[12] Making States, 1824–1940
European Nationalisms and Demarcations
In 1810 Southeast Asia was still a fluid region of religio-cultural exemplary centers but no fixed boundaries except that which separated Dai Viet and China. Rulers made competing claims to supernatural eminence, but their power to control events or exploit populations diminished rapidly with distance from their courts. Such rulers were more comfortable with relations of deference than of equality, and skillful diplomacy sought to keep the more powerful at bay by sending them tokens of honor, without sacrificing status or autonomy at home.
A century later the map of the region was in multiple blocks of color divided by fixed international borders. It had been incorporated into a world system of theoretical equality between sovereign states. Essentially this was a product of intensely competitive European nationalisms, which fought each other fiercely until 1815, but thereafter tended to divert their rivalries into competitive expansion abroad. The lesson of these intra-European conflicts was the so-called Westphalia system, requiring recognition of fundamental equality between sovereign entities. It therefore needed to establish the boundaries between one sovereignty and another. Because we live in the world this system created, it is difficult to appreciate quite how revolutionary a notion it was in Asia.
Even before they had reached Asia by sea, Spain and Portugal had signed the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), demarcating their respective ambitions beyond Europe by a straight-line meridian in the Atlantic. This was later argued to imply a Pacific anti-meridian allotting most of Asia to Portugal. The VOC, after 1600, rejected these claims, but shared the Iberian preoccupation with excluding other Europeans. They alternated wars and treaties with England and Spain, and in 1667 obtained British agreement to stay away from spice-producing Maluku in return for the abandonment of all Dutch rights over New Amsterdam (New York) and New England. After each major war, lines were redrawn in Asia that were designed to exclude other Europeans without necessarily implying anything about who governed the Asian populations. Treaties with Asian rulers were also designed above all to prevent them trading with Europeans other than themselves – usually in vain.
The nineteenth century was a different matter, with a modern understanding of sovereignty and fixed boundaries being extended to the whole map of Asia. No sooner had the British annexed Arakan and Tenasserim to make Siam their neighbor, than envoy Henry Burney explained to the Thai court (1826),
the advantage of having regular boundaries established as soon as possible between the Siamese dominions and our conquests on the coasts of Tenasserim. … I added that the English earnestly desire to live in the vicinity of the Siamese as good friends and neighbours, and not in the same unsettled and unsocial terms as the Burmese had done; that for this reason we are anxious to have the boundary and rights of each party fixed, so as to prevent all chance of mistake or dispute between our subordinate officers (Burney 1971 I, 85–6).
This fixation for clarifying boundaries long preceded any idea that the Europeans might be building states in Southeast Asia, but the long-term implications of the process were immense.
From Many to Two Polities in Nusantara
The lower Peninsula and the Archipelago stretching from Sumatra to Timor and Maluku comprised at once the more politically fragmented and the more culturally coherent half of Southeast Asia. The Java Sea formed a mediterranean world of natural interaction, while the Malacca and Singapore Straits were an equally natural hub region because of their essential role in world commerce. Malay as the language and Islam the religion of commerce spread out from the Straits area to the ports around the Java Sea to give a certain coherence to what was known to Europeans as the “Eastern” or “Indian Archipelago,” and for English writers eventually as “the Malay World.” Nusantara (the islands between) has sometimes been deployed as a needed indigenous term. The spices of Maluku ensured that the sphere of constant maritime interaction would extend to that eastern frontier, but not beyond. Within that world was a cornucopia of polities and peoples. The names of the two eventual states into which the twentieth century divided it, Malaysia and Indonesia, both began as artifical scholarly abstractions for the whole.
The boundaries were negotiated in the nineteenth century between the British, as the dominant regional power, and the Dutch, as a much weakened ally. The Netherlands Indies government nevertheless proved a jealous heir to all the treaties the VOC had signed with gateway rulers around Nusantara to exclude outsiders. The Napoleonic wars had completed the collapse of Dutch commercial hegemony and produced a temporary British occupation of Dutch posts that some would have liked to make permanent. Stamford Raffles, the young and visionary British Governor of Java, was convinced of Britain’s destiny in the region, claiming the VOC had brought only misery through its monopolies. But post-war British diplomacy decreed that there should be a strong and expanded Netherlands in Europe, including modern Belgium, as a buffer against France. The 1814 Anglo-Dutch Treaty provided that Holland’s Southeast Asian possessions were to be restored. A disappointed Raffles was made Governor of the somnolent British pepper post at Bengkulu on the earthquake-exposed southwest coast of Sumatra. He did his utmost to ensure British influence continued, especially in the vital Malacca and Singapore Straits.
As an eager student of Malay, he knew the importance and the independence of Aceh at the northern end of the Straits. He signed a treaty in 1819 promising mutual support with the contestant to its throne he considered legitimate, Sultan Johor al-Alam. He also knew that the Melaka chronicle he labeled “the Malay Annals,” told a story of ancient Singapore as the capital of a maritime polity that connected the Malay lineage of Melaka with much older Sriwijaya (Palembang). He may not have known that the maze of shoals and islands to the south of Singapore rendered the shipping pathway closest to the island as the safest way through this vital choke point of world commerce. His questionable treaties with Malay chiefs there (Chapter 11) enraged the Dutch, who had reclaimed their post in Melaka and considered Singapore part of “their” region. But the Dutch missed their chance to remove the British post, which quickly proved too valuable to be given up. Acrimonious exchanges led inevitably to another colonial line of demarcation.
This was agreed in the Anglo-Dutch London Treaty of 1824, the fundamental charter for the two eventual states. It determined that the great thoroughfare of the Malacca and Singapore Straits would become also a boundary. Dutch Melaka was exchanged for British Bengkulu, Britain agreed to make no further settlement in Sumatra nor conclude treaties “with any Native Prince, Chief or State therein,” and the Dutch agreed the same for the Peninsula. Britain was thus confirmed in possession of the islands of Singapore and Penang and the small ex-Dutch territory around Melaka, which collectively became the Straits Settlements. Raffles’ 1819 Treaty with Aceh was incompatible with the treaty, and in a confidential exchange of notes Britain promised to modify that treaty to meaninglessness, and Holland undertook to try to arrange that Aceh, “without losing anything of its independence,” would be a more secure area for commerce. Neither agreement was carried out, although all parties eventually became aware that Aceh was in a kind of limbo where both its dominant trading partner (the British Straits Settlements) and its chief military threat were forbidden by treaty from interfering.
Dutch leaders hoped the 1824 Treaty would gain them British support in gradually expanding their sway throughout the Archipelago, but there were disputes almost from day one. Holland was determined to industrialize, and to use its Asian possessions as a market for its otherwise struggling textile factories. The Dutch Indies discriminated prohibitively against British textiles and other manufactures, and the Straits merchants therefore protested every extension of Dutch control that would close off their natural markets in Sumatra, Borneo, and elsewhere. These protests slowed the Dutch advance in the middle of the century, and obliged them to operate a more open economy in Sumatra than they did in Java.
The growing intensity of commercial competition around the Malacca Straits convinced Britain that a Dutch Sumatra was better than any other option, and so in 1871 supplemented the 1824 Treaty with a Sumatra Treaty. This allowed the Dutch free reign in Sumatra in exchange for further guarantees of free trade. Eighteen months later the Netherlands had rushed into a disastrous war against Aceh, while the British had an Ashanti War on their hands at the Dutch fort of Elmirah in modern Ghana (West Africa), transferred to Britain as a kind of (unacknowledged) compensation for Aceh. The harvest of realpolitik was bitter.
Britain valued the Peninsula itself initially only for its strategic ports. In the 1870s, however, the Straits commercial lobby, the attractions of the tin trade, and the divisiveness of Malay and Chinese politics combined to propel Britain to “protect” one Malay negeri after another. The first four (Perak, Negri Sembilan, Selangor, and Pahang) then accepted a British Resident whose advice must be followed in “all matters except those pertaining to the religion and customs of the Malays.” A generous annual allowance reconciled most of the rulers (who soon became sultans) to this arrangement. By regional standards only limited force was required to compel their dissatisfied rivals. Although in some senses still sovereign, these negeri were “federated” into a state-like entity called the Federated Malay States in 1896, with its capital in Kuala Lumpur. The northerly negeri of Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan, and Trengganu, already beginning to be modernized under Siamese auspices before they came under British “protection” in 1909, had the wit to follow Johor’s example in remaining out of this federation, adding five more “unfederated states” of uncertain sovereignty.
The greatest Dutch fear on their side of the 1824 line was that European adventurers or local rajas desperate for foreign allies would bring a third European player into the Archipelago. There were plenty of both in the nineteenth century, but James Brooke was the only European adventurer to succeed in founding his own dynasty. His vital assets were his choice of the northern coast of Borneo, outside the core “Dutch lake” of the Java Sea, and the indulgence toward him of Britain. Armed only with one gunboat bought with a £30,000 inheritance, Brooke was able to tip the balance in local conflicts in the Sarawak River area, and have himself appointed representative of the Sultan of Brunei there in 1841. He played the role of referee between rival upriver Dayaks, coastal Malay traders, and Chinese miners expertly enough to stay in charge, styling himself Raja Sarawak in the style of a gateway negeri. Fortunately for him, London was particularly frustrated at Dutch exclusionary policies in the 1840s. Britain made him its Agent to the Brunei sultanate in 1844, and ocasionally supported him militarily on the pretext of anti-piracy measures, and formalized recognition by appointing a Consul to his Sarawak raj in 1863 and establishing a protectorate over it in 1888. Brooke’s nephew Raja Charles (r.1868–1917) extended Sarawak to its modern shape and had it accepted as a “civilized” but exotic state. He played a role that was part hard-working official and part charismatic and colorful sultan like his Malay counterpart in Johor. Sarawak thereby extended the Anglo-Dutch “line” to the east, and created its first land frontier.
The northern quarter of Borneo was even more thinly peopled and stateless, so that adventurers had to apply to sultans in Brunei or Sulu for the fig-leafs of respectability for their intervention. The Brunei negeri itself was slow to modernize or ally with influential Britons to extend its sway, and found itself the smallest of the three Borneo entities eventually “protected” by Britain in 1888.
It was a North Borneo Chartered Company that eventually achieved British recognition for bringing “civilization” to that quarter, with more commerce and less romance than Sarawak. The rise of Germany and rush to harden boundaries against it led to the Madrid Protocol of 1885, in which Spain was recognized in its possession of the troublesome Sulu Archipelago, in return for yielding to Britain all possible Spanish claims in Borneo. The entire area on the British side of the line was thereby filled with asymmetric anomolies under a loose British umbrella. They had in common Malay and English as the two lingua franca, the Straits dollar as a currency, a metropolitan hub in Singapore, and a diverse Chinese community on which the economies largely rested. A group of Foochow (Fuzhou) Christian agriculturalists largely built Sarawak’s second city of Sibu, while Hakka plantation workers were recruited by the struggling tobacco estates of North Borneo. High colonialism did not make this mosaic look much like a single state.
Dutch efforts were much more purposeful, despite very slender resources. Brooke and his emulators forced them to focus on the river-mouths of the remainder of Borneo, trying to tie each negeri into a system of treaties, and where possible to explore the river basins in the hope of heading off European speculators for mineral wealth. By 1889 the Dutch were ready to seek a physical demarcation of an effective Anglo-Dutch border, through a boundary commission that laid down the eventual frontiers of Indonesia and Malaysia. The Natuna and Anambas archipelagoes beween the Peninsula and Borneo were “north of the Singapore Straits,” the clause used to justify Sarawak escaping the Dutch embrace. Since speculators and adventurers had passed them by, however, they were allowed to fall on the Dutch side on the basis of faint connections with the former Riau sultanate. The 2,000-km land border in Borneo was agreed, in the subsequent formal Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1891, to follow the watershed between the mighty river systems whose mouths each side claimed to control. It would be another two decades before this boundary could be surveyed, and much longer before most of the inhabitants came to know which side they were on.
The turn of the twentieth century marked a more abrupt shift in the Archipelago world than elsewhere, when Netherlands India effectively became a state – the future Indonesia. It was the draining wound of their long-running war in Aceh that convinced Dutch policy-makers that only the direct application of superior force made many of the islanders cooperative, and that indirect attempts to work through rajas would not suffice to develop the economy nor to fulfill the mission civilisatrice. The two men credited with bringing the Aceh war to an end by this application of unrelenting force, General J.B. van Heutsz and Islamologist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, applied the lessons to the rest of the Indies when appointed in 1904 as Governor-General and Islamic advisor, respectively. Mobile military columns, mostly Indonesian in personnel, pursued and crushed resistance throughout the vast area on the Dutch side of the line. All the uleebalang in Aceh, and most of the negeri elsewhere, were obliged to sign a Short Declaration, to the effect that their territory formed part of Netherlands India and they would obey all its instructions. A well-trained core of Dutch colonial administrators, the Binnenlandse Bestuur, could be placed anywhere in the Archipelago, and became the professional iron frame to rule what was still an immensely colorful diversity of peoples and institutions.
The factors that create cultural commonalities in Nusantara quickly diminish as one proceeds east through Wallacia, the zone of deep ocean troughs between the tectonic plates of Sundaland (as far east as Borneo and Bali) and Gondwanaland (Australia and New Guinea). The spice trade had created some very plural negeri in Maluku, notably the balanced moieties of Ternate and Tidore, but further east there were not even the beginnings of state-like hierarchies with which outsiders could negotiate. These most problematic of Indonesia’s frontiers were therefore decided by the imperial fixing of demarcations in unknown territories, with no reference whatever to conditions on the ground or the wishes of the inhabitants. Those wishes, it is clear, were predominately to be left alone. They had successfully resisted state organization for centuries, and would continue to do so.
The less difficult Dutch line was that with the Portuguese. The VOC had captured all the major Portuguese forts in the seventeenth century, and suppressed Catholicism in the populations around them. In the south-eastern corner of the Archipelago, however, a hybrid Catholic population hung on, known to others as “black Portuguese” or Topasses (from Malay topi, hat) from their pride in wearing European-style hats. From their main base in Larantuka (eastern Flores), they formed sufficient alliances throughout Timor to dominate its sandalwood exports for two centuries. The VOC established a fort at Kupang (western Timor) in 1653, and the Portuguese authorities of Macao one at Dili (eastern Timor) in 1769. Neither could control the Topasses, although they gave lip service to their Portuguese-ness. It was predictably governments in Europe that felt the need and the right to negotiate fixed borders. In the 1850s Portugual surrendered all claims outside the territories of their principal allies in eastern and central Timor, but negotiations continued until the 1914 judgement of the international Permanent Court of Arbitration arrived at the modern boundary cutting Timor in half, with the East and the Oecussi enclave in north-western Timor judged as Portuguese. Despite all the blood shed in 1975–99 to remove it, this remains the boundary between the modern states of Indonesia and Timor Leste.
New Guinea was partitioned even further in advance of any knowledge of the areas or peoples in question. Anglo-Dutch rivalry was again the driving force, but without the high stakes that Singapore introduced into the westerly frontiers, both sides were shadow-boxing about imaginary empires. Since 1660 the VOC had claimed a right to exclude Europeans from territories as far east as New Guinea, on the basis of Tidore’s pattern of slave-raiding and bird-of-paradise-trading there. But competitive flag-waving only came to the region in the climate of wrestling over the 1824 partition of Nusantara, and uncertainty about its eastern extension. The British made three tragic attempts to build a second Singapore in northern Australia in 1824–9, and the Dutch responded with a settlement on New Guinea’s south coast in 1828–35. Both ventures proved unhealthy, uneconomic, and unwanted by the state-evading inhabitants, in predictable contrast to the reception Singapore received from trading networks further west. But they served their principal purpose, of strengthening British claims to the whole of Australia, and Dutch ones to the Island of New Guinea as far east as its 141-degree meridian, mentioned in earlier Dutch documents as the limit of Tidore’s conceivable commercial reach.
So things remained until the scramble for the last remaining patches of stateless territory occasioned by Germany’s rapid rise in the 1880s. Bismarck’s policy was to support and protect chartered companies, one of which was the Deutsche Neuguinea-Compagnie. This raised the German flag to the northeast of Holland’s maximalist meridian in 1884, naming the islands the Bismarck Archipelago and the mainland opposite, Kaiser Wilhelmsland. Britain was less concerned than its colonists in Australia. Queensland had attempted to pre-empt German action by annexing the southern coast in 1883, and succeeded in winning British support to do so in 1885. Thus was agreed a three-way partition of the Island, with all parties accepting, with minor refinements, the 141-degree meridian as the eastern boundary of Netherlands India. Only the newcomer Germans were ambitious colonizers, encouraging missions and forcing reluctant islanders to work on estates near the coast. Since they lost that territory to Australia in 1914 as an early skirmish of the World War, the island’s interior was left largely to its own devices until World War II saw it become a battleground. In the long run this arbitrarily declared line would become the frontier not only between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea (independent since 1975), but between Asia and Oceania. Only in the 1960s did most inhabitants of the western side encounter the forces that had begun to create a nation in the rest of the Archipelago, which they had many reasons to reject. As in the cases that follow, maximalist pre-emptive claims by the imperialists stored up problems for those seeking to build nation-states in the same space.
Maximal Burma, Viable Siam
In the Mainland the boundary-drawing of the nineteenth century confronted also Siam and China, each with its quite different concept of the world order, with the new European idea of sovereignty. Following Burney’s initial attempt above, Britain constantly pressured Siamese authorities to negotiate an exact boundary on the ground, but met with incomprehension. The polity consisted of a center and its tributaries, and the former could not be expected to know the detailed geography of the latter. Moreover, as one Siamese official pointed out, “the boundaries between the Siamese and Burmese consisted of a tract of Mountains and forest … which could not be said to belong to either nation” (cited Winichakul 1994, 64). When the Siamese needed British goodwill they urged them to make their own line and just tell Bangkok about it; on two occasions they gave them more than had been asked as a sign of magnanimity. Only after Mongkut’s accession in 1851 did the king himself understand the British obsession with a fixed line through the mountains, and sought to educate his officials about it. His son Chulalongkorn finally felt obliged to hire an English surveyor in 1881 to create a Thai capacity for mapping. Before this the Siamese never made an issue of exactly where the British chose to draw lines in the mountains, generally following the watershed between rivers flowing into the Gulf of Thailand and those into the Bay of Bengal.
This had the effect of dividing the stateless and diverse Karen population, which had inhabited the mountainous border zone, between British (the majority) and Siamese sovereignty. One of the few common features of what became Karen identity was resistance to Bama coercion, especially as remembered during “the Alaungphaya hunger” following that king’s devastation of Lower Burma in the 1750s. The British wars against Burma therefore enjoyed support from many Karen, especially those who by 1886 had come to see themselves as a distinct and coherent people through Christian schools and the missionary-developed literature in Sgaw Karen. The new kind of (British) state that appeared to act as referee among Karen as well as between Karen and Bama was therefore welcome, as the assimilative civilization of the lowlands had not been. While assimilation to lowland Bama-style Buddhism continued to occur, the separate destiny of a Karen people was already canonized by one English author in The Loyal Karens of Burma (Smeaton 1887), a pamphlet that established a stereotype.
The British encountered the northern hill peoples only after the conquest of Mandalay in 1886. In claiming to rule vast uplands as successors to Burma’s tributary relations, they approached them initially through Burmese eyes, and named them with Bama names – Shan, Chin, and Kachin. The Tai-speaking muang sending occasional tribute to Mandalay had called themselves Tai, as had other Tai-speaking groups in the upper Chao Phraya and Mekong. Their hereditary leaders had an ambivalent role as tributaries of Burmese kings, who called them sawbwa, but also as representatives to the outside of their own villagers, who called them saopha. The British also needed to distinguish “Burmese Shans” from Tai-speakers in Siam and in China, and to cultivate the sawbwa as the entry point of outsiders into their society. Theravada Buddhism and irrigated rice-growing created points of Shan cooperation with lowland Bama, but language and remembered history kept them separate enough to be so acknowledged by the British, who gradually positioned themselves as umbrella and referee between and within ethnicities. In hills of the north, on the other hand, they met conditions not dissimilar to those of the Karen. Chin and Kachin, too, were stateless and diverse peoples whose common identity derived largely from their resistance to religious and state incorporation by lowlanders. They could accept a distant imperial state that put them on the same level as the Bama, even if it imposed restrictions on violence and arbitrarily separated them from trading partners across the new border. From the 1890s they proved receptive to Christianity and to recruitment as soldiers and policemen, serving with distinction in World War I.
The British constructed Burma as Southeast Asia’s second-largest state by asserting their absolute (in the modern sense) sovereignty over this vast space between India, China, and a more narrowly defined Siam. They followed watersheds where possible in defining borders, and thereby extended state space into distant mountains that it would never have occurred to Southeast Asian monarchs to covet. On the other side of the mountains lay India (easily managed by the same surveyors) and China, which had its own unique understanding of states and their boundaries, discussed below.
The drumbeat beneath the drawing of the map of the modern Mainland in the nineteenth century was Anglo-French rivalry. The British had come to regard India as their fortress, inadequately protected by the Himalayas. Their fixed policy was to keep the areas beyond its borders in the hands of weak or friendly occupants, but to aggressively prevent influence from rivals – France especially, Russia, or later Germany. King Thibaw had to be defeated rather than ignored because he seemed to be succeeding in attracting French interest. The French were equally determined to make good their loss of territory in India by acquiring strongholds that could ensure access to China and a position as near as possible to equality with Britain in Asia. Having found it in Viet Nam, too far from India for British resistance to be more than nominal, the contest was on for each to maximize their imagined borders in order to exclude the other, except insofar as a truly viable buffer intervened.
Siam succeeded in being that buffer through the skill we noted in Chapter 11, foregoing expansionary dreams in return for security in the core area. For most of the century the Siamese had reason for gratitude that Britain had eliminated the Burma threat and secured the western frontier. The French were a different matter, not only reinventing Viet ambitions in Cambodia but conceiving the Mekong as a kind of French highway to China. The Khmer King Norodom may have hoped to continue the delicate balancing between Bangkok and Saigon, but reluctantly accepted a French protectorate in 1863 that would ultimately sever the Thai connection. Siam in turn was persuaded to accept this move through a Franco-Siamese Treaty of 1867 that allowed Siamese sovereignty over Battambang and Siemreap, including the symbolically important remains of Angkor. Cambodian monarchy survived as part of a paternalistic package that reinforced Khmer hierarchies while expecting others to develop the modern economy.
The Mekong route was explored in a well-documented expedition of 1866–8, which had to haul its boats laboriously around the Khone rapids that had always formed the barricade for upriver autonomy. The Mekong route was not viable for shipping. Nevertheless, the river, with its lower reaches now in French hands, became a crucial card in the broader rivalry with Britain. The muang on its eastern side, moreover, had to be controlled to prevent them becoming a refuge for Viet opponents. The Tai-speaking muang in the upper Mekong had sent tributary deference when necessary to Mandalay, Hanoi, Luang Prabang, Bangkok, and Chinese officials in Yunnan, but jealously guarded their autonomy and their commercial mediation between these lowlands. Siam’s claim on the upper Mekong had been vigorously asserted by the conquests of 1779 and 1826 that left Vientiane an empty ruin. In a foreshadowing of the racial ideology that would blossom in the next century, King Chulalongkorn claimed in 1885 that “the Thai, the Lao, and the Shan all consider themselves peoples of the same race/nation [chat]. They all respect me as their supreme sovereign, the protector of their well-being” (cited Winichakul 1994, 101–2). He was emboldened by the conviction that the Lao would forget their traditional antagonism to the Thai when faced with the greater alien-ness of the French. In a conscious attempt to pre-empt French utilization of Hanoi’s tributary relationships, Bangkok sent two military expeditions to the upper Mekong in the 1880s, and focused its mapping and administrative reforms there to simulate modern sovereignty. Eventually sheer force settled the matter.
Siam’s slight advantage in getting troops to the disputed areas first was trumped by France’s greater naval power. The tension culminated in 1893, when after a clash over an uninhabited sandbar in the upper Mekong, French gunboats entered the Chao Phraya River to force Chulalongkorn to agree to further concessions. The official British view in India had been that Chinese and Siamese claims should be maximized so as to provide a buffer between British and French borders. But London declined the Siamese request to guarantee her integrity against the French, and warned Siam to accept French demands up to the Mekong. Britain once again perceived a waterway as a conveniently “natural” boundary. In the vital crunch it supported Siam’s essential viability as a buffer, but would not be drawn into conflict with France over the peripheries. Out of this saga came a reborn Laos, championed by the explorer August Pavie as another form of “protectorate” over colorful kings and submissive peasants. But while Vientiane was rebuilt as a Lao capital, the majority of Lao, who now lived on the west side of the Mekong, were firmly guided to become Northeastern (Isan) Thai.
This French assertiveness proved a blessing for Siam, in facilitating its difficult reinvention as a compact modern nation-state. It was the greater diffidence of the British in the Peninsula that bequeathed a major problem. The southern frontier of Siam incorporated former Malay and Muslim tributaries who proved impossible to assimilate in the same way as Theravada Buddhists. The present Thailand-Malaysia border was secured in 1909, following a period of better Anglo-French relations when the two powers were able to agree on recognizing each other’s ambitions in the disputed areas. In 1902 Britain negotiated a pragmatic compromise over the Malay states still tributary to Siam, whereby Siamese sovereignty would be confirmed provided a British official was appointed Resident to advise the sultan. Despite hopes in Patani and Singapore, Patani no longer had a sultan and was not covered in this hybrid arrangement. We should now spell it Pattani in acknowledgement of its definitive, if often embittered, incorporation into Siam/Thailand. In 1909 the hybrid arrangement ended and Kelantan, Trengganu, Kedah, and Perlis became British-protected sultanates. At the same time, in return for concessions over the upper Mekong and its former extraterritorial rights, France gained control for Cambodia of Battambang and Siemreap. Its scholars immediately took up the paternalistic task of restoring the temples of the “lost civilization” of Angkor.
Westphalia and the Middle Kingdom
At the other extreme from the stateless highlanders, the Chinese world-empire was also confronted by the new doctrine of equal but absolute sovereignty. What little remained of the “tribute” system had lost its economic rationale for Southeast Asians once China was opened to trade in the nineteenth century. As we saw (Chapter 11), the last non-contiguous state to send “tribute” was Siam in 1852, announcing Mongkut’s accession. China modernized its diplomacy in the last decades of the Qing to deal with European states on a basis of equality, but could not bring itself to do the same for former tributaries. In the 1890s Britain considered bringing China into a club of states to guaranteee Siam’s independence, but could not do so as long as Siam-China relations were in ambivalent suspension (as they remained). Among the powers, Britain was the most interested in propping up the Manchus, as a further buffer against Russia and other parties, so that it did nothing to support the many Muslim and other anti-Qing rebels in south-western China. The conquest of Mandalay in 1885 presented the British with an exceptionally complex border problem.
The importance of overland trade between Upper Burma and Yunnan had obliged the traders to find some way to restore relations after China’s disastrous adventure in Burma in the 1760s. A peace was negotiated in 1769, but only by producing very different documents to satisfy each of the proud courts involved. The Chinese record specifies the sending of tribute by Burma, but the Burmese kings agreed only to “good-will missions” every ten years. When no tribute mission from Burma appeared, the Qing closed the border until 1787, when Yunnanese traders desperate to restore their business sent a bogus but highly respectful “Chinese” mission to the Burmese capital. Since China appeared to have taken the first step toward an equal relationship, Burma felt able to resume missions to Yunnan on what it understood to be an equal basis. The last ones took place in 1843, 1853, and 1874.
This miscommunication was replayed during the British expedition against Mandalay in 1885. The Chinese Foreign Minister cabled London to claim sovereignty over Burma on the basis of tribute, and to threaten intervention. British authorities in Burma and India culled Burmese documents to assert that the Burmese missions were between equals, while China and the British Sinologists quoted Chinese documents for the reverse. London compromised by signing a treaty with Beijing in July 1886, which in return for Chinese recognition of British sovereignty in Burma conceded that since “it has been the practice of Burmah to send decennial Missions to present articles of local produce, England agrees that the highest authority in Burmah shall send the customary decennial Missions, the members of the Missions to be of Burmese race” (cited Myoe, unpublished, 3). No mission was ever sent, as the Qing Empire began its disintegration. Demarcating a border in the stateless highlands over which neither Burma nor China had had effective rule would have been a herculean task even with stable conditions in China. It was only in conditions of war against Japan that Britain and the nationalist government in Chongqing (Chungking) agreed to the arrangements of a League of Nations-mandated boundary commission in 1941.
While modernizing Siamese and Burmese courts saw the “tribute” system as no longer appropriate, Viet Nam’s Emperor Tu-Duc (1848–83) sought to reinvent the relationship as a lesser evil than the French. He appealed to China first to help him suppress the Chinese rebel bands moving into the border hills. This enabled the Qing government to tell the French, in 1880, that it was Viet Nam’s suzerain and had fulfilled its commitments to Tu Duc as a dependent king. France nevertheless brushed aside Chinese protests when it began the conquest of Tongking in 1882. Beijing responded robustly by sending troops across the border from Yunnan, leading to repeated clashes with French troops which escalated into a Franco-Chinese war in 1885. In the Treaty of Tientsin (June 1885) which ended it, China agreed to withdraw its troops from Viet Nam, and to respect all treaties made between France and the Vietnamese ruler (including the French protectorate). The asymmetric view from the Middle Kingdom was quaintly honored with the words “In those things which concern the relationships between China and Annam, it is intended that they will be of a nature such as not to affront the dignity of the Chinese Empire.” Ironically, as the “Chinese world order” theory died, the only Southeast Asian ruler who appeared to support Beijing’s view of it was that of Viet Nam, the state that had most tenaciously fought for a thousand years for autonomy and equality.
Building State Infrastructures
European imperial rule over Southeast Asia was of very short duration, roughly 1880–1940. Economically it was a depressingly static period (Chapter 13), and nationalist history-writing sought to marginalize or demonize it. Yet its impact was profound precisely because it brought the region into a new world order of theoretically equal and absolute sovereignty, which subsequent nationalists wholeheartedly embraced. The transformation was achieved by the globalized nationalism of the European imperial states, which ensured that most of the resources of the region would go into constructing state infrastructure that carried the new order into the furthest corners of arbitrarily drawn maps.
Among the most ardent imperial expansionists of the nineteenth century were those who sought protection for building just such an infrastructure of telegraph lines and railways. The telegraph made high imperialism and the new global order possible through unprecedentedly rapid communication around the world. Southeast Asia’s first telegraph cable linked Batavia (Jakarta) with Buitenzorg (Bogor) in 1856, and other local lines followed in Siam and Burma. At the beginning of 1872, only seven years after the first transatlantic cable, a telegraph line was opened that connected Penang, Singapore, and Saigon with India, Japan, and Europe. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, steamship travel from Europe to Southeast Asia was cut by more than half, and each European maritime country developed its shipping link. The newly invented telephone was demonstrated in Singapore in 1878, and was also operating in three cities of Java by 1884. These links enabled resident colonial elites to be much more British, Dutch, and French than was possible at the beginning of the century.
The effect of these technological revolutions coinciding with the high colonial era was to divide Southeast Asia into British, Dutch, French, and Spanish/American blocks. As the dominant shipping and manufacturing power until the advent of the Germans at the end of the century, Britain had an interest in low tariffs. It encouraged Singapore to be the natural hub of regional shipping. France and the Netherlands had the opposite interest, to use their populous eastern colonies as captive markets for their manufactures. French textile manufacturers secured the incorporation of Indochina into the French tariff system in 1887, which became even more protectionist after 1892. Whereas Viet Nam and Cambodia had obtained their manufactured imports overwhelmingly from China, Singapore, and Bangkok until the 1860s, 30% of Indochina’s imports came from France in the 1910s, 40% in the 1920s, and half in the 1930s. While consumers had to pay around 15% more for their clothes and other manufactures than if they had imported from neighbors, France was rescued from a large balance of payments deficit by its export surplus with Indochina. The Netherlands was equally determined to use its colony as a captive market for its otherwise weakly placed domestic textile industry (Chapter 10). The Philippines, tied to the giant US market after 1909 by the Payne-Aldrich law for zero tariffs between them, had 62% of its imports and 70% of its exports with the United States by 1920.
The prominence of Singapore and Penang in the shipping of the Archipelago was a particular problem for Dutch attempts to create a state in the Islands, as it would later be for Indonesian ones. British and other international lines made Singapore rather than Batavia (as in VOC days) the crucial entrepôt of the Straits area, while the local routes were dominated by smaller Straits Chinese steamers. Only in 1888 was the Royal Packet Company (KPM) assembled with enough Dutch government and corporate support to act as an effective instrument of state integration. In 1891 it used nationalistic arguments to wrest the mail contract from the British-owned NISM. As Dutch control of the Archipelago advanced, the Straits Chinese advantage of closeness to local rulers was replaced by a Dutch advantage of cozy supply arrangements with government and estates. The KPM effectively forced out British competition by 1900, and was saved from the rising challenge of the German fleet by its confiscation during World War I. The Dutch Parliament granted the KPM large subsidies and a monopoly of all government mails and business in order to ensure a pan-Archipelago network centered at last in Java rather than Singapore. Its most difficult opponent to subdue was the “mosquito fleet” of small Chinese-owned steamers mostly operating from Singapore, visiting small harbors with a low cost structure and evading Dutch customs when it could. Having failed to defeat them, the KPM adopted a strategy that turned rivals into vassals by buying out the Singapore-based ones and encouraging Indies-based Chinese firms to operate as feeders to KPM lines. Its 137 ships (1929) tied the Indies together with fixed schedules for passengers and freight, facilitated by massive government investment in infrastructure to enable large steamers to unload cargo directly in new ports at Tanjung Priok (for Batavia, 1886), Surabaya (1917), Makassar (hub for the east, 1917) and Belawan (for the plantation area around Medan, 1920). Vertically integrating as many operations as possible, the KPM also developed the colony’s largest coalmine in eastern Borneo to supply its fuel. Economically speaking, it was a classic colonial monopoly. It built technological modernity within a static hierarchy that suppressed rather than stimulated local entrepreneurship, but it did wonders to create a state.
Hong Kong around 1900 had assumed a similar role for the Philippines as Singapore for the Indies, linking the islands to regular steamer routes. The American administration after 1900 directed major investment into building deep-water docks at Manila so that major shipping lines could load directly there. With a much tighter Archipelago the success could be more complete, and by 1930 Manila was so dominant a hub that it accounted for 80% of all Philippine customs receipts. Coastal trade in the central and southern Philippines was dominated by Cebu and Iloilo (Panay). They developed a network of steam lines around Mindanao and Sulu, carrying Visayan workers to extend the frontiers of settled agriculture and of state-incorporated Christians into what had been the lightly populated domain of largely unincorporated, culturally diverse Muslims and animists. The commercial orientation of the southernmost Muslim centers to the Muslim Archipelago was effectively ended.
Java and Luzon played a somewhat similar role within the two colonies, with a developed and integrated infrastructure that could provide the kernel for still highly plural archipelagos. Daendels’ post road from Batavia to Surabaya in Java was unique in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia, delivering express despatches along its 800 km within five days by 1830. Corvée labor was extensively used also to build and maintain a series of feeder roads along this artery, linking all Java’s main cities by all-weather roads for carts and carriages on the eve of the railway revolution. This began in the 1860s with three lines from interior centers to the ports of Batavia, Semarang, and Surabaya. In the 1890s these were linked by two east-west railway routes to give Java the region’s most effectively integrated economy. Luzon was about twenty years behind, with a post road begun in the 1830s and the Camino Real linking Manila along the northern Ilocos coast with the fertile Cagayan Valley. The Spanish opened a railway from Manila through the central valley to Dagupan in 1892. This suffered much during the upheavals of 1896–1902, but was eventually extended down the Bikul Peninsula under the Americans. As in Java, the railways were able to replace the river waterways as they became impassable through deforestation and silting. Unlike the waterways, however, they were a state-operated hierarchic monopoly, not unlike the KPM.
In the Mainland the railways introduced very different integrations than had been possible with the river traffic of the past. British Burma had the most navigable of the region’s rivers, and the 270 steamers of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, reputedly the world’s largest inland fleet by the 1920s, made it railway-like in speed, efficiency, and British-topped hierarchy. But the non-Bama regions beyond this central artery could only have equal access to the Rangoon-centered modern economy as an ambitious railway system was built, beginning in the 1870s. Soon Rangoon was linked not only with newly conquered Mandalay (1889) but with Myitkina in Kachin country (1899), Lashio among the Shan (1903), and southerly Moulmein (1929), a center for Mon and Karen.
This pattern was still more striking in Siam, where the busy traffic of the Chao Phraya in central Siam did nothing to incorporate the Lao of the northeast, whose natural artery was the Mekong, now dominated by the French. Strategic reasons predominated in building the first lines into the north-eastern watershed of the Mekong at Nakon Ratchasima (1896, extended to Khon Kaeng 1937) and toward Siam’s remaining Khmer provinces before these were lost and the railway stopped at Chachoengsao (1907). The northern line to Uttaradit (1909) and Chiang Mai (1921) was also begun for military purposes, and was far from covering costs initially. The southern route down the Peninsula reached Surat Thani by 1915 and the border three years later, hoping to direct southern commerce to Bangkok and away from the British ports. As a vital arm of the state, the railways were primarily managed by German technicians, presumed to have fewer political interests than British and French, and they were protected from competition from road development with its democratic possibilities. In consequence, Siamese in the 1930s had slightly better access to rail per head of population than their neighbors, but only a sixth of the road coverage of Burma and Indochina.
Indochina’s transport integration was boldly envisaged in the 1890s but faced the daunting task of traversing countless flood-prone rivers to connect even the two main population centers. The 1,800 kilometers of the Transindochinois was built in sections, using large government subsidies and levies of Vietnamese labor before the two population centers around Hanoi and Saigon were finally linked in 1936. Although ruinously expensive and never as effective for carrying freight as the shipping links, the railway was popular with Vietnamese who made up 90% of the passengers. The fact that it united them, but notably failed to link Cambodia and Laos, undoubtedly contributed to the conceptual unification of a national rather than imperial space, as well as the movement within it of students, journalists, activists, and revolutionaries.
With the exceptions of Siam and Java, railways were less effective than roads became in the 1920s in integrating economies. The logistic difficulties of mountains, rivers, and jungles were too great. The Americans in the Philippines led the way in creating an effective national road network in the 1920s, but the French also built one of Asia’s best road systems. Accomplishing in the 1930s what the railways could not, this linked the five administrative sections of Indochina by 38,000 km of paved roads, some sealed in asphalt but most paved with stone. Three east-west corridors linked the upper Mekong to the coast, and tied Laos in the first half of the twentieth century more effectively to Viet Nam than to its natural partner in Siam. In the Islands outside Java and Luzon, railways had been significant only in Sumatra, with three distinct networks linking the ports of Belawan, Padang, and Palembang to their hinterlands. Road networks, however, did finally integrate such large and diverse islands as Sumatra and Mindanao in the 1930s, and opened south Bali to a growing tourist traffic from Singaraja in the north.
Financial infrastructure was no less critical. Southeast Asia had been a silver zone since the sixteenth century, and Spanish and Mexican dollars continued to be acceptable everywhere through the nineteenth, supplemented locally by a variety of copper and zinc base coins. The new states were not at first strong enough to discard this pattern, but produced their own versions of the Spanish dollar – the Straits dollar in the Peninsula, the rijksdaalder in the Indies, gradually replaced by the guilder, the piastre in Indochina, the peso in the Philippines, and the baht in Siam. Paper money was introduced in the early 1900s, with the usual national distinctiveness. It was shifted to the gold standard in one country after another, pegged to the metropolitan country, and forced into use in many areas by the requirement that taxes be paid in it. New banking systems and tax regimes were introduced, all having the effect of tying the economies more closely together and to the metropolitan country, and less to their neighbors.
Finally, distinct language regimes linked the elites of different regions within the newly established boundaries. Portuguese, Malay, Arabic, English, and Chinese (especially as spoken in Hokkien dialect) had acted as lingua franca for different groups across the region and beyond it, but in the twentieth century distinct fault lines developed between English, French, Spanish (surviving in the Philippines until World War II), Thai, and Dutch zones. The higher levels of education, administration, the judiciary, and business were conducted in these languages. For wider communication, Malay remained a very important lingua franca in Nusantara (British and Dutch). Vietnamese in Indochina and Bama in Burma were also standardized for use in lower schools and administration. The romanization of both Malay (from Arabic script) and Vietnamese (from Chinese) had begun pragmatically much earlier to help traders, missionaries, and later colonial administrators make themselves understood. In the twentieth century, however, these romanized languages were taught widely in primary schools, and became powerful tools for intellectuals and nationalists to mediate their forms of modernity into a national linguistic space.
How Many States in Indochina?
The borders drawn between competing European nationalisms would quickly be endorsed by nationalists as the boundaries of their own destined space. The infrastructure of modern statehood ensured that modern nation-states would have exactly the boundaries of colonial state-building projects. Only French Indochina did not become one single state, but three. Both the French and the anti-French nationalists wavered on what it was they sought to construct in the new space, depending on what they identified as the chief threat. Despite the division of French Imperial space into five constitutionally separate units (Tongking, Annam, Cochin-China, Cambodia, and Laos), and three protected monarchs, the space was governed centrally by French officials as a new zone of absolute sovereignty. One official insisted in response to de Mayréna’s quixotic “kingdom of the Sedangs,” “The political map of Indochina contains no blanks … leaving no room for independent tribes” (Résident-supérieur Rheinart 1888, cited Salemink 2003, 52). The bureaucracy of this entity was French above and Vietnamese below; its infrastructure was centered around the hubs of Hanoi-Haiphong and Saigon; its schools, culminating in the “Indochinese” Hanoi University, brought all peoples of the colony together through the medium of French. Most of the same factors that gave rise to a maximalist Burma and Indonesia, in other words, applied also in Indochina.
Anxiety about Chulalongkorn’s attempts to mobilize a greater Tai unity led some French officials to toy with fostering a greater Viet identity (labeled “Annamese” in the colonial era), maximizing the Nguyen legacy. Vietnamese nationalists educated with ideas of a broader destiny frequently saw their task as liberating all Indochina from the French, particularly if they were among the 10,000 Vietnamese living in Vientiane in 1937 (outnumbering Lao there) or the 140,000 living in Cambodia. In 1929 it was an Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) that was formed to be the vanguard of this revolution.
Emotionally, the tide was turned by the passionately ethno-nationalist Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang), formed a year earlier. It sought to popularize the term Viet Nam, little used since the early nineteenth century, in place of Annam, which was increasingly invalidated by its use by the French for the Protectorate in the center, and before that by China to imply submission. Its leader Nguyen Thai Hoc demanded that patriots violently sacrifice themselves in the name of this concept. He showed the way immediately before his public execution in 1930 by shouting dramatically “Viet Nam van tue (Long live Viet Nam).” Although Ho Chi Minh was among those influenced by these events toward a more ethnically defined nationalism, the younger communists, supported by the Soviet and French parties, continued to press for an Indochinese vision well into the 1950s. Fundamentally, however, even the ICP was always too Vietnamese to recommend itself to Lao and Khmer elites, whose own nationalism tended to contain a good deal of anti-Viet ethnic sentiment.
Ethnic Construction in the New Sovereign Spaces
The revolutionary concept of sovereign space, within which all were, in principle, subject to the same law, would transform Asia in the twentieth century. With the exception of lowland Filipinos and Javanese, most Southeast Asians encountered the idea of the modern state relatively late in its career, when in the late nineteenth century it already had long abandoned the natural hierarchies and personal charisma of the ancien régime. The European colonial officials who spread the new state idea around were sustained by extraordinary confidence in their project of liberating Asians from traditional constraints on trade and industry, and in the superiority of their technology and rationality. Even when they appeared to defer to local custom, religion, and hierarchy, they had so much more in common with each other than with the people they ruled over that they generated a highly centralized and uniform mode of operation among themselves, beneath a façade of respect for local tradition.
This revolution brought perhaps the greatest changes to stateless and highland people who had previously known states as harbor gateways and periodic predators, to be conciliated with tribute when necessary, assimilated to when advantageous, and avoided otherwise. As we have seen, such people were extremely plural and mobile, multilingual and able to adopt whatever local identities they found themselves in. The colonial umbrella placed them unambiguously within newly absolute borders with “no blanks,” but also offered the possibility of their becoming politically equal to the lowland incorporated populations, or even privileged, on certain conditions. These included generating elites with a certain level of education, and defining themselves and their languages as units large enough to be comprehensible to the colonial states and the outside world more generally. The state apparatus of administrative units, educational languages, textbooks, censuses, and maps gradually brought about a kind of “ethnogenesis,” whereby each colonial space recognized a certain manageable number of standardized ethnicities.
Although it is often said that Siam in this period was reinvented in the image of its colonized neighbors, in this respect it was distinctive. The Thai Buddhist identity of its royal elite was explicitly the norm for a modernized state, and others should, and with some (Muslim) exceptions could, assimilate to that norm. Because the only route to elite status was education in Thai, even the Lao/Isan, who were as numerous as the central Thai, learned a second identity as simply Thai. When nationalism arrived in the early twentieth century, initially at royal inspiration, it was under the slogan “nation/race, religion, monarchy” (chat, sasana, pramakakasat), all of which were Thai and Buddhist. Though colonial rivalries had ensured that Siam had the fewest minority problems, it also made the fewest concessions to them.
In Burma and Indochina the Bama and Viet, respectively, were demographically and historically dominant, but the colonial state ensured that minorities were documented, classified, and to some extent homogenized as ethnicities distinct from the lowland majority. The enormous diversity of Burma was simplified into the eight “big races” – Bama, Mon, Shan, Karen, Kayah, Kachin, Chin, and Rakhine (Arakan) – even though colonial censuses acknowledged as many as 40 dialect sub-groups of Chin alone. The military government of 1988 tried to repudiate a century of consolidation by proclaiming the unity of “135 national races of Myanmar,” but it was too late. Though their map-makers and census-takers were baffled by the internal diversity of every group, British planners were clear about the line between lowland Buddhists (Bama, most Mon and Rakhine) whom they held to have been integrated into the Burmese kingdom, and the “excluded areas” under direct British control in the 1922 and 1935 Constitutions (Map 12.1). These excluded or scheduled areas, representing 47% of Burma’s area and 16% of its population, became a laboratory for anthropologists and missionaries. Helped by a growing body of written literature, they gradually developed elites who saw themselves as speaking for the “big races.” Political state-building, therefore, would necessarily be of a federal type which acknowledged these separate identities.
Map 12.1 The two Burmas: nationalist and “scheduled,” 1930s.
Neither process, separation or remolding into larger blocks, was as developed in French Indochina. Early French policies were markedly influenced by lowland presumptions, shared by Catholic missionaries who came to the highlands with their Viet flock, that highlanders were savages who needed to be educated up to the Viet level. Initially, today’s Central Highlands were, in the east, administered by the mandarins of Annam, who channeled their forest products to the market, and in the west, regarded as part of Laos. Paul Doumer’s energetic centralization of Indochina administration resulted by 1907, however, in three new highland provinces (Pleiku, Darlac, and Haut-Donnai) including former Laos highlands, envisaged as being in practice under French control albeit nominally in the Annam protectorate. Léopold Sabatier became a paternalistic advocate for the separate identity of the Montagnards he administered in Darlac (Ban Me Thuot) from 1913 to 1927, and encouraged education in romanized Rhadé rather than Vietnamese. The battle he waged to stop French rubber interests and Viet colonists from entering the Highlands was lost with his departure, however. The unincorporated highlanders remained, in French eyes, all Montagnards, a slight advance on the Viet characterization as Moi (savages), while scholarship divided them into a mosaic of diversity. The 13% of the Viet Nam population that was officially considered “national minorities” in the 1980s was divided into 48 groups, even the largest of which was less than 2% of the population, and unable to bargain over the definition of state.
The Islands’ states were constructed as two trade empires, in which Batavia and Manila were initially commercial hubs not dependent on any particular hinterland. Even when, in the eighteenth/nineteenth centuries, Dutch and Spanish built their alternative economic bases in Java and Luzon, respectively, no one ethno-linguistic group had any special place. Indigenous inhabitants were all “Indians” (Indiërs and Indios, respectively) or natives. To the colonizers the vital distinctions appeared to be between these indigenous peoples on the one hand, and Europeans and Chinese merchants on the other. There was therefore an inherent equality at the base of the pyramid between the different ethnicities that constructed themselves under the colonial umbrella. Legal equality led to imaginings of community, expressed in Malay and Dutch in the Indies, and in Spanish and, later, English in the Philippines. Ethno-nationalism naturally appeared, particularly among Javanese and Tagalogs, but was no match for a common anti-imperial nationalism (Chapter 15). That nationalism had to be named neutrally, and once “Indian” was felt to be unsatisfactory, Indonesian and Filipino were settled upon as artificial alternatives.
In the Philippines, unincorporated highlanders and southern Muslims were outside the negotiations over national identity. In the Indies, however, highlanders who had rejected incorporation into the Islamic gunpowder empires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries found they could enter the new twentieth century umbrella state as equals with their former adversaries, once they had defined themselves in broad enough terms to be legible by that state. Minangkabau and Mandailing Muslims in Sumatra, and Minahassan Christians in Sulawesi, were sufficiently ahead educationally to be over-represented in the emergent educated class of functionaries, teachers, and nationalist intellectuals. Late-arriving Balinese, Bataks (northern Sumatra), Torajans (Sulawesi), and Dayaks (Borneo) eventually also found their way to the same status as Javanese in the Dutch census as a landaard (inaccurately translated officially as race) and in Indonesian usage as a suku (group or component).
The British parts of Nusantara remained awkwardly diverse. In Sarawak and North Borneo, the colonial regimes had treated the key religio-linguistic groups, including Chinese, as equally necessary parts of an undeveloped polity. The Peninsula was a mosaic comprising three cosmopolitan colonies where “natives” (Asians) were roughly equal under the law, and nine protected sultanates defining themselves increasingly as “Malay.” Never conceived as a single state, this complex of twelve diverse pieces nevertheless had enough in common (English and Malay lingua franca, British institutions, acknowledged pluralism, however differently) eventually to become one in 1963. The tensions between a more Mainland-like ethnic primacy and a more Island-like cosmopolitanism provided an uncomfortable dynamic that nevertheless gave birth to Southeast Asia’s two most prosperous and orderly states, Malaysia and Singapore.
States, not Nations
This extraordinary burst of state-making, concentrated in a mere half-century (1890–1940), was made possible by the equally extraordinary self-confidence of its European agents that it was necessary, justified, and progressive. The changes they introduced made the new structures effective but not owned; familiar but not loved; understood but not empathized with. They had been able to establish states of an exceptional degree of pragmatic centralism dressed in symbolic diversity, precisely because the steel structure of European officialdom was divorced from social realities and cultural norms on the ground. The creation of some kind of empathetic nation within each of these structural frames would be accomplished by the nationalists of the mid-twentieth century (Chapters 15 and 19). This transformation from an alien, resented, and artificial structure to a passionately felt nation required what I have called “alchemy” of a very high order (Reid 2010). The revolutionaries who brought it about would prove even more astonishingly self-confident, in the face of much greater barriers and costs, than their colonial predecessors.