Maritime influences in Southeast Asia,c. 900–1300: Some further thoughts

Abstract

In a recent essay in this journal, (1) Geoff Wade suggested that between c. 900 and 1300 maritime trade influenced political and social evolution across Southeast Asia far more extensively than generally has been recognised. Redeploying the 'Age of Commerce' thesis that Anthony Reid originally developed for the period 1450-1680, Wade argued that between 900 and 1300 as well, commercial impulses from beyond Southeast Asia provided the prime mover, the critical agent, the indispensable stimulus to local evolution. A 'number of changes external to what is commonly referred to as Southeast Asia, impacted the region and provided an environment where maritime trade boomed, and this trade boom induced political, social and economic changes throughout the region'. (2) Thus Wade termed the era between the start of the tenth and of the fourteenth century an 'Early Age of Commerce'. In support of his thesis that Southeast Asian vitality issued directly from rising market demand in China, the Mideast and India, Wade used largely secondary sources in imaginative and perceptive fashion to trace the impact of Chinese and Indian Ocean trade networks on a variety of Southeast Asian developments: the spread of new religions, the movement of political centres from the interior to the coast, political integration, rapid population growth, monetisation, cash cropping, new ceramic and textile industries, and novel modes of domestic consumption and mercantile organisation. (3) No one, so far as I know, had inventoried these ostensibly disparate phenomena across Southeast Asia before 1300, much less linked them to a common maritime dynamic. And yet if Wade's essay offers a welcome, refreshingly integrated overview, his reliance on Reid's Age of Commerce model and his emphasis on regional unity and uniform etiology also carry certain risks. My purpose in this short commentary is to offer, in necessarily cursory fashion, some theoretical perspectives that both complement and complicate Wade's approach. (4) One danger in applying to an earlier period a theory developed for the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries is that it risks mechanistic duplication and chronological conflation. Reid argued that maritime trade was seminal to the dissemination of textual religions--Islam, Christianity, Theravada Buddhism, and to a lesser extent, Neo-Confucianism--during what he terms Southeast Asia's 'religious revolution'. (5) Wade claimed that international commerce spread new religions between c. 900 and 1300 as well. However, the pre-1300 evidence is less strong, and such evidence as we have comes not from the period as a whole, rather from the thirteenth century. This weakens the utility of 900-1300 as a coherent category--at least as regards religious change--and suggests that the thirteenth century might be assimilated more profitably to Reid's subsequent Age of Commerce. For example, although since at least the ninth century Muslim traders from the Mideast had congregated in Chinese and Southeast Asian ports, the conversion of Southeast Asians themselves to Islam seems to have begun fitfully in north Sumatra only in the thirteenth century and did not become regionally significant until the fourteenth and more especially the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. (6) Likewise, in the Khmer empire Theravada Buddhism began to eclipse Hinduism/Mahayana Buddhism only after 1220 or 1250. (7) Following Reid, Wade also suggested that between 900 and 1300 rulers shifted their capitals from the interior towards the coast in an effort to control maritime trade and thus to centralise patronage. In Java the post-920 political shift from the southcentral interior to the Brantas basin did respond, at least in part, to the lure of the China trade. Likewise in Vietnam, as John Whitmore recently has shown, the Tran Dynasty (1225-1400) developed a secondary capital in the commercially vibrant Red River delta. Yet the Tran's primary base remained at Thang Long in the interior. …