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Over the past quarter century, both South Asian historians and historians
of South Asia have, it would seem, grown steadily more insular. Thus,
today, practically no post-graduate department of history in India offers
serious courses on the history of any part of the world save South Asia
itself and-inevitably-Europe. On the other.hand, the histories of China,
Iran, Central Asia and even Southeast Asia are barely represented in most
Indian university library collections, let alone at the level of research and
teaching. This lack of interest on the part of historians of India became
painfully clear to me as an intermittent participant in the CambridgeDelhi-Leiden-Yogyakarta project on the comparative history of India and
Indonesia in the 1980s, and from the published papers in four volumes of
that project, in the Leiden journal Itinerario.
In fact, since the generation of R.C. Majumdar, Himanshu Bhushan
Sarkar and K.A. Nilakantha Sastri, even the history of the so-called
Indianized states of Southeast Asia (or Greater India, as it was once
called) has attracted few Indian historians, and only a handful of South
Asianists (an honourable exception in recent times being Hermann Kulkel).
Review Essay ot Denys Lombard, Le Carrefour Javanais: Essai dhistoire globale; Volume 1:
Les limites de loccidentalisation; Volume II: Les rgseaux asiatiques; Volume III: Lheritage
des royaumes concentriques, Paris, Editions de IEcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,
1990 (Series: Civilisations et Soci6t6s 79), 267 + 423 + 337 pp., maps, plates, bibliography,
price FF. 550 (for the 3 volumes).
1
In point of fact, while the most successful of the four conferences of that project was that
the ancien régime, of which the proceedings were published in Itinerario, Vol. XII(1), 1988
(and as P.J. Marshall, R. van Niel, et al., The Ancien Regime in India and Indonesia, Leiden,
1988), it has passed almost unnoticed on account of its uneven quality and lack of thematic
on
unity.
2
Many of Kulkes scattered essays have been recently reprinted as Kings and Cults: State
Formation and Legitimation in India and Southeast Asia, New Delhi, Manohar, 1993. One
may also mention George W. Spencer, Kenneth R. Hall and Ian W. Mabbett, the last two now
being regarded primarily as Southeast Asianists despite their early work on South Asia.
I am grateful for bibliographical suggestions and discussions to Jim
Siegel and Denis Vidal, neither of whom have read drafts of this text and who almost certainly
will not agree with it, and to Neeladri Bhattacharya.
Acknowledgements:
132
In pointing this out, it is not my intention to lament the death of the spirit
of the 1955 Bandung Conference, which seems to have been still-born for
the most part anyway. Let us note, moreover, that various Asian historiographical traditions have very different relationships with the dominant
(but by no means monolithic) Western one. The Japanese and Chinese
historiographies, while relatively strong, remain inaccessible for reasons of
language to scholars from outside these regions; thus, since World War II,
it is Western scholars like John Whitney Hall and Frederic Wakeman who
have periodically presented, and therefore interpreted these writings for
a larger international audience. In comparison, India and Turkey are both
relatively fortunate in having historians who can engage the larger domain
while being rooted in their own fields: in the Turkish case Halil Inalcik,
Omer Lftfi Barkan (who was associated with Annales historians in the
1950s and 1960s in spite of an avowed belief in Asian solidarity, and a
mistrust of the West), Kemal Karpat, more recently Huri Islamoglu-Inan,
aglar Keyder, $evket Pamuk, Murat Qizakca and Cemal Kafadar, to
4
name only a few.
Meanwhile, historians from a host of other countries, whether Iran,
Afghanistan, Burma, Thailand, Laos or Cambodia (to choose a few
examples), remain almost wholly outside the internationalized domain of
history writing. The histories of their countries are thus those written by
Western scholars, for the most part without interlocutions from recalcitrant
native. It has hence been possible as late as the 1980s to produce major
volumes of the Cambridge History of Iran (Vol. VI, as also to an extent
Vol. VII) dealing with the Safavid, Nadir Shahi and Qajar periods (for
example), with practically no significant contributions by Iranian scholars
therein.5
Is all of this really relevant? Is history writing not a domain that transcends
such divisions? The answer to the latter question is quite clearly in the
-
Frederic Wakeman, ed., Ming and Qing Historical Studies in the Peoples Republic of
China, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1980; John W. Hall, Nagahara Keiji and
Kozo Yamamura, eds., Japan Before Tokugawa: Political Consolidation and Economic
Growth, 1500 to 1650, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981.
4
Cf., for example, the articles reprinted in Huri Islamoglu-Inan, ed., The Ottoman Empire
and the World-Economy, Paris/Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, not all of
which share the editors Wallersteinian perspective. Another attempt at synthesis, still within
a neo-Marxist framework, is Halil Berktay and Suraiya Faroqhi, eds., New
approaches to
state and peasant in Ottoman history, Journal of Peasant Studies, Special Number, Vol.
XVIII, Nos. 3/4, 1991.
5
Peter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart, eds., The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume VI:
The Timurid and Safavid Periods, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, where the
major articles on the Safavids are by H.R. Roemer, Roger Savory, and Bert Fragner; also
Peter Avery, Gavin Hambly and Charles Melville, eds., The Cambridge History of Iran,
Volume VII: From Nadir Shah
to
the Islamic
Press, 1991.
133
negative,
as are
6
Note, however, that writings by Chaunu and Morineau do feature in the only collection of
translated essays by French (largely Annales) historians to be produced in India; cf. Maurice
Aymard and Harbans Mukhia, eds., French Studies in History, 2 Vols., New Delhi, Orient
Longman, 1988-90. This collection, it should be pointed out, is not merely of French studies
in history but almost exclusively of studies in French history.
7
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s, New York, Academic Press, 1989; Janet
, New York,
Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World-System, AD 1250-1350
Oxford University Press, 1989, and most recently Barry K. Gills and André Gunder Frank,
World system cycles, crises, and hegemonial shifts, 1700 BC to 1700 AD, Review, Vol. XV,
No. 4, 1992, pp. 621-87. For a similar attempt at historical sociology, albeit from a
Malthusian rather than a neo-Marxist perspective, Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion
in the Early Modern World, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991.
134
135
Western? What form can it take? For the historian of India, these questions will obviously carry echoes, particularly at the present juncture in our
history. At the most simplistic level, the answers to the first question are
available. Angus Maddison has shown, for example, that the colonial
drain from Indonesia accounted for a far higher proportion of national
income than that from India, and viewed from a number of other perspectives-including that of the development of the transport network-Java
seems to have been far more directly affected by colonialism than India.9
(Whether this holds for Indonesia as a whole is of course another matter.)
However, it is precisely when Lombard opens up other issues~for example,
of dress, gesture and political language, or of aesthetic concepts involving
architecture, literature and cinema (to which an entire chapter is devoted}that the issue of the Western impact begins to assume a complexity that
takes us beyond the computation of some mechanical indices. All of a
sudden, the other strata-those going back to the early modern centuries
and even the medieval period-begin to appear more present than one
might have suspected. One realizes too that the post-Independence rejection of the West, and the policy of self-sufficiency (berdikari) set out by
Sukarno, and which collapsed after his fall in 1965-66, was far stronger as
cultural policy (and far weaker as economic policy) than its corresponding
ideology in, say, India; it was, however, doomed to failure because Indonesia could not by its very nature remain an island unto itself . You cannot
easily close a crossroads.
Having thus enticed the historian of the modem (post-colonial and
colonial) world to delve a little deeper, Lombard enters into the second
8
136
expression)
Cf. Benedict R. OG. Anderson, Notes on contemporary Indonesian political communication, Indonesia, No. 16, 1973, pp. 38-80; also his earlier essay, The Languages of
Indonesian Politics, Indonesia, No. 1, 1966, pp. 89-116.
11
See,
Indonesian
137
For a recent reconsideration of money and monetary circulation, also see Robert S.
Wicks, Money, Markets and Trade in Early Southeast Asia: The Development of Indigenous
Monetary Systems to AD 1400, Ithaca, Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1992.
13
Clifford Geertz, The Religion of Java, London, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1960.
14
Shelly Errington, Some comments on style in the meanings of the past, The Journal of
(henceforth JAS), Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2, 1979, pp. 231-44. The approach in
Erringtons paper is also at variance with the analysis of Burmese texts of the period in Victor
Lieberman, How reliable is U Kalas Burmese Chronicle? Some new comparisons, Journal
of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. XVII, No. 2, 1986, pp. 236-55.
15
Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Asian Studies
138
16
V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman, History, biography and poetry at the Tanjavur
nayaka court, Social Analysis, No. 25, 1989, special issue edited by H.L. Seneviratne on
Identity, Consciousness and the Past: The South Asia Scene, pp. 115-30; for the Rayavacakamu, also see Philip B. Wagoner, Tidings of the King: A Translation and Ethnohistorical
Analysis of the Rayavacakamu, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1993.
17
Peter Carey, Changing Javanese perceptions of the Chinese communities in central
Java, 1755-1825, Indonesia, No. 37, 1984, pp. 1-48; also Denys Lombard and Claudine
Salmon, Les Chinois de Jakarta: Temples et vie collective, Second Edition, Paris, Maison des
Sciences de lHomme, 1980; and Lombard and Salmon, Islam et sinité, Archipel, No. 30,
Peter Carey, Waiting for the "Just King": The agrarian world of south-central Java from
Giyanti (1755) to the Java War (1825-30), MAS, Vol. XX, No. 1, 1986, pp. 59-137.
139
solely
study.
The third volume is brought to a close with a set of general reflections
on the virtues of the Javanese case. Here, while bluntly stating the need
19
Sartono Kartodirdjo, The Peasants Revolt of Banten in 1888, its Conditions, Course and
Case Study of Social Movements in Indonesia, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1966;
also see Sartono, Protest Movements in Rural Java, Singapore, Oxford University Press, 1970;
and the delightful article by Onghokham, The inscrutable and the paranoid: An investigation
into the sources of the Brotodiningrat affair, in Ruth T. McVey, ed., Southeast Asian
Transitions: Approaches through Social History, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1978.
20
Cf. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New
Haven, Yale University Press, 1985; James C. Scott and Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, eds.,
Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance in South-East Asia, London, Frank Cass, 1986.
21
For this neo-Weberian approach, see Soemersaid Mortono, State and Statecraft in Old
Java: A Study of the Later Mataram Period, 16th to 19th Century, Ithaca, Cornell Modem
Indonesia Project, 1968; and Benedict R. OG. Anderson, The idea of power in Javanese
culture, in Claire Holt, Benedict Anderson and James T. Siegel, eds., Culture and Politics in
Indonesia, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1972, pp. 1-69; for a brief critique, Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, State formation and transformation in early modem India and Southeast
Asia, Itinerario, Vol. XII, No. 1, 1988, pp. 91-109.
Sequel: A
140
to finish once and for all with the old clich6s of Oriental Despotism and
the Asiatic Mode of Production, the author summarizes some of his main
theses. In the course of setting out the arguments from the second volume,
he defends (to my mind not quite convincingly) the idea of the diaspora
mercantile community as a heuristic tool for understanding acculturation
(pp. 153-54).22 He also argues that the dynamics of change in the Pasisir
ground to a halt not so much on account of the predation of the VOC, but
because the Sultans of the interior kingdom of Mataram (and notably
Sultan Agung in the early seventeenth century) forged the victory of the
agrarian state over the coast. Nevertheless, he argues, it is from the
consolidation of Mataram that the notion of modern Indonesia takes
sustenance: this, then, is for him the historic role of Mataram.
The concluding paragraph is worth citing in its entirety, summing up as it
does the major focus of the work.
The Javanese case doubtless has a further merit, that of aiding us to
escape the artificial notion of classicism. Given that here the principle
of metamorphism remained weak, our Orientalism has been unable to
forge the idea of a great Insulindian civilisation. Since we do not find
ourselves facing a beautiful edifice, in which case it would have been
deemed sufficient to take apart piece by piece the internal mechanism-the institutions, the thought, the structures-we have been
forced to accept the fact of geographical diversity and to situate ourselves directly in the process of movement. But the question arises of
finding out whether the civilisations that seem great to us today are in
fact not those which, at the dawn of their evolution, had the good
fortune to bind together several worlds at the same time, and thus to
find themselves, like Insulindia, in the position of crossroads (pp.
156--57) .
The point then seems in part to persuade the reader to take Indonesia and
its history seriously as a thing-in-itself, a call perhaps as old as J.C. van
Leur and B.J. Schrieke, but still much needed for the Sinologist or the
Europeanist with his/her blinkers, as well as for the Indianist with his/her
gaze fixed unblinkingly on Europe! The same sense seems to motivate
writers on Indonesia (and Southeast Asia, more generally) in the Cambridge
22
141
142
on Johor), will certainly
to
Indian
other
accessible
(and
Anglophone) historians than
appear
those of Lombard, not only for obvious linguistic reasons but because of a
certain familiarity with the manner in which the work of the former is
organized.&dquo; The vaulting ambition of Lombards synthesis may be discouraging to some, who would prefer the conventional, early modern, regional
kingdom study (Andayas speciality), or Reids neat (at times disconcertingly gazetteer-like) presentation of matters.
On the other hand, the easy facility with which Reid presents affairs is at
times misleading: a great deal of the quantitative tables and charts he
presents in his chapter on economic history in the Cambridge History is to
my mind questionable, and the product of single-mindedly result-oriented
rather than rigorous methods (as emerged from discussions in which this
writer participated at the Asian Studies Association of Australia meetings
in July 1990). Historians of the Mughal period in Indian history are not
unfamiliar with this approach and its concomitant challenge: If you dont
like my numbers, give me some better ones! The consequences are then
dismaying: the tenuous and hypothetical numbers of a first essay become
the firm diving board for a second, subsequent leap into the unknown, and
eventually may well be used with their usual boldness by generalist historians,
who cannot be bothered to read the fine print!28 This, I fear, will be the fate
of Reids tables on population, on Southeast Asian pepper and spice
exports, and bullion imports. The pepper export graph in the Cambridge
History is, for example, rather difficult to defend in statistical terms.
Taking the tenuous data on total European imports of pepper from Asia
over the years 1400 to 1700, Reid produces numbers for the Southeast
Asian part of this pepper. This naturally raises the question: how does he
know what historians who have worked in the Portuguese, Italian and
Dutch archives do not? Mainly because he is content to make a series of
heroic assumptions such as: (a) that in the sixteenth century the revived
Red Sea trade drew most of its supplies from Sumatra; (b) that in the
seventeenth century, India ceased to be a major exporter of pepper. The
first statement is debatable, and the second a major misreading of secondary
evidence. What is more, he then extrapolates without further ado (and his
27
Leonard Y.
Early
Modern
Period, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1993. Andayas earlier works include The
Kingdom of Johor, 1641-1728: Economic and Political Developments, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford
University Press, 1975; and The Heritage of Arung Palakka: A History of South Sulawesi in
the Seventeenth Century, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1981; for a similar if more subtle
approach see Barbara Watson Andaya, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1993, which
focuses on the kingdoms of Palembang and Jambi.
28
In this context, even the useful pre-emptive strike by Victor Lieberman, Wallersteins
system and the international context of early modem Southeast Asian history, Journal of
Asian History, Vol. XXIV, No. 1, 1990, pp.70-90, may not be sufficient.
/143
footnotes are not helpful to the reader who wishes to follow the procedures
used and their bases) to all exports from Southeast Asia-be they to
Europe or the rest of Asia (China, but also India).29
We are left to infer then that Reid is somewhat at sea in the world of
early modern Indian Ocean trade, as also a decade or so out of date in his
grasp of secondary literature on this subject. For how else could he assert
with confidence that Coromandel exports to Southeast Asia grew dramatically in the sixteenth century and that Malabar ships exported cloth to
Melaka? Perhaps this reflects his training and early work as a modernist
political historian working on the twentieth century, not the best preparation for making authoritative statements on the quantitative dimensions
of early modern seaborne commerce. At the same time his success, like
that of Kenneth Hall for an earlier period of Southeast Asian history,
seems to lie largely in the ability to import into the historiography prefabricated master concepts that are a generation or more old in European
literature: Absolutism, Military Revolution, General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, and so on.
If one is going to approach Southeast Asian history through the prism of
the Annales school, there is thus something to be said for going for the
genuine article. This is not to say that one cannot fault Lombards work at
the level of detail: some lacunae exist in the vast, sixty-page bibliography
(for example, the writings of Peter Boomgaard, and Luc Nagtegaal might
have found a place there) ;~ the Arab navigator Ibn Majid, it has been
shown conclusively, did not guide the Portuguese to Calicut in 1498 as
stated (Vol. II, p. 11). But none of these fundamentally affects any of the
central hypotheses. Again, the Dutch archival sources of both the VOC
and the colonial administration, could have been made use of; the Portuguese sources too are limited to major published texts like Barros, Couto
and Tom6 Pires. But this is in a work which employs an array of materials
in classical and modern Malay, Chinese, old Javanese, Dutch, French,
English, some Portuguese and even some Italian-no mean feat! To the
extent that Lombards work is primarily an exercise in the history of
29
Reid, An "Age of Commerce", pp. 15-19; also Reid, Economic and social change.
30
For his major earlier work, see Anthony Reid, The Contest for North Sumatra: Acheh,
the Netherlands and Britain, 1858-1898, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1969;
subsequently, The Blood of the People: Revolution and the End of Traditional Rule in
Northern Sumatra, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1979. The temptation to compare Reids approach to pre-colonial Southeast Asia with that of Burton Stein for pre-colonial
India is thus present in more than one sense; cf. Subrahmanyam, State formation and
transformation, pp. 97-98.
31
Among numerous recent works by him, see, Peter Boomgaard, Buitenzorg in 1805: The
role of money and credit in a colonial frontier society, MAS, Vol. XX, No. 1, 1986, pp.
30-58, as well as several essays on demography; also Luc Nagtegaal, Rijden op een Hollandse
Tijger: De noordkust van Java en de VOC, 1680-1743, Ph.D. thesis, University of Utrecht,
1988.
144
See, for example, Jacques Revel, Histoire et sciences sociales: Les paradigmes des
Vol. XXXIV, No. 6, 1979, pp. 1360-76; subsequently the two
editorial statements, Histoire et sciences sociales: Un toumant critique?, Annales ESC, Vol.
XLIII, No. 2, 1988, pp. 291-93, and Tentons lexperience, Annales ESC, Vol. XLIV, No. 6,
1989, pp. 1317-23; most recently, Jacques Revel, Lhistoire au ras du sol, introduction to
Giovanni Levi, Le pouvoir au village: Histoire dun exorciste dans le Piémont du XVIIe siècle,
trans., Monique Aymard, Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1989.
33
François Furet, Beyond the "Annales", Journal of Modem History, Vol. LV, No. 3,
1983, pp. 389-410, a curious piece which, besides expressing suspicion of global history or
total history, is devoted in large measure to an attack on Anglo-Saxon historical tradition as
represented by the eccentric figure of Richard Cobb!
145
34
fra Cinque