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Political Elites in Coloninal Southeast Asia: an Historical Analysis*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Harry J. Benda
Harry J. Benda
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

Present-day political systems in the nation states of Southeast Asia can be classified in accordance with various criteria; they can, for example, be politically grouped on a spectrum ranging from parliamentary democracy to totalitarian dictatorship. The focus of the present inquiry is the sociology of political elites rather than the forms of polity which these elites have created or helped to create. It deals exclusively with the ruling “national” elites, leaving out of consideration secondary groups, such as territorially- or ethnicallybased local and regional elites, religious leaders, and other traditional elites. Two kinds of “national” elite can be discerned in contemporary Southeast Asia, which we shall call “intelligentsia elites” and “modernizing traditional elites”. Disregarding for the time being the constitutional frameworks and the degree of popular participation of each individual state, it may be said that both elites are in many respects oligarchies.

Type
Political Elites
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , April 1965 , pp. 233 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1965

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References

1 Such classifications have i.a. been attempted by Almond, Gabriel A. and Coleman, James S. (eds.), The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton, 1960)Google Scholar, 532 ff., and Shils, Edward, “Political Development in the New States”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, II (1960), 265–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 293–411. (Separately published, Mouton and Co., 1962.)

2 This terminology is borrowed from Geertz, Clifford, “Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States”, in Geertz, (ed.), Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa (Glencoe, 1963), 105–57.Google Scholar

3 This shared experience and outlook is important for both civilian and military intelligentsias.

4 See Mannheim, Karl, Ideology and Utopia (London, 1948), esp. ch. 3.Google Scholar

5 I have discussed this concept in two earlier essays, “Non-Western Intelligentsias as Political Elites”, The Australian Journal of Politics and History, VI (1960), 205–18Google Scholar, reprinted in Kautsky, John H. (ed.), Political Change in Underdeveloped Countries: Nationalism and Communism (New York and London, 1962), 235–51Google Scholar; and “Intellectuals and Politics in Western History”, Bucknell Review, X (1961), 1–14.Google Scholar

6 See Edward Shils, “The Intellectuals in the Political Development of the New States”, in Kautsky, op. cit., 195–234.

7 Cf. Benda, Harry J., “The Structure of Southeast Asian History: Some Preliminary Observations”, Journal of Southeast Asian History, III (1952), 106–38Google Scholar (Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, Reprint Series, # 5).

8 Cf. Coedès, Georges, Les peuples de la peninsule indochinoise: histoire — civilisations (Paris, 1962), 58–60Google Scholar and 204 ff.

9 Cf. Leach, Edmund, “The Frontiers of ‘Burma’”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, III (1960), 49–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Cf. Heine-Geldern's, Robert classic study, Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, 1956).Google Scholar

11 See, for example, a contemporary Chinese report on Angkor: “Usually princes are chosen for office, and if not, those chosen offer their daughters as royal concubines.” Paul Pelliot, Mémoires sur les coutumes du Cambodge de Tcheou Ta-Kuan (Paris, 1951), 14.Google Scholar

12 Kevin O'sullivan has traced royal successions in Angkor in his illuminating essay, “Concentric Conformity in Ancient Khmer Kinship Organization”, The Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 13 (1962), 87–96.Google Scholar

13 The question of the supremacy of royal power vis-à-vis the Brahman priests in India has recently been critically examined by Ludo and Rosanne Rocher, “La sacralité du pouvoir dans l'lnde ancienne d'après les textes de Dharma”, in Le Pouvoir et le Sacré (Brussels, n.d.), 123–37. In the Southeast Asian context, this problem still requires attention. Coedes (op. cit., 206) observes that in Cambodia and Champa the Brahmans did not occupy as pre-eminent a position as in India, but apparently a position inferior to that of the king.

14 The exceptions were lands — at times entire villages — granted to religious personnel, usually in perpetuity.

15 For good descriptions of the tjatjah as “tax unit”, see Rouffaer, G.P., “Vorstenlanden”, in Adatrechtbundels, XXIV (1931), 245, 289, 303–304.Google Scholar

16 Cf. Palmier, Leslie H., “The Javanese Nobility under the Dutch”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, II (1960), 200Google Scholar, and literature cited there. Furnivall, John S. acutely observed that the Javanese system constituted “the direct contrary of feudalism”. Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy (Cambridge and New York, 1944), 13–14Google Scholar. For the same writer's comment on the similarities between Java and Burma, see his Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (Cambridge, 1948), 37.Google Scholar

17 Cf. Sharp, Lauriston, “Cultural Continuities and Discontinuities in Southeast Asia”, The Journal of Asian Studies, XXII (1962), 9.Google Scholar

18 Cf. Rouffaer, op. cit., 277–78 and 309–10, and also Schrieke, B., Indonesian Sociological Studies: Selected Writings of B. Schrieke, Part Two (The Hague, 1957), 200Google Scholar. On the modes of royal control over officialdom in Cambodia and Thailand, respectively, see Briggs, Lawrence P., The Ancient Khmer Empire (Philadelphia, 1951), 151Google Scholar and Quaritch-Wales, H.G., Siamese State Ceremonies (London, 1931), 196.Google Scholar

19 This kind of polity was limited to profoundly Indianized areas only where, as Coedes says (op. cit., 204), “plusieurs facteurs ont contribue a briser les barrières entre groupes fermés les uns aux autres, et à les fondre dans une organisation plus ou moins centralisée.” Elsewhere, as e.g. in Western Malaya but also in parts of Sumatra, royal power, though it used the panoply of the Indianized monarchy, was restricted and circumscribed by the existence of the “countervailing” power — whether landed or mercantile — of territorial or kin chiefs. See e.g. Gullick, J.M., Indigenous Political Systems of Western Malaya (London, 1958), 49.Google Scholar

20 Remnants of feudalism and powerful nobilities in fact continued to obstruct monarchical centralization in Vietnam for several centuries. For a survey of the successive efforts to create a centralized state modelled on Imperial China see Khôi, Lê Thánh, Le Viêt-Nam — Histoire et Civilisation (Paris, 1955), 170–74Google Scholar, 222–24, 251–53, 263–64, 323–26. On the Sinicization process, see Miyakawa, Hisayuki, “The Confucianization of South China”, in Wright, Arthur F. (ed.), The Confucian Persuasion (Stanford, 1960), 21–46.Google Scholar

21 Unfortunately no institutional study on the Vietnamese bureaucracy has to my knowledge yet appeared. While it was obviously very closely modelled on the Chinese bureaucracy, on which the analysis in the text is largely based, the parallel may have to be qualified in the light of specific data at a later date. Dr. Truong Buu Lam, Director of the Institute of Historical Research in the University of Saigon, currently is at Harvard University, has been kind enough to read the sections on Vietnam. On the Chinese gentry, I have drawn on Hsiao-tung, Fei, China's Gentry: Essays in Rural-Urban Relations (Chicago, 1953)Google Scholar, esp. Chs. I and II; Kung-chuan, Hsiao, Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle, 1960)Google Scholar; and on Chung-li, Chang, The Chinese Gentry: Studies on their Role in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Society (Seattle, 1955)Google Scholar, according to whose tabulations landownership played a relatively insignificant role in gentry recruitment.

22 A “Council of Notables” administered village affairs. It was recruited, writes Mus, Paul, by co-option among “la petite oligarchie des villages, en y associant un certain taux de lettres ou de fonctionnaires en retraite”. Viet-Nam: Sociologie d'une guerre (Paris, 1952), 23Google Scholar. The position of notables thus seemingly paralleled that of the local gentry in China. On the latter, cf. Fei, op. cit., Ch. IV, and Hsiao, op. cit., esp. 263–65, 289–97, and passim.

23 The social origins and composition of the Vietnamese ‘mandarinate’ has, once again, not yet been systematically investigated. LS Thánh Khêi (op. cit., 328) stresses the ‘democratic’ recruitment through open examinations as one of the great reforms of the Nguyên dynasty in the 19th century, but his assessment appears legalistic, devoid of sociological insights. Ch. Gosselin, , L’Empire d’Annam (Paris, 1904), 39Google Scholar, observed that “tous les lettres du pays, organises depuis des siecles en une espece de franc-mac.onnerie [sic], se pretent mainforte les uns les autres …” Cited in Isoart, Paul, Le phénomène national viêtnamien (Paris, 1961), 61Google Scholar. Cf. also Chesneaux, Jean, Contribution à I'histoire de la nation vietnamienne (Paris, 1955), 85–86Google Scholar. For China, see i.a. Hsiao, op. cit., 382–83, 390–91, and for an earlier period, Kracke, E.A. Jr., Civil Service in Early Sung China, 960–1067 (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 69–70.Google Scholar

24 Muslim power actually extended to Luzon in the 16th century, but the Spanish conquest pushed it Southward. — My colleague, Professor Harold C. Conklin, was kind enough to read the sections dealing with the Philippines critically, and to suggest some corrections and improvements.

25 Phelan, John L., The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565–1700 (Madison, 1959), 118–20Google Scholar. See also the same writer's “Free versus Compulsory Labor: Mexico and the Philippines”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, I (1959), 189–201.Google Scholar

26 The outstanding example is Java which, though technically under direct rule, was administered by a dual hierarchy, one Dutch, the other native. Thus Furnivall (Netherlands India, 258) claimed that “the distinction between Direct and Indirect Rule was of legal rather than practical interest, for in the parts under Direct Rule it was Dutch policy to leave the people as far as possible under their own heads …” But the important fact of this dual system was that native officialdom had developed into a bureaucratic hierarchy subordinate to its European counterpart, so that, though ethnically separate, it progressively ceased to function in its own right, as a truly indigenous administrative apparatus.

27 This “magnet effect” needs a great deal of careful research. One typical example is that of Sumatrans drawn to Java in colonial times. A study of Indonesian “political decision makers” in the mid-1950's shows that Sumatrans, who in 1930 accounted for 8% of the total population of the Netherlands Indies, supplied 20% of cabinet members and 18% of top-level civil servants. See Soemardi, Soelaeman, “Some Aspects of the Social Origin of Indonesian Political Decision Makers”, Transactions of the Third World Congress of Sociology (London, 1956), 340Google Scholar; on the coincidence of such high offices with university training, see ibid., 342.

28 Educational statistics for French Indochina indicate that of a total of 525 students enrolled in the University of Hanoi in 1921–22, 265 came from Tonkin, 133 from Cochinchina (both in effect directly ruled), the protectorates of Annam, Cambodia and Laos supplying 70, 19 and 5 students, resp.; in 1929–30, the corresponding figures were 298 and 84, 98, 6 and 7 (breakdowns for the intervening years were apparently not published). See Coyle, Joanne Marie, “Indochinese Administration and Education — French Policy and Practice, 1917–1945” (Unpubl. doctoral diss., Fletcher School of Diplomacy, 1963), 187–90.Google Scholar

29 See Note 26, above. On the modernization of the administration, coupled with the disintegration of the traditional system of Burma, see Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, op. cit., 73–75. On the extent of “Anglicization” among Burmese colonial officials, see the case studies in Pye, Lucian W., Politics, Personality, and Nation Building: Burma's Search for Identity (New Haven, 1962), 211–44.Google Scholar

30 On this point, see Shils, loc. cit., and the same author's “The Intellectuals in the Political Development of the New States”, in Kautsky, op. cit., 195–234.

31 In the peripherally Indianized societies — as e.g. in parts of Sumatra — the response to economic innovation was far less passive. This contrast requires a good deal of careful investigation. In Geertz's, CliffordAgricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963)Google Scholar, it is explained in terms of different “eco-systems” and in relation to Dutch economic activities in Indonesia.

32 The term is here used descriptively to denote the existence, side by side, of a capitalist and a subsistence economy. I am not here concerned with the inferences drawn from this co-existence by such scholars as H. Boeke, which have given rise to a voluminous and controversial literature.

33 On the Indian chettyars in colonial Burma and Malaya, see Mahajani, Usha, The Role of Indian Minorities in Burma and Malaya (Bombay, 1960), 16–22Google Scholar, 98–101.

34 On the Vietnamese in Cambodia, see Steinberg, David J., Cambodia: Its People, Its Society, Its Culture (New Haven, 1959), 40–42.Google Scholar

35 In Vietnam (especially in French Cochinchina), moneylenders were not primarily Chinese, as a reading of Purcell's, VictorThe Chinese in Southeast Asia (London, New York & Toronto, 1951)Google Scholar, 236 ff. would suggest, but also Vietnamese landlords. See Robequain, Charles, The Economic Development of French Indo-China, tr. by Ward, Isabel A. (London, New York & Toronto, 1944), 40n., 85–86Google Scholar, 192–93, and Gourou, Pierre, L'utilisation du sol en Indochine française (Paris, n.d.), 276–80Google Scholar. In the Philippines, Purcell (op. cit., 635) writes, “that the Filipino is always in debt to the Chinese is undoubtedly true, but the evidence is all to the effect that the Filipino cacique is even more oppressive and usurious.”

36 The interplay between traditional religious or ideological and modern socialist, especially Marxist thought, has as yet received inadequate attention. A penetrating analysis of Confucianism and Marxism can be found in Mus, op. cit., Chs. XIV, XVIII and XIX. Cf. also Sarkisyanz, Emanuel, Russland und der Messianismus des Orients: Sendungsbewusstsein und politischer Chiliasmus des Ostens (Tübingen, 1955)Google Scholar, and the same author's “Marxism and Asian Cultural Traditions”, Survey 43 (1962), 55–64Google Scholar and 129, and “Kommunismus und Geisteskrise Asiens: Marxismus und orientalische Weltanschauungen”, in Oberndorfer, Dieter (ed.) Wissenschaftliche Politik: Eine Einfiihrung in Grundfragen ihrer Tradition und Theorie (Freiburg, n.d.), 335–64.Google Scholar

37 For a careful analysis of indirect rule in British Malaya and the Netherlands Indies, see Emerson, Rupert, Malaysia: A Study in Direct and Indirect Rule (New York, 1937).Google Scholar

38 Cf. Reesink, G.J., “Inlandsche Staten in den Oosterschen Archipel (1873–1915)”, B.K.I., 116 (1960), 313–49Google Scholar, and Justus M. van der Kroef, “On the Sovereignty of Indonesian States: A Rejoinder”, ibid., 117 (1961), 238–66.

39 See Emerson, op. cit., 24 ff., 248 ff., 351 ff. For a brief but clear analysis, see Kaberry, Phyllis M., The Development of Self-Government in Malaya (London, 1945).Google Scholar

40 This process is well demonstrated in the Javanese princely states of Mataram from the eighteenth century onward. In Malaya, a new religious officialdom was created in the late nineteenth century. Cf. Roff, William R., “Kaum Muda-Kaum Tua: Innovation and Reaction amongst the Malays, 1900–1941”, in Tregonning, K.G. (ed.), Papers on Malayan History (Singapore, 1962), 162–92.Google Scholar

41 Since this essay deals with colonial Southeast Asia, the special case of Thailand has been omitted from this discussion, even though important parallels do exist. Cf. Wilson, David A., Politics in Thailand (Ithaca, 1962)Google Scholar, Ch. I, and Lauriston Sharp (ed.), Thailand (New Haven, 1956), Ch. 6.

42 Cf. Soenarno, Raden, “Malay Nationalism, 1900–1945”, Journal of Southeast Asian History, I (1960), 1–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. his comparison between Malay and Indonesian nationalism, 27–33.

43 Since the traditional Thai elite demonstrated a negative response to economic modernization quite similar to that of elites in colonial, Indianized Southeast Asia, the importance of the colonial factor must not be exaggerated. Cf. Sharp, op. cit., 160–67. Geertz (op. cit., 130 ff.) draws parallels between Java and Japan which would seem less relevant than comparisons within Indianized Southeast Asia.

44 For a brief summary of French colonial policies towards the three pays, see Devillers, Philippe, Histoire du Vêit-Nam de 1940 ê 1952 (Paris, 1952), 28–29Google Scholar. Cf. also Isoart, op. cit., Ch. IV, and Lê Thánh Khôi, op. cit., 394–406. Of Cochinchina one French historian observed that it possessed “une tonalité française, caracteristique de cette portion d'Indochine”, Georges Taboulet, La geste française en Indochine, I (Paris, 1956), 522.Google Scholar

45 Cf. Devillers, op. cit., 39–40, Mus, op. cit., 240–41, Chesneaux, op. cit., 166, Isoart, op. cit., 255–58.

46 Cf. Chesneaux, op. cit., Ch. X, and Sacks, I. Milton, “Marxism in Viet Nam”, in Trager, Frank N. (ed.), Marxism in Southeast Asia (Stanford, 1959), 102–70.Google Scholar

47 See Wickberg, Edgar, “The Chinese Mestizo in Philippine History”, Journal of Southeast Asian History, V (1964), 62–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 Cf. Geertz, Clifford, Peddlers and Princes: Social Change and Economic Modernization in Two Indonesian Towns (Chicago and London, 1963), esp. Ch. 4.Google Scholar