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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 offersserious 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 Cambridge-Delhi-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-calledIndianized 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 d’histoire globale; Volume 1:

Les limites de l’occidentalisation; Volume II: Les rgseaux asiatiques; Volume III: L’heritagedes royaumes concentriques, Paris, Editions de I’Ecole 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

on 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

unity.2

Many of Kulke’s 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.

Acknowledgements: 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 certainlywill not agree with it, and to Neeladri Bhattacharya.

© 1994 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on July 16, 2007http://sih.sagepub.comDownloaded from

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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 forthe most part anyway. Let us note, moreover, that various Asian historio-

graphical 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 domainwhile 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,Çaglar Keyder, $evket Pamuk, Murat Qizakca and Cemal Kafadar, to

name only a few.4

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 ofhistory writing. The histories of their countries are thus those written byWestern scholars, for the most part without interlocutions from recalcitrant

’native’. It has hence been possible as late as the 1980s to produce majorvolumes of the Cambridge History of Iran (Vol. VI, as also to an extent

Vol. VII) dealing with the Safavid, Nadir Shahi and Qajar periods (forexample), 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

3 Frederic Wakeman, ed., Ming and Qing Historical Studies in the People’s Republic ofChina, 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, 1981.4Cf., 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 editor’s 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.

5Peter 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 UniversityPress, 1991.








133

negative, for national history-writing traditions are important even today,as are 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 agendabeing 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 historiographycertainly does not. This is that part of the French (or Gallicized) historio-

graphy which is picked up and translated by American (or less frequentlyBritish) academic presses, and which since the late 1960s has run the gamutfrom 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 MagalhdesGodinho), appear to be secrets relatively well kept from them .6 Interest-

ingly, 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 styleof Carlo Ginzburg, or better still (for those like Amitav Ghosh who dare)Umberto Eco, than to launch into ’global’ histories. Such an abdication bya host of Indian historians has meant, in turn, that history without frontiers,as well as comparative history, has been left as it were to professionalJacks-of-all-trades, such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Janet Abu-Lughod,Jack Goldstone and Andre Gunder Frank.’

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 Expan-

sion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s, New York, Academic Press, 1989; Janet

Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World-System, AD 1250-1350

,

New York,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.








134

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

Essayin Global

History)is an

apt responseto those who believe that ’total

history’ is dead, and it should be read if for this reason alone. Its organiz-ation 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), con-

siders the consequences of the middle period between the fifteenth and

seventeenthcentury,

when Java came under Chinese and Islamicinfluence;and the third, and slimmest-190 pages followed by a long glossary and

bibliography-is entitled;The Heritage of the Concentric Kingdomevidently 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 justifiesthis 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 productof 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 portsworth the name, and thus forces maritime activity to concentrate more or

less

exclusivelyto the north.

Once we appreciate this fact, the manner in which the Dutch East India

Company (VOC) expanded into Java in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies becomes logical. Indeed, the Dutch by inserting themselves viathe Pasisir did no more than follow the principal routes of penetrationtaken 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 photo-

graphs.Lombard takes us

rapidly throughthe 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’,








135

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

penetrating insightsinto

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 clearlydefinable Western ’impact’? Concomitantly, and in a more prescriptivemode, is there a possible synthesis between the ’indigenous’ and the

’Western’? What form can it take? For the historian of India, these ques-tions will

obviouslycarry echoes,

particularlyat the

present juncturein 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 perspec-

tives-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,

gestureand

politicallanguage, or of aesthetic

concepts involvingarchitecture, 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 rejec-tion of the West, and the policy of ’self-sufficiency’ (berdikari) set out bySukarno, and which collapsed after his fall in 1965-66, was far stronger as

cultural policy (and far weaker as economic policy) than its correspondingideology in, say, India; it was, however, doomed to failure because Indo-

nesia 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 onthe ’Cultivation System’, from which the most important ’revisionist’ works are thought to be

those of C. Fasseur

(recentlytranslated into

Englishfrom Dutch), Robert van Niel, and

Robert E. Elson; the last gives a particularly revisionist view, arguing that the systemexpanded commercial possibilities and hence peasant prosperity: see Elson, Javanese Peasantsand 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.








136

volume, passing implicitly from a history flavoured with political sociology

and cultural anthropology to early modern history. The exercise in politicalsociology (as indeed in political anthropology, if one may be permitted the

expression) 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 helpeddefine a form of cultural and political anthropology for modern Indonesia

of which Lombard is aware, and which he manages to fit into his frame-

work.&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 constructsand interpretations, on his reading of secondary literature. It is in the

second volume that one suspects his heart really lies, since it partly repre-sents a return to the period and terrain chalked out in his first monographLe Sultanat dAtj6h au temps d’Iskandar Muda (1607-1636) (Paris: Ecole

Franqaise d’Extr6me Orient, 1967), translated in 1986 into Bahasa Indo-

nesia. 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 ’Fana-ticism 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 associ-

ated by him with modernity-such as a particular notion of the Person and

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. O’G. Anderson, ’Notes on contemporary Indonesian political communi-

cation’, 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: Language and Hierarchy in an

Indonesian City, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986.








137

impact becomes profound, and he demonstrates this with reference to

Malay literature in particular.Here, as in the first volume, a good deal of emphasis is laid on literaryevidence, and we are reminded of the author’s 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 Indo-

nesia into French). But, in evident tribute to the Burckhardtean model (orat least a version of it outlined by the author’s 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 thePasisir-a

society thatis

farmore

monetized andcom-

mercialized, and perhaps far more susceptible to social mobility than that

which went before. A discussion of money and monetary circulation provid-ing a useful summing up of the state of the art to the time of the book’s

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 tripartitedivision

suggested byGeertz in his The

Religion ofJava

(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 devel-

opment 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 amongrecent 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 IndigenousMonetary 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

stylein the

meaningsof the

past’,The Journal

of Asian Studies (henceforth JAS), Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2, 1979, pp. 231-44. The approach in

Errington’s paper is also at variance with the analysis of Burmese texts of the period in Victor

Lieberman, ’How reliable is U Kala’s 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.








138

Dirks cannot 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 earlymodern 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

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 finallycome together in the closing chapter, dealing with Javanese toleranceand/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 pogromof 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 C&oelig;dès and Louis-Charles Damais have already made anotable 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 move-

ments drew their ideological sustenance, and concepts such as the long-awaited 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 Indonesianhistorian 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

16V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman, ’History, biography and poetry at the Tanjavurnayaka 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 Rayava-cakamu, 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 centralJava, 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 l’Homme, 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.








139

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

Thesemovements

are, however,in Lombard’s

view,a sort of

social safetyvalue (rgbellion-soupape) rather than possessing the capacity to bringabout 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 seven-

teenth and eighteenth centuries (pp. 36-48). Further, in arguing that the

rulers of Mataram used not

only ideologicalconstructs borrowed from

Maja-pahit 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 dependentalmost solely on the ruler’s charisma.21 No doubt ideas such as wahyu (asmall luminous ball that appeared as a sign of the ruler’s 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 certainrespects

Islam has had

onlya 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

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 statingthe need

19 Sartono Kartodirdjo, The Peasants’ Revolt of Banten in 1888, its Conditions, Course and

Sequel: A 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 investigationinto 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

Statecraftin Old

Java: A Study of the Later Mataram Period, 16th to 19th Century, Ithaca, Cornell Modem

Indonesia Project, 1968; and Benedict R. O’G. 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, SanjaySubrahmanyam, ’State formation and transformation in early modem India and Southeast

Asia’, Itinerario, Vol. XII, No. 1, 1988, pp. 91-109.








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 maintheses. 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 notablySultan 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 takessustenance: 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 principleof ’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 mechan-

ism-’the institutions’, ’the thought’, the ‘structures’-we have been

forced to accept the fact of geographical diversity and to situate our-

selves 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 goodfortune 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, ’Iraniansabroad: 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 Lombard’s approach from the plea, fashion-able 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.








141

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

These volumesare

partlya

productof 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 chaptersin the first volume of the Cambridge History are thus written by such

historians, a significant exception being the Malaysian Jeya Kathirithamby-Wells. Now located in large measure in the Antipodes (Australia and NewZealand), 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 andBritish 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 IndonesianEconomic Studies and Review of Indonesian and Malayasian Affairs date

respectively to 1965 and 1967.

If Lombard’s Le Carrefour Javanais represents the major work publishedthus far of the Archipel group, the flagship of the Antipodean tradition is

often said to be a work-in-progress, namely, Anthony Reid’s Southeast

Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680,

of which one volume has

appearedand the second is announced.25 In coverage, this already widely acclaimed

work apparently touches largely on the same period as the second part of

Lombard’s 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 Braudel’s organizing principle in The Mediter-

ranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II: his first volume

(1988) is thus about ’structures’, and the second (from which several papersand a

chapterin the first volume of the

Cambridge History ofSoutheast

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

From Early Times to c. 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 ofIslam to 1750, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, also in two parts, ’events’ and

’structures’.








142

century Maluku follows two others, on Sulawesi and on Johor), will certainly

appearmore

accessible to Indian (and other Anglophone) historians thanthose 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 Lombard’s synthesis may be discour-

aging to some, who would prefer the conventional, early modern, regionalkingdom study (Andaya’s speciality), or Reid’s neat (at times disconcert-

ingly 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 tomy 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 meetingsin July 1990). Historians of the Mughal period in Indian history are not

unfamiliar with this approach and its concomitant challenge: ’If you don’t

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 Reid’s tables on population, on Southeast Asian pepper and spiceexports, and bullion imports. The pepper export graph in the CambridgeHistory 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 makea

series ofheroic 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’. Thefirst statement is debatable, and the second a major misreading of secondaryevidence. What is more, he then extrapolates without further ado (and his

27 Leonard Y. Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern

Period, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1993. Andaya’s 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 inthe 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, ’Wallerstein’s

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.








/143

footnotes are not helpful to the reader who wishes to follow the proceduresused and their bases) to all exports from Southeast Asia-be they to

Europe or the rest of Asia (China, but also India).29We 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 ’dramatic-

ally’ 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 prepar-

ation for making authoritative statements on the quantitative dimensionsof 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 prefabri-cated master concepts that are a generation or more old in Europeanliterature: Absolutism, Military Revolution, General Crisis of the Seven-

teenth 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 Lombard’s 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 mighthave 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 Portu-

guese 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 materialsin classical and modern Malay, Chinese, old Javanese, Dutch, French,English, some Portuguese and even some Italian-no mean feat! To the

extent that Lombard’s work is primarily an exercise in the ’history of

29 Reid, ’An "Age of Commerce"’, pp. 15-19; also Reid, ’Economic and social change’.30For 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 com-

pare Reid’s approach to pre-colonial Southeast Asia with that of Burton Stein for pre-colonialIndia 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.








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 olderworks 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 particularmoment in that evolution-and may well set in motion a wide-rangingdebate in Indonesia when translated into Bahasa Indonesia (as is soon

anticipated). Eschewing simplistic formulae borrowed from the Europeanliterature, 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 eventuallybe 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 state-

ments 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 incar-nation of the Annales is far more closely tied to currents in post-modernistwriting, and in the proud privileging of the ’banal’ and the ’normal excep-tional’ (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

"Annales"’, Annales ESC, Vol. XXXIV, No. 6, 1979, pp. 1360-76; subsequently the two

editorial statements, ’Histoire et sciences sociales: Un toumant

critique?’, Annales ESC, Vol.

XLIII, No. 2, 1988, pp. 291-93, and ’Tentons l’experience’, Annales ESC, Vol. XLIV, No. 6,1989, pp. 1317-23; most recently, Jacques Revel, ’L’histoire au ras du sol’, introduction to

Giovanni Levi, Le pouvoir au village: Histoire d’un exorciste dans le Piémontdu 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!








145

certain. Their effort continues in practice to be to link the particular withthe 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 well-

defined starting point-the changing structure of the Genoese aristocracy,or the workings of a Piedmontese exorcist, to take two examples.&dquo; But weare at the same time exhorted to read Raymond Queneau and Arnaldo

Momigliano, both Foucault and Foucault’s 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 professorwho 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, onlyhis colleagues who had ventured as far as distant Spain?35 Let us not forgetthat besides France itself, only Italy, Iberia and the Iberian world, and to a

limited extent the Netherlands and the Baltic, had attracted the core groupof 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 historio-

graphy 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 claimingallegiance 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 writer’s

view at least-be all to the good.

34 Cf. Edoardo Grendi, La repubblica aristocratica dei Genovesi: Politica, carità e commercio

fra Cinque e Seicento, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1987. But compare his earlier programmaticstatement, ’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, December1967, 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.

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