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The Southeast Asian Port and Polity: Rise and Demise

Article  in  The Journal of Asian Studies · November 1991

DOI: 10.2307/2058623

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Kenneth R. Hall Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells

Ball State University University of Cambridge
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Review
Reviewed Work(s): The Southeast Asian Port and Polity: Rise and Demise. by J.
Kathirithamby-Wells and John Villiers
Review by: Kenneth R. Hall
Source: The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Nov., 1991), pp. 995-998
Published by: Association for Asian Studies
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 BOOK REVIEWS-SOUTHEAST ASIA 995

his lack of authority to deal with the various military commanders. Equally, the
Briggs Plan of June 1950 did not allow for the deployment of troops and police
"to guarantee the population security against terrorist attack" (p. 22). In fact, there
were more guerrilla-instigated incidents and more civilians killed in 1951 than in
any other year of the Emergency, and it was a number of years after that before
the rural population of Malaya began to feel secure.
But most significantly, there is no attempt to put the military events of the
Emergency in a political context despite the point made in the dust jacket blurb
that "It became a textbook example of how to fight a guerrilla war, based on political
as much as military means." Certainly, there is no discussion of the ebb and flow
of political events of the Emergency which were crucial to the availability of solid
intelligence and on which successful land and air operations by the security forces
were dependent. The book, therefore, ignores General Sir Gerald Templer's 1952
assessment of the situation, noted in John Cloake's Templer: Tiger of Malaya (London:
Harrap, 1985), p. 262, that "The shooting side of the business is only 25 percent
of the trouble and the other 75 percent lies in getting the people of this country
behind us." Interestingly, Cloake's book, as well as a number of other key studies
of the government's counterguerrilla strategy, are-missing from the bibliography of
further readings. One final point: The reference in the subtitle to the "Commonwealth"
is mystifying. There is, for example, no assessment of the decision to bring in forces
from outside Britain or any detailed examination of the role of Commonwealth units
in the campaign against the communists. All these points serve to reinforce the
general feeling of this reader that the book is mistitled and that the author has no
grasp of the events of the Emergency beyond some files he came across in Ministry
of Defence archives.

RICHARD STUBBS
McMaster University

The Southeast Asian Port and Polity. Rise and Demise. Edited by J.
KATHIRITHAMBY-WELLS and JOHN VILLIERS. Singapore: Singapore
University Press, 1990. xiii, 265 pp. $22.00 (paper).

This impressive collection of twelve articles is the result of two early-1980s

working sessions that were sponsored by the British Institute in Southeast Asia. It
is a selective study of the interrelationship between trade and polity in key areas
of Southeast Asia from earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century. Still,
the majority of the book addresses the post-1400 era, when the unprecedented growth
of trade strained the traditional power dynamics of the region, and only one chapter
on Ayutthya examines the non-"Malay" region of the Southeast Asian mainland.
After an incisive overview essay by Kathirithamby-Wells, the first three studies
(Leong Sau Heng, Jan Wisseman Christie, Nik Hassan Shuhaimi bin Nik Abdul
Rahman) examine the genesis of port and polity on the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra
in pre- and protohistoric tithes; the middle six shift the focus to Thailand (Dhiravat
Na Pombejra on Ayutthaya), Java (Kathirithamby-Wells on Banten), and the eastern
islands of the archipelago (Villiers on the Spice Islands and Makassar, Ruurdje
Laarhoven on Magindanao, and James Warren on Sulu), while the two concluding
chapters (Saharil Talib on Terengganu and D. S. Ranjit Singh on Brunei) return
to the Straits of Melaka and the Malay Peninsula region, which acquired a new
significance with the rise of Singapore in the early nineteenth century. The collection

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996 THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES

was purposely structured to avoid already well-studied port-polities like Melaka,

Aceh, and Johor. As such, the authors' most notable contribution is their coverage
of the less well-known, but no less significant developments that took place in the
eastern Indonesian archipelago and the southern Philippines after 1400. Another
commendable feature of this book is that over half the chapters are contributed by
Southeast Asians whose unique understanding of indigenous culture richly permeates
their scholarship.
Together, the authors position themselves against Western perceptions of Southeast
Asian political and social structures that make distinctions between agrarian and
maritime as separate historical categories, and especially take exception to the
association of the former with Wittfogel's "Oriental Despotism" or the Marxist
"Asiatic Mode of Production." Rather, they collectively note the need to reach an
understanding of the symbiosis between these two aspects of economic wealth and
power in early Southeast Asian history. Summarily, the typical Southeast Asian
polity was characterized by interlinkage between capital city and maritime center,
which might or might not have been one and the same. Traditionally, maritime
centers thrived in the "orbit" of the ruler. Ports were important to agrarian-based
states as the source of external markets for their produce as well as a vital source
of luxury goods such as cloth, spices, precious metals, and aromatics that were
critical ritual and ceremonial commodities, while ports required the produce and
markets of their hinterlands to sustain their existence.
Throughout history, Southeast Asia's ports also functioned as "cultural brokers,"
and chiefs and rulers with a relationship to, or in control of, strategic maritime
centers found themselves in favorable positions to administer wealth and exercise
significant influence over their subject populations. Effective state administration
did not occur via an intricately managed bureaucratic structure, but through the
ruler's network of patronage and reciprocal relations with a variety of subordinate
local elite. Relations between the political center and its component parts, inherently
fragile and often in a state of flux, were held in balance by the ruler's individual
initiatives that determined his power. But local elite assumed strategic importance
in polities that were defined more by areas of influence than as units of territory.
Nobility and chiefs with direct access to manpower and provincial products were
in a strong position to check royal despotism. Since this elite simultaneously functioned
as managers of the component parts of the administrative infrastructure, they could
well determine realignments of loyalties and resources whenever a center of power
diminished and other potential centers competed to take its place.
The authors also respond to Anthony Reid's recent proposal, as most completely
expressed in Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680: The Lands Below the
Winds (New Haven: 1988), that from about 1400 a rich cluster of maritime states
developed in Southeast Asia that, in turn, fostered "the development of a new type
of Southeast Asian society." That is, trade expansion and the simultaneous spread
of Islam and Theravada Buddhism in the region produced a galaxy of prosperous
new urban centers. The authors believe that port-polities previous to 1400 exhibited
the basic characteristics Reid sees as typical of the post-1400 "urbanized" scene.
Together, they view the inherent patterns of urbanization in the region becoming
more pronounced with the increase in the volume of trade and the proliferation of
wealth and commercial prosperity, but there was an overall integrity and continuity
to Southeast Asian society and the region's cultural patterns, due especially to the
essence of Southeast Asia's geography in which there was so much necessary
interdependency between coast and hinterland, as well as so much potential for
external communication .

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 BOOK REVIEWS-SOUTHEAST ASIA 997

There was thus a regional continuity, wherein Singapore's rise to preeminence

within the Southeast Asian system of commerce and exchange was the natural outcome
of the overall expansion of long-distance trade and the evolution of the port-polities
that had begun in the early centuries of the Christian era, if not before. In the
nineteenth century, the indigenous port-polities fell from their positions of eminence
and acquired a reduced but essential role at the lower levels of the new commercial
hierarchy that was dominated by European trade capitals (Manila, Batavia, Rangoon,
Bangkok, and Saigon, as well as Singapore) at strategic positions along the main
sea routes, but this was a replay of earlier patterns of historical development within
the region, as the new regionally dominant ports of trade serviced their own
"hinterland" sectors by connecting them in traditionally important ways to the exter
sphere.
The authors agree that there is no clearly perceived uniformity, periodization,
or historical framework to early Southeast Asian history, and that there are significant
spatial discontinuities in the regional development. The diversity of regional
development is perhaps best demonstrated in the emergence of cash-crop economies
and new states in the "Spice Islands" during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
With the growth of the spice trade in the Banda Islands, a merchant oligarchy of
orang kaya evolved that controlled village confederations. But in Maluku, to the
north of Banda, the same era of commercial and political integration witnessed the
emergence of a higher level of unification under the new rulers of Ternate and
Tidore. Here the insular character of the region dictated the retention of a degree
of traditional provincial authority, but trade enhanced the role of the ruler as the
coordinator of the region and allowed the development of a polity in which there
was considerable centralization of royal authority and control. By assuming a role
as the Islamic spiritual head of the region, and by initiating a network of subordinate
warrior nobles (sengaji), the Ternate-based ruler was able to enforce a clove monopoly
as well as a system of compulsory tribute collection through kora-kora expeditions.
In the face of a more intensive European commercial challenge at Banten in
western Java, a system of forced pepper cultivation and centralized trade was initiated
by the local rulers. By the mid-seventeenth century, the relationship of the Banten
center to its upriver and inland hinterlands on both sides of the Sunda Strait had
been altered from one of tribute to taxation, as representatives of the port-based
monarch collected, via local chiefs, some amount of local produce from each male
inhabitant. The ruler was no longer merely an overlord, but became a manager of
both the spiritual and material affairs of his state.
Likewise at Makassar in the eastern archipelago, there was a high degree of
interdependency between trade and politics, as royal supervision of trade allowed
that region's resistance to Western attempts at monopoly control. The island's stature
was enhanced due to its locally strategic position between rice-rich and militarily
strong Gowa and commercially shrewd Tallo', while it also served as the center for
collection of sea produce from Sulu, pepper from Borneo, and slaves from the southern
Philippines and the eastern Indonesian islands.
On the other hand, at the Magindanao polity in south Mindanao, which was
the seventeenth-century collecting-and-supply center for surrounding international
entrepots, there was no single focus on a principal entrepot. Characteristically, multiple
interactions took place between the hinterland populations (who supplied wax and
cinnamon) and coastal peoples (who gathered pearls and tortoise shells) and the three
main collection and export centers. An accelerated growth of internal and external
commerce quickly outstripped the available local labor supply and necessitated the
import of slaves to supplement the agricultural workforce. In the face of these changes,

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 998 THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES

a confederation of chiefs and datu emerged within the broad framework of a loosely
integrated Islamic state structure.
Moreover, the book substantiates the resiliency of autochthonous institutional
traditions in the face of significant economic transitions within the Southeast Asian
region, and demonstrates that there were other ways to organize commerce than
through rigid political centralization and royal autocracy that were seemingly
characteristic of other regions of the emerging "world system."

KENNETH R. HALL
Ball State University

The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Burma (BCP). By BERTIL
LINTNER. Ithaca N.Y.: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program,
1990. xii, 188 pp. $10.00.

This welcome addition to the Cornell Southeast Asia Program's contributions

to the field of Burma studies invites comparisons with recent books from two different
series: Charles B. Smith, Jr.'s The Burmese Communist Party in the 1980s (Singapore:
Regional Strategic Studies Programme, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1984)
and Brigadier General Khin Nyunt's Burma Communist Party's Conspiracy to take over
State Power (Yangon: Ministry of Information of the Government of the Union of
Myanmar, 1989). All three are written in English (the latter is also available in
Burmese), devote half or more of their pages to documents, and overlap in subject
matter. Their differences, however, are significant.
Lintner sets out a richly woven narrative of the chameleon career of this long-
running Communist insurgency from the founding of the party by young Burmese
intellectuals in 1939 to its demise in an ethnic mutiny a half century later. The
story line is supported with extensive biographies, and the description of the last
days of the party is further elaborated by appendixes presenting an organizational
table, maps of war zones, and current characterizations of over a dozen ethnic insurgent
groups. The scope of Lintner's worK is broader than Smith's, which consists of an
analytical introduction and several key documents of one stage in the life of the
party. Lintner's method makes extensive use of field research and a number of Burmese
language sources. Burmese organizational names, titles, and phrases are often given
both in English and in Burmese script, with transliterations usually provided. A
few errors of spelling and transliteration do creep in, e.g., the last syllable of the
grim staccato pyouk-touk-thak (purge-expel-kill) is erroneously rendered as hta
(pp. 23, 50). In argument, Lintner's and Smith's books are both compatible and
complementary.
The contrast is starker with General Khin Nyunt's first book in the Burma
government's ongoing series. The Khin Nyunt thesis is that the Burma Communist
Party was largely responsible for the 1988 rebellion and that it continues to influence
the party that won the 1990 election and to direct the subsequent assaults on the
prolongation of State Law and Order Council (SLORC) military rule. In contrast,
Lintner says that the surprisingly accurate reporting on an early demonstration in
March "was almost the extent of the CPB's 'involvement' in the pro-democracy
movement in Burma of 1988" (p. 44). He challenges the Khin Nyunt thesis directly
in his concluding chapter, engaging its evidence and decrying its motives.
Two questions are involved here. One has to do with the use of labels; the other
with the assessment of historical causation. What is the thing that was called the

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