Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiaaccounts and records throughout the archipelago, including areas they
did not directly rule, with which the mainland courts had nothing simi-
lar in scale to compete until well into the late nineteenth century. The
mainland court monopoly on perspective had other consequences as
well. By being captured by the court perspective, historians of mainland
warfare misunderstand the big campaigns as much as they do the lo-
cal conflicts. Royal chronicles, in representing the history of warfare in
ways that emphasized the role of the court, ignored altogether the role of
everyday people, the common folk, who remain nameless in the official
accounting of the fighting. Where battle portraits do include subalterns
in the grand scheme of things, they remain in the background. Most of
the royal soldiers who marched from Burma across the mountains to
besiege Ayudhya in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, it will be
suggested, were the same rural warriors involved in local conflicts, and
when they went to Ayudhya, they fought in the same way that they had
on their home landscape in Burma, in the vicinity of the rural settlement
in which they spent most of their lives.
This chapter argues that local, rural warfare was the most basic
component of pre-colonial Southeast Asian warfare although it might
be termed differently in different parts of the region due to academic
legacies.^7 The answers to questions such as how a war was fought, with
what means, and for what purpose can only be found in local sources
and not in the reliance on state chronicles at face value. This requires
more work on understanding the rural community. This requires setting
aside the distinction made between lowland and highland societies and
dropping the statecraft and religious frameworks that prevent us from
understanding some relatively basic dynamics at work in shaping local,
rural warfare that was common to the region. These include the impact
of agricultural or monsoonal cycles (was war always waged at the same
time and if not, was it waged in the same way at different times of the
year), the regularity of conflict (how often were “wars” between commu-
- Village warfare as used in the present chapter would arguably be very close to the
“tribal warfare” presented by Janet Hoskins in her study of headhunting on Sumba
in the Eastern Indonesian Archipelago. See Janet Hoskins, “On Losing and Getting
A Head: Warfare, Exchange and Alliance in a Changing Sumba, 1888–1988”
American Ethnologist 16.3 (August 1989): 420; Idem, “The Headhunter as Hero:
Local Traditions and their Reinterpretation in National History”, American
Ethnologist 14.4 (1987): 614.