Anticolonialism in Southeast Asia

The earliest traces of "anticolonialism" can be found in the documents compiled by scholar-officials working within the various colonial administrations. Specifically, political officers who accompanied the initial military campaigns of conquest and later those within the civil service were among the first to interpret and write about the wide range of responses to colonial operations in the region. Many of these accounts speak of anticolonial resistance as brief interludes or disturbances, mere interruptions to the social order established by the authorities. Within official reports, gazetteers, manuals, and censuses, administrators organized, defined, and made sense of these outbreaks, thereby creating the very categories and perspectives under which "resistance" and "anticolonialism" would eventually be considered. Throughout the region, officials identified key cultural markers such as protective tattooing, charms, and astronomical symbols as part of the "traditional" uniform of resistance, which combined superstitious beliefs and religion in order to appeal to the masses who participated in these movements. Other features included the rebuilding of royal palaces and religious edifices in mountain strongholds that were said to represent cosmological and spiritual power. Case studies demonstrate these similarities in the early minlaung (prince) movements of Burma (1885–1890s), the "save-the-emperor" movements of northern Vietnam (1885–1896), and the Java War (1825–1830). Characteristics of anticolonial resistance were first identified, labeled, and codified by officials whose jobs were to affirm colonial policies as much as they were supposed to collect and interpret the societies they were charged with administering.

More importantly, colonial officials were interested in establishing the causal factors for these disturbances and wrote their reports accordingly, influencing scholars who would later use these sources, their approaches, and their descriptions for their own studies. Reports often stated that these brief instances of violence resulted from irrationality, superstition, gullibility, false prophets, religious fanaticism, and other inherent cultural traits that predictably would endure if not for colonial intervention. It was no surprise that initial pockets of resistance that faced the Dutch in Java, the British in Lower Burma, and the French in Vietnam would be considered akin both in character and origin to the anticolonial rebellions in the early twentieth century, though the circumstances would be considerably different. Thus, officials were charged with finding and naming examples of what was "anticolonial" in Southeast Asia partly in hopes of establishing the difference between traditional Asia and modern Europe. In this manner, the idea of anticolonialism began to take shape along a binary framing that placed Southeast Asians and Europeans at opposite ends, structuring the way in which protest, resistance, and revolt would be studied in the years to come.