The foregoing chapters have traced a robustly expansionary period in which Southeast Asian elites interacted as equals with Europeans and others. All sides of the exchange appeared eager to learn from the cultural differences that newly confronted them. This picture is difficult to square with the more abundant evidence from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Southeast Asians, even more than Asians in general, appeared unable to compete with the Europeans commercially, militarily, scientifically, or politically. That a divergence between East and West occurred between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth was clear; its causes were far less so. For the past century debate has raged around this issue, between colonial and nationalist apologists, between Marxist economic determinism and cultural explanations, between European exceptionalism and theories of Asian decline. Southeast Asia provides a critical forum for this wider debate about the relative impoverishment of what became the twentieth century’s Third World. The boom and bust of its spice trade and its entrepôts makes it one of the world’s more dramatic cases.
In the colonial period, European agency was thought to be central, for better or worse, reducing the Asian actors to helpless victims of European advance. The relentless monopolies of the VOC in the seventeenth century had crushed Asian commercial dynamic, causing the decline of states, cities, and welfare. Serious empirical quantification began in the 1960s, led by Chaunu (1960) and Magalhães-Godinho (1969) on Iberian data, but extending later to the copious records of the VOC. Japanese scholarship helped complement the European data with Japanese and Chinese evidence that Japanese silver and Chinese shipping were essential to the commercial boom of 1567–1644. It became more apparent that Southeast Asia formed part of a larger global pattern of massive expansion of silver production and trade in the long sixteenth century, followed by a faltering or crisis in the mid-seventeenth.
In the 1990s, the historiographic frontier was able to shift to more balanced empirical explorations of Eurasia as a whole, escaping from theories of West European, Chinese, or Japanese uniqueness. The fundamental point of Victor Lieberman (2003, 2009) is hard to deny, that the whole Eurasian world has evolved over the past thousand years in ways that show more parallels than divergences. Like Kenneth Pomeranz (2000), he rejects Europe/Asia dichotomy in favor of specific comparisons between different parts of Eurasia that have the most useful parallels. Lieberman (2009, 77–92) helpfully summarizes nine fields of interaction across Eurasia which help to explain the “strange parallels” he perceived between the Southeast Asian pattern and that of other parts of Eurasia. These may be further summarized under five heads to which I will return: changes in climate; disease patterns; military innovation, notably cavalry and firearms, tending to favor stronger states; global commercial cycles; and intellectual trends, borrowings, and reactions.
My own intervention in these debates was to argue that the radical changes affecting Southeast Asia in the mid-seventeenth century strengthened the case already proposed by Geoffrey Parker (1978; 2013), that the European crisis associated with the “little ice age” of the seventeenth century was in fact a global crisis (Reid 1990; 1993, 270–311). Victor Lieberman (1995) explicitly rejected this thesis for Mainland Southeast Asia, and his focus on the territorial consolidation of the major Mainland states led him to posit rather regime crises across the region in 1560–1600 and 1750–1800, which nevertheless produced ever-stronger state integration thereafter (Lieberman, 2003).
The question of when or how Asia’s impoverishment relative to Europe came about was not Lieberman’s concern, but was taken up by Kenneth Pomeranz (2000). He shifted the crucial moment of economic divergence between Europe and Asia to the period 1750–1850, and the critical cause to the exhaustion of resources of land and energy (especially timber) in the most dynamic Asian cores such as the Yangzi delta, whereas western Europe (especially England) had access to coal at home and abundant agricultural and forest resources in the New World. His impressive argument implicitly discounts the importance of the Chinese crisis associated with the shortage of silver and fall of the Ming Dynasty in the 1640s, but has little to say about this crisis elsewhere in Asia. Southeast Asia remains a periphery rather than a core in his scheme, with too low and dispersed a population to encourage proto-industrialization in the manner of England, the Netherlands, or parts of China.
I had argued that there was an important seventeenth-century crisis in Eurasia as a whole, but that Southeast Asia was more profoundly affected because of its high exposure to the expanding trade cycle in the long sixteenth century, and its vulnerability to VOC monopoly strategies and the withdrawal of the Japan-China silver-for-silk exchange from the region’s economy (Reid 1993, 288–9). That there was a decisive change in the region at this time appears to me indisputable, in the direction of reduced engagement with the long-distance trade and with foreign ideas. The remainder of this chapter seeks to summarize this change and address the more intractable problems of its fundamental causes and its effects.
There is a global synchronicity in the upward movement of prices, particularly for grain but also for labor, throughout the sixteenth century, followed by a decline in the middle decades of the seventeenth. Many authors have pointed as an explanation to the reduced amounts of silver being sent to both Europe and Asia (via the Manila galleon) from the New World silver mines after 1628, after more than a century of expansion. For Asia, the remarkable fact that Japanese silver exports also boomed in the period 1570–1630, and thereafter dramatically collapsed to less than half the peak levels by the 1640s, was even more persuasive as a factor in the collapse of China’s Ming Dynasty (1644) and the problems of many Southeast Asian entrepôts.
Throughout the century from the 1540s to the 1640s China placed a markedly higher value on silver (in comparison with gold or key trade goods) than the rest of the world, as a result of the decay of China’s paper money system and the need for currency for the expanding population and economy of Ming China. This highly profitable trade of silver from Southeast Asia and elsewhere to China came to an end when the influx of a large share of global silver output into China finally eliminated the price differential. This reduced both real value of revenues collected by the Chinese government in silver, but also, more drastically, the profits of the trade which had been conducted in Southeast Asia.
This factor is understood to have played a role in the fall of the Ming Dynasty, but it had an even more dramatic effect in Southeast Asia, as the venue for most of China’s trade with the rest of the world in the period. The region’s ports and urban centers had benefited more than most from the trade boom of 1570–1630. International demand for its products reached a peak in the 1620s, when Southeast Asian pepper and spices accounted for more than half of the value of European homeward cargoes from Asia. China and Japan had also traded with each other and with the maritime world at large in Southeast Asian ports. In 1635 Japanese ships stopped coming, while Chinese demand was reduced drastically by the crisis of the 1640s and the embargo on foreign trade imposed by the new Qing regime until the 1680s. For Europeans the initial concentration on Archipelago spices and pepper was replaced by other Asian interests, notably Indian cloth and indigo. Malukan spice and Southeast Asian pepper together dropped from 68% of Dutch homeward cargoes in 1648–50 to 23% in 1698–1700, and from the bulk of English cargoes before 1640 to about 2% after the loss of access to Banten in 1682 (Reid 1993, 288–9).
The small but significant technical disadvantage of Southeast Asian ships in naval encounters with Europeans was one of the military factors that had some profound effects on trade and shipping. The situation described by Portuguese and Italian writers in the early 1500s, and confirmed by marine archaeology, was that the South China Sea shipping was dominated by large “junks” of 300–500 tons, primarily based in Melaka, Java, and Siam though often built in Pegu. The Portuguese described these ships as Javanese or Malay, though their hybrid Sino-Southeast Asian design suggest the likelihood that they emerged from Chinese-Southeast Asian interactions, as explained in Chapter 3.
By the time the abundant Dutch reportage becomes available a century later the situation had already changed substantially. Portuguese ships had grown larger, China-based ships of around 500 tons had dominated China-Southeast Asia trade since the official licensing began in 1567, and Southeast Asian vessels had become numerous but smaller. The first Dutch voyage reported, “the East Indian islands are very rich in ships, but all little vessels, so that the largest junk I have seen would not carry more than forty tons” (Lodewycksz 1598/1915, 132–3). The Portuguese had inflicted some spectacular defeats on the profitable but unwieldy large ships, and made them too risky for local entrepreneurs to continue to invest in. There were still a few large vessels owned by Southeast Asian rulers in the early 1600s, both rice-carrying junks on the major supply routes and some military galleys of huge proportions. But the Dutch warships had even more of an edge in naval warfare than the Portuguese had had a century earlier, and there was a further reduction in the size of Southeast Asian ships by 1650. Apart from a few vessels built to European or Chinese design by some of the strongest kings, Southeast Asian vessels were then seldom of more than 20 tons. Large-scale shipping, as well as the longest-distance routes, had become a matter for Europeans and Chinese, and a diminished number of Indian vessels built to European design.
Linked to these naval setbacks was the destruction of the most important maritime entrepôts in Southeast Asian hands. Three of these occurred in the sixteenth century – Melaka’s conquest by the Portuguese in 1511, Brunei’s sacking by the Spanish in 1578, and the devastation of Pegu in the 1590s, first by its own disastrous king and then by its neighbors. The first two of these were probably made good by the rise of alternative entrepôts as was the usual Southeast Asian pattern. The destruction of Pegu and the seventeenth-century setbacks that followed were of much greater long-term significance. Tuban, Surabaya, and the other ports of central and east Java were conquered by Sultan Agung in 1625, with the effect that the center of Javanese life moved to the interior. The cosmopolitan coast was so marginalized that it was regarded as the enemy by subsequent Mataram rulers, to be squeezed and hobbled until finally surrendered to the VOC. Javanese commercial life, like that of the Mons after Pegu’s destruction, suffered a permanent setback both absolutely and in relation to rival modes of life.
Under the Governorship of Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1618–29), VOC naval power in Asia was purposefully and ruthlessly deployed to establish permanent strategic strongholds and monopolies over the most vital items of trade. It was Southeast Asia’s misfortune to provide the headquarters of this efficient Asia-wide operation in Jakarta, renamed Batavia in 1619. The five tiny volcanic islands of Banda, source of all the world’s nutmeg and mace and governed by a remarkable oligarchy of traders, were conquered and depopulated in 1621. Slaves were introduced to tend the nutmeg under Dutch and Eurasian plantation-owners.
A military turning point between Asian and European power came in 1629, when coincidentally Aceh attempted to expel the Portuguese from Melaka, and Mataram to expel the Dutch from Batavia. Both were spectacular failures, and the main European enclaves were not seriously threatened by Asian power again. The VOC had also established a dominant position over the erstwhile clove center and sultanate of Ternate in the 1620s, and completed its monopoly of cloves with victories in the Ambon area in the 1650s. But since Makassar remained a powerful free-trading rival to Dutch dominance in eastern Indonesia, as Banten did in the Java Sea area, these now became targets. The VOC was able to wait until internal conflicts made it possible for them to find important local allies, with the result that Makassar fell in a series of battles ending in 1669, and Banten in 1682.
Only Aceh in the west and Ayutthaya in the north remained as great alternative magnets for free trade, and refuges for the mercantile groups expelled by these Dutch conquests. But in mid-century the VOC gradually prised loose from Aceh its lucrative pepper-growing dependencies in Sumatra and its tin-producing colonies in Malaya. Ayutthaya was the last great refuge for Southeast Asian cosmopolitanism and innovation under King Narai (1657–88). He tried in turn to play Muslims, English, and French against the Dutch, but ended by seeming to be so dependent on insensitive French troops that an anti-foreign revolution took place as he lay dying. Both Muslim and European trade largely deserted Ayutthaya, leaving the Dutch and Chinese to contest a much-reduced international trade.
The earliest European sources give witness to a diverse maritime trading world, in which Javanese were the most prominent, but Cham, Makassarese, Bandanese, “Luzons” (from Manila and Brunei), and Mon (from Pegu, coastal Burma) also owned and operated trading ships of over 100 tons, holding their own with those of Gujarat, south India, Bengal, and China. The Javanese and Mons were no longer considered maritime people after the disasters discussed above, however. Many of the indigenous rulers who survived the pressures of the mid-seventeenth century preferred to deal with foreign traders – European, Chinese, and Indian – rather than risk the turbulence of independently wealthy subjects. The indigenous maritime trading groups that best survived into the eighteenth century were Malays (a catch-all term for Malay-speaking Muslims, initially seen as a diaspora from Melaka) and Bugis originating in south Sulawesi. Neither group had a home port of consequence behind them; both were essentially diasporas surviving by their mobility in small vessels of 20–30 tons.
The monopolies and quasi-monopolies established by the VOC over some of Southeast Asia’s key products in mid-century certainly affected the regional economy more severely than that of other parts of Asia. The most severe hit was to revenues from Malukan spices – cloves, nutmeg, and mace – which were the easiest to monopolize because production was localized on a few small islands. Pepper was a much larger trade item in quantity though only slightly larger in value in the boom years of the early seventeenth century. The Company could not monopolize it fully, since the English and Portuguese continued to ship smaller quantities to Europe and the Middle East, and the Chinese to East Asia. Nevertheless, the most important Southeast Asian production areas in Sumatra (apart from those tied to the struggling English company post at “Bencoolen” – Bengkulu) and west Java were under Dutch control following the conquest of Banten in 1684.
The effect was to reduce somewhat the prices paid to growers, but more importantly to cut out altogether the numerous traders who had brought the spices to entrepôts around the region, sustaining much of the commercial dynamism of these cities. Prices paid by European buyers at these Southeast Asian entrepôts of course dropped as the VOC-controlled price system replaced the open market. For cloves the estimated average prices paid fell from about a thousand Spanish dollars per ton at the peak period of competition in the 1630s and 1640s, to a fixed 206 dollars once the monopoly was established in 1656. Average pepper prices fluctuated between about 90 and 160 Spanish dollars per ton in 1600–60, but dropped sharply thereafter before stabilizing at the fixed price paid by the Dutch company of 83 dollars (5 reals per pikul; Bulbeck et al. 1998, 58, 84). Quantities of Malukan spices declined, as the higher prices the VOC could impose in Europe discouraged consumers there and drove them to alternative products. The total effect on Southeast Asian trade of the decline in return for the two most valuable exports of the time is estimated in Table 7.1.
Table 7.1 Pepper and clove exports by quantity and value at European (Amsterdam) and Southeast Asian (entrepôt) prices, in thousand Spanish dollars.
| Decade | Estimated clove exports p.a. | Estimated pepper exports p.a. | ||||
| Tons | Europe value | SEA value | Tons | Europe value | SEA value | |
| 1600–09 | 300 | 1866 | 210 | 4000 | 600 | |
| 1630–39 | 400 | 1196 | 400 | 3800 | 2005 | 462 |
| 1640–49 | 308 | 718 | 308 | 3800 | 1954 | 602 |
| 1650–59 | 300 | 855 | 90 | 4000 | 1710 | 417 |
| 1660–69 | 160 | 822 | 33 | 4900 | 2286 | 357 |
| 1670–79 | 136 | 405 | 28 | 6500 | 1924 | 417 |
| 1680–89 | 134 | 389 | 28 | 4700 | 1542 | 392 |
| 1690–99 | 176 | 505 | 36 | 5300 | 2082 | 442 |
The strong VOC stake in the world supply of these items, and of other Southeast Asian products like nutmeg, cinnamon, sandalwood, tin, and sugar, gave the Company enormous leverage also in other aspects of trade, including Southeast Asia’s key imports from India (cloth) and Japan (silver, and later copper). The quest for monopoly dragged the Company into huge military expenditures, creating a vicious circle in which high overheads made it increasingly difficult for it to maintain profitability except under monopoly conditions. Southeast Asia’s products in the long run suffered in world markets, especially in Europe and Japan, because the Company kept prices high and experimentation with new products minimal. By the eighteenth century the items of greatest interest to world trade were no longer Southeast Asian, but had shifted to the cotton cloth of India, the tobacco and sugar of the New World, and the silks, porcelains, and tea of China.
Chinese shippers contributed much to Southeast Asia’s trade boom of 1570–1630, as they would again after 1750 (Chapter 9). Their trade was devastated, however, by the crisis which led to the fall of the Ming in 1644, and the brutal methods adopted by the conquering Qing (Manchu) regime in its struggle against the Ming-loyalist Zheng family regime with its power base in Fujianese maritime trade. Chinese vessel arrivals in Manila, officially registered as averaging 34 a year in the 1630s, slumped to five to six a year (most of them Zheng’s) for the whole period of the conflict, 1644–83. The Manchus conquered Taiwan in 1683 and lifted their ban on maritime trade in 1684. Chinese arrivals in Manila picked up again, but only to half the level of the boom period. As the winner in the conflicts of the seventeenth century, Batavia suffered less than Manila, and was at or beyond its boom-period levels by 1688.
Southeast Asian-controlled ports were affected in various ways by the China upheaval, and some were able to defy the overall downward trend for a time, as illustrated in shipping records of Manila and Nagasaki (Table 7.2). Vietnamese ports once again profited from China’s restrictions on its own traders. During the Ming maritime bans in the fifteenth century, Dai Viet (like Champa and some Tai muang) had filled the gap by exporting millions of ceramics around Southeast Asia through its port of Van Don. The Van Don export system appears to have collapsed during Dai Viet’s internal conflicts in the early 1500s, along with extensive Viet involvement in foreign trade. “Over the Four Seas, there was utter misery,” declared the royal chronicle (cited Whitmore 2011, 114). Tomé Pires (1515/1944, 114) could report that the Viet “are a weak people on the sea” and had little trade except with China.
Table 7.2 Chinese junks arriving Nagasaki from Southeast Asian ports1 (in brackets ships arriving Manila; from Chaunu 1960).
| Decade | Tongking | Cochin-China | Cambodia | Siam | Patani | Banten | Dutch ports | Total |
| 1651–60 | 15 (1) | 40 (6) | 37 (5) | 28 (3) | 20 | 1 | 2 | 143 |
| 1661–70 | 6 (1) | 43 (5) | 24 (2) | 26 (7) | 9 | 14 | 122 | |
| 1671–80 | 8 | (5) 41 | (1) 10 | (10) 26 | 9 | 1 | 38 | 133 |
| 1681–90 | 12 | 25 (1) | 9 (1) | 31 (7) | 9 | 23 | 109 | |
| 1691–1700 | 6 | 29 (0) | 23 (1) | 19 (15) | 7 | 1 | 18 | 103 |
| 1701–10 | 3 | 12 | 1 | 11 | 2 | 2 | 31 | |
| 1711–19 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 13 | ||
| 1720–24 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 7 | ||||
| Total | 52 | 199 | 106 | 147 | 56 | 3 | 98 | 661 |
The conflict and repression on the China coast in the mid-seventeenth century for a time redirected some Chinese ships to Southeast Asian ports, and created an opportunity for Dai Viet to export its silks to Japan to replace the Chinese supply through the new port of Pho Hien. In consequence there was a remarkable late-flowering trade boom in mid-seventeenth-century Dai Viet (Tongking), bringing in supplies of chiefly Japanese silver many times larger than state revenue from internal taxes. Since this increased trade revenue coincided with disruptive warfare against the southern Viet regime of Cochin-China, and apparent sharp declines in agrarian population and revenue (see below), the effect in changing the orientation of Dai Viet toward a more cosmopolitan outlook was especially marked. After 1684, however, direct China-Japan trade became possible, albeit under the tight controls of the Nagasaki system, and Dai Viet’s final maritime moment ended.
Cambodia also did well briefly in the 1690s, after the 1688 revolution in Siam disrupted trade there, but the overall trend was relentlessly down. An increasingly restrictive Nagasaki quota system in principle limited vessels from Southeast Asia to ten a year in 1689 (of which three from Cochin-China) and five in 1715, although Table 7.2 shows there was a lag in implementation. Taken together with Spanish and Dutch data, the Nagasaki figures well reflect the extent to which the leading Mainland ports suffered.
Tempting as it is to seek a single cause in climate, environment, silver, or aggressive Dutch monopolies, none of these will do on their own. While changes in global climate and trade damaged the long-term environment for Southeast Asian commerce, there were numerous specific setbacks that had their own causes, whether or not ultimately linked in complex ways with global phenomena. Individual actors too had a decisive impact on the outcomes, with incompetent or tyrannical rulers bringing ruin on their people as frequently as brilliant ones achieved success.
Progress has been rapid in recent years in the understanding of global climate changes. It has become clear that what is “normal” weather for one generation or even one century may not be normal in the longer life-span of the planet. As shown in Chapter 2, tree rings and stalagmite sequences have confirmed that Mainland Southeast Asia, like China, enjoyed benign conditions for agriculture during the warm medieval climate anomaly between 900 and 1250, and that worsening conditions thereafter contributed to the collapse of the temple-building nagara of Pagan and Angkor. Another period of climate amelioration in 1470–1560 allowed for substantial new growth in northern rice-growing societies such as Sukhothai, Chiang Mai, Vientiane, and Dai Viet, though even more so in the new port-states also able to profit from the great rise in seaborne commerce, like Pegu, Ayutthaya, and the new Cambodian capital at Phnom Penh. The Eurasian cooling which set in about 1570, and produced the little ice age in the mid-seventeenth century, then severely disrupted climate, and hence agriculture and population, in the northern part of Southeast Asia as in China. From about 1700, on the other hand, the global climate warmed gradually, though with an acceleration in the twentieth century. Major short-term disruptions to this pattern were caused by volcanic eruptions and solar irregularities.
The temperature swings in the island tropics have been shown to be less than those in the great Eurasian landmass, with only about a 0.6 degree rise in temperatures between the early 1800s and the 1950s, one third the average in temperate zones. The seventeenth-century drop in temperatures should also have been less extreme in maritime Southeast Asia, possibly aiding the rise of its port-polities in the age of commerce at the expense of rice-dependent concentrations in the north. Short-term climatic variations in the Islands caused by volcanic eruptions and by the cyclical El Niño were particularly acute in the seventeenth century.
The Islands were and are the site of the world’s most destructive volcanism and tectonic upheavals. Increasingly sophisticated dating techniques, such as ice cores as well as tree rings, have made possible the charting of short-term fluctuations in global climate linked to massive volcanic eruptions which create a dust veil around the planet, cooling temperatures and preventing crops from ripening. The volcanoes of Southeast Asia tend to be both the biggest in explosivity, and the most dangerous for the planet as a whole, since their sulphur-rich dust veil disperses around the whole populated part of the planet whereas northerly and southerly eruptions affect chiefly their own latitudes.
The most extreme years of global cold in the seventeenth century, in 1601–4, 1641–3, 1665–8, 1676, and 1695–9, were probably caused by major eruptions at the beginning of each such period, as of the little ice age as a whole. Although most of the new data has come from the northern hemisphere, the majority of the eruptions big enough to have such effects were located in Southeast Asia’s Islands. Like the better-known Tambora and Krakatau in the nineteenth century, the eruptions that affected global climate had their most disastrous effects closer to home in the Islands, both in killing tens of thousands immediately, and in darkening skies and spoiling crops over a much wider area. The first of these global crisis periods, which in Europe and Russia extended throughout 1584–1610 but with a nadir around 1601, has been attributed to two Javanese eruptions uncertainly dated 1586 and 1593. Possibly more important was a massive eruption of Billy Mitchell volcano on Bougainville Island to the north of New Guinea, which has been approximately carbon-dated to 1580 ± 20. In Tongking the years 1586–97 were the worst noted in the annals for crop failures, starvation, and disease, following a similar pattern to Northern Hemisphere crises.
For the Indonesian Archipelago the most useful tree-ring data is still that of Berlage in Java, which shows below-average growth for the whole period 1598–1679 but acutely so in several patches. The first of these was in 1605–16, corresponding with severe droughts in the Indonesian archipelago in 1606–13, and the most notable indigenous record of a famine in the Aceh capital around 1604–5 when “many of the people died” (Raniri 1643/1966, 34). The second was in 1633–8, also coinciding with three of the driest years in the whole 759-year sequence of the recent Viet Nam tree-ring study, in 1633–5 (Buckley et al. 2010). This was presumably the cause of a prolonged drought and crop failure reported for both Siam and Bali in 1633, and a drought in Maluku in 1635. The eruption of Mount Parker in Mindanao in January 1641 spread ash over an area extending to Maluku, Luzon, and Borneo that very likely caused crop failures and famine. The worst period in the Archipelago (but not the Mainland), both in terms of tree rings and reports of famine, disease, and crop failure, occurred between 1660 and 1665. The cause here is unclear, though a possible culprit is an uncertainly dated eruption of Long Island off the New Guinea coast. In Tongking (and Hainan) the strong El Niño of 1681 brought a terrible drought and crop failure in 1681–2, with so many starving that “bodies covered the roads,” as the court chronicle put it. This was followed by an appalling epidemic that killed a third of the population over much of Tongking in 1682–3, and also spread to Cochin-China.
A final geological factor that must be considered in Island Southeast Asia is the record of major earthquakes and tsunamis. Research since the giant earthquake off Northwest Sumatra that produced its deadly 2004 tsunami has established that in addition to the known earthquakes and tsunamis that destroyed Padang in 1697 and 1797, there were major events in the middle of the seventeenth century. The Aceh capital was hit by a tsunami or storm-surge in January 1660, which killed over a thousand people and ended its golden age as a major Indian Ocean port. The historical record on the exposed south coast of Java is very weak, but the most reliably dated Javanese chronicle suggests that a tsunami in 1618 caused sufficient damage to have the Mataram capital moved and the myth launched about the powerful but dangerous queen of the southern ocean (Ratu Kidul), who provided power and legitimacy to the kings of Mataram by ritually mating with them.
The end of Manila’s golden age was dramatically marked by the earthquake of 1645 that destroyed most of its substantial buildings. This and an earlier quake of 1619 have been estimated to be the most severe (about Magnitude 8) of any earthquakes to strike the Philippines between 1600 and 1900. Dutch Batavia (Jakarta) experienced its most severe earthquake in January 1699. Forty buildings collapsed and almost all houses were damaged. Since known large Java earthquakes have all been centered in the subduction zone off Java’s south coast, the damage to population centers in the interior and south must have been greater than in Batavia, especially as it was the uprooted trees that came down from the uplands and blocked the rivers and waterways of the city that caused the most long-term damage.
These climatic and tectonic difficulties seem the likeliest overall explanation for population declines in the mid-seventeenth century, even though civil wars and foreign conquests might appear persuasive in a single location. Reliable population data are scarce, but those we have from Spanish and Dutch censuses of areas they partially controlled show dramatic declines. These amount to a loss of 35% between 1591 and 1655 in the lowland Philippines (Luzon and Visayas), of 17% between 1634 and 1674 in the clove-producing Amboina area (Ambon and Lease), perhaps 37% in the same period in adjacent Seram, about 70% in Ternate over the century ending in 1680, and perhaps a similar catastrophic drop in Minahassa (northeast Sulawesi) between 1644 and 1669. In the Javanese heartland of Mataram there was also a steady downward trend between 1651 and 1755 in the number of households (cacah) reported for taxation (Reid 1993, 294–7). Taken overall, this was a dangerous time for agricultural populations dependent on the weather, as well as for the commercial centers facing Dutch monopoly pressures on their trade.
Taken overall, the seventeenth-century crisis turned many Southeast Asian societies away from reliance on the international market, and reduced the dominance of urban and cosmopolitan factors in them. As the gunpowder states lost the advantages that had propelled them to a brittle prominence – trade wealth, firearms, international allies – they responded in two different ways. In much of the Archipelago, the port-states lost their newly acquired leverage over their hinterlands, with a consequent re-dispersion of power among myriad river-chiefs and lineage units. The memory of founder-kings and conquerors from the age of commerce nevertheless played a role in the growing cultural coherence of such regions. In states which had already developed compact populations in irrigated rice-growing areas, such as Java and several Mainland societies, there was a trend to greater self-sufficiency and internal integration, to some extent making up in their own hinterlands for the losses internationally. In the lowland Philippines a Manila-centered state was created during the age of commerce, which survived the crisis that followed only in a more self-sufficient and Filipinized form. Church, state, and commercial metropolis lost much of their power to transform.
The large Southeast Asian port-cities that dominated the long sixteenth century experienced more than the usual blows in the seventeenth. Cities sacked in earlier times had usually been rebuilt elsewhere, but seventeenth-century setbacks to Asian-ruled cities such as Pegu, Banten, Aceh, Makassar, Brunei, and Patani were of longer-term significance. Euro-Chinese enclaves like Batavia and Manila could fill the role of Asian cities in long-distance trade, but not in cultural and political life. The indigenous population of the Euro-Chinese cities was small, detached from local elites, of generally low status, and in Batavia’s case mostly slave or ex-slave. These cities were certainly the site of some remarkable cultural experimentation, but they could not lead the local societies.
In other parts of the world, notably Britain, the Netherlands, and Japan, the seventeenth-century crisis encouraged a trend toward coherent nation-states. It may be, as Lieberman (2003) argues, that the Mainland states – Burma, Siam, and the two Viet Nams – also moved in a different direction from the Islands from this point, developing a more self-contained internal market on the pattern of Tokugawa Japan, and more standardized forms of secular and religious authority. Burma’s foreign trade was at considerably lower levels throughout the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth, and in 1632 its capital was re-established as far up the Irrawaddy and away from oceanic trade as it could be, at Ava near modern Mandalay. In Siam and Cochin-China, too, foreign trade played a reduced part in state revenue after the 1680s. Nevertheless, commercialization appears to have continued in all these states internally, increasing social differentiation while making it easier for the crown to build an impersonal revenue base. Whatever stability was reached in these states was fragile, however. In marked contrast with Tokugawa Japan or even Qing China, all the dynasties of mainland Southeast Asia fell in the middle of the eighteenth century. Part of the reason was external and internal warring. A more fundamental problem, however, was the failure to maintain an adequate revenue base once foreign trade ceased to provide its core.
The first of the gunpowder states to collapse was the greatest of them, the empire built by King Bayinnaung of Burma from his commercially successful capital at Pegu. His successor Nandabayin (1581–99) drove the Mon subjects of the capital to rebellion by his demands to sustain the overextended military. This led to further ferocious repression by the desperate ruler, with the ports of Cosmir (Bassein) and Martaban the first to be destroyed. From 1597 the imperial capital was under siege by Nandabayin’s many enemies, who completed the destruction of the coastal cities in 1599. A Jesuit source soon after claimed that the whole population had been slaughtered or captured, or had fled, with 240,000 Mons taking refuge in Siam, Laos, and Arakan. “It seems that the whole country is nothing but desert, and that there is nobody left in this kingdom of Pegu” (du Jarric 1608, 626). The Mon merchants were no longer vital participants in the Indian Ocean trade system, except insofar as they could still trade as minorities out of Siam or Arakan. The port of Syriam was initially spared the general destruction. It was governed from 1600 to 1614 by the Portuguese Philip de Brito, initially as a mercenary soldier of the Arakan king, but eventually as ruler of another independent port-state.
The new period of Burma’s history (1606–1752) is misleadingly called “Second Toungoo” because later chroniclers sought to stress the continuity from Bayinnaung. It was nevertheless a classic case of the vernacularization described in Chapter 8. Anaukhpetlun (1606–28) began the Bama patronage of the hitherto Mon-sponsored Shwedagon pagoda in Rangoon, and gradually a new port under his control arose around it. A Buddhist reaction enabled him to have de Brito killed in Syriam. He and his brother and successor Thalun (1629–48) were above all concerned to secure the rice-producing power base of the upper Irrawaddy tributaries. They focused attention not on the lost empire but on the Bama irrigated rice-basket near to the new capital at Ava. In this core zone they forced the tributary princely lineages established by Bayinnaung to move to their court, and replaced them in effective control by town governors (myò-wun) replaceable by the palace. Spies began to be sent out by the court to ensure their loyalty. A more modest, integrated, and Bama state gradually emerged, and with it a society that can begin to be called Burmese. The overland and river trade to Yunnan became as important as the now-diminished maritime arm. The British and Dutch Companies, now the biggest players in the Indian Ocean trade, lost interest in Burma and closed their offices there in 1657 and 1679, respectively.
Siam profited from the collapse of Pegu and Mon/Burman maritime trade, moving quickly to dominate both sides of the Peninsula through the west coast port of Tennasserim. For most of the century until 1688 Ayutthaya became the biggest entrepôt of Mainland Southeast Asia, attracting Muslim, Chinese, Portuguese, British, and Dutch traders alike.
The seventeenth-century kings who rebuilt Siam after the disaster of Bayinnaung’s conquest nevertheless sought the kind of internal absolutism that used the wealth of foreign trade and weapons to crush opposition. The reign of Naresuan the warrior-king (1590–1605) “was the most militant and severe of any which was ever known in Siam … he killed and had killed by law more than 80,000 people … He was the first to make the mandarins come creeping before the king and lie continually with their faces downward … The mandarins lived in great fear of His Majesty” (van Vliet 1640/2005, 229). This form of absolutism in the capital was brought to a peak under Prasat Thong (1629–56) and Narai (1659–88), portrayed by foreign observers as having terrorized the old elite and robbed them of their property while appointing low-born people of ability to official positions. In the manner of other gunpowder rulers with brittle authority, their absolutism was little effective at any distance from the capital, and depended for its success on the wealth generated by foreigners.
These capable kings played the game well and presided over the last of the glittering cosmopolitan courts to fall. The end came only in April 1688, when King Narai’s dependence on French soldiers, British port-governors, and his Greek-born minister Phaulkon became too much for his Buddhist subjects. The master of the royal elephants took advantage of anti-foreign sentiment to seize the palace, expel the French, and kill Phaulkon and two potential successors to Narai, who himself died three months later. This coup leader became King Phetracha (1688–1709), under whom foreign trade in all directions was much reduced, though it gradually revived in the eighteenth century as a predominately Chinese affair. Siam too focused on its own internal coherence around a Theravada Buddhist paradigm.
In the Islands, the societies most exposed to the forceful methods of the VOC and its competitors developed an aversion to the export products that seemed to attract both violence and instability. Surviving epic poetry from the pepper-growing areas testifies to this reaction against pepper. It brought wealth but could not replace rice in times of crisis. Greater self-sufficiency seemed desirable to many states, as well as necessary to those who could no longer afford cloth or rice imports.
The gunpowder states that had been the dramatic beneficiaries of the long sixteenth century boom were the most reliant on trade and external support, and therefore the most vulnerable in the crisis. The port-states like Demak, Japara, and Surabaya on the north coast of Java lost their life-blood in the early 1600s when the VOC took over most of the lucrative spice trade from Maluku. This left them vulnerable to dominance by the agricultural interior, and by states for which trade was a minor priority. The great builder of Mataram (with its capital near modern Yogyakarta), Sultan Agung (1613–46), ended the independence of the port-states, conquering one after another until the strongest complex of ports in the Surabaya area fell in 1625. Sultan Agung apparently intended to unite the whole of Java for the first time, but his progress was stopped at Dutch Batavia, which defeated two massive Mataram forces sent against it in 1628 and 1629. Thereafter Agung made a kind of peace with the Dutch, interpreting VOC envoys as tribute-bearers, and professing to be uninterested in their commercial concerns. Instead he patronized a distinctive Javanese court culture, blending some of the cosmopolitan Islam from the port-states he conquered with the Hindu-Buddhist sacred places, the cults of volcano and tsunami, and the agricultural animism of the interior and south (Chapter 8). The political unity of the Javanese-speaking area was of very short duration, as the tyranny and paranoia of Agung’s successor Amangkurat I (1646–77) sparked rebellion and Dutch intervention that progressively fragmented Java politically after 1670. The cultural legacy of Sultan Agung’s reign was, however, much more durable.
Mataram’s rise left Banten as the last independent port in Java, less vulnerable because it was protected from Mataram expansion by Batavia, and faced no interior threat from the scattered Sundanese-speaking population of the west Java uplands. Its trade, moreover, was securely based on its own supplies of pepper, for as long as it could use the support of Muslim, Chinese, English, Portuguese, and Danish traders against the constant threat of Dutch monopoly intentions. In the 1620s and 1630s, Banten was frequently blockaded by the VOC, sharply reducing both pepper exports and food imports, which convinced the once-wealthy city that it needed more self-sufficiency. Under the forceful Sultan Abdulfatah Ageng (1651–82) Banten became the principal resort for all who resisted Dutch monopolies, and an embassy it sent to London in 1682 was funded for a three months’ stay by the East India Company, anxious about its exclusion from the pepper-market by the Dutch. Lionized by London Society, the two senior figures in the 30-strong party were received at Windsor by Charles II and knighted as Sir Ahmad and Sir Abdul. This could not prevent internal conflicts and Dutch intervention from defeating Sultan Ageng in a bitter war of 1682–3. Subsequent rulers were “Company’s kings”, pledged to deliver all their pepper to the VOC at fixed prices. Banten remained distinct from its Sundanese hinterland, Javanese in language but not in politics or religion. Its Islam was oriented more to Mecca than to Mataram.
The other port-states around the Java Sea were all seen as rivals in the spice trade by the VOC, until either forced or coopted into the Company project. Makassar was the greatest of these in the first half of the seventeenth century, expertly playing Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Muslim cards under the guidance of Karaeng Matoaya and his son Pattenggalloang, and keeping its internal coalition intact. When the latter died in 1654, and the impetuous young Sultan Hasanuddin of Goa decided to rule alone without the partnership of a chancellor from Tallo’, Makassar suffered from all the problems of a brittle gunpowder state. Rebellions against his authoritarian style broke out in Bone, Mandar, and Buton, enabling the Dutch to attack the capital and take one of its southern approach forts in 1660. One of the Bugis rebel leaders, Arung Palakka, unsuccessful in defending Bone on that occasion, sought help and arms from Batavia. In alliance with the VOC, his Bugis forces were able to defeat a large Makassar force in 1667, first at Buton and then Makassar itself. The sultan was forced to sign the Bongaya Treaty whereby all non-Dutch Europeans had to leave, and Makassar gave up its loophole for the non-Dutch spice trade.
The fall of Banten and Makassar left the VOC as master of the Java Sea by 1685, able to exclude major competitors in the buying of pepper and other tropical produce and thereby to reduce incentives for producers. Dutch expeditions succeeded in destroying Palembang in 1657 and its neighbor Jambi in 1687, in each case tightening its exclusion of other buyers. The Riau Archipelago to the south of Singapore profited from its place on the route to China to accommodate Chinese, English, and Bugis traders through the eighteenth century, though periodically destroyed by Dutch attack or internal conflict. Aceh was the only major Island port not to suffer conquest or destruction by the end of the seventeenth century, and continued to benefit from Indian, Chinese, European, and Bugis trade. Its remarkable experiment with female rule in the period 1641–99 proved successful in maintaining internal order and a port friendly to commerce, but it could no longer defend its more distant possessions. The 1660 flood event (above) did not help. Both the tin of the Peninsula and the pepper of the west Sumatra coast passed out of its control in the 1660s. This diminished the capacity of the queens to control their own hinterland. Their male successors were even less successful in the eighteenth century.
The stage of gunpowder kings of great wealth and brittle power was decisively over. The long eighteenth century would provide opportunities for a greater range of small traders in the economy, and for home-grown leadership in religion, culture, and politics.