Introductionlate Eighteenth-Century Vietnam.” The chapter also emphasizes how
much particular kinds of warfare could be a political choice rather than
an unavoidable consequence of the surrounding environment. As most
of the chapters in the present volume demonstrate, rulers made choices
about whether or not to employ military means to achieve their goals. The
means chosen by different political competitors within late eighteenth-
century Vietnam to decide their fate was naval power. Naval warfare has
often been associated in the historiography with the conflict in the island
world. Identifying its importance in Vietnam helps to highlight it as one
of the common elements of warfare in the region. This attention also
affords Southeast Asia a different position within the historiography on
non-western warfare than, say, the pre-colonial Americas or sub-Saharan
Africa for which it is almost exclusively focused on fighting on land. By
contrast to the areas examined by Wellen, Lopez, and Hägerdal, however,
Vietnamese states had the resources to reinvent their militaries on a scale
that was not replicated by any late pre-colonial state in the archipelago.
When the struggle for controlling Vietnam was over, the victorious
Nguyen were able to step away again from the military revolution they
had undertaken. Vu Duc Liem demonstrates for example that when the
military struggles within Vietnam were over, and the Nguyen Court
emerged victorious, it soon turned its back on naval power.
Hans Hägerdal’s chapter “Expansion and Internalization of Modes
of Warfare in Pre-colonial Bali” also links political and military develop-
ments. As in the cases of Wellen’s and Lopez’s chapters, Hägerdal’s atten-
tion is focused on alliances. He argues that these alliances were sometimes
a more effective political tool in warfare than technological excellence.
Part of the motivation for warfare was the acquisition of human captives
who could be sold for profit, as was the case of the raids examined by
Lopez, but in the case of Bali warfare was also expansive, making the
goals of Balinese warfare unique in late pre-colonial Indonesia.
In his closing comments, Hägerdal ruminates on the debates over the
nature of political power within Bali and the relationships between the
rajas, on the one hand, and village leaders on the other, making stable
central political control difficult to assert and hold and suggesting a de-
centralized political terrain. In their own way, each of the area examined
by the contributors to this volume experienced the significant tensions
between trans-local rulers and the local populations they ruled, wished