In researching about “Srivijaya” recently, I have been reading about Southeast Asian history in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and I’ve come to realize something that I had not thought of before: There was big-time imperialism taking place in Southeast Asia before the European white boys showed up and tried to gain control of the spice trade.
Now that I can see that Sanfoqi, the placename in Chinese sources that people think refers to “Srivijaya,” actually refers to Cambodia, there are various issues that have become clear to me, that I was not aware of before.
The first one is that Javanese attacked Angkor in the late 1360s and controlled territory in the Cambodian world for decades after that point.
There is a Javanese historical source, the Nagarakretagama, which indicates that by the mid-fourteenth century the Javanese kingdom of Majapahit had already kicked ass on a lot of its neighbors in the island world and claimed authority over their territories, however, the fact that Javanese also beat up on Angkor and grabbed some Cambodian territory was new information for me.
The place that the Javanese controlled was known to Chinese as Old Port, and in the late 1300s there were thousands of Chinese who settled there as well. This was not “state-sponsored” colonization, but in the early 1400s the Ming did officially recognize some of the Chinese “chiefs” (toumu 頭目) in Old Port.
That the Cambodians allowed these foreigners to occupy some of the territory they claimed authority over was probably in part due to the fact that they were busy trying to fight off the Siamese, who I can now see probably attacked and captured Angkor on multiple occasions over a period of several decades.
Meanwhile, the Siamese beat up on lots of other people as well, as the new polity of Ayutthaya went around attacking neighboring polities to demand their submission. They attacked polities in the area of what is now northern Thailand, and they headed down the peninsula as well.
I have a theory that the Songkhla area was still an important trans-peninsular trading center, and my hunch is that the expansion of Ayutthaya brought that area under Siamese control.
It is in this context that I think we need to see the rise of Melaka in the early 1400s, as some of the trade that had previously gone overland across the Kra Isthmus was now redirected southward through the Straits of Melaka. The Siamese eventually figured this out, and attacked Melaka in the 1440s.
The ruling elite of Melaka, however, had their own imperial ambitions. One interesting detail I came across in a Ming Dynasty source is that in the early 1400s the ruler of Melaka asked the Ming emperor to grant him Old Port, but the emperor did not agree to do so, as he knew that it was under Javanese authority.
Then, of course, we know that the Vietnamese went and clobbered the Cham in 1471 and claimed territory. And finally, we could probably include the history of the Hanthawaddy Kingdom in this story of imperial conquest as well.
I’m sure that I could find still more examples, but what we can see here is that in the long century from roughly 1370-1470, Southeast Asia was a region of big-time imperial efforts to conquer areas and to control trade, precisely the stuff that we are taught to associate with Europeans. . .
However, a couple of boatloads of Portuguese capturing Melaka in 1511 was nothing compared to the *&#^ that had been going down in the region for the century+ before that point.
So why haven’t people talked about an “Age of Premodern Southeast Asian Imperialism”? (Let me know if I’ve missed such a characterization, but I just see works on “the age of commerce,” the “early modern period,” and topics such as “warfare” in general.)
Historians working in the “Western” academy haven’t talked about this, I would argue, because there is a strong liberal bias in much of the extant English-language scholarship on premodern Southeast Asian history.
Just as nationalist historians inverted colonial-era paradigms to present the former-colonized as the heroes and the colonizers as the villains, so can we find in many English-language writings on premodern Southeast Asian history a similar dichotomy, where the Southeast Asians are the good guys, and the Europeans who arrive on the scene are the bad guys.
As I see it, however, Majapahit and Ayutthaya were not exactly kingdoms of innocent angels. Instead, they were empires that were as focused on conquest and domination as any other empires in the world at that time. Yes, that’s right, they were imperialists. So why don’t we call them that?
I think it’s important that we question the way that the Southeast Asian past has been characterized in English-language scholarship because these days I keep coming across calls to “decolonize” or “decolonialize” knowledge about Southeast Asian history. I get the point of those calls, but I think they are destined to remain unfulfilled because they stem from a liberal critique that overlaps with the liberal post-colonial Western representation of the Southeast Asian past, which in turn perpetuates inverted colonial-era knowledge paradigms.
This overlap will lead those who wish to decolonize/decolonialize Southeast Asian history to continue to employ representations of the past that were developed by the post-colonial-era Western scholars whom they theoretically wish to move beyond.
So, in other words, to truly decolonize/decolonialize knowledge about Southeast Asian history, you have to simultaneously de-liberalize it, because many current representations of the Southeast Asian past in English-language scholarship are liberal inversions of colonial-era paradigms.
However, I don’t think that this is going to happen because the current call to decolonize/decolonialize and the earlier mission to represent Southeast Asia in a positive light share the same liberal impulses.
So, we shouldn’t expect to see anyone writing about an age of premodern Southeast Asian imperialism anytime soon.
Imperialism is going to continue to be something that other people did, not premodern Southeast Asians.
So I think there is rather a different thing happening here. I think a lot of the mystery is that modern historians often do not have the classical civilization background that was shared by virtually all academics or professionals up until roughly the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Not that I necessarily thing it is a bad thing, but it does make discussions of Imperialism become highly abstracted from the specific Roman legal forms, “Imperium” meaning something similar to Jurisdiction, Command, Assignment, with relations to the victorious general sense of “Imperator”.
Colonia as well, was a settlement of Roman veterans, either in a new city or as a quasi garrison in a renamed older one. It is the source of the modern city name Cologne.
But the gist is that when European power spread, especially in the mid to late 19th centuries were many literal parts of the Roman Empire were occupied/colonized by European powers, Roman comparisons became omnipresent cliches. This is as true with detractors as well as critics, and retains something of this status today (there is a DS9 episode where Doctor Bashir talks about this vis a vis the Romulans and Federation).
But there was a separate division as well, across both the critics and supporters: Whether the past was directly analogous to the present, or whether there were fundamentally new forces at work.
The recent change is that, with less focus on the particular Roman institutions, the signifier has become substantially hazier than a particular analogy to a particular widely understood state structure to help to explain a newer or less understood one.
For instance, you implicitly define imperialism as the general activity of “bureaucratic conquest states”, while the people you criticize use imperialism as sort of “great power cultural and military hegemony over external regions”.