Monarchies and decolonisation in Asia

Robert Aldrich, Cindy McCreery

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526142719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

With original case studies of a more than a dozen countries, Monarchies and decolonisation in Asia offers new perspectives on how both European monarchs who reigned over Asian colonies and Asian royal houses adapted to decolonisation. As colonies became independent states (and European countries, and other colonial powers, lost their overseas empires), monarchies faced the challenges of decolonisation, republicanism and radicalism. These studies place dynasties – both European and 'native' – at the centre of debate about decolonisation and the form of government of new states, from the sovereigns of Britain, the Netherlands and Japan to the maharajas of India, the sultans of the East Indies and the 'white rajahs' of Sarawak. It provides new understanding of the history of decolonisation and of the history of modern monarchy.

CHAPTER ONE

Monarchies, decolonisation and post-colonial Asia

Robert Aldrich and Cindy McCreery

Monarchies and Decolonisation in Asia is the third volume we have edited for Manchester University Press’s ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series around the previously understudied theme of monarchy – the institution of the crown, the activities of individual sovereigns and other members of royal families, and the culture of royalty – in colonial contexts. The chapters in Crowns and Colonies revealed some of the ways European and non-European monarchies came into contact around the world in the colonial age, particularly at the time that imperial powers were conquering territory and consolidating their holdings from the 1700s onwards.¹ The contributions to Royals on Tour used the lens of visits to Europe by non-European royals, and to Asia, Africa and other parts of the world by touring European royals, as a way of viewing the complementary dynamics of politics and royal ceremonial in European expansion and in the reactions to it, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.² The present volume moves forward chronologically to the period of decolonisation in the mid- and late twentieth centuries to explore the ways in which both European and Asian countries remoulded themselves in the lead-up to and after the independence of the former colonies.

Historians’ attention has long been drawn to the subject of kingship in Asia, ancient and modern. Comparatively little consideration, however, has been given directly to the question of the place of monarchs in the period covering late colonialism, decolonisation, and the foundation and development of independent successor states. Among other specific works about monarchies in the ‘endgame of empire’, Ian Copland’s authoritative monograph provides an analysis of how the maharajas navigated through the last decades of British rule and the transition to independent India, and Yaqoob Khan Bangash has provided an account of the hereditary rulers and the independence of Pakistan.³ Milton Osborne’s classic biography of King Sihanouk offers a portrait of a king whose reign spanned the colonial and post-colonial history of Cambodia, and Geoffrey C. Gunn has examined in detail Sihanouk’s role in bringing about Cambodia’s independence from France.⁴ Herbert P. Bix’s biography of Emperor Hirohito shows how the Japanese sovereign faced the loss of a war, an overseas empire and his political powers, as well as American post-war occupation of Japan.⁵ Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian has explained how the sultans of the Malay states successfully managed the transition from colonial rule to independence and beyond, and John Monfries has profiled the late Sultan of Yogyakarta, a rare Indonesian hereditary ruler whose throne survived republican independence.⁶ Bruce Lockhart has chronicled the decline of the Vietnamese monarchy (which did not long survive the Second World War) and also offered comparative perspectives on the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao monarchies.⁷ Grant Evans has brought together a valuable compendium of documents on the Lao royal family, from their rise under the French to their fall under the post-independence Communists.⁸ Roger Kershaw’s Monarchy in South-East Asia remains an essential volume of reference.⁹ Many other important historical studies of the dynamics of decolonisation in Asia exist, of course, in English and in other languages. It is our hope that the chapters in this volume will make a further significant contribution to the literature on monarchy and decolonisation.

Social scientists have provided much insight into the theory and practice of monarchy. ‘Kingship is one of the most enduring forms of human governance’, as the anthropologists David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins remark, adding that ‘it is attested during virtually all eras on all continents, and for most of human history the tendency was for it to become more common, not less’. They also point out that ‘kings appear remarkably difficult to get rid of’, and that ‘even when kings are deposed, the legal and political framework of monarchy tends to live on’, for example, with the notion that sovereignty has been ‘displaced onto an entity called “the people”’. Moreover, ‘when kings are gone – even when they are deposed by popular uprisings – they are likely to linger in ghostly form, precisely as such a unifying principle’. These affirmations, in this case from specialists examining case studies from such places as the Sudan, Mexico, the Congo and Madagascar, underline the importance and benefit of historical study of monarchies in the modern world, and, in particular, in relation to colonialism and decolonisation.¹⁰

Social scientists have also provided their own perspectives on Asian monarchies, as shown in studies by Benedict Anderson, Clifford Geertz, Stanley Tambiah and Nicholas Dirks.¹¹ Their research on ‘imagined communities’, the ‘theatre state’, ‘galactic polities’ and the impact of colonialism have contributed to an understanding of the theory and practice of monarchy in Asia, and challenged assumptions about monarchy based on Western history. From ancient times onwards, hereditary rule was common throughout Asia, though the forms of governance varied widely over time and place. Different religious and philosophical systems – Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Islam and others – determined the ideology and practice of rulership, as did local geographical, economic and social conditions, military actions, the expansion and contraction of polities, the personalities and rivalries of individual rulers, and the dynamics of family relations and succession to thrones. Some dynasties reigned over diminutive territories and small populations, while others held suzerainty over vast empires and remained in power for hundreds of years or even millennia. China, for instance, long maintained an imperial system in which the emperor was the ‘Son of Heaven’, whose performance of various rites was necessary to secure the well-being of his subjects. The centralised bureaucracy was composed of a corps of mandarins recruited on the basis of competitive examinations. The emperor treated peripheral or neighbouring rulers as the heads of feudatory states to whom power was delegated in return for tribute.¹² More common in Southeast Asia was a ‘galactic’ notion of kingship, where the ability to mobilise populations rather than demarcation of territory determined the ruler’s status; territories overlapped and rulers sometimes paid tribute to several more powerful neighbouring sovereigns.¹³ In Japan, the emperor claimed descent from the sun-goddess; Hindu rulers in India were incarnations of Shiva; in the Buddhist world, a ruler was semi-divine; and Islamic sultans were also guardians of the faith. New rulers and dynasties supplanted old ones, and foreign invasion could lead to regime change, as occurred with the Manchu invasion of Ming China. Even without such cataclysmic events, succession to thrones often encompassed intense and sometimes violent struggles between multiple would-be heirs.

From their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans were awed by the power, mystery and often wealth of the great ‘potentates’ in the East, creating a long-lived fantasy about Oriental autocracy and luxuriance. However, their understanding of the principles and practices of governance in Asia remained limited. In the early modern period, Asian rulers held the upper hand over European merchants, missionaries and emissaries who pleaded for trading privileges, concessions of land, missionary access and other benefits. With the establishment of footholds in the name of European monarchs from the early 1500s, Western and Christian notions of kingship arrived in Asia and were imposed on places over which European conquerors, led by the Portuguese, and chartered companies, such as the English and Dutch East India Companies, gained control.¹⁴ European possessions, however, remained largely coastal enclaves, ruled with acquiescence from local maharajas, sultans and other indigenous figures (though the British holdings in India, augmented by warfare, grew ever larger).

By the 1800s, however, the balance of power had greatly changed, with rapacious expansion and the establishment of far more extensive colonial holdings under the formal aegis of European governments, as seen with the British annexation of Punjab and Awadh in the 1840s and 1850s.¹⁵ The proclamation of British paramountcy over the Indian subcontinent in 1858, after the Great Uprising of the previous year, and the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India two decades later, underscored the new British imperialist and monarchical presence in the region. Meanwhile, through military campaigns in the late 1850s, the French under Emperor Napoleon III had established, in southern Vietnam, a foothold in Southeast Asia, while holding on to and seeking to develop the small French possessions in India. By the late 1800s, a scramble for Asia saw enlargement of the French colonial empire (though now under a republican government in Paris) throughout Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos while Britain moved further into Burma and the Malay states. The Dutch consolidated their holdings in the East Indies, placing thousands of islands under the rule of the Dutch sovereign, and waging war in Sumatra and Bali at the turn of the century to reinforce their imperium. The Japanese took over Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1905 in the name of their emperor. The Spanish monarchs retained control of the Philippines, over which they had long reigned, until defeat by the Americans in 1898. The Portuguese king continued to reign over that country’s residual Asian holdings in Macao, East Timor, Goa and other Indian enclaves; the Portuguese monarchy was abolished after a revolution in 1910, but Lisbon kept its portfolio of overseas outposts. Western incursions into China, from the Anglo-Chinese War (the First ‘Opium War’ of 1840) onwards, weakened but did not topple the Chinese imperial monarchy, and led to British takeover of Hong Kong and the later establishment of foreign ‘concessions’, mostly on the Chinese coast. The sovereigns of Austria-Hungary, Britain, Russia, Italy and Japan thus gained small tracts of land, with trading privileges and legal rights of extraterritoriality, on the edge of the ‘Middle Kingdom’,¹⁶ whose own imperial dynasty was overthrown by internal forces in 1911.

Asian monarchies experienced diverse fates through encounters with outside powers and cultures. It should be remembered that pre-colonial Asian polities were never stagnant and unchanging, and even after colonial incursions, many local rulers engaged of their own volition in programmes of modernisation – for example, with codification of laws, building of new infrastructure, promotion of education and other reformist initiatives. The transformation of Japan under the instigation of the restored Meiji emperor, and of Siam under King Chulalongkorn in the late 1800s and early 1900s count among the most significant and best-known examples.¹⁷ Certain ‘feudatory’ monarchs and dynasties under ‘paramount’ colonial rule were also able to continue to pursue modernisation during and after colonisation, as is demonstrated notably by the Indian princely state of Mysore.¹⁸ Indeed, as research on indigenous Asian dynasties progresses, the dynamism of many sovereigns, administrations and states is being revealed.¹⁹

Siam (later renamed Thailand) was the only state in Southeast Asia to remain independent. The Japanese overthrew the monarchy in in Korea in 1910, five years after establishing a protectorate over the peninsula.²⁰ The British had abolished monarchies in Ceylon (in 1815) and Burma (in 1885), and in such Indian realms as the Sikh empire (in 1849) and Awadh (in 1856). However, they left on the throne traditional rulers of what became known as the ‘princely states’ in India – more than six hundred states of vastly disparate size and population covering about two-fifths of the subcontinent – and the sultanates of the Malay Peninsula. The Dutch retained sultans and rajas in the East Indies as ‘regents’, and the French left pre-colonial dynasties in place in their Southeast Asian ‘protectorates’ of Cambodia, Laos, Annam and Tonkin. However, the European conquerors substantially curtailed the powers of such ‘potentates’, especially in international relations and defence, and on occasion dethroned rulers considered resistant to colonial overlordship or simply charged with incompetence or impropriety.²¹ Even when paying deference to traditional rulers and attempting to use them to win support among ‘native’ populations, colonial authorities worked to undermine their positions. Yet the colonisers also sought to select and groom heirs to local thrones – through education, travel and emoluments – who would be open to Western influence and willing to accommodate colonial overrule Figure 1.1).²²

Colonialists’ hopes of ‘pacifying’ colonies were never realised. Throughout the colonial period, authorities faced both major and minor rebellions, sometimes inspired by demands for the restoration of pre-colonial dynasties, institutions and traditions, and the occasional prince could successfully defy Europeans dispossessing him of his power and assets.²³ Extant or abolished monarchies could serve as rallying points for anti-colonial sentiment. Royals themselves could be implicated in such uprisings, as occurred when rebels named the ageing Bahadur Shah Zafar, the final Mughal ruler, as ‘Emperor of India’ in the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, or when Vietnamese emperors were involved in rebellions in 1885 and 1916. These three rulers paid a high price for colon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Monarchies, decolonisation and post-colonial Asia
• 2 All the king’s men: regal ministers of eclipsed empires in India
• 3 Decolonised rulers: rajas, maharajas and others in post-colonial India
• 4 The Himalayan kingdoms, British colonialism and indigenous monarchs after the end of empire
• 5 Conflict and betrayal: negotiations at the end of British rule in the Shan States of Burma (Myanmar)
• 6 Malaysia’s multi-monarchy: surviving colonisation and decolonisation
• 7 Celebrating the ‘world’s most ideal state’: Sarawak and the Brooke dynasty’s centenary of 1941
• 8 Refashioning the monarchy in Brunei: Sultan Omar Ali and the quest for royal absolutism
• 9 Colonial monarchy and decolonisation in the French Empire: Bao Dai, Norodom Sihanouk and Mohammed V
• 10 Loyalism and anti-communism in the making of the modern monarchy in post-colonial Laos
• 11 Indonesia: sultans and the state
• 12 Defending the Sultanate’s territory: Yogyakarta during the Indonesian decolonisation, 1942–50
• 13 The uses of monarchy in late-colonial Hong Kong, 1967–97
• 14 From absolute monarch to ‘symbol emperor’: decolonisation and the Japanese emperor after 1945
• 15 Dramatising Siamese independence: Thai post-colonial perspectives on kingship
• Index