Making Blood White: Historical Transformations in Early Modern Makassar

Conclusion: The Force of History

Written texts affect social worlds in a multiplicity of ways. The social life of Makassarese historical manuscripts, a world very different from our own, has been the main focus of this work. It has not been about the impact of literacy in early modern Makassar. Rather, it is about how writing histories—one facet of literacy to be sure—transformed history-making as a practice. The new status of the past, how it could be made present, and the effects of this new conceptualization are the heart of this transformation. Part 2 identified three major changes that transformed early modern Makassar. All were related to the spread of historical literacy. First, the advent, possession, and manipulation of written histories catalyzed and helped articulate a trend toward increasing social hierarchicalization. Second, the rising ability of Gowa’s elite to shape how Makassarese interpreted and made sense of their past aided a trend toward political centerization focused at Gowa. Third, the presence and use of written histories fostered a trend toward cultural codification , a trend that itself reinforced the social and political changes taking place in Makassar during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The written past facilitated fundamental transformations in early modern Makassar not because cognitive changes affected an ever-greater number of individuals, but because the Makassarese accorded written manuscripts and the past both social place and significance. “Literacy” does not cause change in a predictable fashion. It does not shift people from one track or path to another like an engineer’s switch. Rather, writing enables new perceptions and uses of what people choose to write— new mediums, new possibilities. In Makassar we see some of the first possibilities that writing presents exploited in ways that reflected the importance of the past to Makassarese. It is in the effects of the social Conclusion The Force of History deployment of this new form of knowledge that the significance of historical literacy is found. At the beginning of this work I wrote that it would seek to expand the range of explanations historians rely upon when they approach the early modern Southeast Asian past. In place of a growing consensus that commercial activities comprised the driving force behind the transformations that occurred during the early modern period, and that the early modern period in Southeast Asia is above all else an Age of Commerce, I argued that cultural forces and cultural meanings are of central importance in understanding the changes under way in Makassar. Certainly only a strained review of the literature in the field could produce a vision of Southeast Asian historians relentlessly pursuing economic and material causes to the exclusion of all else. There are, for example, the reflections of O. W. Wolters on the course Southeast Asian history has taken and his renewed call for understanding the region’s “cultural matrix.”1 Yet commerce is in no danger of being overthrown as the crowning historical force in the early modern period. Anthony Reid’s synthesis Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680 will surely become the standard reference in this vein, but it is the harvest of a long tradition of such work. In a lengthy 1993 article the historian Victor Lieberman also identi- fied a list of forces responsible for transforming Southeast Asia during the early modern period, which he defined as from 1350 to 1830. These included maritime trade (especially the influx of firearms), domestic economic change (especially agricultural expansion), local social developments (especially the spread of literacy), regional competition between states, and religious and cultural standardization (in the form of norms disseminated from political centers). Collectively these forces were responsible for the most evident developments of the early modern period: territorial consolidation into large states and increased administrative integration within them. “In sum, I am arguing that political integration derived strength from an interlocking set of intellectual, economic , and social changes in the local environment.”2 Yet while Lieberman proposes a framework for understanding the period somewhat more expansive than Anthony Reid’s, here too the focus is on observable activities, on the collective patterns of behavior most amenable to the type of historical investigation privileging economic forces that Reid practiced. A recent article by David Wyatt also questioned the focus on trade as the principal instigator of social change in early Southeast Asia, but 196 h Conclusion h instead of expanding the list...