Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiato rule, or sought alliance with. The chapter by Charney, “Armed Rural
Folk: Elements of Pre-colonial Warfare in the Artistic Representations
and Written Accounts of the Pacification Campaign (1886–1889) in
Burma”, pulls pre-colonial Burma out of a court-centred perspective
to highlight the importance of these tensions there as well, shows how
the nature of Burmese court sources has the effect of obstructing this
importance, and identifies local data that raises questions about how
pre-colonial warfare in Burma has been described in past historiography.
In Charney’s view, small-scale warfare dominated the terrain of conflict
in Burma just as it did in most other areas of the region. Charney argues
that differences between “state warfare” as a court-created imaginary
masked the fact that state campaigns were in practice a collective mo-
bilization and projection abroad of the village-level culture of war. The
continuity of what might best be termed “village warfare” was due to the
limited penetration of the early modern Burmese state on village society
and the former’s reliance on a small elite, standing army during times of
peace.
Our closing chapter Gerrit Knaap’s “Military Capability and the
State in Southeast Asia’s Pacific Rimlands, 1500–1700” examines his-
torical practices of warfare on the Pacific border of Southeast Asia, in
areas such as Sulu and Maluku that have often escaped the attention of
comparative military historians. Knaap looks sub-region by sub-region
at varied stages of economic and political development, the relationship
between rulers and warriors, and the varieties of weapons in use. The
chapter also highlights the importance of manpower to warfare as well
as controlling people as a motivation for warfare. While the style and
contents of Knaap’s chapter differ considerably from the other chapters,
it presents valuable descriptions of warfare in less-commonly studied
regions of Southeast Asia that helps to place the local variations in
warfare in Southeast Asia examined in previous chapters into a larger
geographical context that comparative military historians will find use-
ful in making sense of the region.
The present volume provides a new overview of warfare in the region
that has attempted to not succumb to the essentializing of the region
through the examination of early modern warfare. Instead, it attempts to
open the door for interrogating Southeast Asia’s martial past, freed from
some of the Eurocentric constraints of earlier historiography, a little