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Buy options. This introduction lays a groundwork for students to grasp the deep impact of maritime geography on regional culture and history.
Visuals are imperative; display a map that covers the east coast of Africa to the west coast of the Americas and explain that speakers of Austronesian languages extend from Madagascar to Easter Island. This graphic will help accentuate the point that such a development could only have taken place over the waters. Mariners who reached the Maldives presumably procured cowry shells, widely utilized as a medium of exchange.
As the archaeologist and historian Pierre-Yves Manguin has argued, following this archipelago northward would have brought them into northern Indian Ocean exchange circuits. These illustrations help students reorient their inherited geographies, open their minds toward more specifically maritime spatial networks, and scale up the temporal frameworks they bring to the study of maritime history.
The vivid example of jade in very early maritime exchange networks helps drive home this maritime spatial and temporal reorientation, without reintroducing external actors— such as Europeans or other Asians—as the motors of trade and historical change.
They then linked this distribution back to the locations where the jade was originally mined in eastern Taiwan. They explain an early distribution of some jade artifacts throughout Taiwan and from there to the Philippines, while others—two forms of ear pendants—reveal an extensive sea-based trade network between BCE and CE. This sea-based trade network corresponds closely with important far-flung early Austronesian- speaking populations around parts of the South China Sea basin.
Such a social and environmental setting leads to fundamentally different arrangements than is the case with settled agriculture: this populace does not become tied to the land, and relations of debt and dependency are not about land ownership, rents, and inheritance. Economic ties and politics, therefore, took other shapes.
Some people were already maritime then, while others adapted to shifting and settled agriculture and in some cases adapted to maritime ways of life as a result of raiding and capture, as well as flight.
Relatively mobile maritime-oriented people may also have had some unique leeway to use distance and connection strategically. They took advantage of proximity to centers of trade, exploiting political relationships that endorsed their participation in the markets of particular ports.
Yet they also set up periodic markets or fairs outside of such centers. Rather than a collection of national histories—those on the mainland and those that sit in the soup—research and teaching about the region have refocused on. Owen, reflects these changes in its organization with both general thematic chapters and chapters on specific countries.
Yet the de-emphasis of nation-bound frameworks, the scrutiny of networks, and the increased interest in the maritime has not only meant more attention to maritime features of island and peninsular history, it has also resulted in long overdue attention to the maritime history of countries on the mainland. The immense subfield of Chinese political, trade, and residential relations with Southeast Asia must also be mentioned as it pertains in varying degrees to maritime history and the study of networks.
However, the concern with networks is not simply an effect of trends shared with the wider discipline. It also reflects a long-standing concern in the study of Southeast Asia, particularly of its maritime history, to explore the links between trade, towns, and kin. While his scholarship did not reach an English language readership until after World War II, this push to theorize historical dynamics in more sociological ways stressed Southeast Asians as subjects and agents of their own histories.
This diminished the explanatory power of European expansionist approaches and found powerful echoes in a well-known piece from by historian John R. Smail on the possibility of autonomous history in Southeast Asia.
The kinds of problems Smail grappled with nonetheless still crop up. For instance, not long ago, the well-known historian of early Southeast Asia, Kenneth Hall, critiqued some recent work by scholars of South Asia and China on historical interconnections between those regions—through Southeast Asia—by asserting that disregard of the Southeast Asian sources results in misrepresentation of the region, its people, and their roles in these maritime links.
How to show students perspectives from Southeast Asia on its complex interlocal and international connections remains one of the biggest challenges in teaching those new to the study of the region. Beyond the early beginnings sketched above, what resources may one draw on to make maritime history tangible in recognizably Southeast Asian ways? Below I touch on a few ways to teach how Southeast Asians expressed and put into practice relationships in the maritime world. Coming at it this way, from perspectives and events in Southeast Asia, gives students a more balanced, and in some ways more accurate, view than the implicit message they often get by starting a semester or a unit on Southeast Asia with the arrival of ideas or people from India, China, or Europe.
Despite a strong agrarian base, the communities that developed in these regions were also part of the maritime trading network that linked Southeast Asia to India and to China. The islands of maritime Southeast Asia can range from the very large for instance, Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Luzon to tiny pinpoints on the map Indonesia is said to comprise 17, islands. Because the interior of these islands were jungle clad and frequently dissected by highlands, land travel was never easy.
Southeast Asians found it easier to move by boat between different areas, and it is often said that the land divides and the sea unites. The oceans that connected coasts and neighboring islands created smaller zones where people shared similar languages and were exposed to the same religious and cultural influences.
The modern borders created by colonial powers—for instance, between Malaysia and Indonesia—do not reflect logical cultural divisions. A second feature of maritime Southeast Asia is the seas themselves.
Apart from a few deep underwater trenches, the oceans are shallow, which means they are rather warm and not very saline. This is an ideal environment for fish, coral, seaweeds, and other products. Though the seas in some areas are rough, the region as a whole, except for the Philippines, is generally free of hurricanes and typhoons. However, there are many active volcanoes and the island world is very vulnerable to earthquake activity.
A distinctive feature of Southeast Asia is its cultural diversity. Of the six thousand languages spoken in the world today, an estimated thousand are found in Southeast Asia. Archeological evidence dates human habitation of Southeast Asia to around a million years ago, but migration into the region also has a long history.
In early times tribal groups from southern China moved into the interior areas of the mainland via the long river systems. Linguistically, the mainland is divided into three important families, the Austro-Asiatic like Cambodian and Vietnamese , Tai like Thai and Lao , and the Tibeto-Burmese including highland languages as well as Burmese.
Languages belonging to these families can also be found in northeastern India and southwestern China. Around four thousand years ago people speaking languages belonging to the Austronesian family originating in southern China and Taiwan began to trickle into island Southeast Asia. In the Philippines and the Malay-Indonesian archipelago this migration displaced or absorbed the original inhabitants, who may have been related to groups in Australia and New Guinea.
Almost all the languages spoken in insular Southeast Asia today belong to the Austronesian family. A remarkable feature of Southeast Asia is the different ways people have adapted to local environments. In premodern times many nomadic groups lived permanently in small boats and were known as orang laut, or sea people.
The deep jungles were home to numerous small wandering groups, and interior tribes also included fierce headhunters. In some of the islands of eastern Indonesia, where there is a long dry season, the fruit of the lontar palm was a staple food; in other areas, it was sago. On the fertile plans of Java and mainland Southeast Asia sedentary communities grew irrigated rice; along the coasts, which were less suitable for agriculture because of mangrove swamps, fishing and trade were the principal occupations.
Due to a number of factors—low populations, the late arrival of the world religions, a lack of urbanization, descent through both male and female lines—women in Southeast Asia are generally seen as more equal to men that in neighboring areas like China and India. Cultural changes began to affect Southeast Asia around two thousand years ago with influences coming from two directions.
Chinese expansion south of the Yangtze River eventually led to the colonization of Vietnam. Chinese control was permanently ended in , but Confucian philosophy had a lasting influence when Vietnam became independent. Buddhism and Taoism also reached Vietnam via China. In the rest of mainland Southeast Asia, and in the western areas of the Malay-Indonesian archipelago, expanding trade across the Bay of Bengal meant Indian influences were more pronounced.
These influences were most obvious when large sedentary populations were engaged in growing irrigated rice, like northern Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Java, and Bali.
Rulers and courts in these areas who adopted Hinduism or forms of Buddhism promoted a culture which combined imported ideas with aspects of local society. Differences in the physical environment affected the political structures that developed in Southeast Asia.
When people were nomadic or semi-nomadic, it was difficult to construct a permanent governing system with stable bureaucracies and a reliable tax base. This type of state only developed in areas where there was a settled population, like the large rice-growing plains of the mainland and Java.
However, even the most powerful of these states found it difficult to extend their authority into remote highlands and islands. Islamic teachings began to spread in Southeast Asia from around the thirteenth century. Islam teaches the oneness of God known to Muslims as Allah , who has revealed his message through a succession of prophets and finally through Muhammad ca.
These are: 1 the confession of faith.
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