IntroductionZedong applied by the Vietnamese to their struggles with the French
and then the Americans.
Although the impressions of warfare inherited from the colonial and
Cold War eras lingered into the twenty-first century, with the cultural
challenge posed to Western armies in the Middle East and elsewhere,
there has been a rekindling of interest in the pervasive influence of
non-Western forms of warfare. But contemporary military necessity has
not been the only attraction. This return has coincided with changing
historiographical treatments of modernity that have included increasing
efforts by scholars of non-Western societies to reveal local pasts. The
global need for this reconsideration has been voiced very eloquently by
Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), who has argued for the view of a multi-
centred modernity in which Europe was not the main centre but merely
one of many such centres however much its siblings were obscured by
Western dominated discourses emerging out of the Enlightenment.^6
Until recently, efforts to rediscover indigenous history have lacked the
confidence to present local societies as generative centres on par with
Europe and have struggled to demonstrate why it was necessary to study
one region or another at all. In the case of Southeast Asia, the first gen-
eration or so of these general efforts at regional studies had to legitimize
the value of local study by demonstrating that the region had culture
and history different from that of China and India and hence deserved
attention in its own right. This effort is represented by a host of scholars
of the 1970s and after.^7 For example, John Smail’s seminal essay “On the
Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia” chal-
lenged Eurocentric historiographies of Southeast Asia by addressing
historians’ viewpoints and attitudes as well as the relative importance
of various actors in any given history. Reid’s two-volume work Southeast
Asia in the Age of Commerce sought to define Southeast Asia on its own
terms through the examination of countless details ranging from sexual
mores to economics.^8 Groundbreaking when published, these works
changed the way scholars look at historical Southeast Asia. It now
- Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). - John R. W. Smail, “On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern
Southeast Asia”, Journal of Southeast Asian History 2.2 (1961): 72–102. - Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680, 2 vols. (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988, 1993).