Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, Vol. 1 - The Lands Below the Winds / Anthony Reid

Southeast Asia, in the wider world's view, always seems to be defined in terms of the places it lies between, in particular, the 'great civilizations' of India and China. That intermediacy is found in the names given to the region: 'Indochina', the 'East Indies', and even 'Southeast Asia' itself. Scholars of the past have been quick to point out the Indian and Chinese influences inherent in the cultures and languages of Southeast Asia, most well-known among them being the Frenchman George Coedès, who was responsible for popularizing the notion of the Indianized state. These borrowings and adaptations are undeniable, but they can obscure the fact that Southeast Asian peoples had cultures in their own right, and were not simply of a malleable disposition susceptible to the pressures of supposedly 'higher' cultures of more ancient heritage.

Reid's book consciously sets out to establish the historical autonomy and uniqueness of the region, following the historiographical program of another Frenchman, Fernand Braudel. Braudel was the chief promoter of the Annales school, which sought to sketch out the big picture of history, using the tools of sociology and anthropology, instead of focusing on individual 'important' events or people. Therefore, this volume has an encyclopedic feel, and in some places lacks cohesion (the human mind is always seeking narrative to bind facts together). Where it succeeds, however, is precisely in ferreting out interesting and telling details, that inspire the reader to look beyond the boundaries of scholarly disciplines to try and take in a greater whole. Many of these pieces of information are from traveler's accounts written by the early European traders and mariners who sailed to this 'land below the winds' (this name for the region refers to its shelter from the seasonal monsoon winds). Reid also cites with some admiration the early histories written by European scholars (such as Raffles and Crawfurd) who sought to be as comprehensive as they could be. Given such sources and exemplars, what animates the writing, and hopefully the reader too, is a lively sense of curiosity, more than any specific theoretical agenda.

The sense of culture shock that greeted these early European travelers is well-illustrated with choice quotations and observations. For example, he notes that they were surprised at how often Asians would wash themselves, because "whereas the conventional wisdom in Europe was that bathing was voluptuous or dangerous, Asians associated it with purification and 'cooling', without which the body could not be healthy." (p. 51) One can imagine what the Asians thought when they first encountered the smelly, bedraggled European mariners fresh off the boat at port.

Unfortunately, these anecdotal nuggets are so amusing while many quantitative questions remain unanswerable. One of the interpretative parts of this book which I have doubts about is the passage on population growth between the 17th and 18th centuries (see esp. table 1). Here, tentative conclusions about the impact of colonization on the population are obtained by contrasting colonial figures with the population growth rate from the period before. These estimates, however, are largely based upon data which are hard to interpret, such as counts of taxable households (which have to be multiplied by some factor to give the 'true' total population size). Furthermore, the data are obtained from multiple sources spread out through a long span of time - I question if it is actually suitable to put them together in a single analysis, or whether it is possible to extract any meaningful statistics from them. Here, the work of the social and economic historian is most limited, because the data that he or she needs are simply absent.

Most interesting to me was the substantial chapter on sexual relations, and here there is ample material to engage even the general reader. The study of history is most satisfying when it contradicts our commonplace notions about what the past was like, especially when those notions inform what we think the present should be like, whereupon history becomes politically significant. Reid marshals the ample evidence for the place of women in Southeast Asian history, demonstrating how their position was not traditionally subjugate to men, but instead complementary. Commerce and the marketplace, for example, were seen as women's spheres; this traditional attitude can still be seen today in the comparatively high percentage of women entrepreneurs and business owners in Southeast Asia, compared with elsewhere in the world. European traders found themselves dealing often with women merchants, who sometimes held plenty of power and influence in their own right. Given that marriage was often treated as a contractual relationship at the time, it is not surprising that many foreign traders would enter into temporary marriages with local women, which not only offered the benefit of companionship but also distinct commercial advantages, because they could now tap into local markets through their wives. Reid does not mention it here, but such a pattern was also followed by Chinese traders, who came and went on a seasonal basis following the monsoon winds. It was not that trade and commerce were looked down upon as less prestigious than male endeavours like statecraft and war. Women were in some instances put in place as rulers when aristocracies wanted to foster conditions amenable to business:

"In choosing to put women on the throne the orangkaya [aristocrats] were opting not only for mild rule but for businesslike rule. As in other fields, men were expected to defend a high sense of status and honour on the battlefield but to be profligate with their wealth. It was women's business to understand market forces, to drive hard bargains, and to conserve their capital."

There are some rich pickings here for evolutionary psychologists, if they haven't already mined them. When Western powers moved into Southeast Asia with colonial intentions, they negotiated with its rulers using a model of rulership based upon their own historical experience and from their experiences in India. Hence by privileging these specifically male realms, they may have inadvertently contributed to the erosion of the status of women in public life.

Vietnam is usually taken as an exception to many of these generalizations, because of its strong identification with Chinese culture and language. Reid often speaks of 'patriarchal Confucian culture' as an explanation for the role of women in Vietnam compared with elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Having spent a whole semester being told repeatedly how the 'patriarchal Confucian culture' is an inadequate explanation for the position of women in imperial China, I have my reservations about this claim. A more complete story will have to await the attentions of an expert.

What, then, is the use of all this knowledge? How this history, so broadly written, help us engage with the Southeast Asian world today? A few instances come to mind:

1. The 'Asian Values' worldview may be dead in the eyes of most academics, but it is still believed by many in the general public, not all of whom are benighted fanatics. A good, facts-based understanding of the plurality of what constitutes 'Asian values' and cultures is the basis for answering their claims.
2. The colonial experience is often treated as the starting point of modern Southeast Asian history. Histories prior to that are often treated as national myths, or relegated to the status of literature. The less one knows about a period or a historical figure, the easier it is to mythologize it. Learning about social history will make us think twice about accepting a history that is peopled solely by kings, conquerers, and culture-heroes.
3. Modern politics in the region is often drawn up in racial terms, which are at least in part the product of colonial administration. Lines were drawn the better to divide and rule. The social history of the region accomplishes two things: it shows what peoples of this region as far apart as the Philippines and Burma have in common, and it also shows how much is owed to earlier instances of immigration and cultural assimilation.
4. Religion, especially Islam, is yet another hot topic. Islam's presence in Southeast Asia spans more than half a millennium, and through that period many of the debates that we see today have come up: How can Islam be adapted to the local society and culture? How strictly should one adhere to Islamic law? Should Muslims be allowed to marry non-Muslims? The past might offer some useful lessons.

Volume 2 awaits review....

The Year Nothing Happened

Given all the books that are titled 1395 [or some other year] - The Year of Something Important, I was half hoping to be able to write one day a book entitled 1245 [or some other year] - The Year Nothing Happened.

Sadly I have been beaten to it well before. Ray Huang, a historian of China, published a book in the 1980s titled 1587, A Year of No Significance - The Ming Dynasty in Decline. It's next up on my reading list for this summer.

----

For more levity in this vein, a book worth checking out is 1066 and All That, subtitled A Memorable History of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates. It's even been adapted into a musical play!

Hooray for History!

More from Klemperer on the LTI

The Lingua Tertii Imperii, the language of the Third Reich, infected everyone in Germany, albeit to varying degrees. One of the big questions that Klemperer grapples with in his book, yet never quite resolves, is what drove previously decent, thinking people - scholars and intellectuals much like himself and whom he had considered colleagues before the War - to become devotees of the Nazi Party. For all the observation and critical examination that he engaged in close-up at first hand in the War, the note of puzzlement, of disappointment, is still striking with every example of such an intellectual betrayal that he recounts, right down to the last chapter.

It was indeed a pervasive thing, this "language that thinks for you." He describes a friendly (Gentile) woman in the factory where he was a laborer:

Frieda [the woman] knew that my wife was lying ill at home. In the morning I found a big apple in the middle of my machine. I looked over to Frieda's work-place and she nodded to me. A little later she was standing next to me: 'For Mama with my best wishes.' And then with a mixture of inquisitiveness and surprise: 'Albert says that your wife is German. Is she really German?'

The pleasure in the apple was gone. This Sancta-Simplicitas soul, whose feelings were entirely un-Nazi and humane, had been infected by the most fundamental ingredient of the National Socialist poison; she identified Germanness with the magical concept of the Aryan; it was barely conceivable to her that a German woman could be married to me, to a foreigner, a creature from another branch of the animal kingdom; ...

Elsewhere in the LTI he reminds himself of the philologist's old dictum: that although two people may use the same phrase, they need not share the same motivation in using the same phrase. Here, however, it is clear that the words had controlled Frieda's thinking, and not the other way around. The concepts of 'German' and 'Jew' had existed for ages. What the Nazis did was to surreptitiously and thoroughly replace the old concepts with a new, racial one. Similar, and yet different, but not different enough to warrant new words for the new concepts; they instead took over the old words, and slipped all the more easily into people's minds as a result. The most insidious aspect of LTI may hence have been where it retained old words and gave them new meanings, rather than all the new coinages for which it was responsible.

Victor Klemperer on His Wife Eva

Selections from Lingua Tertii Imperii - A Philologist's Notebook, translated by Martin Brady.

From the foreword:

"As long as twenty years ago, my dear Eva, I prefaced the dedication of a collection of essays with the remark that a dedication from me to you in the conventional sense of a present was out of the question, given that you were already co-owner of my books, since they were in every way the product of an intellectual community of property. This is the same today.

But in this case things are rather different than with all my previous publications, this time I am even less entitled to present you with a dedication, and incomparably more compelled to do so than during those peaceful days in which we engaged in philology. But for you this book would not exist today, and its author too. If I were to explain this in detail it would require copious, intimate pages. ... You know, and even a blind man would be able to divine with his stick, to whom I am referring when I speak to my audience of heroism."

From the introduction:

"... a heroism which was completely deprived of support of being part of an army or a political group, of the hope of future glory, a heroism which was left to fend entirely for itself. These were the handful of Aryan wives (there were not that many of them), who resisted every pressure to separate from their Jewish husbands. And just imagine what everyday life was like for these women! ... What stoicism, what a huge outlay of self-discipline was needed to give fresh heart over and over again to their exhausted, broken, and desperate husbands. Amidst the grenade fire of the battlefield, surrounded by falling rubble in a collapsing bomb shelter, even confronted with the gallows, there is always a degree of pathos which affords some support - but in the debilitating nausea of everyday squalor, to be followed by an unforeseeable number of equally squalid days, what is there to keep you going? And to remain strong in this situation, strong enough to be able to embolden your partner the whole time, and convince him again and again that the hour would eventually come and that it is a matter of duty to wait for it, to remain this strong when one is left to cope entirely on one's own in lonely isolation, because the Jew's House does not constitute a community, despite the shared enemy and fate, and despite its common language - this is heroism {Heroismus} over and above any hero-worship {Heldentum}."

For those who found Umberto Eco's essay (in the NYRB) on the characteristics of fascism thought-provoking, Victor Klemperer's book, known succinctly as the LTI, is definitely worth reading with attention. Our modern age may often seem too cynical to be misled by hero-worship, or to be beguiled by the false promises of fascism. But after September 11th, we often easily acquiesce in calling certain people 'heroes' (I'm thinking of soldiers and firefighters as examples) without too much thought. The American armed forces are also hugely influential in the media, both in reportage and in fictional portrayal, projecting an image of aggressive, technologized masculinity - modern warriors in space-age body-armor that still manages to invoke a gladiatorial pose, bearing guns enhanced with lasers and scopes, gazing out inscrutably from behind glazed dark glasses. Military talk - "kinetic operations", "surge", "counterinsurgency" - has entered our civilian ken and work their way into our commonplace speech. Read Klemperer and learn why we should be worried about all this.

The Open Sea - The World of Plankton / Alister C. Hardy

London: Collins. 1956. Out of print.

Published in 1956 as part of Collins's acclaimed New Naturalist series, this volume focuses on the planktonic forms of the open sea around Britain. What's wonderful about it is the enthusiasm with which it is written, the obvious excitement and wonder of discovery (the electron microscope had just been invented, deep-sea research was hardly routine), and the quaintness of the technical methods in the pre-electronic age. Where we can today drop down a temperature probe and have a second-by-second readout of the temperature at different depths of water, oceanographers of the past used an ingenious device called the reversing thermometer:

"The mercury tube of the thermometer, just above the bulb, has a loop and a kink in it, so that when it is swung rapidly upside-down the thread of mercury breaks; as soon as this happens all the mercury that before was above the kink now runs to the opposite, and now lower, end of the tube. When this is brought up the height of this inverted column of mercury is seen against a scale which can only be read when the thermometer is upside down; it tells us the temperature that the thermometer was recording at the moment it was turned over."

This was also soon after the invention of the Thermos flask and refrigerator, the latter quite a luxury in post-war austerity Britain. The next quote, on what the amateur should do after collecting a net-full of plankton from a tow, is instructive of both the social relations of the day, and who Hardy thought the typical reader for his book might be:

"... the samples which you should now have safely in your Thermos flasks to take home -- just be quite sure once again that you haven't put too much into them! It is well to take a quantity of extra sea water home with you so that you can dilute the samples still further before you put them into glass jars in the refrigerator. Two 7 lb sweet-jars are very good for this purpose; they can be conveniently carried in an oblong basket with a space just big enough to take one jar on either side of the handle and with a partition to keep them apart. When you reach home divide your samples out into as many large sweet or preserving jars as your wife -- or your neighbour!-- will allow you to keep in the refrigerator."

Twenty Minutes in Manhattan / Michael Sorkin

Reaktion Books, London. 2009. US$27 / GBP 16.95

This is New York kvetching at its best. Michael Sorkin, an architect who lives in the City (i.e. Manhattan), walks twenty minutes every day from his 5th floor, rent controlled apartment to his studio. In this book, he describes what he sees in the landscape around him and his opinions, usually strongly held, about the way the city has taken shape.

Growing up in the carefully manicured Garden City of Singapore (which gets a few mentions in this book, as does our dear "Uncle Harry"), I am quite a naif about how 'real' cities come into being, grow, and are shaped by multifarious forces. The book was a crash course for me on the ins and outs of concepts like rent control, landlord-tenant relations, fire regulations, building codes, and city zoning, things which are not immediately obvious to someone who's lived in a landscape dominated by highly similar high-rise public housing.

Sorkin is keen on the work of Jane Jacobs, and he mentions her influential work The Death and Life of a Great American City several times. He is quite clear about who he doesn't like: rapacious developers, Robert Moses, the Modernists (especially Le Corbusier - "Corb"), Donald Trump.... This dose of crankiness can be quite excessive - I didn't think a whole chapter on the weasel-ways of his landlord was entirely necessary - and it sometimes strikes me as being simply reactionary. Beneath all the complaining, though, what Sorkin fundamentally argues for is a vision of the city (and urban life in general) as being scaled to the human being. He argues for walking over automobiles, lively streets over condos for the jet-set, equitable housing over gentrification, and for architectures that are designed for their climate and environment, rather than being hermetically sealed glass-and-steel towers. At first glance this book is about architecture and urban design, but it's really about society and the human being as a social being. In this context, his long rant about the landlord makes sense: it's really about social altruism, its fragility, and its ease of frustration; as a guide to the tragedy of the commons it is particularly eloquent.

I must admit that I was quite underwhelmed when I visited the great city myself - how could anyone love such an icky, dingy place? Compared to the great shiny cities like Shanghai or Dubai that are being built with amazing speed all over the developing world, New York could do with a facelift and some tidying up. But the point that Sorkin makes is that the 'tidying up' that well-intentioned (or corruptedly profiteering) city planners and developers push for will eventually end up killing the soul of the city, destroying its naturally-formed communities, and homogenizing it into a world where human relations matter less and less. And maybe it is worth having the streets a bit dingy and the walls a bit crusty if we can defer that bland, soulless future for some time yet.

Empires of the Indus - The Story of a River / Alice Albinia

John Murray, London. 2009. $16.20 (pbk) Book website.

The Indus River is a bundle of contradictions and disappointments: the origin of the name 'India' and yet in Pakistan, one of the classical rivers of fabled fecundity and yet now dammed to near-death, the source of one of the world's most splendid early civilizations and yet flowing through what are some of its most dangerous and economically backward places. The title of this book and its jacket design in friendly pastel colors, both bringing to mind exotic travelogue mingled with exotic culture, belie the real story that Alice Albinia is telling, that of the disappointments and tragedies wrought by history, and of the humanity caught up in its flow.

The premise of this book is a daring one, and despite the easy flow of the narrative, the actual journey that the author herself took must have demonstrated her resourcefulness and courage. She travels from the delta of the Indus, now brackish and more an inlet than a river mouth, up its course until its source in the high mountains of Tibet, and so accumulates a roster of some of the most notorious places in the world: Pakistan, the Pakistan-India border, Afghanistan, Tibet. Concomitant with her trip to the source of the Indus is the historical story told in reverse, from the traumatic Partition of India and Pakistan, to the spread of Islam in the subcontinent, the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the Indus Valley Civilization, and the geological origins of the river itself.

As a woman she has access to the women of the households that hosted her, and as a foreigner she could also speak freely with the men, and it is this view of the home life of the people along her route that give this book some of its most poignant moments. There is also the peculiar disorientation when snippets of interculturality turn up unexpectedly; climbing up a hill in rural Kashmir to see a Neolithic rockface carving, a crowd of boys follows her and her guide to see what they are up to:

"The boys speak little English, but it is the cricket season now, and from the babble of Kashmiri that surrounds me, entire phrases of BBC commentary emerge fully formed: 'Flintoff is coming in to bowl,' says one twelve-year-old. 'It's a bouncer,' says another.'..."

Another repeating motif on the book is how easily history can become effaced. She visits a Sheedi community in Sindh, Pakistan, descendants of African slaves and immigrants to India from centuries before its colonial era. The Sheedi, despite being slaves, had held positions of responsibility under the Mughal rulers, but with the coming of European colonialism had lost that social position; the British imperial administrators regarded them with prejudice, even as they claimed to be emancipating the slaves. In the 1950s, a Sheedi writer named Mussafir wrote an account of Sheedi enslavement and persecution, informed also by his readings on abolition in America, and worked towards social emancipation of his community by education. Yet today his works are poorly known, even in Sindh, the Sheedi community still experiences discrimination in mainstream Pakistani life, and even Mussafir's legacy has been obscured. Most of his writings have been lost - his son's library was largely destroyed by a cyclone - and few copies remain even of his treatise on slavery, published only in Sindhi. Elsewhere, in the highland Yasin valley, Neolithic stone circles are being carved up for building material or looted for treasure. In the desert near Johi, 18th century tombs decorated with vivid murals are falling apart from neglect.

It is fitting, then, that the site of one of humanity's earliest experiments with irrigation and city-building should today illustrate so starkly the failings of that endeavor. Read this book, not just as travelogue and history, but also as a comment on the human condition itself.