Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiavery conscious of the need to understand warfare locally and for much
of the earlier part of the European military encounter with Asia and
Africa there was good reason to do so, for both sides competed on a
relatively equal footing. As scholars of Asian warfare have demonstrated,
early modern Asian states had the resources, military, human, and ad-
ministrative, to compete effectively on the battlefield or on water with
Europeans.^3 They were able to maintain parity well into the early nine-
teenth century as they underwent their own versions of state formation
including the “rise of modern, bureaucratically organized armies and
navies”.^4 Nor were technological differences crucial. This is clearly ex-
emplified by the development of the sixteenth-century harquebus that,
while undeniably representing an important phase in European military
technological development, was in fact quite clumsy and ineffective; it
took a long time to reload, the noise of its positioning and operation
gave warning to its targets, and it depended upon gunpowder that, in
moist tropical environments, frequently became unusable. The absence
of a clear advantage in anything less than ideal circumstances inspired
Europeans to attempt to understand local warfare traditions on their own
terms. It was also the case that outside of Europe, after the first hundred
years of Iberian imperial expansion, especially at sea, Europeans largely
fought each other and when they fought, it was mainly over the control
of trade routes and strategic positions on them. As a result, between
the huge volume of accounts of Western and indigenous combat of the
sixteenth century and the wars of conquest in the nineteenth century in
North America, Africa, and Asia, European thinking on warfare abroad
focused on how to vanquish other Europeans, from the decks of their
- Michael W. Charney, “Shallow-draft Boats, Guns, and the Aye-ra-wa-ti: Continuity
and Change in Ship Structure and River Warfare in Precolonial Myanmar”, Oriens
Extremus 40.1 (1997): 16–63; Laichen Sun, “Military Technology Transfers from
Ming China and the Emergence of Northern Mainland Southeast Asia (c. 1390–
1527)”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34.3 (2003): 248–73; Tonio Andrade,
“Late Medieval Divergences: Comparative Perspectives on Early Gunpowder
Warfare in Europe and China”, Journal of Medieval Military History 13 (2015):
247–76; Idem, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the
West in World History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). - Gayl D. Ness & William Stahl, “Western Imperialist Armies in Asia”, Comparative
Studies in Society and History 19.1 ( January, 1977): 27.