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he 11 states of Southeast Asia are spread across a thousand miles from
India to New Guinea. Half are on the mainland of Asia; the other half
are island groups off the coast, known as Insular or Maritime Southeast
Asia. There are jungle highlands, low alluvial basins, volcanic islands, and
coral reefs. There are millions of miles of coastline. The equator runs straight
through Indonesia. Though there are 11 modern states in Southeast Asia
today, only the Philippines existed a century ago.
The term Southeast Asia came into common use during World War II to
refer to the theatre of operations under Lord Louis Mountbatten. But it was not
quite today’s Southeast Asia. It included Ceylon and omitted Indonesia and
the Philippines. After the war the term came to refer to the region where the
US had strong interests in supporting decolonization and holding back com-
munism. So unlike the term “South Asia,” which subdivided a broad cultural
region into three new states (plus others, of course), the term “Southeast Asia”
joined regions that had never been joined before.
Also unlike South Asia, Southeast Asia was colonized by eight different
nations, none of which ever came close to dominating the whole region as
Britain did in South Asia: China—northern Vietnam (for centuries); Japan—
much of Southeast Asia during World War II; France—Vietnam (1883–1945),
Laos, Cambodia; Britain—Burma, Malaysia, Singapore; Holland—Indonesia;
Spain—the Philippines (1521–1898); the United States—the Philippines
(1898–1946); and Portugal—East Timor. Only Thailand kept itself out of the
clasp of imperial power. Each of these powers left its imprint on the cultures
and emerging institutions of modern Southeast Asian nations. One way they
did this was through the scientific enterprise of documenting ethnicities
through censuses and ethnographic atlases, thus “firming up” conveniently
loose identities. (Some of this looseness was discussed in chapter 4). As move-
ments toward independence reached their climaxes in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury, these colonizing nations aimed to leave behind viable states on the
European model, ideally “nations” that were also “states” (in the United
Nations sense). This required, in most cases, shaping a national identity where
previously there had been other identities; for instance, creating a “Malay”
identity out of Dayak, Iban, Bugis, and others in a Malaysia spread across the
Malay Peninsula and the northeastern part of Borneo. This never did incorpo-
rate Indians and Chinese. Or a creation of Indonesian identity out of peoples
flung across 17,000 islands, including New Guinea. Or even “One Nation,
One People, One Singapore” in a made-for-television slogan in the 1990s. This
required conscious state-level culture-making—“nation-building”—which is
the contemporary reality in Southeast Asia, and which many people, including
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