Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiaupon, there existed a vastly diverse terrain populated by conflicts, warri-
ors, and goals whose unevenness indicates that while this warfare might
be occurring in an interconnected region with comparable culture, that
warfare and martial culture moved according to its own rhythm at the
local level.
Nevertheless, this local experience is only half of the story, the other
half being that provided by their cumulative whole, for the region still
moved along through the history at an unequal speed but still discern-
ibly similar trajectory, especially regarding the availability of firearms,
the growth and decline of regional commerce, and the progress of
statebuilding. The present editors have been drawn to the concept of a
“composite cultural approach” that Kwasi Konadu (2010) has applied
to African diasporic history in the Americas to describe the present
approach to the history of warfare in Southeast Asia, one that situates
dynamism in indigenous warfare culture in both local and regional his-
torical experience, often prompted and shaped by political crisis.^27 The
editors believe that the contributions included in this volume represent
examples of this composite cultural approach, what might be described
as a new cultural approach to warfare to distinguish it from earlier work
on the culture of warfare in the region.
Part of the emphasis on the local experience of warfare is a conscious
effort to put lowland and highland, Java and outer islands, and “centre”
and “periphery” on as equal a historiographical footing as possible in
depicting warfare in Southeast Asia. By doing so, we attempt to “save”
warfare of particular times and places in pre-colonial Southeast Asia from
the state, the nation, or one or another tourist site or museum exhibition
devoted to lowland or highland warriors and how they are supposed to
have looked by viewing local warfare on its own terms. Nevertheless,
bridging the documentary divides within the region, those that have left
rich, written, conventional documentary records and those for which
the historian has to rely more heavily upon oral and illustrative materi-
als, is no easy task. It requires juxtaposing different categories of sources,
reading between the lines, teasing information out from the corners of
illustrations, and a range of other approaches. The difficulties of over-
coming the historiographical divide between coverage of lowlands and
- Kwasi Konadu, The Akan Diaspora in the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010).