Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast AsiaSiam’s eastward expansion. She argues that these efforts were intended to
help compensate for the financial setbacks that resulted from the aban-
donment of the royal monopoly system. By considering these efforts
alongside the eastward expansion that was intended to rebuild Siamese
state power after 1767, she demonstrates how forced migrations changed
the relative military, geographic and economic strengths of warring
states and could be considered a kind of warfare in and of themselves.
Deportation and depopulation, she contends, were more effective than
armed conflict as a means of shifting the balance of power.
Two of our chapters, those by Kathryn Wellen and Ariel C. Lopez,
focus on conflicts in different islands in the eastern archipelago and
reveal how, within this corner of Southeast Asia, major differences in the
relationship between warfare and politics, culture, religion, and society
had emerged at different points in the early modern period. Wellen’s
chapter “La Maddukelleng and Civil War in South Sulawesi” uses the
example of the Pénéki War to show how the complex, multi-layered
political landscape in South Sulawesi lent itself to frequent conflicts
between the various polities. Warfare was one of several means of ad-
justing the balance of power within the kaleidoscope of Bugis polities in
South Sulawesi; other means included deliberation and treaties. While
warfare was a regular feature of Bugis political life, the small scale, even
the personal level, on which it was sometimes fought, suggests that it
fulfilled a cultural role as well.
Lopez’s chapter, “Kinship, Islam, and Raiding in Maguindanao, c.
1760–1780”, examines a series of maritime raids emanating from the
southern Philippines and how they were used as a means of state con-
solidation. In his study, the two crucial factors were religion and family,
both social affiliations, but they served as the basis for the formation of
trans-local political identities of varying effectiveness. As Lopez shows,
the willingness to prepare for war could be a consequence of confidence
in political stability at the local level. He presents the case of the Raja of
Manganitu who was so confident in family-based alliances that he thrice
refused to build defences against the kinds of raids common in the seas
north of Sulawesi.
How far Southeast Asian states were able to innovate and revolutionise
warfare to achieve political success through military contest is examined
in Vu Duc Liem’s chapter “Warfare, Politics of Space and Unification in