Armed Rural Folk“missing” lowland rural folk on the mainland in studies of pre-colonial
warfare, except where the villagers are referenced as victims,^5 is in sharp
contrast to accounts of many of the smaller societies in the archipelago
or the highland areas of the mainland where warfare is admitted to be
more localized and of a smaller scale.^6
For scholars of mainland Southeast Asian warfare, privileging state
sources has meant that the many hundreds of local conflicts that hap-
pened in Burma and other mainland societies in any given year have
been written off as mere problems between the court and local lords.
Instead, it is suggested here that these were small-scale conflicts between
rural communities over resources or for other reasons that were locally
important. These local wars fought between various actors, sometimes
between rural communities per se, and sometimes between the same
communities more than once. One might reasonably ask that if the
mainland and the archipelago were subject to the same centralizing,
state-supporting interpretive frameworks, as mentioned above, why is
pre-colonial warfare in the archipelago so much better understood as be-
ing characterized by local conflict. The answer appears to be the ubiquity
of local Spanish, Portuguese, VOC, and Dutch Colonial Government
by showing that “lowland” warfare on the mainland was of a kind shared with
the “uplands”, this article argues for directing scholarly attention to other factors
that did indeed foster differences that were directly and indirectly responsible for
manifesting historically discernible differences in warfare in the region before the
colonial period.- Accounts of warfare in precolonial Burma make numerous references to the
abuses of commonfolk by immoral rural gentry and bad officials who by doing so
deserved the punishment (meted out by the royal court) they later received for
their transgressions. See, for example, the abuses in 1810 connected to one atwin-
wun whose men seized the wives of the commonfolk when the men had been sent
off on a military expedition. They were forced to work in the fields and at night
the atwin-wun’s men had sexual relations with the women treating them as if they
were their wives. Of course, such evidence was useful in building a case against the
atwin-wun for royal punishment. When the husbands, the common folk, returned,
they complained, but when these complaints were dismissed, such people had no
recourse, lacking agency of their own in this depiction of events. See Cyril Skinner
(trans.), “The Interrogation of Zeya Suriya Kyaw: A Burmese Account of the Junk
Ceylon (Phuket) Campaigns of 1809–1810”, Journal of the Siam Society 72.1 & 2
(1984): 70. - See, for example, the localized nature of conflict in parts of the archipelago as
presented in the chapters by Kathryn Wellen, Hans Hägerdal, Ariel Lopez, and
Gerrit Knaap in the present volume.