Imagined Autonomy: Southeast Asia

Indonesian performers singing The Smiths against USA backdrop (2007)

I have an enduring affection for my one-time close mentor Robert H. Taylor (Bob) who introduced me to good literature and high-powered contacts in Southeast Asia. Our late-afternoon reunions in his thickly-carpeted capacious office imbibing his Southeast Asian anecdotes, enormous cigars, and large amounts of whisky while he advised me on how to go about doing my fieldwork in Indonesia are now the stuff of pleasurable distant memories. This 2007 interview in ANU's 'New Mandala' shows what a colourful and controversial figure Bob was in his heyday. Little did I know when I took over the daunting task of teaching his flagship course Government & Politics in Southeast Asia at the School of Oriental & African Studies that I freed Bob up to pursue higher goals in life (Vice-Chancellorships). 

The point of mentioning Bob Taylor here is that when I began researching Southeast Asia in 1990 as a post-Mexico post-doc Fellow at SOAS it was natural that the first history book I would read was the classic one coauthored by my head of department. And, so, from Bob’s hand-me-down copy of In Search of Southeast Asia (1985) I learned this:
Colonial rule was part of a larger historical process, the scientific and industrial revolution which transformed the world … direct Western rule in Southeast Asia [was] a short-lived frontier institution in a worldwide process of political change [whereby] colonial powers acted as agents of a universal process, laying the foundations for modern nations just as in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere … Southeast Asia was caught up in the world economic revolution.
That sounded reasonable to me at the time, but in retrospect I see Bob’s classic collaborative text was only the best of recent but still somewhat triumphalist ‘old historiography’. I wasn’t aware yet of another tradition of scholarship that was more apologetic in its phrasing and framing, which sought to discover Southeast Asia’s “autonomous” past and present potential, and truculently interrogated the eurocentric assumption that only colonial states and western technology could drag Southeast Asian rulers and peasants into the modern world. 

Here I will briefly and gently question the implied existence of some kind of autonomous economic and institutional potential that would have been better than colonialism and capitalism for Southeast Asia’s future wellbeing. I think the weight of the truth still lies more on the side of Bobs older historiography.

In the 1990s Anthony Reid spearheaded the movement that I will for convenience call ‘new historiography’. Reid did so by identifying an extraordinary Southeast Asian export-led expansion during The Age of Commerce between the 15th and 17th centuries, a mid 17th century crisis and retreat from world trade, renewed commercial dynamism in late 17th century, and finally more sluggish growth post-1850 in the high colonial period.


The mission of new historiography, I think it is fair to say, is to discredit old historiography’s suggestion that nothing much changed in Southeast Asia prior to the arrival of European administration, law courts, railways, steamships, and telegraphs in the nineteenth century. It also offers post hoc justification for Asia’s economic dynamism in the 1980s and 1990s. By 1997, in a collection titled The Last Stand of the Asian Autonomies, Alexander Woodside (one of the original coauthors with Bob of In Search of Southeast Asia) had announced his wish “to reimagine the value of premodern Southeast Asian states in the comparative history of the future”, describing 18th century Southeast Asians as “world pioneers of the globalisation of nation states”, and emphasising the “general growth of economic knowledge” among local literati and elites.


Reid wrote in the same book -- Autonomies -- of wanting to support Asia’s desires to validate their “differentness” “stirred by the cultural confidence that comes with economic success”. Earlier, in Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era (1993), he compared his own writings to the dethroning of eurocentric Japanese history. Rather than highlighting 19th century Meiji integration in global networks and the post-war US occupation, the new historians of Japan emphasised an autonomous self-contained development path initiated in the Tokugawa or Edo period.

Japan belatedly forced itself on the attention of economic historians by its spectacular twentieth-century performance, undermining attempts to identify unique sociocultural features of Europe which made capitalism possible ... There too, economic confidence gives rise to intellectual confidence.  Instead of the question what was wrong with Asian cultures, frequently asked only a few decades ago, attention is now directed to what is right about them. Neither question is helpful, but it is no longer possible to assume that the place of Asia was ordained by environment or culture to be part of a static third world.
These efforts to demarcate a decolonized history were remarkably successful and even won converts from the older historiography. David Wyatt, yet another of the coauthors of In Search of Southeast Asia (1985) complained, alongside Reid and Woodside in The Last Stand of the Asian Autonomies (1997) about histories of Southeast Asia in which “the primary agent of change, and the motive or driving force of that history, comes from outside the region [in the shape of] western imperialism and ultimately colonialism”. In Wyatt’s reinterpretation of history the European rational scientific enlightenment and positivist thinking -- being so transparently imperialist in projection -- are accorded little relevance to Southeast Asia beyond their purely utilitarian function in the exercise of power.

Instead, Wyatt emphasised Thailand’s premodern ideological “autonomy”. Thai “mental furniture”, moral order and cosmic understanding were distinctive “abstract and universal ideas as to the nature of human society and human experience”. Buddhist monks wrote real autonomous histories. The literati were “bibliophilically crazy, with an insatiable passion for collecting books”. They stored their manuscripts in a “frenzy of library-building”. Peasants, “supposedly remote and backward”, cunningly learned to “manipulate world commodity prices in their favour”, demonstrating a “sense of the efficacy of human agency”. Premodern suppression of dissent is celebrated as evidence of “how effective internal hierarchies worked either to socialise the articulate into a particular world-view or to enforce conformity”.


The question in my mind is whether new historiography went too far in correcting the imbalances. In his edited volume Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era (1993) Reid barely apologises for “the fact that no essays are included on the roles of Europeans despite their profound effects on the economic history of the region”, which, he says, “might suggest that we have not yet escaped the period of reaction against Europocentric excesses”. Four years later in the collection The Last Stand of the Asian Autonomies (1997) Reid was still asking authors to focus only on indigenous rather than European patterns in 1750-1850. One of the contributors, Victor Lieberman, actually pointed out that “our weariness with old-fashioned historiography should not obscure the fact that between 1750-1850 [foreigners] defined the political and economic options” of Southeast Asians.


I ceased doing systematic research on Southeast Asia in 1995. I’m reading the new historiography now to catch-up with what I missed. My reaction to it is not enthusiastic. New historiography tries much too hard to be soft on pre-modern and pre-colonial Southeast Asian rulership systems and institutions. The normative element in the work is unnecessary, and the theoretical analysis is weak. Placed in the hands of self-serving politicians a rosy interpretation of the past offered by new historiography could perpetuate resistance to needed institutional reform in Southeast Asia. I do not believe the historians really found viable culturally-particular, non-universal development paths in early modern Asia.


Let me illustrate -- with a symbolic quibble about capitalism -- a core weakness of new historiography. Reid writes in the final pages of his two-volume opus on The Age of Commerce (1993):

Happily, it has become less common to regard capitalism as a stage through which all societies must aspire to pass. Divorced from the feudalism of Europe and the socialism of Marxist prophecy between which it was conventionally set, capitalism loses most of its utility as a category.
Contrast that with Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells rather more balanced or realistic appraisal in her chapter in Reid’s Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era (1993):
There is perhaps no socioeconomic phenomenon of the modern era that links the present with the past more intimately than the growth of capitalism. The nature of this development is inherently global in its dimensions. The forces that set it on its path had their origins in European commercial and political expansion … In the case of Southeast Asia, the passive indigenous response to merchant capitalism, even preceding the era of European imperialism, was at least partly a feature of its political economy.
Using the same evidence provided by old and new historiography we too may (happily!) explore which one paints the truer picture. Of course, Southeast Asian political economy is for Southeast Asians to evaluate and change as they wish. My objection is to whitewashing otherwise first-rate historical analysis with romances of autonomous non-capitalist dynamism, and the two related ideological claims which easily follow: 1. that regional autonomy was somehow superior to nasty capitalism, and 2. were it not for nasty capitalists, imperialists, and colonists Southeast Asia would today be better off.

Fortunately the historiography of Southeast Asia’s ‘autonomy’ is nowhere as crude as the earlier historiography of Latin America’s ‘dependency’. While imagining a Southeast Asian autonomy the western historians claim to want to empower Southeast Asians. Nevertheless, Reid and company greatly exaggerate the quality and value of this autonomy. The risk remains obvious in Woodside’s aim cited earlier - “to reimagine the value of premodern Southeast Asian states in the comparative history of the future”. These influential historians might damage prospects for change if the roots and continuities they claim to find in Southeast Asian political economy turn out to be profoundly negative rather than positive.




Michael G. Heller ©2014

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