Colonialism

Conceptions of colonialism in Southeast Asia have developed significantly since 1970, though scholarship began widening its historical gaze of the region's history and colonialism's place in it nearly a decade earlier. In response to colonial and nationalist-oriented histories of the colonial past, in which the attention was directed toward colonial administrators, policies, and interests in the region, scholars began shifting their focus, creating histories that told the same stories from internal, local, or indigenous perspectives. One of the most significant interventions was offered by John Smail, who saw a lingering problem in the historiography of modern Southeast Asian history. He concluded that both colonial and nationalist scholarship seemed to privilege the same European contexts, events, and narratives about the "colonial period" even when their political sympathies tended to diverge in analysis. In addition, the very conception of "modernity" in the region's history was automatically being associated with the trends, institutions, and ideas that emerged during the colonial period. According to Smail, modern history tended to focus on colonial narratives, concerns, and priorities that signaled a deep disjuncture with the precolonial past, whose own narratives, cultural forms, and terminology were being neglected by the grand narratives of empire, development, and modernity. In order to challenge the prevailing fixtures of colonial and nationalist historiography, Smail called for a writing and periodization of modern Southeast Asian history that applied indigenous categories of analysis, reconstituting the way in which modernity and colonialism would be defined, interpreted, and chronicled. Identifying these cultural forms that could structure the writing of an "autonomous" history of Southeast Asia during this period of intense Eurasian exchange became the overarching paradigm for scholars of the late 1960s and 1970s. This approach aimed to address the imbalance in scholarship, which had tended strongly toward European-oriented histories (which emphasize fundamental changes in society), by favoring histories that engaged the possibility of regional cultural continuities. To Smail, colonialism would no longer mark the arrival of modernity; it would merely mark a stage within the long-term patterns and processes of the region's history.

These adjustments lifted the idea of colonialism from the confines of European studies and placed it within the framework of Southeast Asian studies, which shifted attention that previously privileged the study of history through colonial categories to studies that investigated the nature of indigenous culture during the colonial encounter. While early studies might have explored the ways in which ideas of leadership, agriculture patterns, community organization, and kinship relations were affected by colonial policies and practices, the new interest in an "autonomous" perspective urged scholars to prioritize local institutions, patterns, and terms as the main subject of inquiry, so that the study of colonialism would become integrated into the cultural history and anthropology of Southeast Asia. One example could be found in the work of Emanuel Sarkisyanz, who demonstrated through his study of Burmese Buddhism that Southeast Asians reacted and responded to colonialism through local terms and concepts inherent to their worldview. The dismantling of the monarchy, subsequent rebellions, and nationalism were all considered through the prism of Buddhism in Burma, suggesting that it was possible to view the colonial period from a more Southeast Asian perspective. At the same time, effort was directed toward the ways in which global, regional, and local forces bound and interacted with peasant societies outside state or religious institutions, shifting the terms of engagement of colonialism to everyday life and practices. Seminal works such as James C. Scott's The Moral Economy of the Peasant directed attention to the ways in which global market economies affected the everyday life of the peasant in Southeast Asia, fundamentally challenging local conceptions of legitimacy, economy, and authority. In addition, such approaches stretched the legacy of precolonial traditions, which were often labeled as "traditional," into an epistemological space that previously scholarship had neglected to consider. Indigenous religion, ritual, and customary laws, and other modes of the precolonial conceptual world, became categories of analysis that were now used to study the role and nature of colonialism in Southeast Asia.