1. What is Southeast Asia?

“What is Southeast Asia?” provides a geographical, political, social, and historical overview of each of the eleven nations that make up Southeast Asia. Mainland Southeast Asia is home to hundreds of ethnic groups that are today the citizens of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Island (or maritime) Southeast Asia includes the Malay Peninsula and two huge archipelagos whose even more diverse populations are now citizens of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, and the Philippines. The entire region stretches some 5,000 kilometers from end to end and 4,000 kilometers north to south. It contains 625 million people, around 9% of the world’s population.

5. The past is in the present

What remains today of Southeast Asia’s former kingdoms and colonies and its first-draft nations? “The past is in the present” suggests the answer is quite a lot. The extraordinary heterogeneity of Southeast Asia has not changed. Beneath the skin of the region’s national identities, thousands of separate ethnicities and languages and dialects remain, playing a role in local power struggles and sometimes in national ones. The impressive survival of the new states since independence, and their formal incorporation into a web of international organizations, suggest that Southeast Asia’s nations are here to stay. And yet, Southeast Asia remains rife with conflict. Often, the sleeping mandalas provide an explanation.

2. Kingdoms

By the second or third millennium bce, the people of Southeast Asia were cultivating rice, domesticating pigs, chickens, and cattle, and forming the region’s earliest settled communities in several mainland areas congruent with present-day north Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaya. “Kingdoms” describes what little is known about the early civilizations through the region, such as at Funan and Angkor. It also describes pre-modern Southeast Asia as a world of mandala kingdoms and how Southeast Asian societies and states evolved in communication with adjacent Asian civilizations in India and China, absorbing Islam and Theravada Buddhism. After China’s withdrawal from the region, the Europeans arrived from the 1500s bringing new trade and cultural influence.

3. Colonies

The mandala world of Southeast Asia was fragile, but it was also rich. The first Europeans that were drawn to Southeast Asia to gain access to the region’s precious goods directly were from Portugal and Spain. “Colonies” describes the arrival of the Portuguese in Goa in 1510 and their capture of Melaka; the Spanish seizure of the Philippine islands from the Aztecs in 1521; and the colonizing of the Dutch and British. By the early twentieth century, the colonial spheres of Holland and England had expanded dramatically and both France and the United States had also seized colonial territories in Southeast Asia. Of the region’s indigenous kingdoms, only Siam survived.

4. Nations

Most of Southeast Asia’s colonies had been created by conquest and coercion. Almost everywhere, Southeast Asians attempted to fend off European rule in every way possible. “Nations” describes the processes of resistance to colonial powers, growing nationalism, and new movements for political reform and independence. Japan’s entry to World War II changed everything. The impact of the war on Southeast Asia is explained along with the move to independence and nation-building that followed. It also outlines the effects of the Cold War, the signing of the ground-breaking Treaty of Amity and Cooperation by the ASEAN members, and the financial booms and crashes of the 1990s and 2000s.