CHAPTER 7

Military Capability and the

State in Southeast Asia’s

Pacific Rimlands, 1500–1700

Gerrit Knaap

I

n recent decades, a most intensive debate in historiography has been
the one on “the military revolution” in early modern Europe. This
deals with the many profound changes in society that coincided
with the massive introduction of gunpowder technology in warfare.
During recent years, the concept of the “military revolution” has also
entered the historiography of Asia, as witnessed by a thought-provoking
publication of Peter Lorge, which stresses that parts of Asia were in
certain periods on a par or even ahead of Europe. Lorge thus refers to
an “Asian military revolution”, although he immediately admits that in
each part of the continent variations were taking place. Lorge’s concept
of an Asian military revolution is based on military studies that focus on
areas where sweeping military changes have occurred. Thus, in some
areas it is cavalry, in other areas it is organization, and in regions such
as East Asia it is firearms. Southeast Asia, at least the island portion of
it, politically and militarily less organized than the great polities of East
and South Asia, is portrayed by Lorge as not belonging to the forefront
of Asia because it did not widely use gunpowder technology, notwith-
standing regional differences in levels and trajectories.^1
In the present chapter, Southeast Asia’s different development in
this field of history shall not be questioned. Instead, it looks at what
was happening militarily on a number of the islands, more specifically

1. Peter Allan Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb
   (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 3–4, 9–11, 88, 91.