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Historiographical Reections on the Period 1750–1870

in Southeast Asia and Korea

Anthony Reid

Itinerario / Volume 18 / Issue 01 / March 1994, pp 77 - 88

DOI: 10.1017/S0165115300022324, Published online: 22 June 2011

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0165115300022324

How to cite this article:

Anthony Reid (1994). Historiographical Reections on the Period 1750–1870 in Southeast
Asia and Korea. Itinerario, 18, pp 77-88 doi:10.1017/S0165115300022324

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 77

Historiographical Reflections
on the Period 1750-1870
in Southeast Asia and Korea1
ANTHONY REID
(Australian National University)

The historiography with which most of us interact outside our own country
or area of expertise is predominantly western and primarily in English.
Although increasingly diverse in authorship, this historiography continued
to build on traditions and sources which were developed in a less universalist
age. It is not surprising the find that the period (roughly mid-seventeenth
to mid-eighteenth centuries) in which most independent countries of
eastern Asia sought to disengage from the European-dominated world
economy is poorly understood or appreciated. I am conscious of the danger
that my own recent work on the Southeast Asian 'Age of Commerce' may
unintentionally reinforce negative images of those states which reacted to
the traumas of the seventeenth century by decreasing their interaction widi
European traders.2
This paper, like the project from which is derives, is intended to draw
attention to the inadequacy of such a view, particularly in relation to the
second half of that period, divided from die first by major changes in both
global and local economies. It is historians of Japan who have most vigo-
rously challenged the negative imagery of a half-century ago, and I begin
widi a short overview of some of that work.

The Historiography of Japan as no. 1

The Japanese challenge to the West has been slower in the intellectual
domain than the economic one. Until recendy the phenomenal economic
success ofJapan served rather to confirm than to challenge the dominance
of historiographic models derives from die West. Modernity was seen as
coming to Japan with Admiral Perry and die Meiji restoration of 1866. It
was the exceptional vigour with which western ideas and technologies were
adopted, first during die Meiji era and subsequendy during die Allied
occupation of 1945-1949, diat was seen by most Japanese as well as western
scholars as die key to diis success. For die dominant schools of history
78 ANTHONY REID

Marxism provided much the most influential explanation of how J a p a n

fitted into a broader global historical evolution. In this pattern the Toku-
gawa era from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, when Japan was
relatively isolated from outside contact, was interpreted as p r e m o d e r n and
feudal - indeed as the closest approximation to European feudalism outside
Europe. Marxist categories were used in Japan as elsewhere in Asia to
establish an actual or potential equality with the West. T h e stages from
feudalism through capitalism to socialism could be telescoped inward, it
appeared, to enable Asia to catch u p with Europe. T h e task of dethroning
Eurocentric history was to establish that the non-West had an equally valid
place in that agenda.
In the last two decades the establishment of Japan as the primary model
of prosperity and modernity makes this set of views difficult to sustain,
above all in Japan itself. Japan did not simply emulate the West more
successfully than odiers; it found the means to surpass Europe a n d America
and to export a different style of m a n a g e m e n t and government. Just as
Marxism and the other schemes which have dominated the historiography
of the past century sought to explain the rise of a capitalist and expansive
Europe, new schemes begin to emerge to explain the rise of East Asia and
especially Japan. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki has pointed out, we must go back
to the Victorian era to find in the West parallels for the confidence of the
Japanese scholars who now lead the offensive. 3 T h e Victorians too built
grand historical schema with Britain (read Japan) at the apex of civilization,
and had a nostalgia for a purer Gothic (read Tokugawa) age when the key
values of society were seen as unsullied by commercialism.
A new historiography now seeks to find the roots of Japan's success
precisely in the Tokugawa or Edo period when Japan was unified and
relatively self-contained. Instead of being backward, hierarchic and isola-
tionist, Tokugawa Japan is now seen by a wide variety of historians as die
key to Japan's modernity, and perhaps even to a new stage of modernity
for the rest of die world. A n u m b e r of economic historians have pointed
to the unified market, die sophisticated urban culture, die absorption of
new crops and techniques and die increase in productivity of diis period
as laying die basis for Meiji growdi i n d e p e n d e n t of developments in Euro-
pe. 4 In die past few years more ambitious claims have been made by Tsuji
Tatsuya, Kawakatsu Heita and Bito Masahide, diat die 'civilization' deve-
loped in Tokugawa J a p a n is some kind of pattern for a world in need of
new directions. 3 '
We have entered an era which calls for a new perspective on die theory
of civilization. This is n o n e odier, I believe, dian die wisdom hidden in
die forms of Japanese civilization which the Japanese people diemselves
created during die sakoku (Tokugawa) period, and which can be brought
to life in die present age."
Aldiough diis 'Edo-boom' or 'Edo-mania' has encouraged both romantic
nostalgia and arrant chauvinism, we should not be distracted b y d i e s e
HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SOUTHEAST ASIA AND KOREA 79

excesses from the fundamental challenge of a new historiography. Called

into question is the nature of modernity itself. Were there multiple ways
of coping with large populations, complex urban societies, rapid communi-
cations, competitive nation-states and a global market, or only variations
of the one model imposed on the rest of the world in the decades after
1870? The smaller states of eastern Asia - Korea, Vietnam, Burma, Siam,
and to a lesser extent some of the Archipelago states - also withdrew into
relative isolation from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries.
As with Japan, this period is the source of most of what we today associate
with the specific cultural identity of these states. The questions Japanese
historians are now asking of their history should be asked of the whole
region. It is not the uniqueness ofJapan but of northwestern Europe which
ought to be in question.

The 'Last Stand' in Southeast Asia and Korea

It is hardly surprising that the Englishmen responsible for the conquest
and reconstruction of Burma and the Malay States, the French in Vietnam
and Cambodia, the Japanese in Korea and the Dutch in the Archipelago
should have justified their actions by casting the respective andens regimes
in a negative light. When writer-activists such as Fytche, Gamier, Pavie,
Brooke, Swettenham, Snouck Hurgronje, Liefrink and Colijn portrayed
the nineteenth-century kingdoms as tyrannical, chaotic, backward-looking,
and incapable of delivering welfare to their people, they were in part making
the case for why these regimes had to be pushed aside.
There were however more fundamental mental attitudes in the nine-
teenth century which drove colonial-period scholars, including those deeply
sympathetic to the cultures in question, to conclusions often even more
negative than those of the first generation activists. As Michael Adas has
well shown, the eighteenth century marked a change in attitude of the
West to the non-West, as the confidence born of technological superiority
carried into the fields of statecraft and education.7 By the middle of the
eighteenth century the fascination many earlier European intellectuals had
felt for distant and exotic cultures was replaced by a growing conviction
that 'oriental despotism' kept these countries poor. 'This inertia of sluggish-
ness from which the country (Burma) suffers in respect to invention and
the progress of the arts may have many causes. But the principal one is
the government itself, oppressor of any industry.'8
In response to the European enlightenment this view became linked
with a theory of decline from an earlier period of stronger and more
effective states. There were at least three grounds for this theory. First,
European standards of what an effective state was had changed since the
early travellers had written enthusiastically about Pegu, Melaka, Brunei and
Ayudhya. Second, those early travel reports dated from the 'Age of Com-
merce' in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when many Asian
80 ANTHONY REID

states experienced a peak of wealth and centralization.9 Third, Europeans

began in the nineteenth century to uncover ruins of the classic temple
building civilizations of Angkor, Pagan, Champa and Java, which they could
equate with the vanished glories of Greece and Rome.
Raffles was the first and perhaps the most influential of these enlighten-
ment generation to be seduced by the romance of these overgrown monu-
ments, as he encountered them in Java. 'The grandeur of their ancestors',
he remarked, 'sounds like a fable in the mouth of the degenerate Javan;
and it is only when it can be traced in monuments, which cannot be falsified,
that we are led to give credit to their traditions concerning it.'10 Raffles
developed an elaborate theory to explain how the 'Malays' (in the broad
sense) had declined, through piracy, slavery, uncertain lines of succession,
arbitrary exactions and monopolies, the lack of effective law - all of which
had been encouraged or tolerated by the Dutch but could be put right by
the beneficence of British rule." At Angkor a half-century later were un-
covered 'ruins of such grandeur [...] that, at first view, one is filled with
profound admiration, and cannot but ask what has become of this powerful
race, so civilized, so enlightened, the authors of these gigantic works'.12
It should be acknowledged that indigenous historiography often re-
inforced this notion of decline. The more powerful kings of the past (Se-
jong, Anawhrata, Boromatrailokanatha, Le Thanh-tong, Iskandar Muda,
Agung) achieved legendary status as the founders of religion and the makers
of the law. In Korea and Vietnam the chronicles of the nineteenth century
tended to perceive political perfection in Tang Dynasty China, and to judge
local phenomena as deviations from this ancient model.
The intellectual climate in which colonial scholars constructed the first
modern national histories of the countries in question, therefore, deter-
mined that the more remote past would attract most of the attention and
the immediate pre-colonial past be seen in terms of failure and missed
opportunities. Japanese scholars such as Kawai and Itani saw the last Korean
dynasty as marked by chaotic divisions and inability to cope with modern
pressures.13 Coedes conceded that the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient
preferred the intellectual challenge of reconstructing a lost history of an-
cient Cambodia to working on more recent periods where documentation
was relatively rich - especially in the cast of Vietnam.14 Those who did
reconstruct the history of pre-colonial Vietnam (led by Luro, Silvestre and
Schreiner) took the view that 'administration, justice, religion, literature,
and science all came from the Middle Kingdom [...] and [after indepen-
dence from China] the Annamites did not make any progress on Chinese
civilization'.15 The widespread concern of eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-
tury Asian states to keep Europeans at arms length was seen as a 'spirit of
blind and arrogant self-sufficiency'.16 D.G.E. Hall's monumental History
(1955), still the most influential general textbook for pre-colonial Southeast
Asia, summed up well the scholarship of the colonial period. After 1635
Burma 'surrendered to traditionalism and isolation, and its increasing in-
HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SOUTHEAST ASIA AND KOREA 81

transigeance and xenophobia made western trade with Burma [. ..] and
even ordinary diplomatic relations, impossible'.17 The Emperor Tu-Duc in
negotiating with the French, 'took his cue from China and was too simple-
minded to realise [. ..] the consequences'. Aceh (here following Vlekke
almost verbatim) and Brunei were nests of pirates, while the Balinese dynasty
of Lombok exercised 'cruel oppression' over the Sasaks.18 The major theme
of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is in fact the inexorable
advance of European power.
Nationalist historiography might have been expected to reverse this pat-
tern and turn the 'last stand' into a heroic source of pride. But the nationa-
lists were energetic modernizers who had learned their modernity in wes-
tern-style schools, reading and reacting against colonial histories. The rulers
who had compromised with or been humiliated by the colonial conquerors
were sources of embarrassment rather than pride. They represented 'feudal'
hierarchies subsequently fossilized under the colonial umbrella into forms
which the nationalists saw as an obstacle to progress. It was the shadowier
ancient kingdoms of presumed great power which seized their imagination
as it had that of the colonial scholars. Angkor became the central symbol
of Cambodian nationalism, as Pagan, Sukhothai, the Melaka sultanate,
Sriwijaya and Majapahit did elsewhere. The Brunei sketched by the chroni-
cler of Magellan's expedition has become the model for the newest of
Southeast Asian's nationalisms. Sukarno's exhortation may stand for many:

We have a glorious past... What Indonesian's national spirit will

not live when hearing the greatness of the kingdoms of Melayu
and Sriwijaya, the greatness of the first Mataram, the greatness of
die time of Sindok and Airlangga and Kediri and Singasari and
Majapahit and Pajajaran - the greatness too of Bintara, Banten,
and Mataram under Suntan Agung.19

Where they were not ignored altogether, the later kingdoms seemed pathe-
tic or reactionary. Nationalists preferred to focus on peasant or proto-
nationalist rebellion, of which the Tay Sono in Vietnam and Diponegoro
in Java were particular exemplars.
The attractiveness of the Say Son as a model 'people's rebellion' was one
reason why die dynasty which crushed it was especially denigrated by Vietna-
mese nationalists and Marxist histories. The stricture of die colonial histo-
rians that die Nguyen regime was 'pure monarchy, absolute, without con-
trol, without effective constitution, without any other limit than powerful
custom become almost ritual and a code transmitted from time immemo-
rial' was congenial enough to be quoted repeatedly by Marxist nationalists.1"'
The dominant view in Hanoi until recently was diat die Nguyen dynasty
'destroyed every progressive policy of Quang Trung [the Tay Son ruler]
and put a reactionary 'anticommerce policy into effect'. "' It represented
a 'profound and irremediable crisis' of the feudal order." In a similar way
82 ANTHONY REID

North Korean Marxists regarded the policy of the regent Taewon'gun who
dominate Korea after 1864 as 'conservative, anachronistic, and aimed at
[...] revamping the feudal system'.23 Non-communist nationalists in both
countries were almost as scathing about the inadequacy of their last rulers.24
There are plenty of indications that these negative attitudes have begun
to change, both among historians and political decision-makers. Korean
scholars were probably the earliest and most determined revisionists, eager
to overturn the image of a stagnant and fossilized late Choson Dynasty
established by Japanese scholarship. Both in the north and south, Marxist
categories tended directed the early stages of this quest to a pursuit of
'incipient capitalist'. The North Korean view had taken a clear if somewhat
crude shape by the 1960s: 'Weak capitalist relations gradually emerged in
Korea in the eighteenth century while feudal relations continued to be
prevalent. The newly emerged capitalist relations brought about a more
naked and more direct form of exploitation.'25 Southern historians were
also concerned to show that modern capitalism had begun independendy
before it was forced upon Korea by the Japanese, though there was also
greater readiness to question the Eurocentric Marxist progression.26 The
Sirhak (Practical Learning) school of scholarship which became dominant
in die eighteenth century has also been celebrated in bodi Nordi and
Soudi as an indigenous indication of modernity and 'part of die effort to
recover die historical ego of die nation'.27
The work on Konbaung Burma of Myo Myint, Lieberman and Koenig
had undermined die stagnant image by showing a process of almost constant
reform.28 For Siam, Gesinck, Reynolds and Wyatt have suggested diat
Rama I, despite his claims to be recreating Ayudhya, 'really intended some-
thing fundamentally new'.29 Nidhi Aeusrivongse has taken diis furdier by
pointing to die complete revolution in social and intellectual forms which
underlay the changes from die top.30 Aldiough Woodside (1971) still re-
mains almost alone as a serious study in English of the Nguyen dynasty,
die information available has been fundamentally transformed by die work
on the local land registers by Nguyen Dinh Dau, Nguyen Due Nghinh and
odiers in Vietnamese, and Yumio Sakurai in Japanese." Similar sources in
Korea have recendy been analyzed also in an empirical and careful spirit.32
A revival of interest in die last dynasty has been marked by a 1989 conference
in Ho Chi Minh City, and by a number of publications about old Hue
which seem motivated as much by nostalgia as by a desire to boost tourism.
James Warren's work on Sulu, van der Kraan's on Lombok, Trocki's on
Riau-Johor and Shaharil Talib's on Trengganu have begun die revisionist
task for some of die more dynamic Archipelago states, diough almost
everydiing remains to be done on die internal dynamics of states such as
Aceh, Palembang, Bone and Wajo in diis period.33 For the Javanese states
after the Gianti Treaty (1755) die work of Ricklefs, Kumar and Carey has
begun to show die rich diversity and capacity for social and intellectual
change even after die military disasters of die previous period.34
HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SOUTHEAST ASIA AND KOREA 83

A 'Chinese Century5
The century 1740-1840 witnessed a remarkable growth of Chinese influence
in the smaller Asian states though his has been obscured in the western
literature by die opposite reaction of the European enclave ports, which
sought to limit their earlier dependence on Chinese intermediaries. The
massacre of about 10,000 Chinese in Batavia in 1740 was one tragic indica-
tion of the changing climate in these European ports, but die Spanish
exclusion of non-Catholic Chinese from the Philippines in 1755 (repeated
in 1766) was of even greater long-term importance. A distinct overseas
Chinese identity was for die following century much less attractive in die
Dutch settlements and virtually impossible in die Spanish. Chinese in Java
were more inclined to assimilate into die indigenous states, and in the
Philippines to avoid Manila in favour of such ports as Sulu.35
China was meanwhile finally overcoming its disabling antipathy towards
die overseas enterprise of its emigrant population. The last of die many
imperial bans on private Chinese trade abroad was diat of die Kanxi Empe-
ror in 1717. It was revoked in 1727, legitimating and encouraging an
overseas junk trade already rapidly developing. Sojourning abroad, and
especially serving a foreign government, continued to be condemned, but
die immensely wealdiy Batavia trader Chen Ilao may have been die last to
be punished when he was sentenced to banishment on his return in 1749.
In 1754 the Chinese authorities declared for die first time diat any Chinese
with valid reasons would be entided to return home and have his property
protected.'6 The effect of diis relaxation was quickly evident in die outflow
of traders, miners, planters and adventurers of all kinds.
This era saw the establishment of colonies of Chinese miners in nordiern
Vietnam, western Borneo, Phiket, Kelantan and Bangka. Chinese planters
established new export industries of pepper in Brunei, Cambodia and
Chantaburi, and of gambier in Riaujohor.37 In Soudieast Siam as well as
Keda and Java, sugar plantations were opened by Chinese immigrants. The
Mekong delta area became a new frontier for Chinese agricultural and
commercial enterprise. Whereas rulers in Burma and nordiern (Trinh)
Vietnam reacted with fear and tight controls, the Nguyen rulers of Hue,
like Taksin and Rama I in Siam and the Yamtuan Mudas in Riau, were
eager to use Chinese colonists to increase not only dieir revenue but their
control over frontier areas.
Most of these economic pioneers produced or traded for die China
market. Hence a great expectation occurred in the junk trade to such ports
as Ha Tien, Saigon, Terengganu, Riau, Brunei (where seven junks a year
were said to be arriving in the 1770s) and Sulu. The greatest of" all Chinese
ports outside China, however, was Bangkok, which probably replaced Bata-
via at the end of the eighteenth century as the busiest port between Calcutta
and Canton. According to Crawfurd tiiere were 280 junks and about 11,500
84 ANTHONY REID

seamen, almost all ethnic Chinese, based in Bangkok in the second decade
of the nineteenth century.38
Despite its conservative Confucian ideology, the Chienlung Emperor's
long reign was prosperous and relatively effective in dealing with its Asian
neighbours. After abortive military intervention in Burma in 1766 and
Vietnam in 1788, and a prickly conservatism towards the 'usurper', Taksin,
relations were quickly restored with all these states to a level of almost
unprecedented warmth. Tribute missions visited the Chinese capital during
the last ten years of the Chienlung reign (1785-1795) at a rate of almost
four a year - more than at any time since the sixteenth century. From
Korea envoys continued to arrive about twice a year as late as 1874, while
Vietnam sent missions almost every year and Siam was more zealous than
it had been for four centuries - omitting to send tribute in only five years
of the period 1784-1832. Even in the Archipelago, where no state had sent
tribute to China since the early 1500s, Sulu recommended the practice in
1727 and sent several formal missions between then and 1763.19
There is as yet no historiography of this 'Chinese century', at least in
English. As a theme it is unlikely to appeal to nationalists, and few historians
working on Southeast Asia handle the fragmentary Chinese records with
ease. Nevertheless a comparative treatment of Southeast Asia in this period
of wariness about the West must take account of the alternative economic
and intellectual stimuli from China and Chinese.

Cultural Innovation and the Problem of Modernity

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that what we know of the so-called
'traditional' literature and art of the countries in question was produced
or reproduced in this 'last stand' period. Earlier works have not survived
well, and modern collections began to be formed in this period. Beyond
diat superficial point, however, it is also clear that the courts, the religious
institutions and the new social classes called forth a vast quantity of creative
work, which in, each of the literary and artistic traditions represented
changes so profound as to raise questions about the nature and the sources
of modernity. These question must be central to the agenda of the project
we have embarked upon.
Nidhi's work (still primarily in Thai) had made the point most forcefully
for early Bangkok literature (1788-1824), where he finds 'a new and vigorous
spirit of experimenting with new techniques, new motifs, new verse forms,
and new ideas' which set Thai literature on a path which might have led
to a modern sensibility even without the massive impact of western models
after 1855 (Nidhi's English summary of Aeusrivongse 1984). He notes a
number of novel features both in genre (more prose, and work intended
to be read rather than recited; more 'popular' forms being adopted into
court literature; more drama; more fiction; less use of the Indie epics) and
in content. There was a greater realism, with epic (and Indian) heroes
HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SOUTHEAST ASIA AND KOREA 85

giving way to kings, traders, foreigners and the people of everyday city life,
as well as narrations of excursions into the countryside. There is a tendency
to humanistic as well as realistic depictions. Ordinary people are often
portrayed as comic, but the heroes have to learn exemplary behaviour
through experience, unlike the god-like heroes of Ayudhya. There is there-
fore a more complex characterization. This trend towards realism in litera-
ture is parallelled by realism in painting, especially in the everyday urban
scenes in the lower parts of temple murals.
Since some of the impetus for change was a greater emphasis on Buddhist
morality rather than Hindu or animist cosmology, it is not surprising that
parallel trends occurred in Burmese art and literature. Yet Korea and
Vietnam appear to have experienced a somewhat similar evolution in a
Confucian tradition. In Korea the 'practical learning' (sirhak) school turned
away from philosophical speculations and toward a thorough examination
of contemporary affairs. Novels reached a wider audience (including
women) and treated of Korean as well as Chinese themes, while painting
became more naturalistic and included popular everyday scenes. The wider
use of Korean as opposed to Chinese was parallelled by the flowering of a
popular Vietnamese literature in nom, most successfully in the radical
woman poet Ho Xuan Hong. The masterpiece of Vietnamese poetry, the
Tale of Kieu, can still move modern readers even though it was written by
a conventionally-educated Confucian scholar under the Emperor Gia Long
(1802-1820). In both countries neo-Confucian critiques of modern customs
by some literati were accompanied by more popular and subversive forms.
In all these societies China may have been important less as a model
than as a source of 'otherness', of self-consciousness about individual and
collective diversity. In the Malay World Europeans and Arabs as well as
Chinese provided that stimulus. The modernity of Munshi Abdullah's
writing is sometimes dismissed as outside the Malay mainstream, but there
were other authors of the period who were almost as radical in bringing
an Islamic critique to bear on Malay society and history. The Buddhist ethic
which Nidhi identifies as driving out animist, Hindu and royal-mythological
mentalities mayfindparallels in the work of Islamic writers of the Palembang
and Riau schools, such as Kemas Fakhruddin, Abdul-Samad-al-Palimbani
and Raja Ali Haji.4" There is no doubt that the last named wrote about
foreigners and traders in a similar realistic spirit to that discerned by Nidhi,
and not simply as attributes of royal grandeur. On all these questions,
however, and still more in relation to Bugis and Acehnese literatures,
comparative work has barely begun.
In Java and Bali, despite the image of literary 'decline' which colonial
scholars picked up from indigenous informants, 'the 18th and 19th centu-
ries are not more often seen as a period of cultural renaissance, when most
of the existing corpus of literature was written.'" Despite the Dutch presence
in Java indigenous writers were almost as isolated from European literary
norms as their Korean and Vietnamese counterparts. Nevertheless there
86 ANTHONY REID

were radically new types of writing (including the realistic court diary of a
lady soldier); there was a new consciousness of Javanese as one people
(bangsa) amongst a variety of others, to be criticized in the balance with
other ethnic groups; and an Islamic ethic became much more influential
(Kumar 1984 and forthcoming). In Bali and Lombok new genres became
popular, including new types of kakawin and Panji stories written not for
the courts but for a variety of diverse patrons.
The colonial conquests of the nineteenth century in one sense mark the
progressive retreat of extinction of one autonomous polity after another.
Although these defeats have been seen as fundamental watersheds from
both a colonial and a nationalist viewpoint, there may be deeper senses in
which the high colonial era continued patterns of commercialization and
intellectual innovation which had begun during the 'Last Stand'. This, I
suggest, makes these innovations even more interesting. As the Japanese
example forces us to reinterpret the idea of the modern, these other Asian
examples will be of increasing importance.

Notes
This paper arises from a three-year project funded by the Toyota Foundation, to whom
gratitude is first due. My collaborators in that project are the source of many of the ideas
in this paper - Nichi Aeusrivongse, Martina Deuchler, Yeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells,
Alfons van der Kraan, Ann Kumar, Victor Lieberman, Yumio Sukurai and Carl Trocki.
In addition, I must thank Nola Cooke for much of the material on Vietnam, Lorraine
Gesick, Patrick Jory, David Marr, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Li Tana, Stewart Lone, Graig
Reynolds and Tan Lay-cheng.
Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450-1680 (2 vols., New Haven 1988-
1993).
I am indebted for much of this section to two unpublished papers by Dr. Morris-Suzuki,
'Re-writing History: Civilization Theory in Contemporary Japan', and 'Edo Boom'.
HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SOUTHEAST ASIA AND KOREA 87

4 Thomas Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization 1750-1920 (Berkeley 1988).

Hayami Akira, 'Introduction', in: Akari Hayami and Yoshihiro Tsubouchi eds., Economic
Development in Rice Producing Societies. Some Aspects of East Asian Economic History 1500-1900
(Tokyo 1989).
5 Tsuji Tatsuya, Edojidai o kangaeru (1988). Kawakatsu Heita, Nihon bumei to indai Seiyo:
'Sokoku'Saito [Japanese civilization and the modern West] (Tokyo 1991). Bito Masahide,
Edojidai to wan nani ka [What is the Edo age] (1992).
6 Kawakatsu Heita, 'Shakai no bussan fukugo' toshite no bunmei', Mugendai 91 (1992).
7 Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men. Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western
Dominance (Ithaca 1989).
8 C M . Mantegazza, La Birmanie (Rome 1784) 103.
9 Reid, Southeast Asia.
10 Thomas Stamford Raffles, The History ofJava (London 1817. Reprinted Kuala Lumpur
1965) II, 6.
11 Thomas Stamford Raffles, Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles,
by his widow (2 vols., London 1835) I, 90-100.
12 Henri Mouhot, Travels in the Central Parts of Indo-China (Siam), Cambodia, and Laos during
the years 1858, 1859, and 1860 (2 vols., London 1864. Reprinted Bangkok 1986).
13 Kawai Hirotami, 'Chosen ni okeru toso no gen'in to so tqji nojokyo* [Cause of political
factional strife in Choson dynasty and socio-political conditions of the period], Shigaku
zasshi27/3 (1916). Itani Zen'ichi, Chosen keizai-shi [An economic history of Korea] (Tokyo
1928).
14 G. Coedes, 'Etudes indochinoises', BSEI26 (1951) 437-462.
15 A. Schreiner, IAS institutions annamites en Basse-Cochinchine avant la conquetefrancaise (2 vols.,
Saigon 1900-1902) I, 53-54. E. Luro, Le Pays d'Annam; Etudes sur Vorganisation politique et
sodale des annamites (Paris 1878). J. Silvestre, L'Empire d'Annam et lepeuple annamiie (Paris
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