Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiabuilding and inter-island connectivities, namely modes of warfare and
their political implications. It offers a long-term perspective of the inter-
play between internal and external conflict patterns from the sixteenth
century to the eve of colonial subjugation. A question that has baffled
observers for centuries is: how could the Hindu culture of Bali maintain
itself in central Indonesia, surrounded by (more or less) Muslim islands
that often took a hostile stance? No definite answer has ever been of-
fered, and this chapter will not pretend to provide one. However, by
seeing how patterns of military conflicts changed over four centuries, we
may at least gain an idea of how periods of external military expansion
and contraction influenced and linked with periods of internal turbu-
lence. We may also relate the patterns of warfare to changes in military
technology and with the development of statebuilding in neighbouring
areas. All this may provide clues, first, to the ability of indigenous politi-
cal organization to meet external military pressure, and second, to the
motor of the internal instability that ended with the colonial invasion of
1906–08.
This undertaking is necessarily an essay in the original French sense
of the word: an attempt. It is important to stress the limitations of the
sources. Balinese babad (roughly but somewhat insufficiently translated
as “chronicles”) are notoriously difficult to date but are usually from
the late pre-colonial and the colonial periods. Moreover, their focus on
the origins and genealogy of noble lineages limits the information that
can be expected from them.^2 Literary works can give clues about the
imagery and conduct of warfare although the stereotyped Indic models
suggest some care in using them as sources.
For their part, Dutch archival materials provide an important but
fragmentary body of information after the first visit to Bali in 1597.
The attention of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was seldom
focused on Bali, but its systematic recordkeeping ensured that at least
some information about the island was committed to paper. In spite of
respectable spadework by scholars such as Willem Bijvanck (1894–95),
Hermanus Johannes de Graaf (1949), Henk Schulte Nordholt (1996),
- Peter Worsley, Babad Buleleng : A Balinese Dynastic Genealogy (The Hague: M.
Nijhoff, 1972): 82.