh (town‐dweller) became officially accepted. The Viet kingdom in Tongking I call Dai Viet, and the southern Viet kingdom of the Nguyen that blossomed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cochin‐China (as did foreigners at the time).

Variants of the vernacular terms “Myanma,” the written form, and “Bama,” the spoken form, have become as controversial as Burma’s politics. The English name for the country stabilized as Burma by the 1880s, and I have used that term for the state in all eras, despite Myanmar having been adopted by the country’s military rulers (but rejected by the then‐suppressed opposition) in

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1989. The name of the largest language and ethnic group within that state was often also called Burmese, though Burman was used by some when the ethno‐linguistic distinction needed emphasis in a multi‐ethnic state. Recent official usage has favored Bama as the term for the lowland majority language (though less so ethnicity), and I have adopted it in this book as an appropriate linguistic and ethnic self‐designation.

This book is intended to be lightly referenced, which has prevented me from adequately acknowledging the mountain of observation, insight, and scholarship on which it relies. If I were to begin to thank those from whom I have learned about Southeast Asia’s countless peoples and experiences there would be no end to it. Let me simply thank those who have read some or all of the text and helped me get the balance right – Mary Somers Heidhues, John Sidel, Eric Tagliocozzo, Bob Moore, David Marr, Craig Reynolds, Li Tana, Pierre van der Eng, and Nicholas Cheesman. As always Helen was an indispensable support, companion, and gentle critic.

Bob Moore was patient beyond all reasonable expectation in waiting for this long‐promised book in the series, and immensely helpful in steering it in an accessible direction. Tessa Harvey, Georgina Coleby, and their colleagues at Blackwell (which became Wiley Blackwell over the years) were most helpful in the publication process. Karina Pelling of CartoGIS at ANU drew wonderful maps. I am once again grateful to ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific for providing a generous welcome home for me since 2009. The Center for Southeast Asian Studies in Kyoto (2009–10) and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2012–13) provided wonderfully supportive and stimulating environ-ments in which to do much of the writing.

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A – Arabic; B – Bama; C – Chinese; D – Dutch; I – Indonesian; J – Javanese; Jp – Japanese; M – Malay; P – Portuguese; S – Spanish; Sk – Sanskrit; Tag – Tagalog; Th – Thai; V – Vietnamese.

áo dài (V) modernized (1920s) form of Vietnamese female dressbangsa (M/I) modern race or nation, from older descent or castebangsawan (M) modern staged theater in Malay, on Indian modelbelacan (M) garnish of fermented shrimp or other seafoodbissu (Bugis) transsexual shamanic priestblijver (D) stayer (migrants), as opposed to transient sojournersbungkus (M) lit. “bundle”; home‐made cigarettes with maize‐leaf

wrappercasado (P) locally domiciled [Portuguese with family]cash base Chinese‐style coin with square hole for stringing.

Anglicization of Portuguese caixachao (Th) lord of a muangchat (Th) race or nationcultuurstelsel (D) [forced] cultivation system, of export crops primarily in

Javadalang (J) puppeteer‐narratorÐàng Trong (V) “the inner region”; Cochin‐China or southern Viet Namdharma (Sk/Pali) cosmic law or order; in Buddhism, the teaching, way, or

dutyÐôi Mới (V) “new change”, Viet Nam reform program from 1986Han (C/V) common self‐identification of Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese

having adopted “civilized” norms (of the Han and other dynasties)

hát bội (V) Chinese‐derived classical Viet Nam theaterhui (C) (Chinese) association or societyilustrado (S) enlightened, in particular of elite Spanish‐educated

FilipinosIndië (D) India (the Indies, Indonesia)Jawi (A) Southeast Asian Muslimkadi (M/I) Islamic judge

Glossary

Glossary

xxiii

kaum muda (M/I) young groupkebaya (M) light female upper garment; blousekeroncong (I) hybrid musical style featuring a ukelele‐like instrumentkiwi (M) traveling merchant, or crew with share in cargokomedi (M) commercial popular performance (from French comédie)kongsi (C/M) a partnership or cooperative association, particularly for

business or mutual support (pinyin gongsi)kretek (I) clove cigarette (onomatopoeic)kris (M/J) wavy-bladed daggerlingga (Sk) symbolic male phallus, particularly emblematic of Shiva,

often paired with female yonilukjin (Th) Sino‐Thai, typically with Chinese father and Thai or local

mothermestizo (S) mixed, creole, particularly of Chinese‐Filipino hybridityMinh Hương (V) “Ming exiles”; long‐settled or hybridized Chinese in Viet

Nammuang (Th) autonomous polity based on a single irrigated rice areanagara (Sk) town, city, Indic‐style statenakhoda (M) supercargo or commander of a shipNanyang (C) South Seas; Southeast Asianat (B) unseen spirits, ubiquitous in Burmanegeri (M) settlement, trade center, river‐mouth statenôm (V) hybrid Viet‐Chinese script (from chữ nôm = southern

characters)Nusantara (M) The island world comprising today’s Indonesia and

Malaysia (from Malay nusa = islands; antara = between)orang laut (M) sea peopleorangkaya (M) merchant aristocrat (lit. rich person)padi (M/I) bunded rice field, flooded during growing seasonparian (Tag) Chinese quarter (of Manila)peranakan (M) local‐born (of foreign fathers), particularly of hybridized

Chinese Indonesianspongyi (B) (Theravada Buddhist) monkraja (M/Sk) king, rulerrantau (M) migrate, frontier of migrationromusha (Jp) volunteer, the term used for forced laborers deployed by

the Japanesesangha (Pali) the brotherhood of monks in Hinayana Buddhismsarsuela (Tag) light opera, musical romance (from Spanish zarzuela)sarung (M) wrap‐around lower garmentsawah (M/I) bunded and flooded rice fieldsawbwa (B) Shan hereditary chiefs of muang (from Shan Saopha)seishin (Jap) spiritshari’a (A) Islamic lawsiwilai (Th) civilized, or civilizationtarekat (M/I) a mystical order with similar ritual practice, from Tariqah

(A: way, method)

Glossary

xxiv

Tatmadaw (B) National Armed Forcestotok (C) China‐born, or by extension Europe‐born for Europeanstrepang (M/I) sea‐cucumber or bêche de mer, an echinoderm living on

the sea floor.ulama (A/M) scholar and teacher of Islamic texts (plural of ‘alim,

though used also as singular in Southeast Asia)uleebalang (Aceh) hereditary territorial chief in AcehVolksraad (D) “People’s Council,” legislative assembly of Netherlands

India, 1918–41wayang (J/M) theaterwayang kulit (J/M) “leather theater”; Javanese shadow puppet theaterwujuddiyah (A) a monist strain of Sufi mystical beliefyoni (Sk) symbolic vagina, representing female procreative energy

and matching male linggazhang (C) miasma; diseases attributed to dangerous atmosphere

of tropics

xxv

ABRI Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia; Armed Forces of the Indonesian Republic

AFPFL Anti‐Fascist People’s Freedom LeagueASA Association of Southeast AsiaASEAN Association of Southeast Asian NationsBCE Before the Common Era (bc)CE Common Era (ad)DRV Democratic Republic of Viet NamGCBA General Council of Buddhist (from 1920 Burmese) AssociationsICP Indochinese Communist PartyICS Independent Chinese Schools (Malaysia)ILO International Labor OrganizationISEAS Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, SingaporeJAS Journal of Asian StudiesJSEAS Journal of Southeast Asian StudiesKMT Kuo Min Tang (pinyin Guomindang) “National Peoples’ Party,” the

ruling nationalist party of China before 1949, and thereafter in TaiwanKPM Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij (Royal Packet Navigation

Company)MCP Malayan Communist PartyNGO Non‐Government OrganizationNIT Negara Indonesia Timur; State of East IndonesiaNU Nahdlatul UlamaPKI Partai Komunis IndonesiaPNI Partai Nasionalis IndonesiaPRB Partai Rakyat Brunei; Brunei People’s PartyPRC People’s Republic of ChinaPRRI Pemerintah Revolusioner Republik Indonesia (Revolutionary

Government of the Indonesian Republic – rebels of 1958–9)SEAC South‐East Asia CommandSLORC State Law and Order Restoration Council (Burma)UMNO United Malays National OrganizationVOC Vereenigde Oost‐Indische Compagnie; [Dutch] United East India

Company

abbreviations

A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads, First Edition. Anthony Reid. © 2015 Anthony Reid. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

1

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 through-out 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

[1] PeoPle in the humiD troPiCs

PeoPle in the humid troPics

2

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 popula-tions. 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 for-ests 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