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

Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asia

have been sponsored or directed, however, such sources are also often
capable of providing insight into other, non-state aspects of warfare if
we look closely enough and in the right way. There is also a great deal of
artistic and photographic source material that has not yet been applied
very usefully to the examination of warfare in pre-colonial Southeast
Asia after the classical period. The problem in applying art to historical
study is not so much in its methods, for historical methodology using
art is very rich.^13 Rather, conventional written and artistic sources have
not been used to challenge the perspectives of each other in pre-colonial
Southeast Asian historiography but rather for their complementarity,
how they reinforce or clarify each other or how one fills in the gaps in
our knowledge that the other kind of sources has left behind. This lat-
ter task, the development of a multi-relational understanding of source
material as a complex of meanings has made significant headway in the
history and anthropology of the region’s post-war historical experience
but has not been directed into earlier periods of the region’s history.

Royal Soldiers as Armed Rural Folk

The emergence of standing armies was a late development in pre-
colonial Southeast Asia. There were indeed early on royal bodyguard
contingents but permanent or semi-permanent formations of a scale
sufficient to wage the kingdom’s major battles only come very late and,
even then, they were always supplemented by peasant levies. In most
early modern campaigns, rural agriculturalists and others were deployed
on a temporary basis with their own weaponry using skills they already
had. For the latter, Sanskrit stratagems, formations, and tactics, if they
were ever used, would have more than likely fallen on deaf ears. In the
last half of the eighteenth century, the Kingdom of Burma’s military
might was anchored around a core standing army of forty-one “great”
(su-gyi) regiments who were professional, trained, and well-armed and

Asian Warfare; Richard Cooler, British Romantic Views of the First Anglo-Burmese

War, 1824–1826 (Ascona, Switzerland: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 1978).

13. The lineage of this literature can be traced back to the classic study by Lucy
    Maynard Salmon, The Newspaper and the Historian (New York: Oxford University
    Press, 1923).