1 India

1.1 The “Eighteenth Century Problem” and British Rule in India

British rule in India began in the second half of the eighteenth century in the Bengal region, and there has been much debate in recent years about how to place the eighteenth century in the history of India. Traditionally, the eighteenth century after Aurangzeb’s death (1707) has been regarded as a period of turmoil following the decline and dismantling of the Mughal Empire. However, a revisionist history has been proposed that criticizes such an understanding as being Mughal-centric and emphasizes the fact that trade and commerce flourished, and urbanization progressed under the regional governments (successor states). According to this view, British rule was positioned as an extension of the preceding period, and the traditional understanding of the break in Indian history at the beginning of British rule had to be reconsidered.

It should be noted that British rule in India began before colonial rule in other places and lasted for almost 200 years. Since the period under British rule differed from region to region, the form and character of its rule changed according to the time and region.

1.2 From the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century to the Revolt of 1857

After defeating the French-backed local regime in Bengal at the Battle of Plassey (1757), the East India Company embarked on its journey from trading company to colonial power. In 1765, the East India Company was granted the diwani (the right to collect land revenue) in Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar by the Mughal Emperor after its victory over local forces, including Mughal troops, in the Battle of Buxar (1764), and consolidated its position in the Bengal region.

During the tenure of Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of Bengal (period of service as Governor-General of Bengal: 1772–74; as Governor-General of India: 1774–85), the Judicial Plan of 1772 established the principle of applying Hindu law (Dharmashastra) to Hindus and Islamic law to Muslims in the field of family law. Based on this policy, Dharmashastra texts written in Sanskrit were translated into English. As a result, a beginning was initiated to divide the community into Hindu and Muslim by religion, and Brahmanical values were spread through the judicial system for Hindus.

Land revenue formed the pillar that supported colonial finances. In order to stabilize this revenue, various systems were introduced in each region. The Zamindari system (Permanent Settlement) was introduced in Bengal in 1793 by Lord Cornwallis, Governor-General of India (period of service as Governor-General: 1786–93), who granted land ownership to zamindars, who had been tax collectors since the Mughal era, and imposed a fixed land revenue on them. In the early nineteenth century, the Madras and Bombay Presidencies adopted the Ryotwari system, in which the ryot (upper strata of the peasantry) were made to bear the burden of land revenue and the amount of land revenue was periodically reassessed. There were other variations on the land revenue system, but they all had one thing in common: they defined the landowners who were to pay the land revenue and overlooked the rights of the various kinds of tenants who existed under them. In general, the burden of land revenue in the early years was heavy.

At a time when friction with France was growing in Europe, Lord Wellesley, Governor-General of India (period of service as Governor-General: 1798–1805) pushed for territorial expansion. In 1799, he defeated Tipu Sultan of Mysore in South India, who had attempted to unite with the French revolutionary government to oppose the British, and also brought various powers under his control through the Subsidiary Alliance Treaties. In 1789, the Indian army numbered just over 100,000, but during the Napoleonic Wars, it swelled to 155,000, one of the largest European-style standing armies in the world (Metcalf and Metcalf 2002, p. 60). In the early nineteenth century, while winning the Napoleonic Wars, the British overthrew the Marathas in India (1818) and gained economic advantage from the Industrial Revolution. The British rule in India seemed to have stabilized. The tenure of William Bentinck (period of service as Governor-General: 1828–35) was also seen as an “Age of Reform” influenced by the liberalism and utilitarianism of his own country. The “Civilizing Mission” was foregrounded as the ideology of legitimacy for rule, such as the banning of sati, the Hindu practice of burning a widow alive with the body of her deceased husband (1829).

1.3 From the Aftermath of the Revolt of 1857 to the First World War

The Indian Revolt, an uprising which challenged British rule, was suppressed by overwhelming military force. The cost of quelling this uprising is variously said to have amounted to either 50 million or 36 million pounds (Bates 2007, p. 80; Bose and Jalal 1998, p. 95; Brown 1994, p. 96). In 1857, Queen Victoria issued a proclamation that intended to pacify her Indian subjects, and the Government of India Act 1858 transferred power from the East India Company to the British Crown. The Governor-General of India was to concurrently hold the position of Viceroy, and a Minister for India was appointed to the Cabinet back in Britain. The Indian Civil Service, selected through an examination introduced just before the Indian Revolt, became the core of the bureaucracy as the “steel frame of Raj (British rule).” The period from then until the First World War was the “High Noon of Empire” (Brown 1994, p. 96).

The annexation policy of the local states, promoted strongly by Lord Dalhousie (period of service as Governor-General: 1846–56), came to an end because it was considered a contributing factor to the Indian Rebellion. From then on, the rulers of a number of large and small princely states that were granted relative autonomy in terms of internal affairs and local landowners were positioned as the main collaborators in British rule. (At the time of independence, there were more than 500 princely states, which is about one-third of India’s total population and 40% of its total land area (Metcalf and Metcalf 2002, p. 103; Bates 2007, p. 82). Furthermore, starting with the Indian Councils Act of 1861, a policy of incorporating influential Indians into the legislative structure, first through non-official appointments and later through limited elections, was initiated. In the 1880s, under Viceroy Ripon, elections were also introduced to local self-government. However, there was a reluctance to intervene in the internal affairs of Indian society, and the ideology of legitimizing rule shifted focus to “good governance.”

The army was reorganized after the Indian Rebellion. British soldiers were given more weight; in place of the upper caste Hindus from the Ganges plains who had been employed as soldiers before the Revolt, Indian soldiers were recruited from those communities stereotyped as “martial races,” such as Sikhs, Muslims, and Nepalese Gurkhas who came from areas not involved in the Revolt, such as the Punjab. Indian troops were deployed around the world to maintain and extend British rule, at no cost to the taxpayers back home. Examples include the suppression of the Mahdi Rebellion in Sudan, the Boxer Rebellion (1900) in China, and deployment to the South African War (1899–1902) (Bose and Jalal 1998, p. 98). Military expenditure was a large proportion of India’s fiscal budget. The racist attitudes of the British, who saw themselves as the “ruling race,” were aroused by the Revolt and increasingly came to the fore in the late nineteenth century.

1.4 Restructuring of Indian Society, Culture, and Economy Under Colonial Rule

Like the aforementioned principles of the judicial system, the census, which came to be conducted every ten years from 1871, had the effect of fixing the linguistically and socially diverse Hindu and Muslim communities into a monolithic community. The census and ethnographic research on various castes and tribes also acted to embody them as homogenous groups. Herbert Hope Risley, a high-ranking colonial administrator in India who presided over the 1901 census, was notorious for bringing racial theory into the understanding of caste, and also for his attempt at establishing a hierarchy of castes. The embodiment of caste and religious communities was to have a major impact on the political culture of post-independence India.

The Charter Act of 1813 not only abolished the East India company’s monopoly (with the exception of tea), but also stipulated that one lakh (100,000) rupees per year be allocated for the promotion of local education. The conflict between the Orientalists, who stressed the importance of classical languages such as Sanskrit and Arabic, and the Anglicists, who wanted to give priority to English, ended in the victory of the latter with Macaulay’s Minute on Education of 1835. Through education in English, the Minute aimed to create a class of people who were “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” who would act as intermediaries between the British, the ruler, and the Indians, the ruled (Zastoupil and Moir 1999, p. 171). Throughout the colonial period, primary education was neglected, even though Charles Wood’s Educational Despatch of 1854 went some way to correcting this. On the other hand, a knowledge of English became essential for access to public office and white-collar careers, like in the legal profession, which entailed social status and high income. This in turn fostered friction between castes and religious communities.

With the decline of the traditional cotton textiles industry due to colonial rule, India’s economic structure was transformed into a typical colonial structure, exporting its raw materials to the world and at the same time importing manufactured goods and capital from the metropolis. India was a lifeline for the British economy in the sense that the excess of exports that India had outside the United Kingdom compensated for the deficit in British balance of payments. In addition, home charges, consisting of military expenditures, bureaucrats’ pensions, and interest payments on investments in railroad construction, were a burden on Indian finances. The “drain of wealth” and “deindustrialization” theories, which were the theoretical weapons used by nationalists to challenge British rule in India, have been criticized in recent years, however. Such criticism points out that the Indian cotton industry survived through differentiation from British industrial cotton products, and that industries in other fields emerged.

Modern industries with Indian capital emerged in the late nineteenth century, such as the cotton industry in Bombay. In addition, traditional commercial communities, such as Marwaris in North India and Nattukottai Chettiars in South India, expanded into Southeast Asia and other regions under British rule. With the indentured labor system, Indian workers also moved to Mauritius, the Caribbean, and other parts of the world as plantation workers and the like.

1.5 Embryonic Social and Religious Reforms

The first Indians to receive an English education were overwhelmingly upper caste Hindu males. In the first half of the nineteenth century, various religious and social reform activities were initiated primarily by these men. Rammohan Roy, who founded the Brahmo Samaj, a Hindu reform organization in Calcutta in 1828, played a major role in the banning of sati. The rise of evangelicalism in Britain, the 1813 Charter Act that lifted the ban on missionary activities in company territories, and the full-scale activities of missionaries in India who criticized Hinduism and society combined to provide the background for these activities. It is worth noting that the main themes of social reform movements were issues concerning women, such as sati, widow remarriage, infant marriage, and girls’ education. It can be said that the local elite shared with the British the perception that the status of women was an indicator of the “level of civilization” of the society in question. In the 1850s, Governor-General Dalhousie’s initiatives, such as the establishment of the postal service, the telegraph system, and the railroads, stimulated not only economic activities but also the activities of the elite. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, anti-Brahmin movements, such as Jyotirao Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj (Truth-Seekers Society) founded in 1873, which criticized the hegemony of  the upper castes, emerged.

On the other hand, in the early nineteenth century, there were several movements among Muslims to “purify” Islam by adhering to the Qur’an and Hadith, and in the 1870s, the Aligarh movement started by Syed Ahmad Khan was born to promote the “modernization” of Islam. These religious-based reform movements had the contradiction of causing friction among religious communities.

Apart from the above elite trends, armed uprisings by peasants and tribes were also seen throughout the nineteenth century. Criticizing the elite-centered understanding of Indian nationalism, a group of historians who came together in the early 1980s to form the Subaltern Studies collective emphasized the consciousness and behavioral norms of “subalterns,” subordinate groups who are relatively autonomous from the elite (Guha 1982).

2 Southeast Asia

2.1 Southeast Asia: Regional Overview

Southeast Asia consists of the southeastern part of the Asian continent (Indochinese Peninsula and Malay Peninsula) and the countless islands that surround it. The former is called Mainland Southeast Asia, and the latter Maritime Southeast Asia. Historically, Southeast Asia has played a role in connecting the East and the West, as it is located at a strategic point in the maritime traffic routes of Asia (Tarling 1992, Reid 2015).

Forests covered the land, and agricultural development was limited. In a space with low population density and mobility, a networked society connecting the sea and rivers was formed. Many of the states established there were port city states, based on trade. The port polity is one of the representative types of kingdoms in Southeast Asia. The ruler, located in the port, reigned by distributing the specialties of the hinterland to foreign merchants and mediating between the internal and external worlds, connecting people, goods, and culture (Kathirithamby-Wells and Villiers 1990. These port polities wielded power from the exterior to govern over the internal affairs of their countries, and the spread of religions such as Buddhism and Islam also stemmed from them.

Southeast Asia has been strongly influenced by the global economy, and the times have changed in accordance with these transitions. For example, Lieberman (2003, 2009), who specializes in Burmese history, has attempted to contrast the history of Mainland Southeast Asia with that of Europe during the same period, and to depict it within the context of the interlocking regions of Eurasia as a whole.

In the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, the prosperity of Southeast Asian port cities coincided with the rise of East–West trade, and this period became known as the “Age of Commerce.” Reid (1988, 1993) coined the term “Age of Commerce,” referring to the period when merchants from all over the world flocked to Southeast Asia, the maritime world connecting East and West, and port polities prospered as a result of the global economic revitalization of the “long sixteenth century.” In the Indian Ocean, a network was established of Muslim merchants engaged in the transit trade of spices such as cloves and nutmeg, which were specialty products of the Maluku Islands in East Indonesia, and Islam spread to port cities in Maritime Southeast Asia. European powers such as Portugal and the Netherlands also arrived in search of spices. In the South China Sea, the demand for silver from Ming Dynasty China increased, and the transit trade of silver brought in by the Japanese and Spanish flourished.

The Age of Commerce came to an end in the late seventeenth century with the decline in the price of spices in Europe and the withdrawal of Japan and China from oceanic trade. In the eighteenth century, land development on the mainland increased and the population grew, shifting the economic focus to the hinterland. Reid (1997, pp. 11–14), who espoused the idea of the “Age of Commerce,” saw the subsequent period from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century as the final phase of Asian autonomy before colonization. Reid regarded the growing influence of the Chinese people due to the expansion of the Chinese market and the increase in immigration as characteristic of this period and regarded it as the “Chinese century.” On the islands, the cultivation of commodity crops such as coffee expanded, and European powers such as the Dutch and Spanish began to penetrate the interior. On the continent, the Konbaung Dynasty of Burma, the Rattanakosin Kingdom of Siam (Thailand), and the Nguyễn Dynasty of Vietnam were established one after another, and the prototype of the current framework of nation states emerged. With the increase in the number of immigrant workers from China, the development of the deltas of major rivers such as the Mekong, Chao Phraya, and Ayeyarwady began. This development was accelerated by colonization.

2.2 The Changing Order in the Seas of Asia

With the development of the Industrial Revolution in the latter half of the eighteenth century onward, the European powers underwent a change in character. The Dutch East India Company, which established its dominance in the seas of Southeast Asia in the latter half of the seventeenth century, sought to monopolize the trade of tropical products and adopted a mercantile policy. Meanwhile, the British East India Company, which entered the region in response, adopted a free trade policy, lowering tariffs to guarantee the free entry of merchants and selling its own country’s products to markets in Asia.

In the course of its expansion from India, where it was based, to China, the British East India Company acquired three ports in the Malacca Straits as transit points: Penang (1786), Singapore (1819), and Malacca (1824), turning them into the Straits Settlements. It was Raffles who acquired Singapore from the Malay sultanate in Johor, declaring it a free port and making it Britain’s trading base in Southeast Asia. In Singapore, he drew up a modern city plan and instituted progressive policies, such as the establishment of educational institutions for local people and the abolition of slavery.

Raffles’ construction of Singapore is considered to be the beginning of “modernity” in Southeast Asia. Raffles brought with him the most advanced European liberal thought, science, and technology of the time. He had a deep interest in and attachment to the local Malay people and, therefore, actively tried to reform their society in order to civilize them. This was in contrast to the traditional European powers, who sought commercial interests and were less concerned about the local society. It was this attitude of intervention that led to the subsequent period of colonial rule.

The liberalism brought in by the British did not mean freedom for local powers, as unrestricted free trade meant the dominance of industrialized Western powers. In the middle of the nineteenth century, in the process of transition to imperialism, the process by which Britain expanded its power through economic domination through free trade rather than political domination can be regarded as free trade imperialism. Through such events as the Treaty of Nanking (1842) following the Opium Wars of the Qing Dynasty, the Bowring Treaty between Siam and Britain (1855), the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Japan and the United States (1858), and the Treaty of Saigon of the Nguyễn Dynasty (1862) following the French occupation of Cochinchina, the countries of East and Southeast Asia were forced to “open up” under the military dominance of the West. The inclusion of these countries in the free trade order was the first step in the establishment of the colonial regime. This incorporation into the free trade order was a major shift from the world order of port cities. Many studies have been conducted in Japan on the changes that took place in maritime Asia during the middle of the nineteenth century and the continuity with the preceding and following periods (e.g. Kagotani and Wakimura 2009).

2.3 Division of Southeast Asia

The end of the nineteenth century ushered in the age of imperialism. In addition to Britain, other countries such as France and the U.S. achieved industrialization, and capital from various countries vied with each other for investment opportunities. The evolution of means of transportation and communication, such as steamships, railroads, and telegraphs, increased Western pressure on Asia. The West shifted from controlling the trading networks in the seas to controlling the land. By the beginning of the twentieth century, with the exception of Siam, Southeast Asia had been divided into colonies (Tarling 2001).

The Dutch East India Company dominated the maritime network of the spice trade in the seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth century, it used Batavia as a base to gain control of Java. The Dutch East India Company was dissolved by Napoleon, but the Dutch then took direct control of the region. In addition to Java, the Dutch expanded their rule to other islands (outer islands), eliminating small local kingdoms. As a result, although it encountered resistance in the Java War, the Padri War, and the Aceh War, it established control over the area that is now Indonesia in the early twentieth century.

The British fought three Anglo-Burmese wars with Konbaung Dynasty in the nineteenth century and colonized Burma in 1885 after the Konbaung Dynasty was overthrown. Burma was adjacent to the Bengal region, which was Britain’s stronghold in India, and was of strategic importance to Britain. For this reason, Burma was incorporated into British India.

From the 1870s, the British moved into the Malay Peninsula, where tin mining operations were being developed, from the Straits Settlements, and made nine small kingdoms into protectorates one after another (British Malaya). In the 1880s, Brunei, the Malay sultanate of Borneo, the Kingdom of Sarawak, which was ruled by the British Brooke family, and North Borneo, which was ruled by the British North Borneo Chartered Company, became protectorates (British Borneo). In addition to Burma, Malaya, and Borneo, the British established control over the coastal areas between India and China.

The French intervened in Nguyễn Dynasty Vietnam, with which they had originally had close relations, and after occupying the eastern part of the Mekong Delta in 1862, they moved up the Mekong River with the aim of advancing into China and made Cambodia a protectorate the following year. In 1867, France also took control of the western part of the Mekong Delta, forming French Cochinchina. In the 1880s, French intervention in northern Vietnam increased, and after the Sino-French War, the Nguyễn Dynasty became a protectorate in 1886. From there, France took possession of northern Vietnam (Tonkin) and central Vietnam (Annam). These areas were combined to form French Indochina in 1887, incorporating Laos, which had been made into a protectorate, in 1899.

The north central part of the Philippine Islands was ruled by Spain, which arrived from the Pacific in the sixteenth century. However, after Spain lost the Spanish-American War in 1899, it handed over the Philippines to the United States. After Spain’s defeat, native inhabitants temporarily took power in the Philippines (the Philippine Revolution), but the U.S. defeated the revolutionary government with military force, and the U.S. territory of the Philippines was established. The U.S. conquered the Muslim areas in the southern part of the archipelago that Spain was unable to conquer, and the territory that is now the Philippines took shape.

While Burma was colonized by the British in the west and Cambodia and Laos by the French in the east, Siam was regarded as a “buffer state” and maintained its independence. Domestically, the two kings of the Rattanakosin Kingdom, Mongkut (Rama IV) and Chulalongkorn (Rama V), were successful in their modernization policies. Rama IV, who “opened up” the country through the Bowring Treaty, welcomed many foreign advisors and began to modernize the country. Rama V implemented a series of modernization policies known as the Chakri Reforms, including the development of a cabinet system and military organization, and the establishment of a local administrative system. He also made treaties with Britain and France to demarcate their borders and ensure their independence.

In his book Siam Mapped, the Thai historian Thongchai (1994, pp. 16–19) describes the drawing of borders and the “geo-body” of the pre-modern polity, which had little territoriality due to colonization, as a milestone in the formation of the modern nation state. Thongchai emphasized the linkage between the formation process of the concept of Thainess, or Nation, in Thailand and the establishment of geographical totality, pointing out the importance of geography and cartography. His discussion focuses on the case of Thailand, influenced by Anderson’s (1991) theory of “imagined communities.” The borders of Siam were established through the division of the region into colonies and by the cutting of the periphery by Britain and France. The borders drawn during the colonial period have been inherited by the current Southeast Asian countries, and Southeast Asia as a region took shape in the early twentieth century.

2.4 Southeast Asian Society Under the Colonial Regime

The establishment of the colonial system brought about many changes in Southeast Asia. The “modernity” introduced with this colonization has been essentially inherited by the present Southeast Asian states and societies.

One change in politics and administration is the development of the modern administrative system. In premodern Southeast Asia, the power of the state was imperfect, and various levels of chiefs coexisted and their power was stratified. Scott focused on the resistance of people in various parts of Southeast Asia to the power of the state, describes the mountainous areas of Southeast Asia as areas that are not encompassed by the state, and depicts the independence of the people living in these mountainous areas from state power (Scott 2009). However, colonial powers introduced a hierarchical administration based on territorial units and applied laws and institutions in a centralized manner. Even in Siam, which escaped colonization, the central government sent governors to replace local chiefs in the process of modernization. Although there were many imperfections due to the lack of finances and manpower and the complicated geographical terrain, the system of governance that was established became the basis for the present administration.

Part of the administration was carried out by native inhabitants. Europeans were in the absolute minority, and as the administration expanded, their dependence on locals inevitably increased. In the early twentieth century, colonial governments began to train local bureaucrats in large numbers, establishing institutions of higher learning such as the Indochina University in Hanoi in 1906. The local elite, who had acquired the language of the suzerain state and the modern Western way of thinking, became an intermediary between the suzerain state and the local people.

In terms of the economy, Southeast Asia was positioned as a source of primary commodities under the Western-dominated world economy, which led to the development of commodity crops (sugar cane, coffee, rubber, etc.) and mining of mineral resources (tin in the Malay Peninsula, oil in the Dutch East Indies, etc.). Monoculture plantations created through vast amounts of capital extended across swathes of rainforest. Colonial development took place through the introduction of capital and laborers from outside into sparsely populated forests. In particular, the number of Chinese migrant workers increased rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The export-oriented economy was transplanted to local societies in its entirety.

The colonial economy had an international structure that transcended the relationship of colony and suzerainty under the principle of free trade. In the Malay Peninsula, rubber plantations funded by British capital were manned by Indian laborers, and the products were exported to the United States. In addition, rice from the continent was imported to feed the workers, and people and goods were connected beyond the boundaries of the colonies. In particular, inter-Asian trade expanded substantially through networks of Chinese people, and economic relations within Asia deepened. Sugihara (1996, pp. 95–156) reveals the deepening of intra-Asian trade and economic relations in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia in the inter-war period. This shows that even under the colonial system, the economies of Southeast Asia had relative autonomy from the colonial suzerainty through the mediation of Chinese and other Asian immigrants.

The expansion of the economy led to the development of colonial cities such as Singapore, Saigon, Rangoon, and Kuala Lumpur. In these cities, immigrants, mainly from China (and some from India), made up the majority of the population. A unique culture was created in these cities in which the suzerain nation, Asian immigrants, and local society mixed, as represented by the architecture. In the colonies, Asian immigrants played a major role in creating a complex society in which multiple communities coexisted in a single political unit without social intermingling. Furnivall (1967, p. 446), a colonial bureaucrat in British Burma, pointed out that colonial societies in Southeast Asia, such as Burma and Indonesia, were “plural society,” divided into layers of Europeans, foreign Orientals, and locals that did not intersect with each other.

The role of the native population in the politics and economics of these colonial spaces was limited, but in the early twentieth century, people began to adapt to modern political and economic regime. The administrative elite, educated in European languages under colonial rule, became the new leadership class, while the number of people literate in local languages increased. In addition, religious forces such as Buddhism on the continent and Islam on the islands were revitalized by adopting modern values. Among those who were exposed to modernity, there emerged a group of people who had doubts about the framework of colonial society itself. For example, the modernist Islamic reform ideology developed in the Middle East flowed into Southeast Asia and played a major role in Indonesian political movements. This was due to the development of transportation infrastructure and the penetration of the monetary economy, which led to an increase in the number of Muslims from Southeast Asia studying and making pilgrimages to the Middle East (Laffan 2003). Such local elites became the bearers of nationalism, criticizing the political inequality among ethnic groups and the outflow of economic wealth and pressing for a change in the status quo.