Warring Societies of Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia_ Local Cultures of Conflict Within a Regional Context

Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asia

creased rates of urbanisation in early modern Southeast Asia during the
period that he refers to as the “Age of Commerce” (an urbanisation that
was reversed by the seventeenth-century crisis),^3 but rural Southeast Asia
remained the primary locus of the lives of most pre-colonial Southeast
Asians. Regardless of whether we call them villages, settlements, cen-
tres, or something else (Rigg, for example, refers to rural settlements
perhaps because this eschews the necessary implication of an equation
with “community”) and whether they were insulated from the outside
world or well integrated into the larger economy, rural settlements of
one sort or another dominated local life across the landscape, which is
well documented not just from the European sources of the pre-colonial
and early colonial eras, but also indigenous administrative records, royal
edicts, revenue inquests, and inscriptions going back to the classical
period in various parts of the region. In other words, although there is
no scholarly consensus on the historical nature of organized rural life
in mainland Southeast Asia, it is broadly accepted that most Southeast
Asians were located – and most of their everyday life was spent – in rural
areas. On the other hand, attention is rarely focused on conflict among
rural folk in the primary or secondary accounts of pre-colonial warfare
in lowland areas, the plaines or the non-massif,^4 on the mainland. The

Press, 1979); the best-known case made for the moral economy approach regard-

ing peasant behaviour in the Southeast Asian village is James C. Scott, The Moral

Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1976).

3. Reid’s arguments, made in various articles, were most fully elaborated in Reid,
   Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce.


4. Some scholars of highland or upland Southeast Asia have recently modelled them
   for various purposes as a single zone referred to variously as the Southeast Asian
   Massif (Michaud) and Zomia (van Schendel; Scott). See Jean Michaud, “Economic
   Transformation in a Hmong Village of Thailand”, Human Organization 56.2
   (1997): 222–232; Willem van Schendel, “Geographies of Knowing, Geographies
   of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia”, Environment and Planning D:
   Society and Space 20.6 (2002): 647–668; Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed,
   2009. There is an inconsistency in how the uplands are distinguished from the
   lowlands and some scholarship finds upland–lowland divisions in the archipelago
   as well. For a critique of some of this literature, see Mandy Sadan, “Review of James
   C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast
   Asia”, Reviews in History http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/903 (date ac-
   cessed 5 June 2016). The present article, however, does not seek to reaffirm the
   lowland–highland bifurcation of the region, but instead to question the relevance
   of a distinction that clearly populates the literature on precolonial warfare. Indeed,