Studies in History

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Writing History 'Backwards': Southeast Asian History (and the Annales)

at the Crossroads
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Studies in History 1994; 10; 131
DOI: 10.1177/025764309401000106
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Writing History Backwards: Southeast Asian

History (and the Annales) at the Crossroads
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Delhi School of Economics

Over the past quarter century, both South Asian historians and historians
of South Asia have, it would seem, grown steadily more insular. Thus,
today, practically no post-graduate department of history in India offers
serious courses on the history of any part of the world save South Asia
itself and-inevitably-Europe. On the other.hand, the histories of China,
Iran, Central Asia and even Southeast Asia are barely represented in most
Indian university library collections, let alone at the level of research and
teaching. This lack of interest on the part of historians of India became
painfully clear to me as an intermittent participant in the CambridgeDelhi-Leiden-Yogyakarta project on the comparative history of India and
Indonesia in the 1980s, and from the published papers in four volumes of
that project, in the Leiden journal Itinerario.
In fact, since the generation of R.C. Majumdar, Himanshu Bhushan
Sarkar and K.A. Nilakantha Sastri, even the history of the so-called
Indianized states of Southeast Asia (or Greater India, as it was once
called) has attracted few Indian historians, and only a handful of South
Asianists (an honourable exception in recent times being Hermann Kulkel).
Review Essay ot Denys Lombard, Le Carrefour Javanais: Essai dhistoire globale; Volume 1:
Les limites de loccidentalisation; Volume II: Les rgseaux asiatiques; Volume III: Lheritage
des royaumes concentriques, Paris, Editions de IEcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,
1990 (Series: Civilisations et Soci6t6s 79), 267 + 423 + 337 pp., maps, plates, bibliography,
price FF. 550 (for the 3 volumes).
1

In point of fact, while the most successful of the four conferences of that project was that
the ancien régime, of which the proceedings were published in Itinerario, Vol. XII(1), 1988
(and as P.J. Marshall, R. van Niel, et al., The Ancien Regime in India and Indonesia, Leiden,
1988), it has passed almost unnoticed on account of its uneven quality and lack of thematic

on

unity.
2
Many of Kulkes scattered essays have been recently reprinted as Kings and Cults: State
Formation and Legitimation in India and Southeast Asia, New Delhi, Manohar, 1993. One
may also mention George W. Spencer, Kenneth R. Hall and Ian W. Mabbett, the last two now
being regarded primarily as Southeast Asianists despite their early work on South Asia.
I am grateful for bibliographical suggestions and discussions to Jim
Siegel and Denis Vidal, neither of whom have read drafts of this text and who almost certainly
will not agree with it, and to Neeladri Bhattacharya.

Acknowledgements:

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132

In pointing this out, it is not my intention to lament the death of the spirit
of the 1955 Bandung Conference, which seems to have been still-born for
the most part anyway. Let us note, moreover, that various Asian historiographical traditions have very different relationships with the dominant
(but by no means monolithic) Western one. The Japanese and Chinese
historiographies, while relatively strong, remain inaccessible for reasons of
language to scholars from outside these regions; thus, since World War II,
it is Western scholars like John Whitney Hall and Frederic Wakeman who
have periodically presented, and therefore interpreted these writings for
a larger international audience. In comparison, India and Turkey are both
relatively fortunate in having historians who can engage the larger domain
while being rooted in their own fields: in the Turkish case Halil Inalcik,
Omer Lftfi Barkan (who was associated with Annales historians in the
1950s and 1960s in spite of an avowed belief in Asian solidarity, and a
mistrust of the West), Kemal Karpat, more recently Huri Islamoglu-Inan,
aglar Keyder, $evket Pamuk, Murat Qizakca and Cemal Kafadar, to
4
name only a few.
Meanwhile, historians from a host of other countries, whether Iran,
Afghanistan, Burma, Thailand, Laos or Cambodia (to choose a few
examples), remain almost wholly outside the internationalized domain of
history writing. The histories of their countries are thus those written by
Western scholars, for the most part without interlocutions from recalcitrant
native. It has hence been possible as late as the 1980s to produce major
volumes of the Cambridge History of Iran (Vol. VI, as also to an extent
Vol. VII) dealing with the Safavid, Nadir Shahi and Qajar periods (for
example), with practically no significant contributions by Iranian scholars
therein.5
Is all of this really relevant? Is history writing not a domain that transcends
such divisions? The answer to the latter question is quite clearly in the
-

Frederic Wakeman, ed., Ming and Qing Historical Studies in the Peoples Republic of
China, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1980; John W. Hall, Nagahara Keiji and
Kozo Yamamura, eds., Japan Before Tokugawa: Political Consolidation and Economic
Growth, 1500 to 1650, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981.
4
Cf., for example, the articles reprinted in Huri Islamoglu-Inan, ed., The Ottoman Empire
and the World-Economy, Paris/Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, not all of
which share the editors Wallersteinian perspective. Another attempt at synthesis, still within
a neo-Marxist framework, is Halil Berktay and Suraiya Faroqhi, eds., New
approaches to
state and peasant in Ottoman history, Journal of Peasant Studies, Special Number, Vol.
XVIII, Nos. 3/4, 1991.
5
Peter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart, eds., The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume VI:
The Timurid and Safavid Periods, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, where the
major articles on the Safavids are by H.R. Roemer, Roger Savory, and Bert Fragner; also
Peter Avery, Gavin Hambly and Charles Melville, eds., The Cambridge History of Iran,
Volume VII: From Nadir Shah

to

the Islamic

Republic, Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press, 1991.

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133

for national history-writing traditions are important even today,

the institutions that transmit them. In the case of Indonesia, the
national (and I do not mean nationalist) historiography has remained
relatively weak, save for a handful of historians, mostly in Jakarta or at
Yogyakarta (on whom more below). It is thus the Dutch, the British, the
American, the Australian and increasingly the French historiography which
has come to define the state of the art in Indonesian historical studies, in a
manner largely inconceivable to Indian or Turkish historians. In the India
of the late 1980s and early 1990s, one is more or less used to the agenda
being for the most part set by Indian historians (even if they are often
expatriates!), and one tends to use the foreign (usually British) historians
largely as a demonological device.
If the academic and intellectual relationship with Britain remains troubled
in India, the relationship with a certain sort of French historiography
certainly does not. This is that part of the French (or Gallicized) historiography which is picked up and translated by American (or less frequently
British) academic presses, and which since the late 1960s has run the gamut
from Braudel, Duby, Le Goff and Le Roy Ladurie, to Todorov, Foucault
and Bourdieu. Discussions with Indian research students, however, reveal
curious gaps in this identification parade: the works of Fr6d6ric Mauro,
Pierre Chaunu and Michel Morineau (to say nothing of Vitorino Magalhdes
Godinho), appear to be secrets relatively well kept from them .6 Interestingly, the lessons that are increasingly drawn from this selective reading of
Annales, Annaliste, and New History writings-notably by the second
wave of historians of the Subaltern Studies school-has been that the
generalizing moment is over; far better to defend the fragment, in the style
of Carlo Ginzburg, or better still (for those like Amitav Ghosh who dare)
Umberto Eco, than to launch into global histories. Such an abdication by
a host of Indian historians has meant, in turn, that history without frontiers,
as well as comparative history, has been left as it were to professional
Jacks-of-all-trades, such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Janet Abu-Lughod,
Jack Goldstone and Andre Gunder Frank.

negative,
as are

6
Note, however, that writings by Chaunu and Morineau do feature in the only collection of
translated essays by French (largely Annales) historians to be produced in India; cf. Maurice
Aymard and Harbans Mukhia, eds., French Studies in History, 2 Vols., New Delhi, Orient
Longman, 1988-90. This collection, it should be pointed out, is not merely of French studies
in history but almost exclusively of studies in French history.
7
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s, New York, Academic Press, 1989; Janet
, New York,
Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World-System, AD 1250-1350
Oxford University Press, 1989, and most recently Barry K. Gills and André Gunder Frank,
World system cycles, crises, and hegemonial shifts, 1700 BC to 1700 AD, Review, Vol. XV,
No. 4, 1992, pp. 621-87. For a similar attempt at historical sociology, albeit from a
Malthusian rather than a neo-Marxist perspective, Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion
in the Early Modern World, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991.

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134

thousand-page work under review (The Javanese Crossroads: An

in
Essay Global History) is an apt response to those who believe that total
history is dead, and it should be read if for this reason alone. Its organization in three volumes will come as no surprise to those who are aware of
the French fascination with that particular number (from Dum6zil to
Braudel). More intriguing is the arrangement of the three volumes: the
first (The Limits of Westernisation) deals with the Western impact on Java
from the seventeenth century on, using largely Indonesian and Dutch
sources; the second, and most voluminous (The Asiatic Networks), considers the consequences of the middle period between the fifteenth and
seventeenth century, when Java came under Chinese and Islamic influence;
and the third, and slimmest-190 pages followed by a long glossary and
bibliography-is entitled;The Heritage of the Concentric Kingdom
evidently refers to the concept of the mandala as a political p- --.Pie in
medieval Javanese kingdoms such as Majapahit. Thus, what we have is an
exercise in writing history backwards, with the third volume dealing with
the earliest period and the first with the most recent. The author justifies
this with the metaphor of geological strata which must be excavated, but
the proof of the pudding must lie in the eating.
Fittingly, as with any product of classic Annales influence, the first
volume begins with geographical considerations. The very first sentence
reminds us: Any historical approach misses its aim if it neglects the
geographical factor (p. 13). We are then led through the Sunda region in
western Java which has a special character and culture of its own even
today, the main Javanese landmass itself and then to the Pasisir-the north
coast, which plays a particularly important role in what follows. For the
Javanese south coast, we should remind ourselves, has practically no ports
worth the name, and thus forces maritime activity to concentrate more or
less exclusively to the north.
Once we appreciate this fact, the manner in which the Dutch East India
Company (VOC) expanded into Java in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries becomes logical. Indeed, the Dutch by inserting themselves via
the Pasisir did no more than follow the principal routes of penetration
taken by the Chinese and by Islam, although the former came from west to
east rather than east to west. All of this is set out very well in maps; one of
the particularly notable features of the work is its careful attention to
cartography, while another is its effective use of black and white photographs. Lombard takes us rapidly through the formation of the Dutch East
Indies as a colonial state to address the issues which concern him more
closely-those of the history of mentalities. The Dutch colonial archives
are not much in evidence here, and the much-studied cultivation system
(culluurstelseo which has for so long obsessed Dutch historians of Indonesia is
reduced to fitting proportions (as is the attendant agricultural involution,
The

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135

by Clifford Geertz). We are instead given brief and at times

penetrating insights into Christianization, the army, universities, the middle
class, clothing, gesture and language, based on a form of ethnohistory, as
well as on literary sources and a vast array of secondary literature of which
Lombard disposes-in Dutch, English, French and Bahasa Indonesia. The
chief questions are those posed often enough in post-colonial societies:
how, historically, did the West change matters, and was there a clearly
definable Western impact? Concomitantly, and in a more prescriptive
mode, is there a possible synthesis between the indigenous and the
set out

Western? What form can it take? For the historian of India, these questions will obviously carry echoes, particularly at the present juncture in our
history. At the most simplistic level, the answers to the first question are
available. Angus Maddison has shown, for example, that the colonial
drain from Indonesia accounted for a far higher proportion of national
income than that from India, and viewed from a number of other perspectives-including that of the development of the transport network-Java
seems to have been far more directly affected by colonialism than India.9
(Whether this holds for Indonesia as a whole is of course another matter.)
However, it is precisely when Lombard opens up other issues~for example,
of dress, gesture and political language, or of aesthetic concepts involving
architecture, literature and cinema (to which an entire chapter is devoted}that the issue of the Western impact begins to assume a complexity that
takes us beyond the computation of some mechanical indices. All of a
sudden, the other strata-those going back to the early modern centuries
and even the medieval period-begin to appear more present than one
might have suspected. One realizes too that the post-Independence rejection of the West, and the policy of self-sufficiency (berdikari) set out by
Sukarno, and which collapsed after his fall in 1965-66, was far stronger as
cultural policy (and far weaker as economic policy) than its corresponding
ideology in, say, India; it was, however, doomed to failure because Indonesia could not by its very nature remain an island unto itself . You cannot
easily close a crossroads.
Having thus enticed the historian of the modem (post-colonial and
colonial) world to delve a little deeper, Lombard enters into the second
8

Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia,

Berkeley, University of California Press, 1963. There is a vast subsequent historiography on
the Cultivation System, from which the most important revisionist works are thought to be
those of C. Fasseur (recently translated into English from Dutch), Robert van Niel, and
Robert E. Elson; the last gives a particularly revisionist view, arguing that the system
expanded commercial possibilities and hence peasant prosperity: see Elson, Javanese Peasants
and the Colonial Sugar Industry: Impact and Change in an East Java Residency, 1830-1940,
Singapore, Oxford University Press, 1984.
9
Angus Maddison, Dutch income in and from Indonesia, 1700-1938, Modern Asian
Studies (henceforth MAS), Vol. XXIII, No. 4, 1989, pp. 645-70.

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136

volume, passing implicitly from a history flavoured with political sociology

anthropology to early modern history. The exercise in political

sociology (as indeed in political anthropology, if one may be permitted the
and cultural

I should note, carries clear lessons for students of India-for

Lombard is building on a tradition of such analysis for Indonesia far
superior and far more subtle than its South Asian counterpart. Many South
Asianists imagine that Benedict Anderson has authored little else besides
Imagined Communities (1983); but as every Indonesianist knows, he is the
author of a number of penetrating essays on the language and culture of
post-Independence Indonesian politics. Works by his colleagues at Cornell,
like James T. Siegel, though little known or read in India, have helped
define a form of cultural and political anthropology for modern Indonesia
of which Lombard is aware, and which he manages to fit into his framework.&dquo; This incorporation of divergent traditions into a single master
account may appear forced to some readers (and indeed may even be
resisted by the authors in question), but it is based on an article of faith:
Lombard clearly believes, in true Braudelian fashion, that all the other
social sciences are subsidiary to history!
The deftness of touch in the first volume nevertheless does not wholly
conceal the fact that Lombard is quite dependent here, in terms of constructs
and interpretations, on his reading of secondary literature. It is in the
second volume that one suspects his heart really lies, since it partly represents a return to the period and terrain chalked out in his first monograph
Le Sultanat dAtj6h au temps dIskandar Muda (1607-1636) (Paris: Ecole
Franqaise dExtr6me Orient, 1967), translated in 1986 into Bahasa Indonesia. This second, as pointed out earlier, is the largest of the three
volumes (423 pages), and would be a substantial monograph in itself. It is
divided into five chapters: Ancient maritime relays, The moving forces of
Javanese Islam, The Islamic stimulus, The Chinese legacy, and Fanaticism or tolerance. The principal aim of this volume is to argue that,
despite a hoary tradition to the effect in Indonesian studies, the dawn of
modernity came not with European influence, but with the simultaneous
impact, from the fourteenth century on-but especially from the fifteenth
century----of Islam and China. Lombard identifies some key concepts associated by him with modernity-such as a particular notion of the Person and

expression)

the Other, a certain perception of geographical space, and a notion of

linear time which leads to the development of a historiographical impulse.
All these, he argues, may be found in Java from the time the Islamic
10

Cf. Benedict R. OG. Anderson, Notes on contemporary Indonesian political communication, Indonesia, No. 16, 1973, pp. 38-80; also his earlier essay, The Languages of
Indonesian Politics, Indonesia, No. 1, 1966, pp. 89-116.
11

See,

for example, James T. Siegel, Solo in the New Order:

City, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986.

Language and Hierarchy in an

Indonesian

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137

impact becomes profound, and

Malay literature in particular.

he demonstrates this with reference to

Here, as in the first volume, a good deal of emphasis is laid on literary

evidence, and we are reminded of the authors interest in language and

linguistics as well as in Southeast Asian literature (he has translated at least

one novel, Corruption, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, from Bahasa Indonesia into French). But, in evident tribute to the Burckhardtean model (or
at least a version of it outlined by the authors father, the celebrated
Islamologist Maurice Lombard, in a paper from 1960, Les villes et la
personne) the changes are located in a new type of society that emerges
above all in the Pasisir-a society that is far more monetized and commercialized, and perhaps far more susceptible to social mobility than that
which went before. A discussion of money and monetary circulation providing a useful summing up of the state of the art to the time of the books
publication, thus leads us into a more general panorama of economic and
social life in the towns of the north coast. 12 It is in this urban milieu that the
hikayat literature cited at some length by Lombard found its sustenance
and also its key concepts. In posing the impact of Islam thus, as a historical
process, the author naturally has occasion to differ with the tripartite
division suggested by Geertz in his The Religion of Java (1960), between
the categories of abangan, santri and priyayi as structural constants: the
first, the simple, superficially Islamicized village folk, the second, the
orthodox Muslims of a mercantile milieu, and the last, the cosmopolitan
(and thus syncretistically religious) elite.3 He also quite clearly parts
company with a recent ethnohistorical analysis of the Hikayat Hang Tuah
by Shelly Errington, who argues that Malay grammar precludes the development of historical concepts by its very nature, and that history writing is
thus purely a post-Renaissance western genre.&dquo; This latter approach has
some implicit supporters among recent writers on South Asia, and is
ironically enough cited with approbation by Nicholas Dirks, for example,
in his study of Pudukkottai.~ The problem, it would seem, is that neither
Errington nor Dirks has paid adequate attention to genre in the corpus
they themselves study: the vamcavalis of the Mackenzie collection used by
12

For a recent reconsideration of money and monetary circulation, also see Robert S.
Wicks, Money, Markets and Trade in Early Southeast Asia: The Development of Indigenous
Monetary Systems to AD 1400, Ithaca, Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1992.
13
Clifford Geertz, The Religion of Java, London, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1960.
14

Shelly Errington, Some comments on style in the meanings of the past, The Journal of
(henceforth JAS), Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2, 1979, pp. 231-44. The approach in
Erringtons paper is also at variance with the analysis of Burmese texts of the period in Victor
Lieberman, How reliable is U Kalas Burmese Chronicle? Some new comparisons, Journal
of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. XVII, No. 2, 1986, pp. 236-55.
15
Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Asian Studies

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138

necessarily be generalized into texts like the Tanjavuri andhra

rajula caritra, or the Rayavacakamu (both from the late seventeenth or
early eighteenth century).6 Besides, is not this bald statement that all early
modern Asian texts are flat and lacking in a sense of history and historical
change, one of the grosser clich6s of the very Orientalism that Dirks and
Dirks cannot

others wish to attack?

The second set of influences dealt with in this volume-the Chinese-are,
as the author admits, far more difficult to locate precisely. Though Chinese
sources have been used on a quite extensive basis, they have yielded less
rich insights than the larger array of materials on Islam. The two finally
come together in the closing chapter, dealing with Javanese tolerance
and/or intolerance with respect to the Chinese. Building in particular on
the work of Peter Carey for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, as well as his own earlier joint writings with Claudine Salmon,
Lombard makes out a case for the complex interaction between the two
elements, from the late medieval centuries through the anti-Chinese pogrom
of the 1960s.&dquo;
It remains, in the last volume, not merely to draw the elements together,
but to revisit the history of the Indianized states to which French scholars
such as Georges Cœds and Louis-Charles Damais have already made a
notable contribution in this century. Lombard takes the opportunity to set
out the classic distinction between trading state and agrarian state, the
latter based in pre-Islamic times on rice agriculture, a hierarchical social
order, and notions of equilibrium such as the mandala. It is from this
stratum, he suggests, that even later colonial peasant millenarian movements drew their ideological sustenance, and concepts such as the longawaited ratu adil (just king) surfaced time and again.&dquo; He notes, in
passing, that the Javanese historiography has a tradition of excellent studies
on such movements (notably by Sartono Kartodirdjo, the major Indonesian
historian of the post-Independence generation, and Onghokham); modern
Indian historians, with the possible exception of Ramachandra Guha, have
for their part of course ignored them, preferring to locate their works
_

16
V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman, History, biography and poetry at the Tanjavur
nayaka court, Social Analysis, No. 25, 1989, special issue edited by H.L. Seneviratne on
Identity, Consciousness and the Past: The South Asia Scene, pp. 115-30; for the Rayavacakamu, also see Philip B. Wagoner, Tidings of the King: A Translation and Ethnohistorical
Analysis of the Rayavacakamu, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1993.
17
Peter Carey, Changing Javanese perceptions of the Chinese communities in central
Java, 1755-1825, Indonesia, No. 37, 1984, pp. 1-48; also Denys Lombard and Claudine
Salmon, Les Chinois de Jakarta: Temples et vie collective, Second Edition, Paris, Maison des
Sciences de lHomme, 1980; and Lombard and Salmon, Islam et sinité, Archipel, No. 30,

1985, pp. 73-94.

18

Peter Carey, Waiting for the "Just King": The agrarian world of south-central Java from
Giyanti (1755) to the Java War (1825-30), MAS, Vol. XX, No. 1, 1986, pp. 59-137.

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139

in relation to the literature on popular movements in Europe.9

These movements are, however, in Lombards view, a sort of social safety
value (rgbellion-soupape) rather than possessing the capacity to bring
about truly significant transformations through a crisis from struggle. Since
the works of James Scott are not cited in the bibliography, we are left to
wonder how Lombard locates his conceptualization in relation to that of
the American guru of everyday forms of peasant resistance
It is in this volume too that Lombard discusses the influence of earlier
structural and ideological residues on states such as Mataram in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (pp. 36-48). Further, in arguing that the
rulers of Mataram used not only ideological constructs borrowed from Majapahit via Demak, but new elements of centralization, Lombard seems at least
partly to depart from the received wisdom as represented by Soemersaid
Moertono, and Benedict Anderson among others, who have argued that
pre-colonial states in Java remained institutionally hollow, and dependent
almost solely on the rulers charisma.21 No doubt ideas such as wahyu (a
small luminous ball that appeared as a sign of the rulers legitimacy and
suffused him with light which then passed to his followers) may be found as
constants of a sort, indeed even to the present day; and this leads the
author to conclude that in certain respects Islam has had only a weak
influence. Yet, one of the advantages of the long view is that it permits a
sense of evolution of the context within which such constructs are used,
rather than the mere statement of a structural notion of ritual kingship or
galactic polity, as has become fashionable in the past decade or so.
Whether wahyu is wholly unrelated to other light metaphors-such as
farr-i izidi-of sovereignty in the Indo-Islamic context, would bear further

solely

study.
The third volume is brought to a close with a set of general reflections
on the virtues of the Javanese case. Here, while bluntly stating the need
19

Sartono Kartodirdjo, The Peasants Revolt of Banten in 1888, its Conditions, Course and
Case Study of Social Movements in Indonesia, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1966;
also see Sartono, Protest Movements in Rural Java, Singapore, Oxford University Press, 1970;
and the delightful article by Onghokham, The inscrutable and the paranoid: An investigation
into the sources of the Brotodiningrat affair, in Ruth T. McVey, ed., Southeast Asian
Transitions: Approaches through Social History, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1978.
20
Cf. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New
Haven, Yale University Press, 1985; James C. Scott and Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, eds.,
Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance in South-East Asia, London, Frank Cass, 1986.
21
For this neo-Weberian approach, see Soemersaid Mortono, State and Statecraft in Old
Java: A Study of the Later Mataram Period, 16th to 19th Century, Ithaca, Cornell Modem
Indonesia Project, 1968; and Benedict R. OG. Anderson, The idea of power in Javanese
culture, in Claire Holt, Benedict Anderson and James T. Siegel, eds., Culture and Politics in
Indonesia, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1972, pp. 1-69; for a brief critique, Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, State formation and transformation in early modem India and Southeast
Asia, Itinerario, Vol. XII, No. 1, 1988, pp. 91-109.

Sequel: A

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140

to finish once and for all with the old clich6s of Oriental Despotism and
the Asiatic Mode of Production, the author summarizes some of his main
theses. In the course of setting out the arguments from the second volume,
he defends (to my mind not quite convincingly) the idea of the diaspora
mercantile community as a heuristic tool for understanding acculturation
(pp. 153-54).22 He also argues that the dynamics of change in the Pasisir
ground to a halt not so much on account of the predation of the VOC, but
because the Sultans of the interior kingdom of Mataram (and notably
Sultan Agung in the early seventeenth century) forged the victory of the
agrarian state over the coast. Nevertheless, he argues, it is from the
consolidation of Mataram that the notion of modern Indonesia takes
sustenance: this, then, is for him the historic role of Mataram.
The concluding paragraph is worth citing in its entirety, summing up as it
does the major focus of the work.
The Javanese case doubtless has a further merit, that of aiding us to
escape the artificial notion of classicism. Given that here the principle
of metamorphism remained weak, our Orientalism has been unable to
forge the idea of a great Insulindian civilisation. Since we do not find
ourselves facing a beautiful edifice, in which case it would have been
deemed sufficient to take apart piece by piece the internal mechanism-the institutions, the thought, the structures-we have been
forced to accept the fact of geographical diversity and to situate ourselves directly in the process of movement. But the question arises of
finding out whether the civilisations that seem great to us today are in
fact not those which, at the dawn of their evolution, had the good
fortune to bind together several worlds at the same time, and thus to
find themselves, like Insulindia, in the position of crossroads (pp.

156--57) .
The point then seems in part to persuade the reader to take Indonesia and
its history seriously as a thing-in-itself, a call perhaps as old as J.C. van
Leur and B.J. Schrieke, but still much needed for the Sinologist or the
Europeanist with his/her blinkers, as well as for the Indianist with his/her
gaze fixed unblinkingly on Europe! The same sense seems to motivate
writers on Indonesia (and Southeast Asia, more generally) in the Cambridge
22

For a discussion of the diaspora as a concept, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Iranians

abroad: Intra-Asian elite migration and early modern state formation, JAS, Vol. LI, No. 2,
1992, pp. 340-63.
23
One should be careful though to separate Lombards approach from the plea, fashionable in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to fashion an autonomous history for Southeast Asia;
for this, see John R.W. Smail, On the possibility of an autonomous history of modern
Southeast Asia, Journal of Southeast Asian History, Vol. II, 1961, pp. 72-102.

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141

History of Southeast Asia, a two-volume work that has recently appeared.24

These volumes are partly a product of what one may facetiously call the
&dquo;Cornell diaspora, the group of historians formed at the U.S. universities
in the 1960s and early 1970s, when American interest in Southeast Asia
was at its height for political and strategic reasons; the bulk of the chapters
in the first volume of the Cambridge History are thus written by such
historians, a significant exception being the Malaysian Jeya KathirithambyWells. Now located in large measure in the Antipodes (Australia and New
Zealand), these historians, like Lombard and his team of researchers at
Paris, do represent a healthy decentering of Indonesian studies from the
time when the field was more or less exclusively dominated by Dutch and
British historians. The Cornell journal Indonesia, published since 1966,
predates the Paris-based Archipel, where Lombard has published the bulk
of his articles, by a mere five years; the Australian Bulletin of Indonesian
Economic Studies and Review of Indonesian and Malayasian Affairs date
respectively to 1965 and 1967.
If Lombards Le Carrefour Javanais represents the major work published
thus far of the Archipel group, the flagship of the Antipodean tradition is
often said to be a work-in-progress, namely, Anthony Reids Southeast
Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680, of which one volume has appeared
and the second is announced.25 In coverage, this already widely acclaimed
work apparently touches largely on the same period as the second part of
Lombards work (The Asiatic Networks). Close comparisons being odious,
I should refrain from them, but it is worth noting that Reid too claims, in a
rather explicit fashion, an intellectual affinity with the Annales tradition,
and even directly imitates Braudels organizing principle in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II: his first volume
(1988) is thus about structures, and the second (from which several papers
and a chapter in the first volume of the Cambridge History of Southeast
Asia have been taken) is to be on events.26
The writings of Reid, like those of the prolific Auckland-based Leonard
Andaya (whose most recent monograph on sixteenth and seventeenth
24
Nicholas Tarling,
From Early Times to c.

ed., The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, 2 Vols. (Volume I:

1800; Volume II: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries), Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1992.
25
Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680, Vol. I: The Land
below the Winds, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988.
26
Anthony Reid, An "Age of Commerce" in Southeast Asian history, MAS, Vol. XXIV,
No. 1, 1990, pp. 1-30; Anthony Reid, The seventeenth-century crisis in Southeast Asia,
MAS, Vol. XXIV, No. 4, 1990, pp. 639-59; Reid, Economic and social change, c. 1400-1800, in
Tarling, Cambridge History , of Southeast Asia, Vol. I, pp. 460-507; for another
attempt to adopt the Braudelian approach in terms of both form and content, see K.N.
Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of
Islam to 1750, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, also in two parts, events and
structures.

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142
on Johor), will certainly
to
Indian
other
accessible
(and
Anglophone) historians than
appear
those of Lombard, not only for obvious linguistic reasons but because of a
certain familiarity with the manner in which the work of the former is
organized.&dquo; The vaulting ambition of Lombards synthesis may be discouraging to some, who would prefer the conventional, early modern, regional
kingdom study (Andayas speciality), or Reids neat (at times disconcertingly gazetteer-like) presentation of matters.
On the other hand, the easy facility with which Reid presents affairs is at
times misleading: a great deal of the quantitative tables and charts he
presents in his chapter on economic history in the Cambridge History is to
my mind questionable, and the product of single-mindedly result-oriented
rather than rigorous methods (as emerged from discussions in which this
writer participated at the Asian Studies Association of Australia meetings
in July 1990). Historians of the Mughal period in Indian history are not
unfamiliar with this approach and its concomitant challenge: If you dont
like my numbers, give me some better ones! The consequences are then
dismaying: the tenuous and hypothetical numbers of a first essay become
the firm diving board for a second, subsequent leap into the unknown, and
eventually may well be used with their usual boldness by generalist historians,
who cannot be bothered to read the fine print!28 This, I fear, will be the fate
of Reids tables on population, on Southeast Asian pepper and spice
exports, and bullion imports. The pepper export graph in the Cambridge
History is, for example, rather difficult to defend in statistical terms.
Taking the tenuous data on total European imports of pepper from Asia
over the years 1400 to 1700, Reid produces numbers for the Southeast
Asian part of this pepper. This naturally raises the question: how does he
know what historians who have worked in the Portuguese, Italian and
Dutch archives do not? Mainly because he is content to make a series of
heroic assumptions such as: (a) that in the sixteenth century the revived
Red Sea trade drew most of its supplies from Sumatra; (b) that in the
seventeenth century, India ceased to be a major exporter of pepper. The
first statement is debatable, and the second a major misreading of secondary
evidence. What is more, he then extrapolates without further ado (and his

century Maluku follows two others, on Sulawesi and

more

27

Leonard Y.

Andaya, The World of Maluku:

Eastern Indonesia in the

Early

Modern

Period, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1993. Andayas earlier works include The

Kingdom of Johor, 1641-1728: Economic and Political Developments, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford
University Press, 1975; and The Heritage of Arung Palakka: A History of South Sulawesi in
the Seventeenth Century, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1981; for a similar if more subtle
approach see Barbara Watson Andaya, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1993, which
focuses on the kingdoms of Palembang and Jambi.
28
In this context, even the useful pre-emptive strike by Victor Lieberman, Wallersteins
system and the international context of early modem Southeast Asian history, Journal of
Asian History, Vol. XXIV, No. 1, 1990, pp.70-90, may not be sufficient.

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/143

footnotes are not helpful to the reader who wishes to follow the procedures
used and their bases) to all exports from Southeast Asia-be they to
Europe or the rest of Asia (China, but also India).29
We are left to infer then that Reid is somewhat at sea in the world of
early modern Indian Ocean trade, as also a decade or so out of date in his
grasp of secondary literature on this subject. For how else could he assert
with confidence that Coromandel exports to Southeast Asia grew dramatically in the sixteenth century and that Malabar ships exported cloth to
Melaka? Perhaps this reflects his training and early work as a modernist
political historian working on the twentieth century, not the best preparation for making authoritative statements on the quantitative dimensions
of early modern seaborne commerce. At the same time his success, like
that of Kenneth Hall for an earlier period of Southeast Asian history,
seems to lie largely in the ability to import into the historiography prefabricated master concepts that are a generation or more old in European
literature: Absolutism, Military Revolution, General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, and so on.
If one is going to approach Southeast Asian history through the prism of
the Annales school, there is thus something to be said for going for the
genuine article. This is not to say that one cannot fault Lombards work at
the level of detail: some lacunae exist in the vast, sixty-page bibliography
(for example, the writings of Peter Boomgaard, and Luc Nagtegaal might
have found a place there) ;~ the Arab navigator Ibn Majid, it has been
shown conclusively, did not guide the Portuguese to Calicut in 1498 as
stated (Vol. II, p. 11). But none of these fundamentally affects any of the
central hypotheses. Again, the Dutch archival sources of both the VOC
and the colonial administration, could have been made use of; the Portuguese sources too are limited to major published texts like Barros, Couto
and Tom6 Pires. But this is in a work which employs an array of materials
in classical and modern Malay, Chinese, old Javanese, Dutch, French,
English, some Portuguese and even some Italian-no mean feat! To the
extent that Lombards work is primarily an exercise in the history of
29

Reid, An "Age of Commerce", pp. 15-19; also Reid, Economic and social change.
30
For his major earlier work, see Anthony Reid, The Contest for North Sumatra: Acheh,
the Netherlands and Britain, 1858-1898, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1969;
subsequently, The Blood of the People: Revolution and the End of Traditional Rule in
Northern Sumatra, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1979. The temptation to compare Reids approach to pre-colonial Southeast Asia with that of Burton Stein for pre-colonial
India is thus present in more than one sense; cf. Subrahmanyam, State formation and
transformation, pp. 97-98.
31
Among numerous recent works by him, see, Peter Boomgaard, Buitenzorg in 1805: The
role of money and credit in a colonial frontier society, MAS, Vol. XX, No. 1, 1986, pp.
30-58, as well as several essays on demography; also Luc Nagtegaal, Rijden op een Hollandse
Tijger: De noordkust van Java en de VOC, 1680-1743, Ph.D. thesis, University of Utrecht,
1988.

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144

mentalities, it does leave place for a rigorous serial history focusing a

great deal more on economic and social aspects in the style of the older
works of the Annales school (from the 1950s and 1960s notably), even if the
issue of who will produce such a history (and on the basis of what materials)
remains unresolved.
The past decade has been a rich and significant one in Indonesian and
Southeast Asian studies, and the work under review marks a particular
moment in that evolution-and may well set in motion a wide-ranging
debate in Indonesia when translated into Bahasa Indonesia (as is soon
anticipated). Eschewing simplistic formulae borrowed from the European
literature, it nevertheless shows how an imaginative use of, in particular,
literary and semi-literary materials can be a significant aid in advancing the
history of mentalities. Le Carrefour Javanais thus sets out a paradigm, and
it is at this level-rather than as a set of monograph~-that it will eventually
be read, digested and evaluated by Southeast Asianists.
This said, a few remarks may be in order hero-by way of conclusion-on
the relationship of this work to the Annales historiography of recent times.
It is of course no secret that in recent years, many have wondered whether
the Annales school exists any more, for it appears to have become ever
more ephemeral and hard to grasp. The writings and programmatic statements of the editorial board, and in particular of Jacques Revel, who has
emerged in the past few years as one of the central spokesmen of the
Annales, leaves some room for doubt.2 By drawing sustenance more and
more from the Italian school of Micro storia, developed by Carlo Ginzburg,
Giovanni Levi, Carlo Poni, Edoardo Grendi and others, the newest incarnation of the Annales is far more closely tied to currents in post-modernist
writing, and in the proud privileging of the banal and the normal exceptional (paradoxically enough through the strategic use of what to the late
twentieth-century sensibility is the picaresque and the sensational, as we
see from the repeated return to witchcraft and exorcism as subjects!), than
to forms of global synthesis of the type proposed by Lombard. Is the
globalizing moment past, as Revel implies without ever saying so. and as
Franqois Furet has stated more bluntly ?33 Some of the proponents of Micro
storia, notably Grendi and to a lesser extent Levi, themselves seem less
32

See, for example, Jacques Revel, Histoire et sciences sociales: Les paradigmes des
Vol. XXXIV, No. 6, 1979, pp. 1360-76; subsequently the two

"Annales", Annales ESC,

editorial statements, Histoire et sciences sociales: Un toumant critique?, Annales ESC, Vol.
XLIII, No. 2, 1988, pp. 291-93, and Tentons lexperience, Annales ESC, Vol. XLIV, No. 6,
1989, pp. 1317-23; most recently, Jacques Revel, Lhistoire au ras du sol, introduction to
Giovanni Levi, Le pouvoir au village: Histoire dun exorciste dans le Piémont du XVIIe siècle,
trans., Monique Aymard, Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1989.
33
François Furet, Beyond the "Annales", Journal of Modem History, Vol. LV, No. 3,
1983, pp. 389-410, a curious piece which, besides expressing suspicion of global history or
total history, is devoted in large measure to an attack on Anglo-Saxon historical tradition as
represented by the eccentric figure of Richard Cobb!

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145

certain. Their effort continues in practice to be to link the particular with

the general, and to engage larger questions with an eclectic (indeed at
times even naive) toolbox drawn inter alia from linguistics, neoclassical
economic development theory, and folkloristics, but always from a welldefined starting point-the changing structure of the Genoese aristocracy,
or the workings of a Piedmontese exorcist, to take two examples.&dquo; But we
are at the same time exhorted to read Raymond Queneau and Arnaldo
Momigliano, both Foucault and Foucaults Pendulum, and to watch Tex
Avery (not Walt Disney), as inspiration for our history writing!
Where then does Le Carrefour Javanais stand within this changing
Annales tradition itself? Is it the belated response to the Princeton professor
who allegedly told Le Roy Ladurie in the late 1960s that French historians
were lost once taken out of the familiar waters of French history-and to
whom Ladurie could produce as counter examples, for the most part, only
his colleagues who had ventured as far as distant Spain?35 Let us not forget
that besides France itself, only Italy, Iberia and the Iberian world, and to a
limited extent the Netherlands and the Baltic, had attracted the core group
of Annales historians of the 1950s and 1960s. It is in this sense too that the
publication of this work marks an event, as much in the French historiography as in that of Southeast Asia: it is the first major work on Asian
history from within the tradition of the Annales (and not merely claiming
allegiance to it). That it is the Annales of Febvre and Braudel, and not that
of the apostles of the gmiettement of history may-in the present writers
view at least-be all to the good.

34

repubblica aristocratica dei Genovesi: Politica, carità e commercio

Seicento, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1987. But compare his earlier programmatic
statement, Micro-analisi e storia sociale, Quaderni storici, Vol. XXV, 1972, pp. 506-20.
35
See his address to the American Historical Association meeting at Toronto, December
1967, reproduced as Quantitative History: The 6th Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes
Etudes, in Ladurie, The Territory of the Historian, trans., Ben and Siân Reynolds, London,
The Harvester Press, 1979, p. 19.
Cf. Edoardo Grendi, La

fra Cinque

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