scholarly journals Southeast Asian History and the Mediterranean Analogy

2003 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Multidisciplinary Approach ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
External Influence ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Local Identities ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Asian History ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Conceptual Confusion

Historians of Southeast Asia have been inspired by Fernand Braudel's classic The Mediterranean because of its focus on the sea and multidisciplinary approach, and because it seems to solve two recalcitrant historiographical problems: the definition of time and space, and the reconciliation of local identities and external influence. But while Braudel's prose and intellectual ambition are justly seen as inspiring, conceptual confusion and analytic evasion limit his contribution.

Networks and Synchronisms in Southeast Asian History

1995 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denys Lombard
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Main Difficulty ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
History Of ◽  
Asian History

It is truly not easy to write a “well integrated” history of Southeast Asia. If today, anybody feels such a necessity, the procedure is far from obvious, and thus the utility of using a special issue such as the present one to take stock of the situation is quite evident. The main difficulty is in fact to transcend the heaviness of regional, colonial and then nationalistic histories which have strongly partitioned off the historical space.

Ships, Shipwrecks, and Archaeological Recoveries as Sources of Southeast Asian History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Heng
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Construction Materials ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Critical Component ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Exchanges ◽  
Asian History ◽  
Shipping Networks ◽  
Knowledge Usage ◽  
The Last Two Millennia

Ships form a critical component of the study of Southeast Asia’s interaction both within itself as well as with the major centers of Asia and the West. Shipwreck data, accrued from archaeologically excavated shipwreck sites, provide information on the evolving maritime traditions that traversed Southeast Asian waters over the last two millennia, including shipbuilding and navigational technologies and knowledge, usage of construction materials and techniques, types of commodities carried by the shipping networks, shipping passages developed through Southeast Asia, and the key ports of call that vessels would arrive at as part of the network of economic and social exchanges that came to characterize maritime interactions.

Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Period; Twenty-Five Years On

1995 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard Y. Andaya ◽  
Barbara Watson Andaya
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
General Acceptance ◽  
Convenient Tool ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Asian History

The identity of “Southeast Asia” has been debated since the 1950s, when the region began to develop as an area of academic viability around which courses could be constructed, programmes built, and research published. Much less controversy has accompanied the growing use of “early modern”, a term which seems set to displace “precolonial” in periodizing Southeast Asian history. The phrase, of course, comes from scholarship on Europe, where it was popularized as a result of efforts to find shared “periods” that would facilitate the writing of a general history. It would be surprising if questions as to the applicability of “early modern” in Southeast Asia do not spark off some debate, especially in light of subaltern writings that reject the notion of modernity as a universal. For such historians the very invocation of the word implicitly sets a “modern Europe” against a “yet to be modernized non-Europe”. But whatever decision is made regarding terminology, scholarship on Southeast Asia is increasingly viewing a period that stretches from about the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century as rather different from those traditionally described as “classical” and “colonial/modern”. The term “early modern” itself is at present a convenient tool for historical reference, and only time will tell whether it will find general acceptance.

The Indian-Derived Law Texts of Southeast Asia

1978 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. B. Hooker
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Social Condition ◽  
Important Class ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Law Texts

The aim of this paper is to outline the characteristics of one very important class of Southeast Asian law texts—the “Indian-derived.” In the process, it may be possible to throw light on some basic questions such as the nature of State, and the definition of sovereignty in medieval Southeast Asia. The texts are important examples of the adaptation of Indian legal culture in new environments. I hope to show that the idea of law exhibited in the texts, while dependent upon such basic Indian ideas as “duty” (dharma), is not only differently defined in the various cultures of “Indianized” Southeast Asia but transcends such limited legal definitions as “rules” or “coercion.” Law instead rests upon native concepts, giving rise to rules of conduct that ought, to be observed by reason of social condition. It is among these rules that law is to be found; law is an aspect of dharma, the definition of which varies from one law text to another. It is ultimately concerned with a definition of obligation that is simultaneously suitable in local terms and consonant with absolute principles derived from the Indian texts.

Kingship, Time, and Space: Historiography in Southeast Asia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John K. Whitmore
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Trade Routes ◽  
Northern Vietnam ◽  
Royal Courts ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Second Category

This chapter demonstrates how the topic of Southeast Asian historiography divides itself into three fairly distinct categories that progress through this period. First, there was the epigraphy, — materials carved mainly into stone (but also metal). These were the main surviving forms of writing for almost all the classical polities that emerged in the region from the seventh century on. The second category consisted of writings on paper (or other materials like palm leaves) from the royal courts of two specific regions, eastern Java and northern Vietnam, during the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries. Finally, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as the international trade routes brought and reinforced universal ideologies deeper into the region, localities began to write their own histories and to integrate these histories into the grand cosmic schemes of these religions.

Beyond Nationalism and Revolution in Southeast Asia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
John T. Sidel
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
State Power ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Asian History ◽  
New Nation

This chapter offers a composite picture of the Philippine, Indonesian, and Việtnamese revolutions that goes beyond both established understandings of these revolutions as nationalist in nature and the various strands of the growing body of literature on the various cosmopolitan connections cited above. The chapter intends to provide a new descriptive overview of the three major revolutions in Southeast Asian history. In so doing, the chapter provides a critical counterpoint to those understandings and accounts of these revolutions that, consciously or unconsciously, follow official nationalist narratives in which the rise of national consciousness produces nationalists who make national revolutions. It works to undermine efforts to appropriate these revolutions — and the making of these three new nation-states — for the nationalist elites who came to occupy state power in the aftermaths of these revolutions and throughout the postindependence era. By providing alternative narratives, the chapter suggests ways these revolutions might be understood not only in terms of their victories and their victors but in light of their betrayals and their victims, as the diverse and diverging emancipatory energies that helped to fuel revolutionary mobilization were in various ways absorbed, appropriated, and eviscerated by postrevolutionary (nation-)states.

Local Integration and Eurasian Analogies: Structuring Southeast Asian History, c. 1350—c. 1830

1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-572 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Systematic Overview ◽  
Local Integration ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
Asian History ◽  
Classical States

The historiography of precolonial Southeast Asia remains remarkably fragmented and inaccessible, even by the standards of that variegated region. We have a limited number of country monographs. But no systematic overview of Southeast Asian political or economic history has been attempted for all, or even part, of the period between the waning of the classical states in the fourteenth century and the onset of high colonialism in the early nineteenth. Scholarly surveys, like the magisterial and still standardmagnum opusof D. G. E. Hall, make discretion the better part of valor by providing separate country chapters without integrative theme or comment.

Presidential Address: Five Voices From Southeast Asia's Past

1994 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 1076-1091 ◽  
Author(s):  
David K. Wyatt
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Asian History

In 1962 the association for asian studies met, as this year, in Boston, at its fourteenth annual meeting, when the Association was addressed by its President that year, Lauriston Sharp. In his search for “some of the continuities and discontinuities of human experience in Southeast Asia,” Sharp proposed that “we should first work back from the present and up the little streams, the short runs of Southeast Asian history and prehistory” (Sharp 1962:5). Following Sharp's metaphor of time as the river, we can find that the rocks and rivulets, the surges and pools and mighty dams of a very minor river in the northern part of what is now called Thailand have much to tell us of the rich and complex past of Southeast Asia. We are concerned here with a small and, most would argue, inconsequential river; but any river at its spate is capable of raising and pushing along the largest boulders. I would hope that this particular river might serve to wash clean and highlight anew the ground that Sharp so eloquently covered so many years ago.

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