GLOBAL AND LOCAL IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN HISTORY

Abstract

This article revisits the same author's Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce (1988–93) through the lens of a pattern of alternating globalization and localization in Southeast Asian History. It highlights the effects of the intense globalization of the “age of commerce” (centuries) on Southeast Asian performance traditions, notably the state theatre of the great entrepôts. Reid considers the critiques of his emphasis on a seventeenth-century crisis in the region in the decade since publication, and defends most of his original position against Victor Lieberman and Andre Gunder Frank in particular. He pursues the theme forward in time, to note another period of significant trade expansion and globalization in roughly 1780–1840; the following high-colonial period which paradoxically had more of a localizing effect on most Southeast Asian populations, and the nationalist reaction which (again paradoxically) marked extreme globalization in some respects between the 1930s and the 1960s.