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Maritime influences in Southeast Asia, c. 900–1300: Some further thoughts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2010

Victor Lieberman
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Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , October 2010 , pp. 529 - 539
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Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2010

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References

1 Wade, Geoff, ‘An Early Age of Commerce in Southeast Asia, 900–1300’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 40, 2 (2009): 221–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Ibid., p. 222. See also pp. 259, 263.

3 Ibid., pp. 258–62.

4 For further discussion, see Lieberman, Victor, Strange parallels: Southeast Asia in global context, c. 800–1830, Volume I: Integration on the mainland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chs. 1–4; Lieberman, Victor, Strange parallels: Southeast Asia in global context, c. 800–1830, Volume II: Mainland mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar, ch. 7. Some of the theoretical concerns in this essay were anticipated in my discussion of the original Age of Commerce thesis. See Lieberman, Victor, ‘An Age of Commerce in Southeast Asia? Problems of regional coherence — A review article’, Journal of Asian Studies, 54, 3 (1995): 796–807CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Reid, Anthony, Southeast Asia in the age of commerce 1450–1680, Volume II: Expansion and crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, ch. 3.

6 Ricklefs, Merle C., A history of modern Indonesia, 4th edn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 3–16Google Scholar.

7 Chandler, David, A history of Cambodia, 2nd edn (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 68–71Google Scholar; Leclere, Adhemard, Le bouddhisme au Cambodge (Paris: E. Leroux, 1899), pp. 1–34Google Scholar; Thompson, Ashley, ‘Changing perspectives: Cambodia after Angkor’, in Sculpture of Angkor and ancient Cambodia, ed. Jessup, Helen and Zephir, Thierry (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1997), pp. 22–32Google Scholar. Nor does the period 900–1300 have any particular resonance for religious change in the western mainland, where Theravada/Hinayana Buddhism appeared by the 4th century CE and gained traction in the Pagan period, but where it did not begin to marginalise Mahayana, Hindu and animist elements until the 15th or 16th centuries. Stargardt, Janice, The ancient Pyu of Burma, Volume I: Early Pyu cities in a man-made landscape (Cambridge: PACSEA, 1990), pp. 326–40Google Scholar, 347; Aung-Thwin, Michael, Pagan: The origins of modern Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), pp. 1, 17, 24, 30–48, 128, 169Google Scholar; Aung-Thwin, Michael, The mists of Ramanna (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), p. 33Google Scholar. See also Wade, ‘Early Age’, p. 260.

8 Whitmore, John, ‘The rise of the coast’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 37, 1 (2006): 114–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Aung-Thwin, Mists of Ramanna, pp. 92, 108, 308–10; Harvey, G.E., A history of Burma (London: Cass, 1967), p. 112Google Scholar; Wyatt, David, Thailand: A short history, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 54Google Scholar; Chandler, History of Cambodia, p. 78. The term ‘charter’ is preferable to ‘classical’, because, by avoiding association with Greece and Rome, it facilitates comparison with European states c. 900–1300 that fulfilled the same foundational role as Pagan, Angkor and Đại Việt. That is to say, like Carolingian / Capetian France, Norman / Plantagenet England, and Kievan Rus, Southeast Asian polities c. 900 to 1300 provided a literary, aesthetic, legal, institutional and political charter for subsequent generations.

10 On current evidence we are quite unable to match the detailed quantification in Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, Volume II, ch. 1.

11 Wade, ‘Early Age of Commerce’, pp. 248–51, 260–2; Christie, Jan, ‘Javanese markets and the Asia Sea trade boom of the ninth to thirteenth centuries’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 41 (1998): 344–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 On Javanese economy and political economy to c. 1300, see n. 11 supra, plus Christie, Jan, ‘Texts and textiles in “medieval” Java’, Bulletin de l'Ecole Francaise de 'Extreme-Orient, 80 (1993): 181–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Christie, , ‘Negara, mandala, and despotic state’, in Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th centuries, ed. Marr, David and Milner, A.C. (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), pp. 65–93Google Scholar; Christie, , ‘Trade and value in pre-Majapahit Java’, Indonesia Circle, 59–60 (1992–93): 3–17Google Scholar; Christie, ‘Register of the Inscriptions of Java’, 2 vols. (2002); Christie, ‘The agricultural economies of early Java and Bali’; Christie, , ‘Wanua, Thani, Paraduwan’, in Texts from the islands, ed. Marschall, Wolfgang (Berne: University of Berne, 1989), pp. 27–42Google Scholar; Christie, , ‘Money and its uses in the Javanese states of the ninth to fifteenth centuries’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 39 (1993): 243–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Christie, , ‘States without cities’, Indonesia, 52 (1991): 23–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boomgaard, Peter, ‘From riches to rags?’, in A history of natural resources in Asia, ed. Bankoff, Greg and Boomgaard, Peter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 185–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and sources in Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 2, pp. 780–97.

13 Boomgaard, Peter, Southeast Asia: An environmental history (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007), pp. 74–6Google Scholar.

14 See Christie, ‘Agricultural economies’, and the theoretical discussion of early modern Indonesian and Philippine trade in Henley, David, ‘Population and means of subsistence’, JSEAS, 36 (2005): 337–72Google Scholar; David Henley, Fertility, food, and fever (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2005), pp. 46–67, 606–10. Dealing with areas of small agrarian and demographic capacity, Henley focuses on external trade, but his theoretical insights apply equally well to local commercial systems.

15 See n. 12 supra and the estimate at Boomgaard, Southeast Asia, 146, that in 1800 still only 10% or fewer Javanese depended on foreign trade. In 1800 such trade was far larger than in 1400 not only in absolute terms, but as a portion of the economy.

16 Aung-Thwin, Michael, Myth and history in the historiography of early Burma (Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1998), p. 96Google Scholar. See also Michael Aung-Thwin's books: Pagan, chs. 2, 5, 8, 9; Mists of Ramanna, pp. 301–2. For analyses congruent with Aung-Thwin, see Luce, G.H., ‘Economic life of the early Burmans’, Journal of the Burma Research Society, 30 (1940): 283–301Google Scholar; Luce, G.H., Old Burma — early Pagan, 3 vols. (Locust Valley, NY: Artibus Asiae,1969)Google Scholar, vol. I, pp. 29–38, 84–92; Tun, Than, Hkit-haung myan-ma ya-zawin (Rangoon: Maha Dagon Sa-pei Htok-wei-yei, 1969)Google Scholar, chs. 15–16; Than Tun, ‘History of Buddhism in Burma, A.D. 1000–1300’ (University of London, PhD diss., 1956), chs. 7–10; U Maung Maung Tin, Myit-tha taze-yawa kwin-zin-lei-la chet-hmat-zu (Mandalay: Sa-pei Bani, 2000); Frasch, Tilman, ‘Coastal peripheries during the Pagan period’, in The maritime frontier of Burma, ed. Gommans, Jos and Leider, Jacques (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002), pp. 59, 63, 66Google Scholar. On Pagan's commercial interest in Lower Burma and the northern peninsula, see also Hall, Kenneth and Whitmore, John, ‘Southeast Asian trade and the Isthmian struggle, 1000–1200’, in Hall and Whitmore, Explorations in early Southeast Asian history (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Southeast Asian Studies 1976), pp. 303–40Google Scholar.

17 Guy Lubeigt, ‘Pagan, an [sic] hinterland port-city in medieval Burma: A new geographic approach’, Paper for the 12th International Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists.

18 Aung-Thwin, Pagan, pp. 113, 114.

19 Vickery, Michael, Society, economics, and politics in pre-Angkor Cambodia (Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1998), p. 300Google Scholar. Also pp. 405–6.

20 Fletcher, Roland et al. , ‘The development of the water management system of Angkor’, IPPA [Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association] Bulletin 28 (2008): 57–66Google Scholar; Brendan Buckley et al., ‘Climate and the collapse of Angkor’, forthcoming in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Diamond, Jared, ‘Maya, Khmer and Inca’, Nature, 461 (24 Sept. 2009): 479–80CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Penny, Dan et al. , ‘Vegetation and land-use at Angkor, Cambodia’, Antiquity, 80 (2006): 599–614CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Greater Angkor Project, ‘Redefining Angkor’, Udaya, 4 (2003): 107–25; Ortloff, Charles, Water and engineering in the ancient world (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 358–76Google Scholar.

21 Hall, Kenneth, Maritime trade and state development in early Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), pp. 177–8Google Scholar. See also Hall and Whitmore, ‘Southeast Asian trade’.

22 Claude Jacques, ‘Sources on economic activities in Khmer and Cham Lands’, in Marr and Milner, Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th centuries, p. 330; also p. 332.

23 Whitmore, ‘Rise of the coast’, p. 122.

24 Ibid., pp. 108–9, 121; Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 1, pp. 362–5.

25 In what is now Vietnam, Champa's late-14th-century ascendancy over Dong Kinh, and more especially the post-1620 independence of the maritime-oriented Nguyen domain from the north, may be compared to the post-1350 breakaway of Pegu from Upper Burma and of Phnom Penh and Ayudhya from Angkor. In Java the pasisir coast triumphed over the more interior state of Majapahit in the late 15th and 16th centuries. See n. 9 supra; Ricklefs, History of modern Indonesia, pp. 38–43; Tana, Li, Nguyen Cochinchina (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1998)Google Scholar.

26 Boomgaard, Southeast Asia, p. 145. Even during the post-1400 Early Modern period, Reid's Age of Commerce, he argues that external influences were ‘notable’, but ‘modest’.

27 Lopez, Robert, The commercial revolution of the middle ages, 950–1350 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 56Google Scholar.

28 The Cambridge illustrated history of the middle ages, Volume II: 950–1250, ed. Robert Fossier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 5.

29 Arlette Higounet-Nadal, ‘La croissance urbaine: XII –XIV siecles’, in Histoire de la population Francaise, t. I: Des origines a la renaissance, ed. Jacques Dupaquier (Paris: Quadrige, 1988), p. 267.

30 Moore, R.I., The first European revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 35–6Google Scholar.

31 McCormick, Michael, Origins of the European economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 578–9Google Scholar. For similar views see Duby, George, The early growth of the European economy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 10Google Scholar; Verhulst, Adriaan, The Carolingian economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 113CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Epstein, S.R., Freedom and growth (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 70–1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 2, pp. 135–39, 164–70.

33 See discussion and citations at Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 2, pp. 510–19, 548–56.

34 Again, see discussion at Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol., pp. 681–91.

35 Although I focus here on Western Europe, Kiev and much of eastern Europe enjoyed a similar vitality c. 900 to 1240.

36 For detailed discussion, see Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 2, chs. 2, 5, 6, 7.

37 Whereas the economic shift from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe, from North to South China, and from coastal to interior Cambodia all gained momentum from the 8th to 10th centuries, intensive cultivation of key dry zone districts in northwest India and the Deccan began in the 10th and 11th centuries. Large-scale reclamation of hkayaing areas in Burma started in the 10th and 11th centuries, and of taik frontiers in the 12th century.

38 For recent studies of dramatic 14th-century climatic deterioration in central and eastern mainland Southeast Asia, see Richard Stone, ‘Tree rings tell of Angkor's dying days’, Science, 323 (20 Feb. 2009): 999; Richard Stone, ‘The end of Angkor’, Science, 311 (10 Mar. 2006): 1364–68; Diamond, ‘Maya, Khmer and Inca’; Buckley, ‘Climate and collapse of Angkor’. See Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 2, pp. 121, 239–40, 370–1.