A History of Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1400–1830 by Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya (review)

This is a work of great distinction. That was only to be expected, given the expertise in the field of the two authors. Barbara Andaya’s earlier books include a work on Peninsular Malaya in the eighteenth century, Perak: The Abode of Grace (1979), and one on Southeast Sumatra in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, To Live as Brothers (1993). Leonard Andaya published The Kingdom of Johore 1641–1728 in 1975, The Heritage of Arung Palaka in 1981, The World of Maluku in 1993 and Leaves of the Same Tree in 2008. The two authors have worked alongside each other, and also together: their well-known history of Malaysia (2001) precedes the present work.

Adding the two accumulations of expertise together has resulted in a book that is more than the sum of its parts. However their collaboration has been achieved — and even a stylistic analyst could probably not tell — it has produced what could be considered a kind of summation of their endeavours, if only that description did not suggest something more pompous or pretentious than a book that is easy to read, free of jargon, full of insights and studded with apt quotations.

Structuring such surveys, as your reviewer knows only too well, is problematic: authors face what Herbert Butterfield called the challenge of “abridgment”. Periodization is essential, despite the requirements of continuity and the untidiness of the past. In a diverse region that is yet recognized as possessing some kind of unity, it is necessary to deal in geographical divisions as well as chronological ones.

The work begins by discussing the validity of the concepts of “Southeast Asia” and, more innovatively, of “early modern” as a descriptor borrowed from the historiography of Europe. Both concepts, the Andayas recognize, are relatively recent, the first taking hold only in the decades after the Pacific War, the second advanced only as recently as the 1990s. Their book will help that second concept to take hold, too.

The chronological divisions that the authors have chosen are the basis of a succession of chapters that follow an initial discussion of the geographical environment. Chapter Two outlines the “antecedents” of early modern Southeast Asia. Chapter Three deals with the “beginning of an era, 1400–1511”, Chapter Four with the “acceleration of change, 1511–1600”, Chapter Five with “expanding global links and their impact on Southeast Asia, 1600–1690s”. The title of Chapter Six is “new boundaries and changing regimes, 1690s–1780s”. The “last phase” is covered in Chapter Seven, on the period 1780s–1830s.

The chronological divisions have a certain familiarity, but older works would have given their chapters different titles, and their contents would have had different emphases. For example, 1511 is the year in which the Portuguese captured Melaka but, as the Andayas once again show, that did not make the following century a “Portuguese period”. The year 1600 marked the founding of the English East India Company and 1602 that of the Dutch company. But, though the latter was to have so much impact on island Southeast Asia, the seventeenth was not a “Dutch century”.

The second means of “abridgment” that the Andayas adopt, that by geography, helps them to analyse what happened in each of the periods that their chapters discuss. Here their approach is strikingly novel. History, as taught, and even as researched, is still bound up with the nation-state, and it is tempting to consider the history of mainland Southeast Asia in the terms of the three major states that came to dominate it and still do so. That temptation the Andayas avoid by dividing the region into “zones”. And that division also enables them to achieve another of their objectives, to give more attention than most to the history of the peoples on the borders within and between the major states, difficult as it is to find adequate sources for their history...