This piece is part of a series of articles covering the medieval and early modern great powers of each of Asia’s regions: East Asia, Central and North Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and West Asia (the Middle East). Each article discusses the great power dynamics of the main powers within that particular region as well as how the main powers of each region interacted with those of other regions. To view the full series so far, click here.
Southeast Asia — literally the southeastern part of Asia — presents a unique dilemma in terms of describing it. The other regions of Asia could be characterized by shared ecological, historical, and cultural features that defined them. For example, China and India are clearly delineated civilizations with distinctive boundaries and shared literary, religious, and linguistic traits. However, this cannot be said of Southeast Asia. For instance, it has not had a common civilization, defined by, say, Confucianism or the Persian language and high culture.
Is Southeast Asia a mere geographic description, a shorthand for the area of Asia that is beyond China and beyond India, but part of neither? Or does it have common, shared characteristics?
The peoples of Southeast Asia did not necessarily conceive of themselves as inhabitants of a single region with common characteristics and a shared civilization. In particular, Southeast Asia comprises two distinct worlds: its maritime and mainland components. Today, Southeast Asia is home to a number of cultures with disparate elite cultures and political traditions. These include Vietnam, an offshoot of Confucian Chinese civilization, the Catholic, Iberian-influenced societies of the Philippines and East Timor, the Muslim peoples of maritime Southeast Asia — Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei — descended from an older, mostly Hindu culture, and the Theravada Buddhist nations of mainland Southeast Asia, also built upon an older Hindu-Buddhist past: Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. Singapore is a cosmopolitan mix of many cultures. Southeast Asia is thus home to several distinct global religious and cultural traditions.
The concept of Southeast Asia is relatively new, and was only popularized during World War II through the formation of the South East Asia Command (SEAC) set up by the Allies in 1943. This engendered the notion that the region was distinct from the rest of Asia, whereas it had previously been conceived by Europeans as an extension of India or China. Older names for the region, or parts of it, reflect this: the East Indies — often prefixed with a national adjective, such as the Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese East Indies — and Indochina. The modern country of Indonesia takes its name from the term “Indian islands” in Greek.
On the other hand, traditional Indian and Chinese definitions of their civilizations did not encompass Southeast Asia, nor did Southeast Asians believe themselves to be part of India or China, lands which they were aware of and knew to have distinct boundaries. Some scholars, such as New Zealand historian Anthony Reid, have pointed out that Southeast Asia is characterized by a “unique environment, combining a hot, wet, monsoon climate, dense forest cover, and extensive waterways….” The region was less conducive to the formation of large, bureaucratic empires than much of the rest of Eurasia because of its terrain and low population density.
In his book, “Escape from Rome,” historian Walter Scheidel asserted that Southeast Asia never had a single hegemonic empire in its history, largely because it was far away from the Eurasian steppe zone. This shielded it from the warfare that led to the formation of large empires and complex institutions. Rather, it had a fair number of medium-sized states, and a lot of chiefdoms, statelets, or non-state societies. Many of Eurasia’s major events and trends seem to have passed it by or came to it late, and only when oceanic trade became more prominent. For example, the economy of the Khmer Empire is thought to have operated without a standardized unit of currency, with many market transactions paid for with rice or cloth.
Detail of the bas relief of the Tonle-Sap battle at the Bayon [Bayon Prasat]. Angkor Thom, Siem Reap, Cambodia.
Wikipedia/LBM1948
But by no means was Southeast Asia totally isolated, being a source of spices and natural resources for centuries. By the early part of the Common Era, the civilizations of China and especially India began to influence the cultures of the region. Many Southeast Asia state-societies, with the exception of Vietnam, organized themselves on the Indic mandala model, in which a state’s power was concentrated at a core and became more diffuse as it spread outward over a series of tributaries.
Geopolitically, this meant that the region has received and assimilated the civilizations of others rather than exporting its cultures through the actions of a resident great power. No Southeast Asian empire state has conquered China or India or exported a religion, though seafarers from the region have ranged from Madagascar to Polynesia. In fact, the world may be about to experience the sui generis phenomenon of a major, global Southeast Asian power, Indonesia, which has forged a strong state of 280 million people encompassing almost 17,000 islands astride an important sea lane.
Until the past few centuries, Southeast Asia was lightly populated, with population and state formation concentrated in a few fertile areas. The 1909 British-era Imperial Gazetteer of India noted, “Burma is about the size of Sweden, with nearly twice its population [9 million], and contains great tracts of forest and jungle. The territories administered by the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, though smaller in extent than Burma, contain more than eight times the number of inhabitants [75 million]….”
In his famous work “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia,” anthropologist James C. Scott observed that concentrating enough manpower to run a state was a perennial problem in the region:
Political and military supremacy requires superior access to concentrated manpower close at hand. Concentrated manpower, in turn, is feasible only in a setting of compact, sedentary agriculture, and such agro-ecological concentrations are possible, before the twentieth century in Southeast Asia, only with irrigated rice….Padi fields are easier to create and maintain in river valleys and well-watered plateaus….Southeast Asia’s land mass was only one-seventh as populated as was that of China in 1600. As a consequence, in Southeast Asia control over people conferred control over land, while in China control over land increasingly conferred control over people.
Scott described how Southeast Asia contained large tracks of hilly and forested terrain — called Zomia — inhabited by tribes who literally fled and resisted incorporation into states, limiting the size and reach of organized kingdoms. These were (and are) “runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare.” These small societies and statelets could persist for a long period of time because they were less liable to suffer from the systemic collapses experienced occasionally by complex societies.
With this in mind, the geopolitical dynamics of Southeast Asia can be understood to be those of a land of many chiefdoms and fewer kingdoms dispersed across difficult terrain. The major agricultural state societies that did exist tended to be concentrated in the commercially situated ports of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, the rich volcanic soil of Java, or the valleys of the Irrawaddy (Myanmar), Chao Phraya (Thailand), Mekong (Cambodia, Vietnam), and Red (Vietnam) rivers.
A dearth of records — the survival of manuscripts is rare in tropical, humid climates — makes the history of Southeast Asia particularly hard to reconstruct. Southeast Asia finds mention in the annals of China and India in ancient times. Discoveries of Indian and Roman coins point to increasing trade over time. While the Roman, Persian, Maurya, and Han empires were thriving before the Common Era, and the first steppe confederations were forming, Southeast Asia was still home to pre-state societies. Sanskrit inscriptions — a key indicator of state formation — began to appear in Cambodia, southern Vietnam, and Indonesia after the beginning of the Common Era.
By the medieval period, the first major states were forming in the region, driven first and foremost by an increase in the volume of Indian commercial demand. Historian William Dalrymple, writing in “The Golden Road,” linked the flourishing of Southeast Asian civilizations with the decline of Indian trade with the Roman world in the 6th and 7th centuries CE. This encouraged merchants to seek out new wealth to their east. Trade, along with the greater transferability of Indian writing systems and religions — particularly Buddhism and Hindu Shaivism and Vaishnavism — explains why the early kingdoms of Southeast Asia acquired more of an Indic tint rather than a Sinic one. Academics Michael D. Coe and Damian Evans, wrote in “Angkor and the Khmer Civilization”:
[A]n adoption of Chinese-style imperial bureaucracy would have meant a burdensome and humiliating submission to the Middle Kingdom, and the lessening of their own powers. With China, it was all or nothing. In contrast, the Hindu religion and its trappings offered the benefits of a royal ideology tailor-made for nascent Southeast Asian kings, with no political strings attached.
Mainland Southeast Asia
In mainland Southeast Asia, a variety of city-states associated with the local Mon, Pyu, and Khmer cultures formed by the early medieval period. Eventually, in 802 CE, Jayavarman II founded the Khmer Empire — which later had its capital at Angkor — by uniting a number of polities and throwing off the overlordship of Java. The Khmer Empire became the dominant state of much of mainland Southeast Asia for several centuries, particularly in the area of modern Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and southern Vietnam. Its hegemony was relatively loose — mandala style — and it maintained its strength partially through the Hindu devaraja cult, by which the prestige of the king ensured the construction of stone temples and irrigation works that kept the state going. The neighboring state of Champa, in southern Vietnam, operated similarly.
The major geopolitical trend of medieval mainland Southeast Asia commenced around the turn of the first millennium CE. The gradual expansion of Chinese dynasties southward, followed by the Mongol invasions in the 13th century, led to the southward migration of many peoples from what is today the Yunnan and Guangxi provinces of China. Three are especially prominent. One of these groups was the Bamar, who conquered the Pyu states of the Irrawaddy valley and founded the first Burmese kingdom at Pagan. Subsequent Burmese dynasties would create some of the region’s largest empires.
Similarly, Tai peoples (not to be confused with the modern Thai, who are one such Tai people) expanded southward into the Khmer Empire and established their own kingdoms, such as Lan Xang in Laos and Sukhothai in central Thailand. The most prominent of these kingdoms was Ayutthaya, a Thai kingdom, which assimilated much of Khmer culture and eventually sacked Angkor in 1431 CE. Ayutthaya and the subsequent Rattanakosin Kingdom, which has become modern Thailand, were the greatest power of mainland Southeast Asia. Its central location, relatively homogeneous ethnic makeup, access to plentiful agricultural land, and post-Khmer imperial legacy all ensured its continued prominence.
The third state that was founded around this time was Đại Việt, the precursor of modern Vietnam. Đại Việt originated as a breakaway region of China in the Red River region of northern Vietnam. Unlike the other states of the region, it was structured on Chinese bureaucratic lines.
All three of these people — Bamar, Tai, and Kinh (Vietnamese) — originated in the northern part of the region and gradually expanded southward, incorporating smaller polities and people, such as Champa or the Mon states. By the early modern era, they were well-situated to profit from the new sea trade routes pioneered by European powers.
The expansion of the Burmese, Thai, and Vietnamese kingdoms also led to the formation of clear geopolitical rivalries in the region in early modern times, which had not been seen before in the medieval era. In particular, two great rivalries emerged as we enter the post-medieval period. The first was between the Burmese and the Thai, a conflict that went on for centuries, almost up to the present day. The second was between the Thai and Vietnamese, much of it fought over the remains of the Khmer state, most of which was annexed by either Thailand or Vietnam.
Maritime Southeast Asia
Although insular Southeast Asia is connected with mainland Southeast Asia, it is also a very different world. Commerce and the monsoon winds — which blew ships to and from the region — ensured that it was less isolated, more monetized, and more closely connected with India and the Middle East. Settled in ancient times by Austronesians, a seafaring people originally from Taiwan who spread throughout the Pacific Ocean, the region was more open to Indian culture, Islam, and the influence of seaborne, trading empires ranging from the Chola of Tamil Nadu, to the local Srivijaya and Majapahit polities, to the Portuguese and Dutch.
Maritime Southeast Asia comprises the world’s largest group of islands, the Malay Archipelago. Most regions are dominated by different terrestrial biomes, but a unique few, such as the Mediterranean and the Malay Archipelago are so characterized by water, that it would be correct to assert that the people who lived in these areas understood the sea not just in commercial terms, but in geopolitical and strategic terms. Most premodern thalassocracies — states that dominated the sea and waterborne commerce through naval power — were either found in the Mediterranean or maritime Southeast Asia. Historian Aniruddh Kanisetti characterized “Monsoon Asia [as] a much larger, more humid Mediterranean Sea.” States in this region grew rich because of their control over trade routes rather than the creation of large, terrestrial empires.
The most important medieval trading state in Maritime Southeast Asia was Buddhist-Hindu Srivijaya, which lasted between the 7th and 11th centuries until it splintered after an attack by the Chola Empire. While it is sometimes referred to as an empire, others, such as Kanisetti, describe it as a “loose confederation of ports” which included Kedah and Palembang. Based in Sumatra and Malaya, it controlled the main sea route between India and China and spread the region’s lingua franca, Malay, now standardized as both Malaysian and Indonesian. Eventually, the Malay cities such as Malacca would embrace Islam in the late medieval period until the influence of Muslim merchants. Seaborne, mercantile sultanates would also form to the east, all the way up to the Philippines and New Guinea. These include the Brunei, Sulu, and Ternate sultanates. Because these islands contained rare spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves, many were colonized and invaded by European seaborne empires before almost any other part of Asia, from the 16th century onward. The Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and British all grabbed pieces of Maritime Southeast Asia and subjected it to commercial exploitation.
Powerful states also arose in Java, Indonesia’s main island, which was also the most populated part of Southeast Asia, blessed as it is by rich volcanic soils. These monarchical states tended to be more hierarchical than those in other parts of Southeast Asia, but also still suffered from the loose, mandala-like control of outlying territory. However, with the introduction of modern bureaucracy, communication, and oceanic technology, Java, with its large population and tradition of complex states, seems like the most likely place in Southeast Asia to build a great power.
Some early Javanese polities include Mataram, Kediri, and Singhasari, which built many Hindu and Buddhist temples. After a failed Mongol invasion by the forces of Kublai Khan in 1293 CE, the empire of Majapahit was founded by Raden Wijaya in eastern Java. Considered Indonesia’s greatest medieval kingdom, it lasted until the 16th century, when it collapsed under pressure from the local Demak Sultanate; by this time, European powers were already helping themselves to part of Java. According to Herald van der Linde, Dutch author of “Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia’s Greatest Empire,” “at its peak, the Majapahit empire controlled a huge amount of territory, from present-day southern Thailand to Singapore, Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Bali, Lombok and beyond.” Majapahit’s mostly Hindu culture survives to this day on the island of Bali.
As medieval Southeast Asia transitioned to the early modern period, it increasingly shed its isolation due to sea connections and became more integrated into the rest of Asia, strategically, commercially, and politically. Its kingdoms expanded and became more centralized, while other parts of it also fell under colonial rule. The prominence of trade led to the growth of ocean-facing ports such as Bangkok, Rangoon (Yangon), Jakarta, Manila, and Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), not to mention the cosmopolitan entrepôt of Singapore. Meanwhile, the clearing of forests and the expansion of rice cultivation led to a population explosion, a trend that increased with the spread of modern technology and governance. It began to acquire further importance in great power politics due to the presence of natural resources, such as petroleum and rubber, and its incorporation into a number of global empires, as well as its proximity to colonial interests in China and India. Thus, from a humble medieval posture, Southeast Asia was able to take its place as a vital part of the world geopolitical system as it entered the modern era.