Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiaenabled a degree of military sophistication in the form of shotguns, can-
non, and fortifications. The elite even took interest in sending smiths
with diplomatic delegations who acquired skills in manufacturing rifles
in Javanese workshops.^82
As pointed out above, the end of expansion was followed by endemic
internal unrest that appears to have intensified after the early nineteenth
century, perhaps underpinned by the use of modern weaponry.^83 This
warrants a few comments. The nature of the vertical bonds between the
local agrarian units and the royal power centres is a hotly debated topic
that cannot be solved in the context of this study. While anthropolo-
gists since Geertz have tended to see the villages and irrigation systems
as relatively autonomous and maintained by local ritualized networks,
some recent research suggests a degree of royal control over manpower
and water.^84 Be that as it may, the available materials suggest a highly
decentralized socio-economic system, as can indeed be expected in a
pre-modern island Southeast Asian context. Thus the capabilities of the
rajas were relatively unstable and depended on their ability to co-opt
the various mañca (local lords) and village leaders. This localism made
hegemonic attempts difficult to sustain. The contest state, the warring-
type of kingship prevalent in the post-1651 period, depended on the
- Helen Creese, Bali in the Early Nineteenth Century: the Ethnographic Accounts of
Pierre DuBois (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016): 32. Bijvanck, “Onze Betrekkingen
tot Lombok”, 330, notes that a VOC diplomat who visited Karangasem in 1775
was impressed by the royal elite troops armed with muskets and cannon, suggest-
ing a process of military sophistication even before 1600. - Interestingly, the perceived military potential of Balinese people was sufficient for
the Dutch to systematically recruit soldiers to serve in the Java War (1825–1830),
which was done with support from the local Balinese rajas. See Creese, Bali in the
Early Nineteenth Century. - The hypothesis of a Balinese “theatre state” envisioned by Clifford Geertz in Negara:
The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali has served as a point of departure for
several attempts to conceptualize and historically explain the relations between royal
center, local lords, and commoners in the villages. See the essay by Brigitte Hauser-
Schaüblin, “The Precolonial Balinese State Reconsidered: A Criticial Evaluation of
Theory Construction on the Relationship between Irrigation, the State, and Ritual”,
Current Anthropology 44.2 (2003), and the sometimes fiery rejoinders in the same
issue. A point similar to that of Hauser-Schaüblin has been made by Henk Schulte
Nordholt, “Dams and Dynasty, and the Colonial Transformation of Balinese
Irrigation Management”, Human Ecology 39 (2011), who argues that large scale
irrigation in pre-colonial times depended on the dynastic centre to a degree and was
not sustained merely by autonomous local organization.