Autonomous History and the Invention of Politics

Abstract

GREG LOCKHART Australian National University The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya. By ANTHONY MILNER. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. viii, 328. Index, Bibliography. The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya is a beautifully written book about birth of modern Malay consciousness. It combines textual analysis with daring thesis that, in Malaya, politics was a product of colonial experience. But what is so interesting about thesis is way enmeshes local perspective in a global one and unifies two. For as does this may be seen to challenge main assumption of so-called autonomous strand of Southeast Asian historiography as has evolved since post-1945 period of decolonization. This is assumption that, while Southeast Asia has crystallized as a political-cultural entity in an interactive process of acculturation with civilizations, is necessary to describe this process from an internal, regional perspective. Rather than deal with region's history as though were an appendage of Indian, Chinese, Islamic or Western history as colonial historians had formerly done, one must write from the vantage point of Southeast (D.J. Steinberg, In Search of Southeast Asia, 1987, p. 1). Of course such a vantage point remains vital for historians of region - as does for Milner who stresses need to read the writings of Malays themselves (p. 5). Yet I want in this essay to offer a reading of his work, which is prompted by my own, and which shows that autonomous history as we currently understand is outdated by its binary opposition to imperial world view. In other words, I will attempt to show that by shifting burden of discussion from preoccupations about nature of colonial domination to others about nature of political-social change, Milner's postcolonial approach gives new life to autonomous history. This is because of way in which describes process of Southeast Asian acculturation less as a battlefield for external and internal influences and more as a process of integrated historical transformations. The major historiographical issue here is one of and change. In their opposition to external imperial interests, many modern historians tend to stress indigenous cultural continuities in order to clarify historical agency of Southeast Asians themselves. For same reason, others who study pre-colonial history, have stressed indigenous change in order to overthrow orientialist notions of unchanging East. We will see, however, that these autonomous constructions of both and change are flawed by their inability to integrate colonial experience into history of region. In concrete political terms, I will thus demonstrate that autonomous historiography has generally failed to incorporate what The Invention of Politics shows is a central feature of transformation that made Southeast Asia modern: unprecedented destruction or modification of ritual basis for monarchical power and rise of secular political-social consciousness - in age of Western imperialism. It is indeed to identify transition as well as continuity in history of colonial Malaya that Milner's approach is to look forward into events so as to go on, as were, and describe them in progress. From a prospective rather than a retrospective angle of vision, he says, it is easier to perceive uncertainties, ruptures, and tensions in any social situation (p. 4). The influence of Foucault can be felt here, As Milner's acknowledgments and bibliography suggest, however, his ability to read his Malay texts prospectively owes more to textual criticism of O.W. Wolters and others at Cornell University. In History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspective (1982), for example, O. …