Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiagoes without saying that the region has distinct cultural characteristics
that influenced its history. Thus in this volume, we examine the ways
in which Southeast Asia’s culture influenced its military history, both
directly through culturally-specific military practices and indirectly
through cultural influences on the politics of warfare.
The task of undoing the broad generalizations of the twentieth cen-
tury, formed by soldiers, statesmen, and scholars alike, is daunting for
two reasons. First of all these generalizations are naturally embedded in
how the warfare of the time was viewed and recorded in documentation,
histories, and images. Second, and more damaging, was that this period
also saw the production of nearly all of the secondary research on pre-
twentieth-century warfare in the region. However, the obvious solution
of turning back to pre-twentieth-century documentation and images
is prone to its own pitfalls. As with twentieth-century documentation,
pre-twentieth-century sources also contain the stamp of their own era
and culture. For example, European sources were prone to exaggerate
the exoticness of the non-Western world as was the case of Mendes
Pinto’s Peregrination.^9 Similarly, early modern indigenous sources from
Southeast Asia were apt to present a picture of themselves in universal
ways as well, as part of the Buddhist world or Dar al-Islam, and this
equally obscured local particularism. Nevertheless, the range of primary
source material made available in the last decade to complement, rather
than replace, the traditional canon has made it both easier and timely to
reconsider the varieties of warfare in the region as opposed to an essen-
tialized warfare of the region. New sources consist of not only recently
translated East Asian documents but also and particularly new research
and new interpretations of indigenous documentation.
Reconceptualizing warfare in the region has been a continuously chal-
lenging endeavour. Colonial historiography viewed indigenous warfare
through a racial lens, traceable to late-nineteenth-century Europe, that
obscured actual practices and portrayed indigenous warfare in a deroga-
- On an earlier debate regarding Pinto’s veracity, see the discussion by Rebecca D.
Catz in the introduction to her translation of his travels in Fernão Mendes Pinto,
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989). More recent scholarship has attempted to view
Pinto as a more useful source than previously granted.