Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiabroad interests when it came to research. Much of the best work on
Southeast Asian warfare has been by scholars who might normally be
viewed more properly as religious studies scholars, art historians, and
historians of gender, rather than as military historians per se. Second,
the overall lower numbers of scholars working on Southeast Asian his-
tory than, say, the numbers of scholars working on any particular cen-
tury of European or Chinese history required an obligation for a broad
remit to research work simply to sustain the history of the Southeast
Asian region as a field of study. The cumulative effect of both the broad
research interests encouraged and the extensive research obligations
shouldered has meant that the historiography on Southeast Asian
warfare is often subject to more direct scholarly interventions, as this
work has also been especially quick to incorporate new ideas drawn
from other disciplines and related work.
Nevertheless, as eclectic as the historiography of warfare in Southeast
Asia has been, it can be divided into several general angles that we will
refer to here as approaches. These approaches do not represent stages;
there is a rough chronology to their appearance, but they overlap and
complement each other considerably. The earliest and most long-lived
approach has been the aforementioned old cultural approach, which
was established by Quaritch Wales and further developed by Reid and
Leonard Andaya, among others. This approach holds that Southeast
Asian culture, more than any other factor, determined the ways that
wars were fought. This work viewed indigenous culture as a force that
shaped technology or its application, rather than the reverse, over the
course of the early modern period. Southeast Asians were assumed to be
averse to killing and hence developed tactics and responses to war that
avoided bloodshed as much as possible. This claim is perhaps the most
widely cited feature of Southeast Asian warfare in the general historiog-
raphy on warfare. Another commonly cited feature of Southeast Asian
warfare in military historical literature is the importance of people. Even
the application of new military technology, such as cannon, was not
immune to culture’s touch from the perspective of this school. While
small allowances were made for differences in the mainland and island
worlds to explain particular issues, overall this school has not explained
wide differences in the ways warfare was fought in the region. In a region
where warfare is viewed to be culturally determined, this approach has