The Archipelago

Abstract

Island Southeast Asia is the world’s largest archipelago. To a well-found ship and an experienced crew, the seas used to be commons, more easily traversed than the jungles behind the coasts and main rivers. However, colonialism and nationalism have fragmented the land and seas of what used to be called the Malay Archipelago into the separate nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and the micro-states of Singapore, Brunei and East Timor. Over the past two centuries there has been an epic struggle between territorial states that have sought by mercantilist policies to capture and control people and wealth and the integrating commercial forces of free trade based upon Singapore. From 1819 to 1949 the Netherlands was the main antagonist, in the 1960s and 1970s Indonesia, in the 1980s and 1990s Malaysia. In what became the Philippines, first Spanish and then American rulers carried on a more muted conflict with the British free-trade colony of Hong Kong. Although trade from the southwestern and Muslim part of Sulu and Mindanao has continued to flow to Singapore, the rest of the Philippine segment of the archipelago is still oriented more towards East Asia than to Southeast Asia.