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- Early society and accomplishments
- The classical period
- Patterns of a colonial age
- Contemporary Southeast Asia
Patterns of a colonial age
Crisis and response
In the last half of the 18th century, all the major states of Southeast Asia were faced with crisis. The great political and social structures of the classical states had begun to decay, and, although the reasons for this disintegration are not altogether clear, the expanded size of the states, the greater complexity of their societies, and the failure of older institutions to cope with change all must have played a part. It is also likely that European efforts to choke and redirect the region’s trade had already done much to destroy the general prosperity that trade previously had provided, though Europeans were neither ubiquitous nor in a position to rule, even in Java. The most serious circumstances were undoubtedly those of Vietnam, where from 1771 to 1802 there raged a struggle—the Tay Son rebellion—over the very nature of the state. This rebellion threatened to sweep away the entire Confucian establishment of Vietnam, and perhaps would have done so if its leader had not attempted to accomplish too much too quickly. Elsewhere, war and confusion held societies in their grip for much shorter periods, but everywhere rulers were compelled to think of changed circumstances around them and what they meant for the future.
In the mainland states three great rulers of three new dynasties came to the fore: Bodawpaya (ruled 1782–1819) in Myanmar, Rama I (1782–1809) in Siam (Thailand), and Gia Long (1802–20) in Vietnam. All three were fully aware of the dangers, internal as well as external, that faced them and their people, and their efforts were directed at meeting these challenges. As their armies extended their reach beyond earlier limits, these rulers vigorously pursued a combination of traditional and new policies designed to strengthen their realms. Of particular importance were efforts to bring villages under closer state control, curb shifting patron-client relationships, and centralize and tighten the state administrative apparatus. The institution of kingship itself seemed to become more dynamic and intimately involved in the direction of the state. In retrospect, some of these policies had a recognizably modern ring to them, and, taken together, they represented, if not a revolution, at least a concerted effort at change. Even Gia Long, whose conscience and circumstance both demanded that he give special attention to reviving the classical Confucian past, quietly incorporated selected Western and Tay Son ideas in his government. Nor were the changes ineffectual, for by 1820 the large mainland states stood at the height of their powers. Nevertheless, it was uncertain whether these efforts would be sufficient to withstand the pressures of the immediate future.
In insular Southeast Asia the Javanese state confronted a similar crisis, but it had far less freedom with which to respond. The Gianti Agreement (1755) had divided the realm and given the Dutch decisive political and economic powers. Though resistance was not impossible, it was difficult, especially since the rulers and their courts were now largely beholden to the Dutch for their positions. The elite’s response to these circumstances generally has been interpreted as a kind of cultural introversion and avoidance of reality, a judgment that probably is too harsh. The Javanese culture and society of earlier days was no longer serviceable, and court intellectuals sought to find a solution in both a revitalization of the past and a clear-eyed examination of the present. Neither effort was successful, though not for want of trying. The idea of opposing Dutch rule, furthermore, was not abandoned entirely, and it was only the devastating Java War (1825–30) that finally tamed the Javanese elite and, oddly enough, left the Dutch to determine the final shape of Javanese culture until the mid-20th century.
Except in Java and much of the Philippines, the expansion of Western colonial rule in most of Southeast Asia was a phenomenon only of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. In the earlier period Europeans tended to acquire territory as a result of complicated and not always desired entanglements with Southeast Asian powers, either in disputes or as a result of alliances. After about 1850, Western forces generally were more invasive, requiring only feeble justification for going on the attack. The most important reasons for the change were a growing Western technological superiority, an increasingly powerful European mercantile community in Southeast Asia, and a competitive scramble for strategic territory. Only Siam remained largely intact and independent. By 1886 the rest of the region had been divided among the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish (who soon were replaced by the Americans), with the Portuguese still clinging to the island of Timor. What were often called “pacification campaigns” were actually colonial wars—notably in Burma (Myanmar), Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia—and continued well into the 20th century. More peaceful Western encroachments on local sovereignty also occurred until the 1920s. Full-blown, modern colonial states existed for only a short period, in many cases for not much more than a generation.
These colonial regimes, however, were not insubstantial, as they put down strong bureaucratic roots and—though often co-opting existing administrative apparatuses—formed centralized disciplined structures of great power. They were backed by the enormous economic resources of the industrialized Western nations, and by the early 20th century, having effectively disarmed the indigenous societies, they possessed a monopoly on the means of violence. There is no mistaking the impact of Western colonial governments on their surroundings, and nowhere is this more evident than in the economic sphere. Production of tin, oil, rubber, sugar, rice, tobacco, coffee, tea, and other commodities burgeoned, driven by both government and private activity. This brought rapid changes to the physical and human landscape and coupled Southeast Asia to a new worldwide capitalist system.
Indeed, colonial domination was only a variant condition in a rapidly changing world. Siam, which through a combination of circumstance and the wise leadership of Mongkut (ruled 1851–68) and Chulalongkorn (1868–1910) avoided Western rule, nevertheless was compelled to adopt policies similar to, and often even modeled on, those of the colonial powers in order to survive. Modernization appeared to require such an approach, and the Thai did not hesitate to embrace it with enthusiasm. Bangkok in the late 1920s surpassed even British Singapore as a centre of such modern amenities as electric lighting and medical facilities, and the state itself had achieved an enviable degree of political and economic viability among its colonial neighbours. The Thai may have “colonized themselves,” as some critics have noted, but in so doing they also escaped or diluted some of the more corrosive characteristics of Western rule, among them racism and cultural destruction. They also do not appear to have experienced the same degree of rural unrest that troubled their colonial neighbours in the 1920s and ’30s. They were unable, however, to avoid other concomitants of state expansion and modernization.
Transformation of state and society
It was not the purpose of the new states to effect rapid or broad social change. Their primary concerns were extending bureaucratic control and creating the conditions for success in a capitalist world economy; the chief necessity was stability or, as the Dutch called it, rust en orde (“tranquility and order”). Boundaries were drawn, villages defined, laws rewritten—all along Western lines of understanding, often completely disregarding indigenous views and practices—and the new structure swiftly replaced the old. Social change was desired only insofar as it might strengthen these activities. Thus, the Thai began early on to send princes to Europe for their education, employing them throughout the government on their return. The Dutch created exclusive schools for the indigenous administrative elite—a kind of petty royalty—and invented ways of reducing social mobility in this group, as, for example, by making important positions hereditary. But the new governments did not provide Western-style learning to most Southeast Asians, primarily because it was an enormous, difficult, and expensive task and also because policymakers worried about the social and political consequences of creating an educated class. Except in the Philippines, by the mid-1930s only a small percentage of indigenous children attended government-run schools, and only a fraction of those studied above the primary-school level. Some Southeast Asian intellectuals soon drew the conclusion that they had better educate themselves, and they began establishing their own schools with modern, secular courses of study. Some, like the Tonkin Free School in Vietnam (1907), were closed by the colonial regimes, their staffs and pupils hounded by police; others, like the many so-called “wild schools” in Indonesia in the 1930s, were much too numerous to do away with altogether, but they were controlled as carefully as possible.
Nevertheless, during the 1920s and ’30s a tiny but thoughtful and active class of Westernized Southeast Asian intellectuals appeared. They were not the first to literally and figuratively speak the language of the colonial rulers and criticize them, for by the turn of the 20th century Java and Luzon, with the longest experience under Western rule, had already produced individuals like the Javanese noblewoman Raden Adjeng Kartini and the Filipino patriot José Rizal. The newer generation, however, was more certain in its opposition to colonial rule (or, in Siam, rule by the monarchy), clearer and far more political in its conception of a nation, and unabashedly determined to seize leadership and initiative in their own societies. In Burma this group called themselves thakin (Burmese: “master”), making both sarcastic and proud use of an indigenous word that had been reserved for Burmese to employ when addressing or describing Europeans. These new intellectuals were not so much anti-Western as they were anticolonial. They accepted the existing state as the foundation of a modern nation, which they, rather than colonial officials, would control. This was the generation that captained the struggles for independence (in Siam, independence from the monarchy) and emerged in the post-World War II era as national leaders. The best-known figures are Sukarno of Indonesia, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, and U Nu of Burma (subsequently Myanmar).
The chief problem facing the new intellectuals lay in reaching and influencing the wider population. Colonial governments feared this eventuality and worked to prevent it. Another obstacle was that the ordinary people, especially outside cities and towns, inhabited a different social and cultural world from that of the emerging leaders. Communication was difficult, particularly when it came to explaining such concepts as nationalism and modernization. Still, despite Western disbelief, there was considerable resentment of colonial rule at the lower levels of society. This was based largely on perceptions that taxes were too numerous and too high, bureaucratic control too tight and too prone to corruption, and labour too coercively extracted. In many areas there also was a deep-seated hatred of control by foreigners, whether they be the Europeans themselves or the Chinese, Indians, or others who were perceived as creatures of their rule. Most of the new intellectual elite were only vaguely aware of these sentiments, which in any case frequently made them uneasy; in a sense they, too, were foreigners.
In the 1930s, however, a series of anticolonial revolts took place in Burma, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Though they failed in their objectives, these revolts made it clear that among the masses lay considerable dissatisfaction and, therefore, radical potential. The revolts, and the economic disarray of the Great Depression, also suggested that European rule was neither invulnerable nor without flaws. When the outbreak of war in Europe and the Pacific showed that the colonial powers were much weaker militarily than had been imagined, destroying colonial rule and harnessing the power of the masses seemed for the first time to be real possibilities.
The arrival of the Japanese armed forces in Southeast Asia in 1941–42 did not, however, occasion independence. A few leaders perhaps had been naive enough to think that it might—and some others clearly admired the Japanese and found it acceptable to work with them—but on the whole the attitude of intellectuals was one of caution and, very quickly, realization that they were now confronted with another, perhaps more formidable and ferocious, version of colonial rule. The Japanese had no plans to radicalize or in any way destabilize Southeast Asia—which, after all, was slated to become part of a Tokyo-centred Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere; in the short term they sought to win the war, and in the long run they hoped to modernize the region on a Japanese model. Continuity served these purposes best, and in Indochina the Japanese even allowed the French to continue to rule in return for their cooperation. Little wonder that before long Southeast Asians began to observe that, despite “Asia for the Asians” propaganda, the new and old colonial rulers had more in common with each other than either had with the indigenous peoples.
Still, for two distinct reasons the period does represent a break from the past. First, the Japanese attempted to mobilize indigenous populations to support the war effort and to encourage modern cooperative behaviour on a mass scale; such a thing had never been attempted by Western colonial governments. Virtually all of the mobilization efforts, however, were based on Japanese models, and the new rulers were frustrated to discover that Southeast Asians did not behave in the same fashion as Japanese. Frequently the result was disorder, corruption, and, by the end of the war, a seething hatred of the Japanese. It was also the case that, both because the war was going against them and because the response to other approaches was unenthusiastic, the Japanese were compelled before long to utilize local nationalism in their mobilization campaigns, again something quite impossible under European rule. The consequences were to benefit local rather then Japanese causes and, ironically, to contribute handsomely to the building of anti-Japanese sentiments.
A second difference between Western and Japanese colonialism was in the opportunities the occupation provided the new educated elite. The Japanese were wary of these people because of their Western orientation but also favoured them because they represented the most modern element in indigenous society, the best partner for the present, and the best hope for the future. Often dismissed as “pseudo-intellectuals” by the Western colonial governments and prevented from obtaining any real stake in the state, the new intellectuals under the Japanese were accorded positions of real (though not unlimited or unsupervised) authority. Nor could Southeast Asians who found themselves in these positions easily fault the policies they now accepted responsibility for carrying out or at least supporting, since many of these policies were in fact—if not always in spirit—similar to ones they had endorsed in earlier decades. In short, the Western-educated elite emerged from the Japanese occupation stronger in various ways than they had ever been. By August 1945 they stood poised to inherit (or, given the variety of political conditions at the end of the war, to struggle among themselves over inheriting) the mantle of leadership over their own countries.
Southeast Asia was changed in an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, way by the Japanese occupation. Although returning Europeans and even some Southeast Asians themselves complained that Japanese fascism had deeply influenced the region’s societies, there is not much evidence that this was the case. Japanese rule, indeed, had destroyed whatever remained of the mystique of Western supremacy, but the war also had ruined any chances that it might be replaced with a Japanese mystique. There was clearly little clinging to Japanese concepts except where they could be thoroughly indigenized; even the collaboration issue, so important to Europeans and their thinking about the immediate postwar era, failed to move Southeast Asians for long. And, if the general population appeared less docile in 1945 than four years earlier, the reason lay more in the temporary removal of authority at the war’s end than in the tutelage of the Japanese.