Maritime Southeast Asia to 1500 (review)

For world historians studying the premodern period, the integration of Southeast Asia has long proven to be fraught with difficulties. At least in part owing to the relative youth of the field, few historians have ventured to write broad histories of the region. Nonspecialists who wish to understand more about the region are forced either to rely on the few, and generally inadequate, overviews available, or else to sift through an often bewildering mass of local studies and theoretical debates that characterize the field. As a result, the integration of South-east Asia into textbooks and courses on world history has generally remained unsatisfactory.

Maritime Southeast Asia to 1500 by Lynda Norene Shaffer is an attempt to remedy these difficulties. A world historian herself, Shaffer states that the primary purpose of the book is "to introduce to a world history audience that part of maritime Southeast Asia's history that seems most critical to our concerns" (p. xv). She does so by outlining some of the central features of the Southeast Asian maritime realm from around the first century C.E. through the Javanese Majapahit period (1292-1528). By highlighting the involvement of Southeast Asian polities in global trade, Shaffer aims to show the extent to which the region was shaped by and at the same time helped shape the dynamics of global trade. Maritime Southeast Asia, which Shaffer defines as consisting of the Malay Peninsula, the Vietnamese coast, and the present-day states of Indonesia and the Philippines, was actively involved in a network of interregional trade as early as the first millennium B.C.E. She traces the involvement of the region in larger trading networks by focusing on the centers of Funan, Srivijaya, central Java, and east Java.

Taking a roughly chronological approach, Shaffer begins by pointing out some of the early contributions of Malay sailors to naval technologies, such as the balance-lug sail and the design of the jong (from which the English word junk is derived). She then turns to Funan and Srivijaya, setting their fortunes in a larger context of trade that included India, China, western Asia, and the Mediterranean. The remainder of the book focuses on the island of Java. Here, the task of linking the rise of central and east Javanese kingdoms to global trading patterns becomes more difficult because, unlike Funan and Srivijaya, the agriculturally based Javanese kingdoms were more inward-looking. Trade, although important, particularly for Majapahit, was not as central to Javanese polities as it was in Funan and Srivijaya. Nevertheless, Shaffer explains the relationship of the central Javanese Sailendras to Srivijaya and attempts to show how the eastern Javanese kingdom of Majapahit was linked to an expanding international market.

Unfortunately, the book is plagued by problems and factual errors, many of which are obvious to specialists of the region but may not be so readily apparent to world historians for whom the book is intended. Even the geographical focus is unbalanced in favor of the island of Java, to which Shaffer devotes nearly half of the book. Only two other areas, Funan and Srivijaya, receive any indepth discussion, and readers are left wondering if anything at all happened in the Philippines after prehistoric times. The book attempts to integrate the region into world history by focusing on trade, yet seaborne trade in agriculturally oriented Java was hardly of more importance than it was for some polities on mainland Southeast Asia that Shaffer does not discuss. Indeed, Java, and in particular central Java, has more in common in this regard with political centers such as Angkor and Sukhothai than with Srivijaya, for which trade was an extremely important factor. Yet the rise of Melaka, an important center of trade from the fifteenth century onward, is accorded only passing notice.

Shaffer's book is also disappointing in the very area where it promises...