Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiaessay identified as Orientalism.^14 As Patrick Porter (2009) has shown,
European discourse on non-Western societies reimagined Asian warfare
in exotic ways that intellectually and administratively facilitated their
management after conquest. These ways included the development of
concepts such as “martial races” with which the British, for example,
used Indians to suppress other Indians.^15 Within different colonial socie-
ties, European and indigenous western-educated scholars had produced
a number of studies of pre-colonial armies along these lines and some of
this work continued after independence as historians at European uni-
versities and sometimes the same colonial scholars themselves, who had
relocated back to the metropolitan universities, continued this kind of
work into the 1950s and 1960s, often utilizing major university collec-
tions of Southeast Asian warfare paraphernalia held in Leiden, Paris, or
London. Such work produced particular images of the main royal armies
of the past and ultimately explained, through assertions of recruitment
problems, poor management of manpower, backward military strata-
gems and tactics, problematic application of firearms, or weaknesses in
drill, the reasons why these armies necessarily failed when faced with
European arms.^16 The products of this colonial labour would ironically
form the basis of some of the early nationalist historiography that would
blend these explanations with the romanticized glory of popular histori-
cal novels, in Burma for example, and accounts of kings and battles in
the royal chronicles.
Like the larger orientalist project regarding Asia, Quaritch Wales’
work was unconsciously, but nonetheless profoundly essentializing, on
a regional scale. It admitted no problem with throwing classical texts
from one society in together with anthropological work of the 1950s
on other societies and weaving them together to form a singular view
of the region. Although Quaritch Wales clearly recognized that foreign
influences were present, such as in the Sanskrit manuals of war trans-
- Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
- Patrick Porter, Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009). - Some of the works along these lines include “Javanese War and its Consequences”
(Chapter Two) in B. Schrieke, Indonesian Sociological Studies: Selected Writings of B.
Schrieke, Part Two, Ruler and Realm in Early Java (The Hague: W. van Hoeve Ltd,
1957): 121–52; R. R. Langham-Carter, “The Burmese Army”, Journal of the Burma
Research Society 27.3 (1937): 254–76.