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The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period, and:
Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief (review)

Article  in  Journal of World History · January 1996

DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2005.0049

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Review: [untitled]
Author(s): Michael W. Charney
Reviewed work(s):
The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period by Leonard Y.
Andaya
Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief by Anthony Reid
Source: Journal of World History, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 145-149
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20078666
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Book Reviews 145

in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had had long experience in

colonization and cultural conquest. Although one would have wel
comed information on trade across the great silk road and Western con
tacts with central Asia, the book represents medieval European history
in a world perspective.
The strength of this magisterial achievement rests on the impor
tant questions it raises; on its reflection of prodigious learning lightly
worn but creatively used; on its vivid, sensitive, and exciting prose;
and on its broad perspective, which always appreciates Muslim influ
ences on Mediterranean regions as well as pagan influences on the
Baltic. If the book is perhaps too sophisticated to be put in the hands
of American undergraduates, graduate students, scholars, and teachers
will ignore it at their peril.
BENNETT D. HILL

Georgetown University

The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern

Period. By Leonard Y. Andaya. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1993. Pp. ix +
306. $38.

Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief.
Edited by Anthony Reid. New York: Cornell University Press,
1993. Pp. xvi + 286. (cloth); $15.95
$41.30 (paper).

Early modern southeast Asia offers one of the most provocative and
yet least understood periods in Asian history. The intersection of fire
arms, growing international trade, and a plethora of newly empowered
kingdoms ushered in a period of warfare, commercial competition,
political centralization, and territorial expansion that previous histori
ography has not brought together adequately. In recent years, histo
rians of early modern southeast Asia have contributed vigorous anal
yses of the period, stimulating and provoking valuable arguments and
research. But gaps have remained. The works under review here at
tempt to fill some of these gaps from a variety of perspectives and for
diverse areas within southeast Asia.
In The World of Maluku, Leonard Y. Andaya offers an inspiring
attempt to identify the fundamental conceptual constructs that deter
mined boundaries, conceptual and geographical, and legitimate be
havior in Malukan history. Malukan myths, he explains, formed a
unified world of "family" out of the many islands and ethnolinguistic
communities of the eastern Indonesian archipelago. Maluku's unity
 146 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING I 996

and prosperity depended upon the maintenance of dualism, especially

that of Ternate and Tidore, and the replication of the number four. As
Andaya cleverly shows, the Malukans' view of the early modern period
of their history is as a cycle in which their world moved from unity to
disunity, and from the existence of the four pillars to the failure to
maintain them.
In Andaya's view, Islam, increased trade, and the influence of Euro
pean ideas of the proper status and role of kingship all worked to shat
ter the Malukan world. Islam brought increased access to firearms and
Muslim trade and thus strengthened Malukan sultans to an unprece
dented degree with regard to other traditional sources of authority. Due
to Dutch overlordship and the widening gulf between the sultan and
other leaders brought by international trade, the Malukan sultans aban
doned their obligations to the periphery, changing the nature of ex
change from rituals of unity to the sultans' self-interested pursuit of
wealth and political power. Malukans saw in these changes the col
lapse of Malukan unity, which the popular revolt of Nuku and his en
thronement as sultan of Tidore in 1801 restored.
Andaya's approach to his source material is unusual and sometimes
a tad too ambitious, but it is generally effective. Because of the absence
of indigenous materials, he is forced, with the help of recent ethno
graphic materials, to reconstruct the early modern world of Maluku
from contemporary European translations of Malukan traditions. Of
course, there are some problems with this approach, as Andaya fully
admits. European material and myths that have survived from the
early modern period are usually concerned with elites or simply with
kings. Further, one might wonder if the tremendous task of extracting
indigenous views from European records produced some four hundred
years ago is really possible to achieve without significant distortion.
These problems aside, Andaya has made some useful observations that
are certain to stimulate future approaches to the eastern archipelago,
and southeast Asia in general, for the early modern period.
The ten pieces brought together by Anthony Reid present a diverse
assortment of analyses by major scholars of early modern southeast
Asian history. A conference in Lisbon in 1989 seems to have provided
the inspirational and coordinating basis for the volume. Of course,
some papers in the volume present arguments that can be found in
fuller form elsewhere. Andaya's chapter, for example, reiterates some
themes that are central to his World of Maluku. Reid has happily con
tributed a paper to the volume, which, in keeping with his structuralist
approach, is geographically and conceptually the most general in this
volume. Reid discusses rapid indigenous conversion to Catholicism
Book Reviews 147

and Sunni Islam that helped characterize the 1550-1650 period. It will
come as no great surprise to those familiar with Reid's past work that
he ties the various reasons for the quickened pace of conversion to
growing maritime trade.
Luis Filipe Ferreira Reis Thomaz and Barbara Watson Andaya both
discuss how pressures emanating from international commerce divided
and weakened certain societies in early modern southeast Asia.
Thomaz, for example, argues that before the Portuguese conquest,
Melaka split into two factions, with the Chinese, Tamils, and Javanese
eagerly viewing a Portuguese alternative to Islamic Melakan expan
sion opposed to the Gujeratis and Islamic Melakan port officials, who
saw anti-Islamic Portuguese competition as a threat to Melaka's com
mand of subsidiary seaports. This observation is important, and it
questions the significance of the Portuguese conquest of Melaka in
1511: did the Portuguese destroy Melaka, or was Melaka already begin
ning to fragment before the Portuguese arrived, perhaps even before
they rounded the Cabo da Boa Esperan?a?
Barbara Watson Andaya stresses the relationship between the hulu
(upstream) and the hilir (downstream) peoples as one based on cooper
ation rather than downstream dominance over upstream producers. In
the seventeenth century, she argues, the pressures fostered by the pep
per trade and the Dutch turned downstream courts from beneficent
patrons into self-interested debt collectors, breaking the bond between
the interior and the coasts. An important question remains: how do
groups such as the Minangkabau and their upstream polities fit into
southeast Asia-wide structures of rise and decline? Further, how do the
histories of the upstream worlds challenge periodizations based upon
European colonization of the coasts and lowlands?
Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells and Pierre Yves Manguin both dis
cuss problems that hindered southeast Asian commercial competition
as early as the early sixteenth century. Kathirithamby-Wells explains
that southeast Asian merchant capitalism did not develop in the early
modern period, when royal monopolies forced the average merchant
out of the competition, foreigners filled indigenous trade positions,
and the regularity of royal seizure of private property prevented capital
accumulation necessary for the rise of a merchant class. For his part,
Manguin suggests that before the Portuguese attack, the Chinese and
Gujeratis may have come to dominate long-distance trade, forcing
southeast Asians to shift from long-distance trade carried on by large
southeast Asian junks to local trade and politics. An important obser
vation is that the Portuguese capture of Melaka split the trading world
in half, as Aceh took over the Indian Ocean share of the trade and
 148 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SPRING 1996

Banten took over the South China Sea share. Although perceptive?
and some of Manguin's observations are scintillating?his suggestions
cannot be accepted with any degree of certainty until much more work
will have been done on early modern shipping technologies in south
east Asia.
Both Yoneo Ishii, focusing on internal restructuring, and Dhiravat
na Pombejra, focusing on Ayudhya's international trade connections,
examine the growth of the Ayudhyan state in the early modern era.
Ishii's focus is on Naresuan, an early modern ruler who was able to turn
toward innovation and away from tradition, taking full advantage of
the new tools of statecraft made available by the trade boom of the six
teenth and seventeenth centuries, including commercial profits, for
eign experts, and Portuguese firearms and mercenaries. This approach
enabled Naresuan to lay the administrative foundations for a central
ized state with royal control over the Buddhist sangha necessary for
political centralization.
Parallels to Naresuan can be found throughout early modern south
east Asia. Keith W. Taylor, in his chapter, explains how three moments
of the life of Nguyen Hoang served as sites for the intersection of tradi
tion and innovation and showed how many diverse alternatives were
available to early modern southeast Asian rulers. Further, I know from
my own work on early modern Arakan that Arakanese kings such as
Min Khamaung had access to the same resources as Naresuan's Ayu
dhya and used these resources in the same ways as Naresuan did. Such
commonalities beg broader questions, and Ishii's work is certain to go
far in aiding such efforts.
Pombejra's chief contribution is his observation that Phra Petra
cha's coup de force in 1688, often described as an antiforeign rebellion,
was really a political conflict. But the 1688 revolution was not a water
shed; Pombejra explains that the elite and royal participation in inter
national trade was an "irreversible trend" long before the 1688 coup.
Further, the coup was not the beginning of Ayudhyan isolation: the
court after 1688 needed things that could only be gained from interna
tional trade. The court continued to employ Chinese, Malays, and
other Muslims, and Ayudhyan-crown ships continued to trade with
Japan.
Like Dhiravat na Pombejra, Victor Lieberman also makes an argu
ment for a mainland kingdom, here Burma, that did not shift to isola
tion in the seventeenth century. In perhaps the most complex and
inspired argument in the volume, Lieberman challenges an argument
made by Reid that the mainland kingdoms of southeast Asia turned
away from trade in the seventeenth century and that their bureau
 Book Reviews 149

cratic administrations could not cope with the loss of trade revenues.
Although Lieberman agrees with Re id's assessment of decline in the
archipelago, he also sees more sustained trends on the mainland, such
as territorial expansion, the spread of Buddhist orthodoxy, cultural
Burmanization of noncore peoples, and administrative centralization.
Support for these trends, he argues, came from continued maritime
trade, access
to firearms, monetization, and domestic economic
growth. Lieberman explains that the mainland (using the case study of
Burma) and the archipelago experienced the seventeenth century dif
ferently because of the absence of spices on the mainland, the larger
size of mainland armies, and a mainland geography that prevented
effective naval blockades. Lieberman's work continues to be both
energetic and well researched, and his extensive contributions to the
study of early modern southeast Asia are certain to affect the direction
and quality of research for the present and next generation of scholars
of southeast Asian history.
Both the works under review have made an important contribution
to the study of early modern southeast Asia. There are still gaps in our
understanding of this period and area. Some areas in the early modern
period have been less studied than others and are not as well under
stood. But Leonard Andaya and the scholars who contributed to
Anthony Reid's edited volume have pushed our understanding to new
levels.
MICHAEL W. CHARNEY

University ofMichigan

of Slavery: The Course of Abolition

Slow Death inNorthern Nige
ria,
1897-1936. By Paul E. Lovejoy and Jan S. Hogendorn.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xvii + 391.
$69.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

The abolition of slavery in west Africa was a largely neglected topic

until these authors, well known for previous studies of slavery and the
slave trade in Africa, began studying it in the 1970s. This thorough
and scholarly work presents their findings, which are of interest not
only for historians of Africa, but also for those concerned with com
parative and world
history.
The significance of the subject should be evident from the fact that
the Sokoto caliphate in northern Nigeria was one of the largest slave
societies in the world throughout the nineteenth century. When Brit
ish rule was first imposed on the caliphate and the surrounding areas at

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