Southeast Asian Kingdoms

10 Key excerpts on "Southeast Asian Kingdoms"

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  The Modern Anthropology of South-East Asia

  An Introduction

  • Victor King, William D. Wilder(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Map 2 ). The South-East Asian region is therefore distinguished from the Indian subcontinent to the west and from the Chinese mainland to the north. The concept of a South-East Asia, comprising independent but interrelated nation-states, is given greater salience with the undoubted success of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (or ASEAN). This regional organization was formed in 1967 by the Kingdom of Thailand, the Republics of the Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore and the Federation of Malaysia primarily to promote economic cooperation among its member states. The Sultanate of Brunei joined in 1984 and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1996. The People's Democratic Republic of Laos and Myanmar (formerly the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma) were admitted in 1997, and, Cambodia (formerly the People's Republic of Kampuchea) most recently in 1998. The current ASEAN leaders, though some more strongly than others, hold the conviction that an organization comprising all ten South-East Asian countries makes sense for a variety of economic, political, strategic and cultural reasons.

  Anthony Reid, the distinguished historian of the region, has recently elaborated on the perspectives of ASEAN leaders in terms of what he calls a 'saucer model' of indigenous identity (1999: 7-23). He suggests that during the past 30 years a clear pattern has emerged in the context of such organizations as ASEAN of what he calls the 'low centre' of South-East Asia, that is Singapore and Malaysia, and to some extent Brunei and Thailand at the focal regional communications point and meeting place: of the Straits of Malacca (Melaka). These states have pressed positively for the recognition and institutionalization of an indigenous South-East Asian identity. There is then the 'high periphery' of Myanmar, Vietnam (Laos and Cambodia), and to some extent the Philippines and Indonesia, which have decided that they did not wish to be mere 'appendages of their larger and more threatening neighbours' (that is, India, China and the USA) and therefore South-East Asia 'became a kind of default option for them (ibid.: 7). Thus for Reid, although there are differing local perceptions of regionalism and 'there is no dominant centre or common civilizational heritage' on which to base claims to 'Southeast Asianness', there is nevertheless an 'indigenous origin of the Southeast Asian idea' (ibid.: 8, 19). However, we should note that this indigenous conception of the region is a very recent phenomenon, it has emerged from a regional politico-economic organization and from strategic considerations, and that it is an historian who has firmly argued the case.

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  System And Process In Southeast Asia

  The Evolution Of A Region

  • Donald G Mccloud(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  9 Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and to a lesser extent, Bangladesh, although geographically close to and economically and politically similar to Southeast Asia, are generally linked to South Asia because of their cultural and geographic proximity to India. Even the inclusion of the Philippines as a part of Southeast Asia is sometimes challenged because, despite geographic and ethnic similarities to the region, the intensive Spanish and U.S. colonial impacts on the Philippines have diluted its cultural affinities with the region.

  The countries10 of the region, then, include Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei. (See Map 1.1, following.) In addition to being in geographic proximity, these countries are similar, though not identical, in tropical monsoon ecology. They are also similar in that, with the exception of Singapore, they are all economically underdeveloped but culturally extremely sophisticated. Independent governments reemerged in Southeast Asia only following World War II (except Thailand, which had avoided direct colonial control and thus never lost its independence). Before the colonial period, Southeast Asia was part of a world trading system that linked China to the Middle East and Europe, and as a crossroads in this system, experienced various forms of cultural/religious penetration from Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity.11 As these commonalities mask diverse and complex political, cultural, and economic patterns, an understanding of Southeast Asia must begin with the balancing of these often divergent and overlapping characteristics.

  Much of the diversity of Southeast Asia is rooted in its geographic fragmentation. Not only is the area encompassing Southeast Asia quite large, but there is a natural division between the area attached to the Asian landmass (called mainland Southeast Asia) and the insular portion of Southeast Asia. The countries of Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam are located on the Indo-Pacific Peninsula, which extends directly southward from China. The archipelagic countries include Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Brunei, and Malaysia. Although the inclusion of Malaysia can be disputed because it is attached to the mainland, Malaysia's historical, cultural, ethnic, religious, economic, and political links to Sumatra and the other islands of the archipelago

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  Routledge Handbook of Politics in Asia

  • Shiping Hua(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Southeast Asia’s stunning diversity is intimately tied to historical foreign relations, as the region is situated between two of the world’s great civilizations. Southeast Asia is south of China and east of India, providing a meeting place for their peoples, economies, and worldviews. From China, Southeast Asia gained trade as well as models for statecraft through the Chinese tributary system. From India, Southeast Asia also gained trade as well as cultural influences, namely religions, such as Hinduism; Buddhism; and, later, Islam, which spread from the subcontinent to maritime Southeast Asia. While reality was not nearly so neat, as Chinese Buddhists and Indian princes also played important roles, Chinese political economy and Indian culture made lasting impressions on the peoples of Southeast Asia. That said, Southeast Asian communities were always actors in their own right, able to strategically adapt foreign influences to local circumstances and tastes. For Anthony Reid (1988: 6), “The fact that Chinese and Indian influences came to most of the region by maritime trade, not by conquest or colonization, appeared to ensure that Southeast Asia retained its distinctiveness even while borrowing numerous elements from these larger centres”. Although early foreign relations were significant, they were always outweighed by relations among the peoples of Southeast Asia, whose intra-regional commerce tied diverse kingdoms together.

  Within Southeast Asia, one finds distinctive approaches to early foreign relations. It is useful to distinguish between mainland and maritime polities. Mainland Southeast Asia was home to large Buddhist kingdoms based on wet rice agriculture. These kingdoms were involved in local wars for manpower and paid tribute to China, with some kingdoms emulating Chinese models of bureaucratic politics. Meanwhile, maritime Southeast Asia looked very different. Less populous and home to several small kingdoms, the archipelago was immersed in global trade networks. International relations in each subregion, though, can be understood in terms of a Mandala, a Buddhist visualization of power in which stronger actors attract weaker ones within their orbits (Wolters 1999). When the reach of larger powers waned, smaller kingdoms either broke away on their own or shifted to pay tribute to other powers.

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  The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modern Asian Educators

  1850–2000

  • Shin'ichi Suzuki, Gary McCulloch, Mingyuan Gu, Parimala V. Rao, Ji-Yeon Hong, Shin'ichi Suzuki, Gary McCulloch, Mingyuan Gu, Parimala V. Rao, Ji-Yeon Hong(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part III

  Southeast Asia

  Passage contains an image

  5 Southeast Asian modern educators

  Shin’ichi Suzuki

  Brief historical introduction to Southeastern Asian education

  Anyone familiar with earliest Southeast Asian history is aware of the problematic nature of the classical Southeast Asian “state”. The closer one looks at any given state in traditional Southeast Asia, the more it seems to dissolve before one’s eyes. Upon examination, it appears not to be “government” nor even “administered in any very systematic way at all”, and one is forced to ask just what it is that holds such a “state” together.

  (Gesick, 1983, p. 1)

  Despite its currency today, “Southeast Asia” is a term of rather recent origin. In the past, it was occasionally employed by scholars, merchants, or travelers …, but it did not gain general acceptance until World War II. Even at the present time, not all specialists agree on the area’s exact borders, though almost all now accept at least a common core of countries as part of Southeast Asia.

  (Tilman, 1969b, p. 3)

  The particularities of Southeast Asia are its diversities and its mutual sharp contrasts in politics, religions, languages, culture, and practical livelihood. Such particulars were common to all Asian regions, but it was specific for Southeast Asia.

  In particular, … “Classical” states of Southeast Asia, among the organizationally most complex, culturally most distinctive, and historically most significant political systems of the pre-modern period, have not been much looked at in terms of what they might tell us about the nature of politics in general.

  (Geertz, 1983, p. ix)

  Southeastern Asian regions historically underwent heterogeneous colonial governments (British, French, Dutch, Spanish, and American), whose styles of ruling were idiosyncratic from one colonizer to another. That made the regional multiplicity and differences in their social and cultural settings more complex. The diversity brought into being unparallel and uneven modernization in Southeast Asia. There often emerged wide-scale migrations, crossing older autocratic terrains, which often caused political instability over the regions in the early modern period. These characteristics bore other particularities of the regions, namely political separatism and complex national identities. All affected education.

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  Southeast Asia (Routledge Revivals)

  A Region in Transition

  • Jonathan Rigg(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Yet following the end of the Second World War, the governments of Thailand, and of the newly independent countries of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and (later) Brunei hardly found themselves in an enviable position. They were confronted with the task of continuing the reconstruction of their war-ravaged infrastructures. They had to create a sense of nationhood where previously none had existed. They had to appease groups who were less than satisfied with the terms of independence. They lacked skilled personnel in government and industry. And they were without sufficient financial resources. This makes the transition from underdeveloped, to developing and – in some cases – newly industrializing all the more striking. To take the point one step further, it could even be argued that the market economies of Southeast Asia are the first group of developing countries to escape from underdevelopment.

  The Southeast Asian region as a whole consists of ten countries. These are the mainland countries of Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, and the island states of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. As will be discussed shortly, such a regional formulation does have some geographical legitimacy. This extends from a certain physical unity in terms of climate and geological evolution, combined with common historical and cultural threads. It is these common features that have led numerous geographers to claim that Southeast Asia has a distinct identity that sets it apart from the regions surrounding it (e.g. Fisher 1966). However, although there may be some very good physical, historical, and cultural reasons for studying the ten countries as a unit, their recent economic and political development has served to divide the region into at least two competing subregional blocs.

  On the one hand there are the countries of Indochina. Since 1975, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam have embarked upon strategies of communist reconstruction and development, and their respective governments have aligned themselves with the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China. Burma is also a command economy, although its government has studiously avoided developing close relations with any of the superpowers. On the other hand, there are the six remaining countries, which make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN): Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. These are market economies following outward-looking, export-oriented strategies of economic development. They have also aligned themselves, to varying degrees, with the USA and the West. And, as if to emphasize their economic and political links, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand signed the Bangkok Declaration in 1967, so creating ASEAN. Brunei became the sixth member in 1984.

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  Dictionary of the Modern Politics of Southeast Asia

  • Joseph Chinyong Liow(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Thailand, Kingdom of

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003121565-10

  The Kingdom of Thailand, once known as Siam, is situated in the centre of the mainland of Southeast Asia with a land area of some 500,000 square kilometres. It is the only regional state not to have been subject to European colonialism. While Thailand is a constitutional monarchy, the reigning King Maha Vajiralongkorn has demonstrated a degree of activism that belies the criticisms of his detractors that the eccentric ruler would be a disinterested monarch.

  To Thailand’s west and north lie Myanmar, Laos is to its north and east, Cambodia is to its east, and it shares a southern border with Malaysia. Thailand does not have a direct frontier with the People’s Republic of China but is separated from it by only narrow stretches of territory extending from Myanmar and Laos, which touch to its extreme north. Thailand has a population of almost 70 million, primarily composed of ethnic T’ai whose religion is the Theravada branch of Buddhism. In addition to tribal minorities, such as the Hmong in northern provinces, there is a significant concentration of Malay-Muslims (see Islam) in the southern provinces bordering Malaysia, where armed resistance movements continue to operate. The largest minority is that of ethnic Chinese, who comprise some 10 per cent of the population. A considerable proportion, however, have intermarried into Thai families with a notable degree of cultural assimilation (see Chinese Communities in Southeast Asia).

  The origins of the Thai state date from the tenth century, when ethnic T’ai migrated from southwest China towards the central plain then under the control of the Cambodian empire based around Angkor. The current Thai state dates from the 18th century when King Rama I sited his capital at Bangkok and founded the Chakri dynasty, which is today represented by its tenth incumbent, Maha Vajiralongkorn. From the mid-19th century, modernizing Chakri monarchs opened the country to commercial contact with the west, with the rice trade as the staple basis for economic development. Western skills were drawn on to develop the machinery of state, which over time had the effect of creating tensions between the monarchy and an emerging military-bureaucratic class. In 1932 the absolute monarchy was overthrown by a military coup to be replaced by a constitutional monarchy. There have been 19 coups in the country since then. Following the events of 1932, two principal internal conflicts have dominated the political life of the country. One was within the armed forces, including the police, for the dominant position; this appeared resolved in 1957 when Marshal Sarit Thanarat seized power on behalf of the army. Nevertheless, the police managed to return to a position of prominence for a brief period during the government of Thaksin Shinawatra

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  The Making of Southeast Asia

  International Relations of a Region

  • Amitav Acharya(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  125

  Scholars pointed to important variations between the original Indian and Chinese ideas and practices and those found in Southeast Asia. Examples ranged from Southeast Asia’s rejection or modification of the Indian caste system (the kings used the Indian caste system to describe themselves, but the caste system did not catch on in societies by and large) and the nature of Buddha images in Thailand (as they differed from Indian images) to the distinctive character of temple art in the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of Pagan, Angkor and Java.126 Similarly, Tambiah argues that Indian Buddhist notions of kingship, including that of the Chakravartin, took a deep hold in Southeast Asia, assuming “an effective and enduring organizing role in the constitution of emergent societies”, yet this was not a matter of wholesale and unaltered transmission imposed by Indian rulers or merchants but a development that was “sought, appropriated, and transformed to suit a Southeast Asian context and milieu”.127

  The new preoccupation of historians of Southeast Asia was to show how Indian culture and political ideas were “absorbed by the local population and joined to their existing cultural patterns”.128 In sum, “Southeast Asians…borrowed but they also adapted. In some very important cases they did not need to borrow at all.”129 The historiography of Southeast Asia became a project to demonstrate how the region had “adopted the alien cultural traits without in the process losing its identity”.130 Out of this body of work emerged a number of key concepts that must be counted as major contributions to the scholarship on the transmission of ideas and culture in international relations.131 These include Van Leur’s “idea of local initiative”, or the argument that Indian religious and political ideas were not imposed on or brought into Southeast Asia by conquest or even commerce, but by the voluntary initiative of Southeast Asian rulers who “called upon Indian civilization to the east in a bid to use them for spiritual and political legitimation”.132 A similar concept is “local genius” — developed by H.G. Quaritch Wales to signify the role of local Southeast Asian artists, sculptures and builders in “guiding the evolution of the Indianized civilization itself” — which explained the variations in the design of sculpture and architecture between India and Southeast Asia (despite Indian influence on the latter), and between different Southeast Asian cultures, for example, Cham and Khmer, both of which had been subject to Indian influence.133 Wolters’ concept of “localization” and “relocalization” also spoke to a similar dynamic, with localization defined as a “local statement…into which foreign elements have retreated”.134 The Indian “cultural ideas” discussed covered a broad range, including religion, art, architecture, statecraft, concepts of power, authority, and legitimacy, ideas about political stratification, territorial organization, political institutionalization, diplomatic practice and law.135 A number of secular Indian legal, political and diplomatic texts made their way into the ancient Southeast Asian political landscape. These included the Manusmrti (Code of Manu), the Dharmasastras (legal treatises) and the Arthasastra , the most famous Indian classic on statecraft, all of which were “widely revered” in classical Southeast Asia.136

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  The Non-Western World

  Environment, Development and Human Rights

  • Pradyumna P. Karan(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 Southeast Asia GEOGRAPHICAL SETTING Southeast Asia is a collective name for the lands lying to the east of the Indian subcontinent and to the south of China. Its regional unity derives in the main from its transitional character between the two great demographic and cultural foci of India and China. It consists of the Asian mainland and fringing islands, with a population of nearly 552 million. Southeast Asia has great diversity in its population, resources, and political and economic patterns. Perhaps no area in the world has been swept by so many tides of military, mercantile, and cultural influence as Southeast Asia, and few areas preserve the relics of those influences in such astonishing and appealing variety. Due to its peninsular and island character and the deep penetration of the interior by great rivers such as the Irrawaddy, Red, and Mekong, Southeast Asia enjoys a high degree of accessibility. The accessibility through the sea facilitated Chinese and Indian influences in ancient and medieval periods, and the integration of most of the area into commercial, then colonial empires of the Western European powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, Asia’s three giants—China, Japan, and India—loom over the region. Physically, Southeast Asia comprises frayed-out ends of mountain ranges separated by lowland areas. The mountains are remains of old massifs, with gently rolling topography, and zones of much younger fold mountains characterized by steep slopes and diversified by active or extinct volcanic cones (Figure 4.1). These younger folds, interrupted by the sea, provide the backbone of the Indonesian and Philippine island groups, linking up with the great belt of mountains that rims the Western Pacific. These upland mountain areas are occupied by diverse tribal groups frequently dependent on shifting agriculture

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  Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian History

  • Norman Owen, Norman G. Owen(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, Bangkok had gained the most from the environment in which it found itself. The Chakri and their aristocracy operated within the economic, political, and cultural forces of the age, internal and external, and took advantage of them to further establish their power. Since the mainland competitors of the Thai – Amarapura and Hue – were hampered by their internal situations as well as their approaches to external pressures, Bangkok continued forcefully to push its influence outward, dominating Cambodia, encompassing the Lao principalities of the Mekong valley, drawing in Lanna, and reaching down into the Malay Peninsula. By demonstrating the greatest flexibility in dealing with the changing economic and political forces, combined with the administrative advances and the continued ritual enforcement of the monarchy, the Chakri proved themselves the dominant court of Southeast Asia. They continued to integrate the regions around them, to maximize their access to the resources of their land – maritime and agricultural; human, material, and intellectual – and to maintain the cultural and ritual context in which their monarchy existed.

  References

  • Aung-Thwin, Michael and Aung-Thwin, Maitrii (2012) A History of Myanmar Since Ancient Times: traditions and transformations , London: Reaktion Books.
  • Charney, Michael W. (2006) Powerful Learning: Buddhist literati and the throne in Burma’s last dynasty, 1752–1885 , Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Centers for South and Southeast Asian Studies.
  • Day, Tony (2002) Fluid Iron: state formation in Southeast Asia , Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
  • Eoseewong, Nidhi (2005) Pen and Sail: literature and history in early Bangkok , Chiangmai: Silkworm Books.
  • Florida, Nancy K. (1995) Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: history as prophecy in colonial Java , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Koenig, William J. (1990) The Burmese Polity, 1752–1819: politics, administration, and social organization in the early Konbaung period , Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies.
  • Lieberman, Victor B. (1984) Burmese Administrative Cycles: anarchy and conquest, c. 1580–1760 , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  • Lieberman, Victor B. (2003–9) Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in global context, c. 800–1830

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  The Religious Traditions of Asia

  Religion, History, and Culture

  • Joseph Kitagawa, Joseph Kitagawa(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Modernization and Reform. The eve of the assertion of colonial power in the Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia found them in differing states and conditions. The Burmese destruction of Ayutthayā in 1767 provided the Thai (the designation applied to Tai living in the modern nation-state) the opportunity to establish a new capital on the lower Chaophraya River at present-day Bangkok. Because of its accessibility to international commerce the new site was much better situated for the new era about to dawn; the new dynastic line was better able to cope with the increasing impact of Western influence and was also committed to building a new sense of national unity. The Burmese, on the other hand, tired of wars under Alaungpaya and his son, were beset by religious and ethnic fractionalism. They were disadvantaged by the more isolated location of their capital (Ava, Amarapura, and then Mandalay), and governed by politically less astute rulers such as King Bagyidaw, who lost the Arakan and lower Burma to the British in the Anglo-Burmese Wars. Cambodia, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, basically fell victim to either the Thai or the Vietnamese until the French protectorate was established over the country in the 1860s. The Lao kingdoms of Luang Prabang and Vientiane were subject to Thai dominance in the nineteenth century until King Norodom was forced to accept French protection in 1863. Only in the 1890s were the French able to pacify Cochin China, Annam, and Tongkin, which, together with Cambodia, were formed into the Union Indochinoise in 1887. With the rest of Buddhist Southeast Asia disrupted by the colonial policies of France and Great Britain, Thailand’s independence and able leadership under Mongkut (Rama IV, 1851–1868) and Chulalongkorn (1868–1910) abetted religious modernization and reform, making Thailand the appropriate focus for this topic.

  The classical Thai Buddhist worldview had been set forth in the Traibhūmikathā of King Lü Thai of Sukhōthai. In one sense this text must be seen as part of Lü Thai’s program to reconstruct an administrative and political framework and to salvage the alliance structure that had collapsed under the policies of his predecessor. In laying out the traditional Buddhist stages of the deterioration of history, Lü Thai meant to affirm the meaningfulness of a karmically calculated human life within a given multitiered universe. As a Buddhist sermon it urges its listeners to lead a moral life and by so doing to reap the appropriate heavenly rewards. Within its great chain of being framework of various human, heavenly, and demonic realms, the text focuses on a central figure, the universal monarch, or cakkavattin, exemplified by the legendary king Dharmaśokarāja. Lü Thai’s traditional picture of the world, the role of the king, the nature of karmic action, and the hope of a heavenly reward provide a rationale for Sukhōthai political, social, and religious order. That King Rama I (1782–1809), who reestablished the fortunes of the Thai monarchy, commissioned a new recension of the Traibhūmi

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