Milton Osborne - Southeast Asia

There is no better place to start than with a discussion of size and scale. For a newcomer to Southeast Asian history the past is more confusing than the jumbled present. Yet even when considering the present an outsider has the greatest difficulty in visualising just how large an area Southeast Asia occupies in geographical terms, and how substantial is the size of its population. The fact that Indonesias population is approaching 267 million may be well known. But how often is that fact recognised as meaning that Indonesia has the fourth largest population in the world? Only China, India and the United States have larger populations than Indonesia. And how many casual observers think of a now-united Vietnam as having a substantially larger population, at 96 million, than such countries as Spain (47 million), Poland (39 million), and Canada (38 million)? Vietnams population is even larger than Turkeys (83 million), yet Vietnam is only one of four Southeast Asian states, in addition to Indonesia, whose populations are each in excess of 30 million: The Philippines, 108 million; Thailand, 69 million; Burma (Myanmar) 54 million. Figures can only be approximate where population is concerned, but of the worlds population at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century Southeast Asia accounted for no less than 8 per cent of the total. The significance of this percentage is made clear when the population of China is expressed as a percentage of the worlds total. China, the worlds most populous country, accounts for around 20 per cent of the total. Against this yardstick alone, therefore, the population of the Southeast Asian region is substantial indeed.

Size by itself does not mean power, and this is as true for contemporary Southeast Asia as it was for other countries and regions in the past. Whatever the power that an individual Southeast Asian state can exert within its own borders, or outside them, none of the countries in the region has yet developed the global power that was once exerted by some European powers, such as Britain in its imperial heyday, or by the superpowers of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Here, right away, is a major question for historians of Southeast Asia to consider: why has the Southeast Asian region, despite its size, played so small a part in the shifts of global power over the past two thousand years?

The answer, or more correctly answers, to this question will need to take account of many factors, not all of them agreed among those who make it their business to study the Southeast Asian region. To a great extent, moreover, the answers will point to the need to think about Southeast Asia in terms that will often seem surprising for those whose cultural background has been strongly influenced by Europe. Here is where scale as well as size deserves attention.

When dealing with the unknown or little known there is a strong tendency to think of cities, countries or groups of people as being in some way smaller in size and importance than is the case for better-known areas and peoples. In the same fashion there is a familiar readiness to discount the achievements of unfamiliar civilisations by comparison with the presumed importance of our own society and cultural traditions. This may be less of a feature of life today than it was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the exploring Europeans and their successors, the administrators, missionaries, planters and men of commerce, had not the slightest doubt about their own superiority, however mistaken they may have been in this belief. Nonetheless, the problem remains today as Southeast Asia is still an unfamiliar area to most who live outside its boundaries.

Because we know that London and Paris are major cities today, and that these are the modern successors of settlements dating back to Roman times, our tendency is to think of their always having been large and important. Londinium was important in Roman times, possibly more so than the settlement of Lutetia, which was to change its name to Paris in the fourth century. But because of our familiarity with the name London it is hard, perhaps, to visualise just how small this centre was in Roman times and through to the period of the Norman Conquest. When William the Conqueror was crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066 London still did not enjoy the status of being Englands royal city. No more than 35 000 persons lived in the ill-kept streets of this medieval city; yet this is scarcely an image of London summoned up today. At the same time, in the then unknown land of Cambodiaunknown, that is, to the men and women of Europea population of perhaps a million grouped around and supported a city that could rival and surpass any then existing in Europe for its architectural achievement, its sophisticated water engineering, and its capacity to produce a harvest of two or even three rice crops each year. This was the city of Angkor from whose ruins with their accompanying rich stock of inscriptions we have come to know of a civilisation of remarkable achievement and high technological complexity. But whereas the wonders of Europe, of Rome and Venice, of Paris and London, and a dozen other major cities, have preoccupied scholars and interested observers for hundreds of years, the great Cambodian city of Angkor, the centre of a powerful empire for nearly six centuries, only became part of general Western consciousness in the nineteenth century, and then only slowly.

The point may be made over and over again. Athens, Thebes and Sparta were tiny states, nevertheless they live in the minds of those who study European history for the contributions that they made to the development of European culture, in that terms broadest sense. By contrast, it is still rare outside either specialist circles, or among those who have travelled widely, to find knowledge of the empire of Bagan (Pagan), a centre of Burmese power from the ninth to the thirteenth century and the site of a temple complex that some believe rivals the buildings of Angkor. Those who are the inheritors of the Western tradition are not immediately receptive to the religious and cultural underpinnings of the societies that built Bagan and Angkor. The same problem of a lack of immediate empathy is apparent when attention turns to another early Southeast Asian empire. It is easier for a Westerner to conjure up a picture, accurate or otherwise, of Christopher Columbus sailing to the Americas than it is to picture the heroic navigational feats of Malay sailors who voyaged to China and made the Sumatra-based empire of Srivijaya, which flourished between the fourth and eleventh centuries of the Common Era, such a powerful force in early Southeast Asian history.

The contrast between an awareness of Europe and unawareness of Southeast Asia, on the part of those who do not live in the region, should not be stressed beyond reason. There are a great many good reasons why it is easier to understand segments of European history and why real and continuing difficulties stand in the way of acquiring a similar background awareness of the historical process in Southeast Asia. To gain a truly deep knowledge of early Southeast Asian history requires time, dedication, and a readiness to learn a surprisingly large range of languages. All this is required for the study of problems that may often seem lacking in general interest. Generations of scholars have laboured in some cases to leave little more than fragments for incorporation in the overall fabric of the regions history. For the general student there is, fortunately, some middle ground between a broad lack of knowledge and scholarly devotion to detail that is, however admirable, the preserve of the specialist.