Maritime Trade and State Development In Early Southeast Asia

Author:  Kenneth R. Hall

Mata Kuliah Sejarah Maritim S2 Ilmu Sejarah Universitas Indonesia

Pengajar : Prof. Susanto Zuhdi

Diringkas oleh Hasan Sadeli

 

The subject of this book is the interaction between south east asian peoples and foreign cultures that was consequence of the strategic position of the south east asian archipelago along the major premodern maritime route connecting east and west. Under examination are the classical centers of power that emerged between the first and early fourteenth centuries A.D. and the problems their leaders encountered in ruling their domains. Two forms of classical states are examined : the riverine coastal states of the Indonesian archipelago, the malay peninsula, and the philipines and the lowland wet-rice states of the mainland (burma, thailand, cambodia, laos, and vietnam) and of java.

The book approaches the sources of the southeast asia classical era with the tools of modern economic history and highlights the role that international trade in southeast asia played in the evolution of classical civilizations. The view taken here is that southeast asia response to international trade was a reflection of preexisting patterns of exchange. Well developed internal socioeconomic and political networks existed in southeast asia before significant foreign economic penetration took place with the growth of interest in southeast asian commodities and the refocusing of the major east-west commercial routes on the region during the early centuries of the cristian era, internal conditions within southeast asian states changed to accomodate the increased external contacts. The juncture of the trade routes and the existing or developing forms of exchange and state polity in southeast asia suggest the way this adjustment was made.

An early type of exchange involved highland hunters and gatherers who exchanged their goods and services with lowland cultivators ; for example, trade between groups that practiced swidden (slash and burn) and sawah cultivation. Another type of early exchange network was charaterized by trade between hinterland populations and coastal peoples ; the hinterland people supplied local agricultural or forest products that were in turn dispensed to international traders. Coastal based traders returned goods of foreign origin or specialized services for example moneylending to the hinterland producers. In a third variant, foreign merchants established a coastal base and the worked from this base to organize the necessary trade mechanism that allowed them to extract local products from the hinterlands. In contrast to some views that identify this last patterns of interaction as most characteristic of southeast asia premodern age, this study contends that direct contact was unusual and that southeast asia interaction with foreign merchants was the result of indigenous initiative and response to oppotunities that already existed.

In this book, as in other studies by western historians, there is a tendency to impose western values on ideas of what constituted advanced civilisations in early southeast asia. Urbanization and the development of state system are considered signs of advancement. The great urban centers of angkor (cambodja) and java with their massive stone edifices thus become standars for comparison. But were the nonurban yet focused classical societies less valid as being advanced or civilized and was it necessary for an advanced civilizations to leave impressive temple complexes.

In partial response to this dichotomy, the focus here is on political integration rather than on political centralisation. The evolution of southeast asian societies needs to be understood on their terms. An approach to this understanding can be made by looking at instances of cultural transition an continuity that took place wether or not there was outside stimulations or development of a highly centralized polity that is a state in which a bureaucratic center dominated and efectively integrated its subordinate population centers under its elaborate system of administration, justice, and protection. The states of southeast asia classical age are not depicted as highly bureaucratic polities even in the case of the properous cambodian and javanese wet rice realms. Rather this study analyzes why a higher degree of political centralization was not possible, despite the opportunities for economic development and consequent political innovation afforded by participation in international trade.

Statecraft in indianezed asia geography reveals two dominant patterns. The island world is characterized by numerous river system that flow interior highland to ocean, a feature that had significant impact upon the island worlds social and economic evolution. Over time people settled among these various river systems, populations becoming concentrated only in the broad delta regions at river mouths. This diffusion of the population had important implications for the island realm’s political system, as those who attempted to govern the island world found it necessary to bring multiple river system under their authority in order to implement their political hegemony. Because it was impracticals to control and entire river system, a pattern more common than complete political subjugation emerged the establishment of partial hegemony through direct rule of only coastal plains and river mouths. By controlling the river mouth it was possible to influence movement up and down a river system. A river mouth ruler was able to utilize his controle over the riverine communications netwirk to forgevarious alliances with upriver groups.

In contrass to the geographical inaccessibility of the island world caused by multiple river system pattern, southeast asia’s mainland along with a small number of island locales is dominated by major river system with corresponding broad river plains, which are relatively flat, fertile, and extremly productive agriculturraly. These river plains were conducive to the development of population centers by those seeking to cultivate rice in the rich soil of the plains. Rice plain population centers also proved easier to dominate politically than the more diffused population centers of the multiple river system geography. Southeast asia rice plain, for example pagan in the irrawady river plain of burma, angkor near the tonle sap in cambodja, and vietnam state in the red river basin of vietnam.

            In the island world this great plain geographical pattern is found in central java and again the brantas river basin of eastern java. As on the mainland, population centers and great states developed in both regions. While the majority of the island world shared a multiple river system geography and thus what may be characterized as a riverine political system, the rich soiled rice plains of central and eastern java allowed the development of a higher degree of social and political integration than was possible elsewhere in the island world.

The problem of defining what constituted a classical southeast asian state may be approached by a careful description of the statecraft the management of state affairs of the riverine and wet rice plain systems. Based on western and chinese prejudices that equate advancement with the evolution of elaborate state system, succesful southeast asian wet rice civilizations of the mainland and java are assumed to have become centralized polities. Historians have also minimized the level of integration between the coast and hinterland of the riverine states. The wet rice states were not as centralized as most western historians have believed, however, and the riverine states were not as isolated from their hinterlands as previously thought. Indeed, the two system were not totally unrelated, as the mainland states had both a west rice aspect and a coastal international trade sector that enchanced the economy of the hinterland. Thus, the two not at opposite poles but were part of a continuum. In both, local statecraft was organized to control people not boundaries. Indeed, manpower was the basis of political power.

Classical souteast asia was generally underpopulated. Would be rulers competed among themselves to attract the manpower necessary for them to assume power. The continued existence of a state and its management polity that is, a state in which a bureaucratic center dominated and efectively integrated its subordinate population centers under its elaborate system of administration, justice, and protection, depended on the rulling elites ability to control population centers. The control a state claimed and its actual control over people, however, were quite different. The core of the domain was that area of land, ussualy near the capital, that was administered directly by the state central administration. The king was ussualy a major landholder in this core, but the land holding rights of others normally rights to a share of the produce from the land under their authority rahter than ownership in the modern sense were also protected. Peripheral areas, those areas bordering the core, were in a tributary relationship to the state. Although the state might claim to have administratively annexed these areas, its real control was minimal, as local elites remained in power while paying homage to the center. Although the records of monarchs might be widely distributed, the wording employed in engraved inscriptions found in areas outside the state’s core domain, where the ruler’s power was not direct, honored the authority of the strong local elite. It was through the suport of such leaders of local populations that the ruler could command the loyalty of population centers peripheral to the state’s core.

Classical states showed little capacity to absorb the populations of regions beyond their core. People of various regions could be brought under state’s control, yet, although a regional population might be engulfed by a state even for several centuries, with the decline of that state, this same group of people was capable of reemerging with its local traditions intact – a pattern not unique to Southeast Asia. The key to a center’s control over manpower has its ability to form political alliances with the locally based elite. A ruler, acting from a center of authority, fragmented his potential enemies by reaching agreements with the leaders of local population centers, and these potential opponents became subordinate allies of the state. In return for their patronage of the sate’s monarch, the local elites enjoyed enhanced status in the eyes of their followers, and the allied population received the protection afforded by the state’s armies and shared in a successful state’s prosperity.

Early historiography of the classical period depicted the capitals of Southeast Asian states a social pyramid, with the monarch and his elite on top having little personal contact with the people below. In this view local populations were subjugated, continually exploited, and generally in awe of the elite who resided in the state’s capital. A more intense interaction and interdependency existed between state centers and their subordinate populations, however. In some cases the rulers of classical states even appointed their own clan members to administer key “provinces,” In Java, for instance, classical states were divided into numerous regional provinces (watek), each governed by provincial chiefs (rakrayan) who were often the sons of the states’ monarchs.’ In the Sumatra-based state of Srivijaya certain areas of the realm in the Strait of Malacca were ruled by chiefs (datu), some of whom were relatives of the king, while others were ruled by datu of nonroyal background. The distinction between the powers of the two is not entirely clear, although it appears that the Srivijaya monarch was quite willing to accept strong local leaders as his subordinate datu.

Srivijaya, Java, and other classical Southeast Asian states merged traditional indigenous symbols of divinity and power with Indian cosmolgical symbolism and religious theory to form an ideological basic for their kingship. The blending of indigenous and Indic traditions is seen, for instance, in the universal significance of the mountain in the three main land wet-rice states. In Cambodia, “Mount Mahendra” became the home of the devaraja in the cult of Jayavarman II in the early nith century – a cult that extensively subordinated worship of locl deities to the king’s worship of Siva (see chap. 6). As the traditional abode of ancestor spirites, the mountain was already considered sacred by indigenous tradition. By incorporating the external god Siva, who was known in Indian philosphy as the “Lord of the Mountain” and for his association with fertility, the king’s position was reinforced. It remained for Cambodian kings to associate theselves with this mountain and thereby symbolize their ability to guarantee the flow of life-power from the realm of the ancestors to their subject. In Burma, the various nat spirits were integrated into a similiar cult that also came to be focused on a “Lord of the Mountain,” the Mahagiri spirit of “Mount Popa.” In Vietnam, kings were regarded as descendants from the union of the naga (water) spirit and a maiden who resided on the mountain inhabited by the mountain spirit. The necessity of this process of incorporating indigenous folk belief is well shown in the case of Vietnam, where one reason for the failure of the early Sino-oriented elite of the upper Red River Delta to form a lasting state was their unwillingness to integrate local folk traditions into their Confucian ideology.”

The early Southeast Asian monach’s powers were bestowed through ceremony. The royal court, its activities, and its style recreated a world of the gods – in theory, a heaven on earth. Here all greatness and glory were concentrated. By successfully fulfilling his role as the hypothetical focus of all sanctity and power, the king maintained the orderliness of the world. The king’s court attempted to develop ritual links to its subordinate centers of power by integrating local religious cults into a state religious system, whereby the subordinate centers imitated the ritual syle of the royal center.” Local deities and, of most consequence, local ancestor worship were blended into the state’s religious ceremony. The state made great use of indian (or, in the case of Vietnam, Chinese) ceremony, performed by religious specialists or elites who assumed the role of priests. These state ceremonies, however, were built on traditional beliefs of how spirits and ancestors were to be manipulated to guarantee the prosperity of the living. Indic or Sinic patterns were thus utilized to enhance locl religious views to the advantage of the elite, whoes ritual magic was presented to their subjects as being greater than that of earlier practice.

The state elite’s patronage of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions from India brought them into a wider univers of symbols and attachments and provided an indian framework for their statecraft. Southeast Asian kings utilized Sanskrit vocabulary, described the world in the idiom of Hindu and Buddhist thought, and sponsored art and architecture that expressed the Hindu and Buddhist world views. Royal monuments were cosmological symbols redefining the boundaries of time and space to the advantage of the state’s elite. A vast and orderly cosmos was substantiated by the most advanced mathematical astronomy of the time and was the foundation for Hindu and Buddhist thought. States were patterned on the order of the cosmos and linked the sacred and secular orders. A ruler and his capital were at the center of the univers; cosmological and magical symbols expressed royal power. In the Hindu and Buddhist concepts of state the ruler faciliated the establishment of a secular society that was more nearly in harmony with the natural cosmic order (dharma). In a successful estate, society was harmonious as well as properous. The most effective ruler did not force conformity by use of physical might (danda) but achieved success due to his righteous victory (dhammavijaya/dharmavijaya) and continued peacful leadership.

Summarizing their perceptions of the hindu and Buddhist traditions, early Southeast Asian rulers fused these cosmological principles with Indic topographical formulas (mandala – a “contained core”) that provided a design for the integration of clan or lineage-based groups into more complex centralized polities. In the Indian philosophical tradition a mandala was a sacred diagram of the cosmos that was normally depicted in art as a geometric construct of encompassed circles and rectangles. The worldly mandala (state) in early Southeast Asia was defined by its center, not its perimeter, as there was no notion of a firm frontier.” Subordinate population centers surrounding the center were variably drawn to participate in the ceremony of the state system. To encourage their participation, the personal and regional cults practiced in the state’s regions were assembled at the center. One theoretically moved from the mundane world toward the spiritual one by appraching the sacred axis from one of the four quarters (defined by the points of the compass). The devotee/subject was to become caught up in a psychological state that grew in intensity as he was drawn to this sacred core of the universe and its “world mountain” (normally a central temple complex) that joined the celestial powers with the fertile soils of the earth.

While in a theoretical sense the king’s only duty was ths to maintain the world order – to promote prosperity and to faciliate passage to the realm of the ancestors – in practice his duties sometimes involved the application of customary law regarding land and labor. In an inscription from central Java dated 860, for example, state administrators were asked to intervence in a local dispute when the village elders and a certain individual, who represented a religious foundation (temple), could not resolve the method of repaying a considerable debt owen to the local community. However, since Southeast Asian epigraphy does not contain many references to the adjudication of local disputes, one may assume that the state normally remained above such conflicts during the classical age, discouraging all but major disputes from clogging the state’s adminstrative system. This policy encouraged the continuity of local custom, which the state generally left untouched as long as it was not disruptive to state harmony.

The effective ruler also took an interst in his state’s economic activity. In addition to being the ideological center of state, the royal capital was the economic center of the monarch’s domain. The economic resources of the state’s cor were very important to its ability to maintain power. Rulers of wet-rice states therefore attempted to increase the agricultural output of their core. Under state supervision the construction of water tanks and irrigation system were undertaken, and economic development in gneral was encouraged. In Java, for example, to develop economically peripheral lands, reward loyal followers, and extended the control of the throne, royal land grants known as sima (“freehod”) were given. Although such land was considered to be outside the administrative authority of the king – freeing it from royal demands for taxes and service – a ceremony dedicating the sima land grant emphasized that the grantee was expected to remain loyal to the Javanese state. This ceremony involved an oath in which the grantee pledged his loyality, and it culminated with the pronouncement of a curse by a religious official threatening those present who were not loyal to their monach.

Although different in nature, the economic center of the Srivijaya maritime state was functionally similiar to the wet-rice producing states. It served as a locus for economic redistribution, fulfilling roles both as a trade entrepot and as the central trasury for a series of ports. A downriver port on the edge of the Sumatra hinterland, the Srivijaya capital was more vulnerable to attacks from outsiders as well as to the rebellions of its hinterland inhabitants than the land-based states that were established inland well away from the coast. Yet the capital’s economic control over its disparate subject population – upriver tribesmen and coastal sea nomads – was similiar to that of the land-based states. Because it was difficult to control directly tribal producers who were distant form capital, the Srivijaya state relied on either physical force or alliance rlationship, symbolized by an oath administered to state subodinates, to establish and maintain its economic hegemony in peripheral areas. While a royal navy of sea nomad maintained the capital’s position as the dominant port on the Sumatra coast, a network of alliances with its hinterland tribesmen allowed a flow of goods from the interior to the ports – giving Srivijaya its economic and thus its political strength.

The classical political systems, whether wet-rice or riverine, attempted to draw the resouces of their  realms – in the form of tribute, talent, men, and goods – to their centers. Central Javanese states, for instance, expected both taxes in kind an labor service from their subjects (see chap. 5). Inscriptions report that rulers of eastern Java’s states received specified shares of local products such as rice and cloth, as well as goods supplied regularly by traders such as spices, ceramics, and cloth of foreign origin. Resources acquired from a state’s own core, when added to tributed extracted from politically subordinate peripheral areas, supplied the centers with large quantities of wealth. This wealth was in turn redistributed to maintain loyalty to the state. One type of investment was the regional constuction of large temple complexs that emhasized the state’s theoretical powers. Often such construction was financed by the transfer of the royal right to a share of local products and labor to a community, and the community applied this designated income to finace local temple construction and the temple’s maintenance. In such instances the royal investment also provided for economic development in the vicnity of the temple, and the construction of elaborate temple complexs promoted the growth of an indigenous artisan class.”

Payments to various state armies and administrators were important revenue outlays of the state. Military power was essential in the process of concentrating as many resources as possible at the center. Military strength allowed the state to “proctect” its subordinate territories – whether in theory or in fact – which in turn facilitated the establishment of the state’s economic base, the administration of oaths, and the formulation of the various royal cults. To insure the flow of revenues that supported the classical state, a system of record keeping was initiated and in the more developed wet-rice states a council was formed to handle it. This royal administrative council, concentrated at the center, was composed of a small group of administrators who were generally literate and capable of dealing with a variety of matters. Periodically they were sent out individually or as members of a mobile royal retinue traveling from place within the realm to act on disputes that could not be solved locally or on affairs that were considered to be in the state’s interest. These state administrators also participated in the various state ceremonies. In a system of statecraft in which ritual links were a vital tool of integration, it was essential that the ritual at the center be performed by an elite who knew how to conduct the required ceremonies properly.

To achieve political integration, the leaders of a classical Southeast Asian state had to diversify the state’s economy as well as manipulate aset of symbols that would distinguish them from other elites in the state. Therefore, the ruling elite of a coastal-based state who had ambitions of political grandeur, for example, had to make their state a leader in the externally focused international trade sector. To accomplish this, they had to establish their economic and political authority over upriver populations as well as over the maritime-oriented inhabitants of coastal enclave. To depend only on the redistributions – the allocation of rewards and resources that served to help intgrate the society – derived from facilitating trade in a coastal enclave with limited upriver ties made a coastal-based riverine political system vulnerable to the fluctuations of international trade. If revenues derived from international trade diminished, political and economic alliances that depended on the redistribution of trade goods could no longer be sustainde. As the maritime trade diminished, the sate’s mairitime allies might turn to open piracy to maintain their personal livelihood, thereby further destroying the coastal center’s viability by discouraging international traders from navigating the state’s waters.

Likewise a state too dependent on income derived from is wet-rice plain base was also limited in its development potential. The rice plain state elites of both Java and Angkor shared land control with rival tanded elites and institutions. Some of the competing institutions had been created by the state’s elite to reinforce the state’s legitimacy. For example, temples and temple networks were heavily endowed with economic resources by various classical-era rulers. Initally this patronage returned merit and bestowed superior status on the state elite, but over time the continued endowment of temples could have left the temples with income right exceding those of the state. A network of temples could – and in the case of the Burmese state of Pagan did” – use their wealth and their control over large segments of the state’s land and labor to influences state policy.

Since income derived from the land was the major source of a rice plain-based elite’s ability to exercise political sovereignty, providing the would-be ruler with material as well as “symbolic” capital with which to construct alliance networks, a successful sovereign had to have either immense personal prowess or greater economic resources at his personal disposal than did potential sovereigns from other elites within the realm. It was only when those claiming sovereignty in a rice plain state became more actively involved in external commercial affairs that the aurhority of the state leaders and their court relative to competing regionally based elites and instirutions became more secure. Economic leadership in the commercial sector provided a new source of income for wet-rice plain monachs and in turn enhanced their political accomplishments. Development of an international trade sector also promoted the prosperity of the wet-rice sector, providing new markets for local rice prodution and facilitating the expansion of wer-rice agriculture, which then stimulated the development of a more integrated political and economic order.

Structures of Trade in the Classical Southeast Asian World

Two models may be used to explain the ways that external trade came into contact with existing and developing internal forms of exchange. One reflect the riverine political system, in which upriver exchange networks connected with foreign trade at coastal centers through the agency of river mouth rulers who shared trade-derived prosperity with the interior. The second model attempts to show how trade was coducted in the state’s theoretical powers. Often such construction was financed by the transfer of the royal right to a share of local products and labor to a community, and the community applied this designated income to finace local temple construction and the temple’s maintenance. In such instances the royal investment also provided for economic development in the River plain realms of the southeast asian mainland and java. Contact with foreign merchants was similar to that in the riverine states. Trade gravitated toward the coastal centers, and the trade’s profits were redistributed to empashize the ruler’s hegemony.  But the geography of a rice plain economy held greater potential for the evolution of an integrated and hierarchical system of market exchange, which was capable of facilitating political and social inegration. In both economic system the potential for conflict with foreigners was minimized because trading activities were confined to the coastal ports, where business was transacted by indigenous merchants who supplied the rice, pepper, and other products the foreign seafarers desired.

Diagram of exchange in decentralized southeast asian riverine political system. In this model, an economic system trade center. (A) is coastal base located at a river mouth. Points B and C are secondary and third order centers located at upstream primary and secondary river junctions. Point D identifies distant upstream centers, the initial concentration point for products originating in more remote parts of the river watershed. Point E and F are the ultimate producers the nonmarket oriented population centers of the hinterland and upland or upriver villages whose loyalty to the marketing system dominated by A is minimal. A, represents a rival river mouth center and its marketing system. A, can compete for the loyalty of E and F as well as for trade with X, an overseas center that consumes the exports and supplied imports for A and A.

This riverine system model can be applied to the sriwijaya maritime states as documented in the early seventh century inscriptions discussed in chapter 4. Initially sriwijaya center was in the palembang area of sumatera, a point of the intersection of several river system upriver from the coast, a strategic position that allowed sriwijaya rulers to dominate commerce flowing upriver and downriver from its harbor. Palembang control over its hinterland was based on its own physical might, but was especially dependent on an oath of allegiance that was administered to the state subordinate elites, inclucations, the systematic redistribution of wealth from the royal treasury, alliances with local chieftains (datu), and event the assignment of royal princes to leadership positions in the hinterland. Sriwijaya marketing network was based more upon alliances and the common sharing of the wealth derived from foreign trade than on direct coercion. The sriwijaya monarc was recognized as the source of the system prosperity.

Palembang’s natural enemy was jambi, a rival coastal center dominating the BatangHari river system. Consequently, one of the sriwijaya rulers first expeditions of conquest was againts Jambi in A.D. 682 sriwijaya victory over the rival river system center and subseuqent victories over other river mouth centers on the sumateran, malayan, and western javanese coast guarated sriwijaya control over the flow of goods within the strait of malacca and as well from the region into the international trade route.

The riverine system model implies that the riverine system was by nature impermanent, and indeed some historians believe that sriwijaya as a political entity was characterized by a shifting center. The sriwijaya capital may have initially been on the musi river system but in the eleventh century was a jambi and was likely focused on other riverine centers in the strait of malacca region at times in between.

Chinese dinastic records documents this internal competition among the various malay river systems. Numerous river mouth centers sent tribute missions to the chinese court in hopes of receiving recognition as a preferred trade partner of the chinese. Such recognition would seemingly have reinforced a riverine center’s ability to trade not only with the chinese but also to assume a special position in trade with western  merchants who would stop in the southeast asian archipelago on their wat to china.

Contemporary javanese inscriptions portray networks of clustered vilages called wanua as the most important units of local integration in the pre islamic javanese hinterland. These vilage networks are generally viewed as units of social and political integration ; what is not understood is how the indigenous village cluster markets. Merchants who had a role in providing this commercial linkage. Such encouragement may be seen, for example, in the royal grants to merchants that freed them from royal tax assesments on their transactions within specified village cluster markets. However, the village clusters may be equally understood as local marketing networks whose nucleus was in every instance a periodic market, identified as in Java Inscription.

The pken markets were centers of local exchange. Market participants included farmers and artisans who sold their products and who purchased local goods or those commodities transported to the market by itinerant peddlers.  To facilitate easy access for the population, pken marketplace would have to have been located within walking distance of the homes of the village clusters inhabitants. Thus dictating the pken market position near the geographical center of the village cluster. A local official controlled access to the marketplace, collected taxes on goods offered for sale, and in general represented the village clusters interest in dealings with the intinerant peddlers.

These itinerant peddlers, identified in the inscriptions by the titles adwal and apikul, linked village clusters horizontally into marketing networks composed of multiple wanua comunities of exchange. Pedlers circulated among pken markets and made their travels conform to the indigenous marketing cycle or the local marketing cycle conformed to the travels of the peddlers. In either case the various village cluster communities of exchange were integrated into market cycles, which allowed one wanua community pken market to hold its transactions on a certain day of the week and others one each on the other four. A band of roving participating in a different pken market every day and trading in each village cluster once every five days.

The peddlers and their pken market networks, in turn, were integrated by intermediate full time market centers. Unlike the pken markets, the intermediate centers of exchange had permanent shops or at the minimum a market that net everyday. Such centers were inhabited by adagang, large scale traders, who conducted both a retail and wholesale trade, as well as groups of artisans. Also based in the intermediate center were abakul, market based middlemen who where the key to the natural flow of commodities between village clusters and the intermediate market center. Both serviced the needs of the pken focused intinerans peddlers, supplying goods of various sorts in exchange for local products acquired by the peddlers on their circuit. abakul were whosale specialists who  traded in bulk for local production, especially for the rice, salt, bens, and dyes that figure so prominently in lists of java major exports.

Goods acquired by abakul intermediate traders were transmitted to adagang, the large scale traders who in turn transferred goods to higher order merchants, identified by the title banyaga bantal, who conected the intermediate marketing centers to hogher order markets that were inhabited by banyanga, large scale and seafaring traders those who encircle the sea, those who travel throughout the sea these higher markets were major commercial centers integrating the various networks of exchange below them and were normally located during this age at coastal ports rather than at a royal center or a major pilgrimage center the negotiation of major commercial transactions would have been inappropriate to such sanctified urban centers. It is noteworkthy that banyanga do not appear in lists of those participating in pken market exchange, implying that there was a hierarchy of merchants and marketing activity within the early javanese economy.

Javanese kings especially in the post tenth century era of eastern javanese dominance, played a key role in facilitating trad e. They encouraged and legitimized the incursions of port based traders (banyanga) into the javanese hinterland to collect specified amounts of produce. The royal stance in relation to the trade is reflected in an inscription that elaborates five royal instructions on the conduct of trade, quality control, and the use of standards and approved weights and mesures at warehouses and rice granaries. In the tenth century, according to one inscription, a javanese ruler removed royal taxes from twenty vessels and the shippers of goods of twelve different classes a total of 135 vessels were operating from one north coast port reflecting a sizeable trade.

Another tenth century inscription records a royal grant to encourage settlement along the river and roads leading to an eastern java port to lessen the danger to merchants and coastal people from banditry.

It is important to remember that the centralization of trade constituted not only a convenience for all participants but also served as a merchanism for minimizing the penetration of the hinterland by outsiders. For a river plain state desiring to participate in the international commercial networks, the aid of foreign merchants and seafares was a necessary source of extended economic contacts with china and india. Indeed, eastern javanese inscriptions reflect considerable interaction with a south india based international trade consorsium. The use of seafarers as maritime allies was a double edged sword, however.  Southeast asia early history is full of references to maritime raids, one of the most famous being the 1292 maritime expedition of the mongols againts java. Most javanese ports therefore had fortified enclosures that were under the charge of the ports merchant comunity.

Maritime trade in early southeast asia : Zones and eras.

Premodern maritime exchange in southeast asia was transacted in five commercial zones. The first zone encompassed the northerns malay peninsula and the southern coast of vietnam and was the first to openly solicit and facilitate east west trade during the last milennium B.C. in this age southeast asia was reharded by foreign seamen as an intermediate and virtually unknown region lying between the riches of India and those into the east of china. The initial agents of foreign contact were Malayo-polynesian sailors who made voyages to as far west as the african coast and to china in the east. Passage through southeast asia by international traders became important in the second century. As the central asian caravan routes, the previously prefered connecting link between east and west commercial networks, were distrupted by internal strife . during the second and third centuries the transport of goods shifted to the sea, and shipping flowed along a maritime route between the southeastern coast of china to the bay of bengal via a land portage across the 2upper isthmus of kra. Merchants transit through southeast asia followed ports on the western edge of the mekong delta, said by the chinese to have been under the authority the early southeast asian state of funan.

It is unlikely that the same groups of sailors made the complete journey from the middle east to china or vice versa, in part due to the seasonal nature of the moonson winds, which were critical to navigation.  Westerly winds from the southern indian ocean begin in april and peak in july. In januari the wind flow reverses direction as the northeastern moonson bring easterly winds. This means that voyagers had to wait at certain points until the next season winds could take them to their destination. Because the complete transit from one end of the routes to the other was not possible within a single year, sailors found it expedient to travel only one sector of the route. One group would make the trip between middle eastern ports and india, and another made bay of bengal voyage to the Isthmus of kra, where their goods were transported across the isthmus and shipped from the gulf of thailand to the lower vietnam coast. There commodities from the west were exchanged for those of the east. Another group of sailors then made the voyage from funan to south china. By the time flects arrived in funan ports, those ships traveling the china leg of the routes had already gotten underway, initially no local southeast asian products were exported from funan ports.

During this second and third century era a second commercial zone emerged in the java sea region. This java sea network was chiefly involved with the flow gharuwood, sandalwood, and spices such as cloves among the lesser sunda islands, the moluccas, the eastern coast of borneo, java, and the southern coast of sumatera. The development of commercial center, known in chinese records as Ko-Ying, on the northern edge of the sunda strait region , was critical in connecting the riches of the java sea region with the international route. The sunda strait location was ideal as a point of the end of the java sea where the flow of commerce within the java sea beyond java could be concentrated. Likewise a sunda strait entrepot offered easy acces to funan and its international clientele. Malay sailors initiated the transport of spices from Ko-Ying to Funan. They also began to supplement eastern and western products with products from the forest of the indonesian archipelago. Ko-Ying well represents the indigenous response to the potential for trade provided by the new maritime activities.

By the early fifth century the southern sumatra coast assumed an additional importance, due in part two java sea spices. The principal east west maritime routes shifted from its upper malay peninsula portage to a nautical passage through the strait of malaca, making direct contact with northwestern edge of the java sea. The strait of malaca thus became the third zone of southeast asia commerce, and its center on southeastern sumatera coast soon became the focal point for malay trade in western borneo, java and the eastern island as well as the upper malay peninsula and its hinterland, the chao phraya and irrawady river system. O.W. wolters  described southeastern sumatera as a favored coast that aided the flow commerce, marketing its own sumatera forest products and java sea goods and utilizing malay ships and crews to connects indigenous exchange networks with the international route.

Under the sriwijaya maritime state, which dominated strait commerce until the early eleventh century, a pattern of riverine statecraft emerged built on alliances with malay coastal populations and balanced by an expanding inland power base. In the eyes of the chinese, sriwijaya was the perfect trade partner. It was able to keep goods moving into south china ports by servicing vessels voyaging through the southeast asian archipelago. Sriwijaya ports were utilized as centers of exchange for those ships traveling over  but one segment of the maritime route or as ports of call for ships a waiting the appropriate monsoon winds to take them to their destination. Sriwijaya also succesfully protected the southseast Asian zone of the international commercial route from piracy. In recognition of Srivijaya’s power the Chinese granted the maritime state preferred trade status, suggesting that those who utilized Srivijaya’s ports were given preferential treatment when entering Chinese ports. Wolters argued that this Chinese connection was critical to Srivijaya’s prosperity and that Srivijaya’s power was dependent upon the fluctuations of the Chinese economy. When trade with China’s ports was properous, Srivijaya thrived. But when China’s ports periodically closed, the economic repercussions were disastrous to Srivijaya’s political authority. With declining trade revenues Srivijaya was unable to maintain the loyalty of its seafarers, who shifted their energies to open piracy.

The Srivijayan era of economic hegemony came to an abrupt close in 1025, when the south Indian Cola dynasty successfully attacked the Malacca region’s ports and shattered Srivijaya’s authority over the strait. This raid began a two-century restructuring of the patterns of Southeast Asian maritime trade. In this era not only Indian but also Chinese and Arab traders began more openly to penetrate Southeast Asia’s marktes, moving more directly to the sources of commercial goods. Foreign merchants began to regularly travel into the Java Sea region to acquire spices, a movement that encouraged the development of Javanese ports on the northern and eastern Java coasts as trade intemediaries and as ports of call for foreign mechants from the West. The destruction of Srivijaya’s hegemony also allowed the reemergence of the southern Vietnam coast as a commercial power, as coastal centers in the Cham domain became more prominent ports of call on the way to China.

The relationship of the plain-based and internally focused Javanese state of the outside world changed radically during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. During the eighth and ninth centuries the Javanese capital and the territory under its control had been situated in and arround the Kedu Plain of central Jaca, to the south of the Merapi Perahu mountain range. After the removal of the Javanese state’s political center to the lower Brantas basin of eastern Java in the tenth century, and the subsequent consolidation of the eastern and central Javanese plains under one authority, Javanese rulers began to take a more active interest in overseas trade. This change was in part due to the shift of the royal center to Brantas River basin and in part to the increasing economic potential that direct interaction with the maritime traders provided.”

Not only was this the era of Srivijaya’s demise, it also coincided with a significant increas in the volume and economic importance of trade with China during the reign of China’s Sung dynasty. At the same time that the Java Sea zone flowered as a commercial power during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the penetration of Chinese seamen from the north through the Sulu Sea to acquire the products of the Spice Island brought the development of the Philippines and northern Borneo as the fourth Southeast Asian commercial zone. Chinese traders established trade base in the Philippines during this era. To distribute imports and to extensive network of native trade evolved in this age, and it stimulated major changes in Philippines society.” The archeological remains of early Laguna, Mindoro, and Cebu society especially document the rapid growth of trade centers, as people from the interior and other islands congregated around ports fortified with brass artilery – to protect against the piracy rampant in this region’s sea channels – in response to the opportunities and demands afforded by foreign trade.”

The growing interst among the mainland powers at Angkor and Pagan in directly participating in international trade activities resulted in the development of a fifth Southeast Asian trade region, in the Bay of Bengal regional trade encompassed the mainland political systems and the former Srivijayan domains on the upper Malay Peninsula and the northern and western coasts of Sumatra and made contact with the intentional route in southern India and Sri Lanka. Meanwhile, southern Sumatra and the lower Malay Peninsula remained the principal Southeast Aian landfall for the international traders. Arab traders focused their contact on the Kedah coast of the lower Malay peninsula and shifted their activity from Palembang to Jambi on the Southern Sumatra coast in the late eleventh century.

By the thirteenth century Southeast Asia’s internal trade was back in the hands of Southeast Asians, as foreign merchats found it once again more expedient to deal with Southeast Asia-based intermediaries at major international entrepots rather than attemping to deal directly with the people who controlled the sources of supplies. This was due in part to the growing efficiency exhibited by Southeast Asians in capably providing goods for the foreigners at selected port. As opposed to the Srivijaya era, when trade was dominated by a single Malay state and its ports, by the thirteenth century all five Southeast Asian maritime zones had become prosperous an independent economic networks, not as competitors for maritime dominance but representing an overall commercial prosperity within Southeast Asia. The strongest of the island realm’s political systems, Majapahit, was centerd in east Java. Javanese rulers facilitated the Java Sea spice trade but found no need to dominate the ports of the Strait of Malacca as Srivijaya had in the earlier age. The javanese established a loose hegemony that saw the emergence of new ports; among them were northern Sumatra ports that depended heavily upon commercial interaction with Arab and Indian seamen.

Java’s limited control over the strait region is also linked to the rise of strait piracy. The eventual established of Malacca at the end of the fourteenth century was a result of initiatives given out by the Chinese Ming dynasty to fill what they perceived to be the absence of a major political power in the area that could be depended on to contain piracy, which was jeopardizing the steady flow of commerce into Chinese ports. By the 1430s, however, Malacca’s prosperity depended less on Chinese support and more on interaction with Javanese merchants and Javanese commercial networks. The Javanese controlled the island traffic to and from the strait and used Malacca as a trade intermediary through which to market Javanese rice and Java Sea spices.

A new era of Southeast Asian commerce unfolded after Portuguese entry into the strati region in 1511. Not only did the Europeans take over Malacca, but they also penetrated the Javanese sphere in the eastern archipelago, attempting to break Java’s hold on the spice trade. Over the next four hundred years the Portuguese and other Europans who followed attempted to impose their direct control over the sources of products and to eliminate the indigenous intemediaries who had controlled trade in Southeast Asia sice its inception. Although the Europans’ attemts to monopolize Southeast Asia’s trade failed, they did successfully open the archipelago to a variety of competing groups, both Eastern an Western. By the seventeenth century ports on Java’s north coast, which had emerged as independent economic centers during decline of the Majapahit state, were destroyed by the emerging inland power at Mataram in central Java. This victory effectively internalized Javanese commerce and ended the remaining control of Javanese merchants over the Java Sea trade. Henceforth control over the international trade was assumed by others. In the Strait of Malacca, in Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra, and in Johor on the southern Malay Peninsula, there emerged successors to Malacca and the Javanese; and in the eastern archipelago Malay seamen in Brunei and Sulu assumed control over the regional and Chinese trade with the Spice Islands.

The waxing and waning of states in various parts of Southeast Asia were directly tied to shifting international trade routes, just as trade routes shifted in response to local power configurations and local initiatives. The following chapters discuss this pattern of growth and decline in detail.