Pierre-Yves Manguin wrote:
Introduction and Historiography
The emergence of states in Southeast Asia has long remained linked to factors external to the region, and local agency in this process was barely considered. In Insular Southeast Asia, as in most of Continental Southeast Asia, the process termed “Indianization” (or “Hinduization”) was claimed to be the sole foundation for state formation. In the 1920s onward, Indian scholars such as R. C. Majumdar asserted that quiescent, passive Southeast Asian societies would have, with no transition, found themselves enlightened by the imposition of a great civilization from overseas, in a process often described as a “colonization”. Contemporary European scholars ended up providing in the 1960s a more affable version of the events; prominent among these was George Cœdès, who acknowledged that Southeast Asian societies, thought to have remained in a late Neolithic phase when they came into contact with India, did manage to preserve “the essentials of their individual cultures and developed them, each according to their own genius”. However, major political and economic developments remained pinned to a deus ex machina: state formation and all socioeconomic progress could only have followed the sudden adoption in Southeast Asia, starting around the third to fifth century AD, in subsequent waves, of this Indian cultural package. As perceptions of Southeast Asian history evolved in time, historians revised earlier radical views, shying from univocal explanations of political developments disseminated by Brahmans, warriors and/or merchants from South Asia. They progressively assigned local political developments to a manifold process, with a variety of incentives and outcomes, showing that local rulers and their people, far from being passive recipients of imported cultural traits, played an active part in such sociopolitical transformations.
There has been in Southeast Asian studies a considerable amount of debate about the socioeconomic typology of such early historic polities, and the transition phase leading from chiefdoms to states. Historians … [have] provided broad overall analyses of the nature of state formation and urbanization; epigraphers and philologists, basing themselves on the few early inscriptions available, also had their say in the matter. Finally, anthropologically minded archaeologists, some of them familiar with comparable fields of study elsewhere in the world provided various functional models for this process, following different schools of thought. Mostly complementary models were offered over the years: concentric, mandala-like polities; amorphous political structures with powerful, movable centers and extended peripheries; or dendritic, upland–lowland models have all found their way into scholarly literature and will no doubt continue to be updated as new finds are brought to light by both epigraphers and field archaeologists.
All these studies, however, could not yet take into consideration the results of intense archaeological work carried out in the past decades on the historiographical no man’s land that led from relatively simple prehistoric societies to increasingly complex protohistoric polities. The latter chiefdoms now appeared not to be cut off from transformations and developments in world economy taking place elsewhere in Asia at the turn of the first millennium. As a consequence of economically vibrant exchange patterns, coastal societies progressively adopted sets of common cultural values, and the capture and consolidation of such exchange networks across the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea facilitated the emergence of power relations within the region. Ian Glover’s pioneering essay of 1990 emphasized what he described as “a link in the development of a World Trading System” and set this trend in motion.
[Glover, I. C. (1990) Early Trade between India and Southeast Asia: A Link in the Development of a World Trading System. Hull: University of Hull, Centre for Southeast Asian Studies — interesting never heard about it though published the year I was employed by SOAS and converted from Latin America to Southeast Asian studies]
This is not to say that the Indianization concept needs to be set aside as a historiographical cul-de-sac. The relationship with South Asia was essential in the protohistoric phase of Southeast Asian history and would remain even more so in the following phase. As the political situation evolved in eastern and southern India at the turn of the first millennium AD, with more complex states taking hold of the region, culminating in the brilliant Gupta Empire, Indian culture became particularly attractive to societies and rulers in need of prestigious political and religious models. Shipmasters and sea merchants from both sides of the Bay of Bengal, not to speak of traveling artisans and of Buddhist monks of various origins and backgrounds, must have then been in a favorable position to act as cultural brokers. The sudden acceleration of the cultural borrowing process around the mid-first millennium AD is better understood now as the outcome of this vibrant period, during which the agency of coastal Southeast Asian societies is buttressed by thriving long-distance trade networks.
During the early or incipient state period that follows, almost all discernible economic activities take place along the maritime façade of the islands, in coastal sites connecting maritime networks with forest hinterlands rich in trade commodities. As their predecessors, most of these settlements were still largely built in wood, with houses on stilts, on moving and unstable riparian environments. These are not the easiest sites to bring to light and to excavate, which may partly explain the dearth of archaeological data on the period. Polities that precede the notable monumental and inscriptional developments of the late seventh to eighth centuries are however documented by some elusive Indian references to Suvarnadvipa (the Island of Gold) and by a growing set of more detailed Chinese sources, which, however, provide information that is far from always being reconcilable with field data.
The available evidence is therefore far from sufficient and too unequal to draw definite conclusions out of a brief survey of the data available on these incipient states of Insular Southeast Asia. Rather than follow a strict chronological or geographical order, I will therefore concentrate on those areas where better (if insufficient) archaeological and textual evidence is available to document the state formation process, and only then try to see whether the scattered data gathered for other areas can be made sense of, and garnered to recognize comparable processes. Short of always providing enough data to decide on the political status of such polities, this will at least partly disclose the context in which such transformations were taking place.
[There follow sections on Srivijaya, Thai-Malay Peninsula, Java, Bali, Borneo, Sulawesi]
CONCLUSIONS
Some of the coastal social groups that thrived in late prehistoric and protohistoric times in close relationship with exchange networks clearly developed into early forms of state. This factor explains why all such early historic states are coastal polities. Some of these appear to have kept their early state features for long, possibly living in the periphery of more centralized and mature state systems. Other social groups, in the hinterland forests as well as in wetland, estuarine environments, both nomadic hunter-gatherers and permanent settlers, did not take the path of state formation, many of them until modern times. They did however, complement their income by passing social contracts with coastal state-oriented polities from which they obtained manufactured goods and salt, and to which they provided a wide variety of forest or marine commodities in great demand in international trade networks.
We have only analysed here those potential early states that grew in the early historic period, when one is witness to a process where religion produces its first material testimonies in the form of inscriptions, rock carvings of stupas, and eventually some simple temples; where political economy of former chiefdoms coalesces into royal lineages who exercised control over trade good economies; where cities make their appearance (at least by name); and where armies are called on to absorb neighboring competitors. Such a process, it should be stressed, may also be observed in peripheral areas of Insular Southeast Asia in later times, all along the first and during much of the second millennium (one well-documented such example, both in textual sources and in the archaeological field is that of fourteenth- to seventeenth-century Luwu, in South Sulawesi.
The main problem encountered in the study of the early historic states is that of the partial disjunction between historical and archaeological evidence. Can an isolated statue and a few religious short inscriptions, even if the accompanying shrine has been brought to light, be automatically associated with a polity complex enough to be termed a state? The answer is clearly no, as small size ports-of-trade may well have been installed some distance upstream from the mouth of a river or along a favorable track of coastline by a group of merchants of the corresponding religious obedience, to channel a specific hinterland commodity into trade networks, in the absence of any indigenous, institutionalized bureaucracy, in a political setup that can barely be considered as a chieftaincy. Such a situation has been observed in Lobu Tua (Barus) in the ninth to eleventh centuries, where we have an enclave of mainly Tamil and Javanese traders taking hold of the camphor and gold trade to feed it into a specialized cosmopolitan, maritime network.
Any reader of Joseph Conrad’s short stories will be familiar with such small trading outposts led by a Malay-speaking chief (datu) sitting in a small palisaded kampung, whose only outreach was the river’s upstream non-Malay societies with whom he entered into a mutual benefit contract, but did not rule upon.
[MGH: Indeed! I have read all of them more than once, and would also recommend the somewhat less politically-correct and of less consistent quality ‘Malay Stories’ by his contemporary, Somerset Maugham — SEAsia evolved so slowly that the trading and kampung scenarios of late 19th and early 20th centuries so vividly portrayed by these novelists probably had not changed much in centuries.]
Only when the density of surviving temples and religious paraphernalia is large enough, or when the density of settlements is adequate, can we hypothesize that a ruler has taken over a central place (a kadatuan of some sort, as observed in seventh-century Srivijaya), has set up an administration, taken control of armed forces to impose his overlordship over competing rulers, and finally managed to attract international merchants to his harbor-settlement. Only when epigraphs are present and refer to such a political state of affairs or when contemporary exogenous (mostly Chinese) texts complement our data, can one be more conclusive, albeit at the risk of overinterpreting often skimpy and ambiguous sources. In most areas presented earlier, however, the available data sets lack some of the crucial elements necessary to firmly document a state-formation process comparable to that of southeast Sumatra or West Java, and to precisely determine who were the agents of such sociopolitical transformations. As many socioeconomic developments clearly appear to have been intimately linked to an increasing participation of these societies into an expanding set of regional and long-distance exchange networks, their geographic and environmental position along the chain of producers, shippers, and consumers of the rich trade commodities available in the region was decisive.
What is nevertheless apparent in Insular Southeast Asian developments, is the need to stop adhering strictly to rigid, unilinear models developed elsewhere in the world, notwithstanding their heuristic value. State formation in Insular Southeast Asia appears to be a long-term, adaptive process, showing variations from place to place, depending on an array of factors, largely developed from below, but gaining momentum with the adaptation of state ideologies borrowed from India. The interpretation of Sanskrit terms used in the earliest inscriptions to designate new forms of urban, centralized settlements (nagara, pura or puri) from which newly “Indianized” rulers establish their power remain speculative to this day, pending the exposure of urban settlements by archaeologists, as such terms are borrowed from Indian practices where they may denote different analytical categories. Only when Srivijaya is established in the 680s, when vernacular terms are used for such central place features, can one observe the transition into broader forms of social complexity, for which imported terms for innovative structures are adopted.
Only the advent, starting in the eighth century, of the more mature polities that built large temple complexes and left a sizable number of inscriptions allows historians to better document state-related political, religious, and administrative practices (mostly in Java, by far the richest island for such sources), notwithstanding, here again, the dearth of archaeological excavations of settlement sites. By then, most of the inscriptions emanate from inland polities largely built on an agrarian basis, with a need for tax-oriented territorial markers. Different state-formation processes can then be distinguished: trade-oriented states in coastal environments such as Srivijaya, where agricultural surpluses from rice-growing could not be extracted to supplement the economy, in partial continuity with the early states described earlier, and land-based, mainly agrarian economies such as Mataram in Java, which will alone develop into an even more sophisticated state, Majapahit. [END]
The Source:
Pierre-Yves Manguin, ‘Early States of Insular Southeast Asia’, in The Oxford Handbook of: Early Southeast Asia, edited by C. F. W. Higham and Nam C. Kim, Oxford 2022
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