“At least 45,000 years ago, an artist using red ochre painted a mural of warty pigs at the back of a cave near modern-day Makassar on Sulawesi. The artist ‘signed’ the work with hand stencils. The mural is the oldest known representational art associated with modern Homo sapiens anywhere in the world.” This is just one of a multitude of details in Eric C Thompson’s The Story of Southeast Asia that one feels one should have known, but probably didn’t. A rather later one is that the word “Malay” did not originally specify an ethnicity.
To be “Melayu” or “Malay” in this era did not refer to an ethnic group or race, but to be of royal lineage—the descendants of the rulers of Sriwijaya based at Palembang.
The title telling avoids the word “history” (although Thompson is somewhat less circumspect inside the book itself); writing any account of Southeast Asia, to say nothing of one that starts in distant prehistory, in just a couple hundred pages (rather a couple thousand) seems almost foolhardy, yet Thompson pulls it off by keeping a tight focus on themes and messages.
Thompson makes a good case that Southeast Asia hangs together, rather consistently, over the millennia.
The first is the less than obvious one that Southeast Asia is a concept with enough coherence (rather than mere geographical convenience) to warrant a regional treatment. Thompson makes a good case that Southeast Asia—sometimes characterized as neither China nor India, ie, as what it is not rather than what it is—hangs together, rather consistently, over the millennia.
Some common cultural attributes go back to the Paleolithic:
at some point, 23,000 or more years ago, someone or some group engineered a new tool. They selected smooth, rounded stones from riverbeds, nicely sized to fit in the palm of a human hand. Chipping away at the edges around one face of the stone, they crafted sturdier, more consistently sized tools for chopping and cutting. Archaeologists today call these tools sumatraliths (Sumatra-stones). They are one of the first and most widely distributed examples of Stone Age innovations in Southeast Asia.
Trade has been a consistent theme for more than 2000 years: not only was Southeast Asia a source of many coveted goods such as spices, but it also sat between the major markets of India and China. Another constant theme is a political geography dominated not by centralized kingdoms and empires but by “mandala states” in which
power radiated out from the central sovereign ruler, becoming weaker the farther one moved from that centre. Borders and territory were more loosely defined.
This configuration hardly guaranteed peace, but warfare “aimed to control people rather than territory and to assert one court and one ruler’s superiority over others.”
Even in diversity, for Southeast Asia is remarkably diverse, themes emerge: one major one is the divide between the “maritime realm” (the islands) and the “mainland”. This is ethnic and linguistic, with the population of the maritime realm being primarily made up from Malayo-Polynesian migration emanating from Taiwan (that ultimately populated everywhere from Hawaii to Madagascar, and the mainland people coming overland from the north; rice cultivation seems to have traveled separately one both paths. In the later parts of this history, the Brahman-Buddhism that had been prominent was replaced by Islam in the maritime realm and Theravada Buddhism on the mainland:
Pagan and Angkor were roughly contemporary and similar in many respects, such as the proliferation of spectacular monumental architecture found at both sites. In other respects, Angkor marks the apex and final glory of an old Brahman-Buddhist social and political order, while Pagan marks the bursting forth of a new Theravada-based one.
What also stands out is how little, due to the lack of written records, is definitely known about the details of Southeast Asian history, even in the relatively recent past of the first millennium CE. This is not because the societies were not literate, but because the records, written on such perishable material as palm leaves, have not survived. More, it seems, is known about the rulers and polities of the classical Maya than than their Southeast Asian contemporaries.
There is just the right amount of specific anecdote to illustrate the general principles.
The book is arranged both chronologically and thematically, allowing a great deal of ground (literally) to be covered. Although there is a certain amount of both repetition and jumping back and forth by several centuries, the two organizing principles interleave remarkably seamlessly. There is just the right amount of specific anecdote to illustrate the general principles. Thompson is also in tune with the contemporary zeitgeist: he even has a section on “gender pluralism”.
Hardly surprising in a book of this length, there is the occasional statement or claim which is perhaps a bit overarching when delivered without explicit evidence. For example:
Nowhere has trade and exchange been a more vital and elaborate part of human existence than in Southeast Asia over the past several thousand years.
and
Preeminently, Malayo-Polynesian navigational techniques and sailing technology spread far and wide, propelling world trade for nearly 2,000 years.
Both could be true, or at least not untrue, but hinge on what one means by “nowhere” and “propelling”. Thompson also uses the term “Kanji Sphere” for the
region influenced by Chinese writing, ideas, practices, and culture, spanning from Central Asia to the islands of Japan.
This Japanese-derived term, unknown to me but apparently in use in certain quarters, seems curious when used for something that is in origins and ongoing influence very much Chinese.
Thompson writes well: for an academic text, the book is very readable and unlike other surveys of Southeast Asia made up of multiple papers from multiple authors, The Story of Southeast Asia benefits from editorial consistency and coherence. Modern Southeast Asia occupies relatively little of the book, being presented largely in the context of what had come before.
Given its brevity, The Story of Southeast Asia has no apparent pretensions of being definitive, but while it serves as a primer, it is considerably more than that, making a good case, as it does, that Southeast Asia is a region that is both reasonably well-defined and also more than the mere sum of its parts.
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