Urbanism in the Preindustrial World: Cross-Cultural Approaches

11. Population Dynamics and Urbanism in Premodern Island Southeast Asia

At the time of European contact, the Malay peninsula and island archipelagos of insular Southeast Asia were dotted with numerous maritime trading kingdoms of varying scale and complexity. These kingdoms lay at the intersection of sea routes linking China, mainland Southeast Asia, India, East Africa, and the Middle East in a vast network of spice and luxury goods trade (Figure 11-1). In the ¤fteenth and sixteenth centuries, these maritime trading polities centered on coastal capitals such as Palembang, Melaka, Johor, Brunei, Manila, Ternate , Majapahit, Makassar, Kedah, and Jolo, impressively scaled cities that controlled the ®ow of tropical forest products and raw materials from the island interiors for export to China and other foreign lands in exchange for luxury goods. Some of the indigenous states and complex chiefdoms had trade interactions with the Chinese that date to at least the early to mid-¤rst millennium AD, resulting in a substantial body of Chinese literature on speci¤c polities. In addition, many of these Southeast Asian maritime trading kingdoms adopted Sanskrit-based writing systems (but in Malay script) from their Indic trade partners. Therefore, we have a substantial number of both contact-period European records and early non-European texts going back more than a millennium with information on polity location, scale, and trade relations in these island Southeast Asian complex societies. These historical sources provide quantitative and qualitative data relevant to issues of demography, population dynamics, and processes of urbanization in the early kingdoms and chiefdoms of the region. Work by historians shows that the complex societies present in the island archipelagos of Southeast Asia at the time of European contact developed in a region with comparatively low population densities relative to land, with an average of fewer than six persons per sq km. Competition between political leaders focused on commanding labor rather than on commandeering land, which may explain the strong emphasis on alliance-building activities such as prestige-goods exchanges, ritualized feasting, and religious pageantry aimed at social cohesion in Southeast Asian complex societies. Cultural features related to environments, popu11 Population Dynamics and Urbanism in Premodern Island Southeast Asia Laura Lee Junker Figure 11-1. Location of historically known tenthto sixteenth-century political centers in Southeast Asia and major maritime and overland trade routes. lation distributions, and traditional economic modes tended to constrain intergenerational continuity in political leadership and to promote frequent ¤ssioning of political factions, resulting in the notoriously unstable political units that are at the core of anthropological conceptualizations of these polities as “segmentary states” (Southall 1988), “galactic polities” (Tambiah 1976), and “theater states” (Geertz 1980b). Thus, demographic factors were key variables in how political systems and political economies were structured in island Southeast Asian states. At the same time, historic sources also indicate that island Southeast Asian polities of the ¤rst millennium to mid-second millennium AD were highly urbanized , with many coastal maritime trading ports housing 20 percent or more of the total population of the state. Chinese accounts of the ¤rst millennium AD described large-scale, cosmopolitan ports with extensive administrative and religious architecture, housing for both local nobility and foreign traders, craft production areas, and market locales. These “primate” centers controlled in various ways dendritically organized networks of villages and towns radiating along rivers into the mountainous interior hinterlands of the island, often economically if not politically integrating ethnically and linguistically diverse tribal swiddening populations , hunter-gatherer groups, and lowland farmers into extensive trade webs. In this chapter, I will use historical and archaeological evidence to examine some of the factors that may have been signi¤cant in the maintenance of low population densities but high levels of urbanism in early island Southeast Asian complex societies, as well as how these demographic factors contributed to the unique forms of political structure and political economy found in these maritime trading polities. Unfortunately, archaeological research has not matched historical and ethnographic studies in addressing questions of complex society formation, population dynamics, and urbanism in Southeast Asia. Few premodern island Southeast Asian cities have received any systematic archaeological attention, and for many historically well-known polities, such as seventh- to eleventh-century Srivijaya, archaeologists have yet to even unequivocally locate the polity capital. In addition , Southeast Asian archaeology has lagged behind that of other regions in the world in implementing programs of systematic regional-scale research, resulting in few settlement pattern studies to put archaeologically known cities within a larger regional context. However...