Maritime influences in Southeast Asia, c. 900–1300

Notes

Maritime influences in Southeast Asia, c. 900–1300:Some further thoughts

Victor Lieberman

In a recent essay in this journal,1 Geoff Wade suggested that between c. 900 and1300 maritime trade influenced political and social evolution across Southeast Asia farmore extensively than generally has been recognised. Redeploying the ‘Age ofCommerce’ thesis that Anthony Reid originally developed for the period 1450–1680, Wade argued that between 900 and 1300 as well, commercial impulses frombeyond Southeast Asia provided the prime mover, the critical agent, the indispensablestimulus to local evolution. A ‘number of changes external to what is commonlyreferred to as Southeast Asia, impacted the region and provided an environmentwhere maritime trade boomed, and this trade boom induced political, social andeconomic changes throughout the region’.2 Thus Wade termed the era between thestart of the tenth and of the fourteenth century an ‘Early Age of Commerce’.

In support of his thesis that Southeast Asian vitality issued directly from risingmarket demand in China, the Mideast and India, Wade used largely secondarysources in imaginative and perceptive fashion to trace the impact of Chinese andIndian Ocean trade networks on a variety of Southeast Asian developments: thespread of new religions, the movement of political centres from the interior to thecoast, political integration, rapid population growth, monetisation, cash cropping,new ceramic and textile industries, and novel modes of domestic consumption andmercantile organisation.3 No one, so far as I know, had inventoried these ostensiblydisparate phenomena across Southeast Asia before 1300, much less linked them to acommon maritime dynamic.

And yet if Wade’s essay offers a welcome, refreshingly integrated overview, hisreliance on Reid’s Age of Commerce model and his emphasis on regional unityand uniform etiology also carry certain risks. My purpose in this short commentaryis to offer, in necessarily cursory fashion, some theoretical perspectives that bothcomplement and complicate Wade’s approach.4

Victor Lieberman is the Marvin B. Becker Collegiate Professor of History and Professor of SoutheastAsian History at the University of Michigan. Correspondence in connection with this paper should beaddressed to: [email protected] Geoff Wade, ‘An Early Age of Commerce in Southeast Asia, 900–1300’, Journal of Southeast AsianStudies, 40, 2 (2009): 221–65.2 Ibid., p. 222. See also pp. 259, 263.3 Ibid., pp. 258–62.4 For further discussion, see Victor Lieberman, Strange parallels: Southeast Asia in global context,c. 800–1830, Volume I: Integration on the mainland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),chs. 1–4; Victor Lieberman, Strange parallels: Southeast Asia in global context, c. 800–1830, Volume II:Mainland mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands (Cambridge: Cambridge

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 41(3), pp 529–539 2010.

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One danger in applying to an earlier period a theory developed for the fifteenthto seventeenth centuries is that it risks mechanistic duplication and chronologicalconflation. Reid argued that maritime trade was seminal to the dissemination oftextual religions – Islam, Christianity, Theravada Buddhism, and to a lesser extent,Neo-Confucianism – during what he terms Southeast Asia’s ‘religious revolution’.5

Wade claimed that international commerce spread new religions between c. 900and 1300 as well. However, the pre-1300 evidence is less strong, and such evidenceas we have comes not from the period as a whole, rather from the thirteenth century.This weakens the utility of 900–1300 as a coherent category – at least as regards reli-gious change – and suggests that the thirteenth century might be assimilated moreprofitably to Reid’s subsequent Age of Commerce. For example, although since atleast the ninth century Muslim traders from the Mideast had congregated inChinese and Southeast Asian ports, the conversion of Southeast Asians themselvesto Islam seems to have begun fitfully in north Sumatra only in the thirteenthcentury and did not become regionally significant until the fourteenth and moreespecially the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.6 Likewise, in the Khmer empireTheravada Buddhism began to eclipse Hinduism/Mahayana Buddhism only after1220 or 1250.7

Following Reid, Wade also suggested that between 900 and 1300 rulers shiftedtheir capitals from the interior towards the coast in an effort to control maritimetrade and thus to centralise patronage. In Java the post-920 political shift from thesouthcentral interior to the Brantas basin did respond, at least in part, to the lureof the China trade. Likewise in Vietnam, as John Whitmore recently has shown,the Tran Dynasty (1225–1400) developed a secondary capital in the commerciallyvibrant Red River delta. Yet the Tran’s primary base remained at Thang Long inthe interior.8 Moreover, what I term the ‘charter’ states of Upper Burma andAngkor stood firm against maritime pressures well into the fourteenth century.It was only after 1369 that Pegu, after 1351 that Ayudhya, and after c. 1440 that

University Press, 2009), ch. 7. Some of the theoretical concerns in this essay were anticipated in my dis-cussion of the original Age of Commerce thesis. See Victor Lieberman, ‘An Age of Commerce inSoutheast Asia? Problems of regional coherence — A review article’, Journal of Asian Studies, 54, 3(1995): 796–807.5 Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the age of commerce 1450–1680, Volume II: Expansion and crisis(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), ch. 3.6 Merle C. Ricklefs, A history of modern Indonesia, 4th edn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp.3–16.7 David Chandler, A history of Cambodia, 2nd edn (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 68–71;Adhemard Leclere, Le bouddhisme au Cambodge (Paris: E. Leroux, 1899), pp. 1–34; AshleyThompson, ‘Changing perspectives: Cambodia after Angkor’, in Sculpture of Angkor and ancientCambodia, ed. Helen Jessup and Thierry Zephir (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1997), pp.22–32. Nor does the period 900–1300 have any particular resonance for religious change in the westernmainland, where Theravada/Hinayana Buddhism appeared by the 4th century CE and gained traction inthe Pagan period, but where it did not begin to marginalise Mahayana, Hindu and animist elements untilthe 15th or 16th centuries. Janice Stargardt, The ancient Pyu of Burma, Volume I: Early Pyu cities in aman-made landscape (Cambridge: PACSEA, 1990), pp. 326–40, 347; Michael Aung-Thwin, Pagan: Theorigins of modern Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), pp. 1, 17, 24, 30–48, 128, 169;Michael Aung-Thwin, The mists of Ramanna (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), p. 33. Seealso Wade, ‘Early Age’, p. 260.8 John Whitmore, ‘The rise of the coast’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 37, 1 (2006): 114–16.

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Phnom Penh became major regional centres at the expense of imperial centres fartherinland.9

As regards monetisation, cash cropping, and handicraft and mercantile inno-vation, our data between 900 and 1300 are simply too meagre to say with any confi-dence whether these shifts adumbrated the type of changes Reid documented between1450 and 1680.10

Arguably, however, the danger of chronological conflation is less than that of over-stating pre-1300 geographic uniformity. In a word, maritime primacy between 900 and1300 works admirably for some sectors of Southeast Asia, but less well for others.

Few scholars, I think, would doubt that Wade has captured effectively the prin-cipal economic dynamic in thinly populated coastal polities with limited agrarianresources, polities such as Champa in what is now central Vietnam, Tambralingaand Kedah in the Malay peninsula, Srivijaya and other port states in eastern andnorthern Sumatra, and coastal enclaves in Borneo. In Java too, as Jan Christie, theleading scholar of early Java, has shown, trade with South China and the easternarchipelago between c. 900 and 1400 contributed not only to an eastward shift in capi-tals and the opening of new ports, but to commercial intensification. Much of Wade’sevidence for commercial agriculture, monetisation and new forms of consumption infact derived from Christie’s work on East Java.11

The problem is, however, that Wade favoured a one-directional stimulus-response model: Chinese and Indian Ocean demand compelled Southeast Asianadjustments. But in fact external and domestic elements often joined in complexsynergies, and to dwell exclusively on the former elements is, in my opinion, toposit an implausible degree of indigenous inertia. To some degree this caveat applieseven to labour-scarce realms like Srivijaya, where improved political coordinationand/or an increase in local population could enhance entrepôt efficiency, the supplyof local exports (forest and sea products and minerals), and the demand for Chineseand Indian imports. This concern is more obviously germane to Central and EastJava, Upper Burma, Angkor and Đai Viêt — relatively well populated areas wherethe political economy focused more substantially on agricultural resources and man-power, and where population growth and political consolidation from c. 900 to 1300were heavily influenced by domestic factors.

Thus, for example, my reading of Javanese historiography argues that betweenc. 900 and 1300 the major agents of economic expansion were Hindu/Buddhist

9 Aung-Thwin,Mists of Ramanna, pp. 92, 108, 308–10; G.E. Harvey, A history of Burma (London: Cass,1967), p. 112; David Wyatt, Thailand: A short history, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003),p. 54; Chandler, History of Cambodia, p. 78. The term ‘charter’ is preferable to ‘classical’, because, byavoiding association with Greece and Rome, it facilitates comparison with European states c. 900–1300 that fulfilled the same foundational role as Pagan, Angkor and Đai Viêt. That is to say, likeCarolingian / Capetian France, Norman / Plantagenet England, and Kievan Rus, Southeast Asian politiesc. 900 to 1300 provided a literary, aesthetic, legal, institutional and political charter for subsequentgenerations.10 On current evidence we are quite unable to match the detailed quantification in Reid, Southeast Asiain the Age of Commerce, Volume II, ch. 1.11 Wade, ‘Early Age of Commerce’, pp. 248–51, 260–2; Jan Christie, ‘Javanese markets and the Asia Seatrade boom of the ninth to thirteenth centuries’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient,41 (1998): 344–81.

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temples, to which kings and lesser lords transferred tax rights on specified lands. Bycollecting and marketing produce and by marshalling bonded labour, such insti-tutions built new water control systems, bridges and roads and converted shiftingcultivation and jungle to extensive wet rice acreages. Even after Javanese elitesbegan investing local surpluses in luxury imports rather than temples, land recla-mation and population growth continued under religious as well as lay auspices.12

To be sure, overseas contacts could accelerate and rechannel these processes.Indirectly, they aided expansion by providing those systems of architecture, ritualand cosmology – Hindu and Mahayana – on which temple networks in Java andother charter states ultimately rested. More directly, imported techniques and metalsassisted Javanese artisans, while Indian and Chinese textiles, ceramics and other han-dicrafts encouraged commercial production. To follow Peter Boomgaard, the latterstimulus operated on two levels. On the one hand, some peasants eager to buycheap foreign imports (and at the same time to meet demand for cash taxes) broughtsurplus goods to market for both domestic and overseas sale. On the other hand, inorder to obtain exotic foreign handicrafts, perfumes and spices, secular and lay elitescollected crops for export.13 Thus the Javanese kingdom of Majapahit sent rice andfoodstuffs to Maluku, and black pepper, safflower dye, medicinal herbs to China.Chinese cash and imitations of Chinese coins facilitated transactions on both levels.To obtain prized goods for their own use and for export, Java’s rulers also soughtrepeatedly to dominate overseas ports. This hybrid agrarian-commercial orientationmay help to explain why, alone among major agrarian states, Majapahit survivedthe fourteenth-century commercial expansion that weakened Upper Burma,Angkor and Đai Viêt.

Yet, on present evidence, the proliferation across the Javanese countryside of per-manent and periodic markets – to which peasants and professional traders fed riceand other foodstuffs, livestock, indigenous textiles and pottery – benefited far lessfrom maritime stimuli than from local population increase and forest reclamation.A very modest, if indeterminate, portion of rural production seems to have enteredthe market, and of that only a fraction went overseas. Domestically generated agrarianextension and intensification were primarily responsible for the pattern whereby exist-ing villages expanded, new villages devolved from older settlements, and commercialexchanges multiplied across the countryside. Inscriptions from the late first and early

12 On Javanese economy and political economy to c. 1300, see n. 11 supra, plus Jan Christie, ‘Texts andtextiles in “medieval” Java’, Bulletin de l’Ecole Francaise de ’Extreme-Orient, 80 (1993): 181–211; Christie,‘Negara, mandala, and despotic state’, in Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th centuries, ed. David Marr and A.C. Milner (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), pp. 65–93; Christie, ‘Trade and value inpre-Majapahit Java’, Indonesia Circle, 59–60 (1992–93): 3–17; Christie, ‘Register of the Inscriptions ofJava’, 2 vols. (2002); Christie, ‘The agricultural economies of early Java and Bali’; Christie, ‘Wanua,Thani, Paraduwan’, in Texts from the islands, ed. Wolfgang Marschall (Berne: University of Berne,1989), pp. 27–42; Christie, ‘Money and its uses in the Javanese states of the ninth to fifteenth centuries’,Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 39 (1993): 243–86; Christie, ‘States withoutcities’, Indonesia, 52 (1991): 23–40; Peter Boomgaard, ‘From riches to rags?’, in A history of naturalresources in Asia, ed. Greg Bankoff and Peter Boomgaard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp.185–203; and sources in Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 2, pp. 780–97.13 Peter Boomgaard, Southeast Asia: An environmental history (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007),pp. 74–6.


second millennia refer to burgeoning domestic markets. In turn, local commercecould spur population growth insofar as such marts provided alternate sources ofincome and aided food distribution in rice-deficit areas. By extension, better nutritioncould enhance female fertility and lower child mortality.14 To 1400 there is no evi-dence that more than a small percentage of Java’s population depended for their live-lihood on specifically maritime exports, imports or markets — which alone thereforeseem inadequate to explain a general agrarian/demographic upsurge between c. 900and 1300/1400 and an associated expansion in state resources.15

Such a judgement is yet more secure for Upper Burma. As reconstructed byMichael Aung-Thwin, G.H. Luce and Than Tun, economic expansion in the empireof Pagan centred on Buddhist temples to which wealthy laymen donated extensiveacreages and unfree cultivators. Like their Javanese counterparts, such institutionssponsored improvements in agrarian technique, novel forms of labour control, newwaterworks and forest reclamation. Having expanded between c. 900 and 1100 in‘heartland’ districts (hkayaings) northeast and south of Pagan, from the late twelfthcentury agrarian reclamation moved into frontier areas (taiks) west of theIrrawaddy and south of Minbu. During the thirteenth century reclamation continued,albeit at a more modest pace. In combination, hkayaing intensification and taik colo-nisation permitted and reflected sustained demographic vitality, perhaps too anincrease in per capita productivity, along with expanded local markets for land,labour, foodstuffs and materials. In short, here even more clearly than in Java dom-estic spurs were central to commercial intensification and overall growth. Accordingto Aung-Thwin, the leading Pagan scholar, it was the development of irrigation worksin agricultural basins over 650 kilometres from the coast ‘that enabled the kingdom ofPagan to expand beyond the dry zone of Upper Burma in the first place’ and to dom-inate the maritime south.16

14 See Christie, ‘Agricultural economies’, and the theoretical discussion of early modern Indonesian andPhilippine trade in David Henley, ‘Population and means of subsistence’, JSEAS, 36 (2005): 337–72;David Henley, Fertility, food, and fever (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2005), pp. 46–67, 606–10. Dealing withareas of small agrarian and demographic capacity, Henley focuses on external trade, but his theoreticalinsights apply equally well to local commercial systems.15 See n. 12 supra and the estimate at Boomgaard, Southeast Asia, 146, that in 1800 still only 10% orfewer Javanese depended on foreign trade. In 1800 such trade was far larger than in 1400 not only inabsolute terms, but as a portion of the economy.16 Michael Aung-Thwin, Myth and history in the historiography of early Burma (Athens, OH: OhioUniversity Center for International Studies, 1998), p. 96. See also Michael Aung-Thwin’s books:Pagan, chs. 2, 5, 8, 9; Mists of Ramanna, pp. 301–2. For analyses congruent with Aung-Thwin, see G.H. Luce, ‘Economic life of the early Burmans’, Journal of the Burma Research Society, 30 (1940): 283–301; G.H. Luce, Old Burma — early Pagan, 3 vols. (Locust Valley, NY: Artibus Asiae,1969), vol. I,pp. 29–38, 84–92; Than Tun, Hkit-haung myan-ma ya-zawin (Rangoon: Maha Dagon Sa-peiHtok-wei-yei, 1969), chs. 15–16; Than Tun, ‘History of Buddhism in Burma, A.D. 1000–1300’(University of London, PhD diss., 1956), chs. 7–10; U Maung Maung Tin, Myit-tha taze-yawakwin-zin-lei-la chet-hmat-zu (Mandalay: Sa-pei Bani, 2000); Tilman Frasch, ‘Coastal peripheries duringthe Pagan period’, in The maritime frontier of Burma, ed. Jos Gommans and Jacques Leider (Leiden:KITLV Press, 2002), pp. 59, 63, 66. On Pagan’s commercial interest in Lower Burma and the northernpeninsula, see also Kenneth Hall and John Whitmore, ‘Southeast Asian trade and the Isthmian struggle,1000–1200’, in Hall and Whitmore, Explorations in early Southeast Asian history (Ann Arbor: Universityof Michigan Center for Southeast Asian Studies 1976), pp. 303–40.


Again, I have no desire to minimise maritime influences. Although not cited byWade, Guy Lubeigt recently has argued that the Irrawaddy transmitted Indian Oceancommercial impulses to Pagan, whose elites, starting with the king and the royalfamily and followed by local and foreign merchants, derived profits from trade suffi-cient to finance at least part of their religious constructions.17 Aung-Thwin concursthat coastal trade and luxury imports supplemented agrarian income and helped topull Pagan’s armies into the south as early as the eleventh century. Yet evidencefor rice or agrarian exports from Pagan is far more meagre than from East Java.On the whole, Aung-Thwin concludes, Upper Burma ‘had little need for externaltrade’, which played only ‘a minor role’ in the overall economy and society.18

Angkor resembled Java and more especially Pagan in key respects. In the earlyeleventh and late twelfth centuries foreign trade provided the Khmer elite, like itsBurmese and Javanese counterparts, with valued revenues and prestige goods andhelped to direct imperial expansion, in this case in the upper peninsula and againstChampa. Like Pagan, however, Angkor was located at some distance from the com-mercial coast in an interior dry zone where a self-sufficient agrarian dynamic – sub-stantially reliant on religious temples for labour control, technical knowledge andinvestment in reclamation and water control – defined the essential rhythms of econ-omic life. Indeed, Cambodia’s charter-era florescence came only after the economiccentre of gravity shifted from the coast to the interior. According to MichaelVickery, after the seventh century Cambodia’s ‘economy was almost entirely agrar-ian’.19 At its peak, Angkor was probably the world’s most extensive low-densitycity, covering 1,000 square kilometres with over half a million inhabitants. A vastwater management and irrigation network supported three distinct, yet intercon-nected zones for control, storage and distribution on which not only a sector of agri-culture, but the city’s moats, pools, architectural and residential infrastructuredepended. Until climatic shifts and technical weaknesses overwhelmed it after 1300,this massive system afforded Angkorian civilisation the stability necessary to survivefrequent intra-elite conflicts.20 Even under Suryavarman I (r. 1001–1050), the kingmost closely associated with Angkorian commercial expansion, trade remained sec-ondary to developing and maintaining Angkor’s agrarian base. Under his successorsan internal orientation became yet more pronounced.21 In Claude Jacques’ succinct

17 Guy Lubeigt, ‘Pagan, an [sic] hinterland port-city in medieval Burma: A new geographic approach’,Paper for the 12th International Conference of the European Association of Southeast AsianArchaeologists.18 Aung-Thwin, Pagan, pp. 113, 114.19 Michael Vickery, Society, economics, and politics in pre-Angkor Cambodia (Tokyo: Centre for EastAsian Cultural Studies, 1998), p. 300. Also pp. 405–6.20 Roland Fletcher , ‘The development of the water management system of Angkor’, IPPA [Indo-PacificPrehistory Association] Bulletin 28 (2008): 57–66; Brendan Buckley et al., ‘Climate and the collapse ofAngkor’, forthcoming in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Jared Diamond, ‘Maya,Khmer and Inca’, Nature, 461 (24 Sept. 2009): 479–80; Dan Penny , ‘Vegetation and land-use atAngkor, Cambodia’, Antiquity, 80 (2006): 599–614; Greater Angkor Project, ‘Redefining Angkor’,Udaya, 4 (2003): 107–25; Charles Ortloff, Water and engineering in the ancient world (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 358–76.21 Kenneth Hall,Maritime trade and state development in early Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University ofHawaii Press, 1985), pp. 177–8. See also Hall and Whitmore, ‘Southeast Asian trade’.

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formulation, ‘Everybody agrees that the Angkorean [sic] economy was based onlyupon agriculture.’22

As for Đai Viêt, Whitmore has done more than any scholar to explore growingcultural and commercial ties to the coast and to South China during the Ly (1009–1225) and more especially the Tran (1225–1400) Dynasties. But in concluding arecent survey of Đai Viêt’s maritime links, he wrote:

Though this study has brought to the fore the significance of trade and the coast and theramifications of the changes that arose from lower Dai Viet, there is still the need toemphasize that the inland core remained the centre and focal point of the polity’s activi-ties. For Dai Viet, an expanding interior agriculture formed its foundation … In this Iconcur with Michael Aung-Thwin as he states for Burma that ‘a densely populated, well-irrigated, highly predictable, and productive agrarian interior’ remained dominant. InDai Viet the Tran, after all, did choose to keep the capital where it had been – in themid-river core – and to develop further its agricultural potential.23

Much as in Pagan, Angkor and Java, Whitmore suggested, the prosperity to c.1200 of that mid-river core centred on Buddhist temples and estates, which concen-trated labour and technical resources and spearheaded the opening of interior foot-hills to cultivation. After c. 1200, moreover, the increased salience of the coast inĐai Viêt’s political economy reflected the laborious and technically difficult, but econ-omically rewarding conversion of rich deltaic swamplands to agriculture as much as,if not more than, it reflected expanding maritime trade ties to China. At the same timein Đai Viêt as in other charter realms, such maritime trade expansion as did occurbenefited not only from external dynamics, but from the augmentation in marketsupply and demand that local population increase made possible.24 In assessing thepre-1300 role of maritime trade, note finally that as in Burma, Siam/Cambodiaand Java, so too along the mainland’s eastern littoral it was only after 1300 that thepolitical centre of gravity shifted from the agricultural core towards the commercialcoast.25

After evaluating in methodical, theoretically informed fashion the relative contri-butions of maritime and internal stimuli, Boomgaard also has concluded that before1400 ‘economic and environmental changes in Southeast Asia were set in motionalmost entirely by internal developments (mainly climate fluctuations, disease pat-terns, war, and [domestically generated] population growth)’, rather than by extra-regional commercial forces.26

22 Claude Jacques, ‘Sources on economic activities in Khmer and Cham Lands’, in Marr and Milner,Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th centuries, p. 330; also p. 332.23 Whitmore, ‘Rise of the coast’, p. 122.24 Ibid., pp. 108–9, 121; Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 1, pp. 362–5.25 In what is now Vietnam, Champa’s late-14th-century ascendancy over Dong Kinh, and moreespecially the post-1620 independence of the maritime-oriented Nguyen domain from the north, maybe compared to the post-1350 breakaway of Pegu from Upper Burma and of Phnom Penh andAyudhya from Angkor. In Java the pasisir coast triumphed over the more interior state of Majapahitin the late 15th and 16th centuries. See n. 9 supra; Ricklefs, History of modern Indonesia, pp. 38–43; LiTana, Nguyen Cochinchina (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1998).26 Boomgaard, Southeast Asia, p. 145. Even during the post-1400 Early Modern period, Reid’s Age ofCommerce, he argues that external influences were ‘notable’, but ‘modest’.


In the more densely settled sectors of Southeast Asia, especially on the mainland,the general pre-1300 relation between domestic and external stimuli therefore mayhave resembled that in western Europe and key sectors of South Asia and China.Between c. 900 and 1300 the latter regions also enjoyed unprecedented vitality —demographic, agrarian, commercial and political. Yet long-distance trade was merelya secondary, acceleratory factor. Of course, to recall my own introductory admonition,in attempting broad geographic comparisons, one must guard against artificial con-flation. But if my analysis has any merit and if the sophisticated historiographies ofEurope, China and so forth may be trusted, notwithstanding obvious differences inscale, the parallels between Southeast Asia’s agrarian cores and these other agrarianregions are, to say the least, intriguing.

Writing of Europe’s high medieval expansion c. 950–1350, for example, RobertLopez observed, ‘Even as demographic growth was a prime motor of agricultural pro-gress, so agricultural progress was an essential prerequisite of the CommercialRevolution … it is proper to say that the revolution took off from the manor.’27

‘To put the circulation of money before agricultural development’, wrote RobertFossier, is ‘to put the cart before the horse’.28 According to ArletteHigounet-Nadal, medieval French rural overpopulation, the result of agrarian pro-gress, was ‘certainly the motor of urban development’ and trade.29 In R.I. Moore’swords, the commerce and ‘the cities of medieval Europe “grew out of” the country-side’.30 While emphasising the unique ability of ever more extensive long-distancetrade, extending to the Mediterranean and the Levant, to create windfall profitsand to promote specialisation and efficient resource allocation, Michael McCormickconcurred that early European commercial vigour drew primarily on agrarian pro-ductivity.31 The powerful feudal monarchies of the high medieval era battened onthis economic expansion, and associated fiscal, military, archival and culturalinnovations.32

China’s so-called First Commercial Revolution 800/900–1300 yields to similaranalysis. Although maritime trade stimulated coastal cities and interregional tradeand provided the beleaguered Song state with much needed revenues, there is generalagreement that Song vitality derived primarily from the colonisation of Central andSouth China with its vast rice potential. Whereas for centuries China’s populationhad grown very slightly, if at all, between the eighth and eleventh centuries it morethan doubled, especially in the middle and lower Yangzi. Along with migration

27 Robert Lopez, The commercial revolution of the middle ages, 950–1350 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 56.28 The Cambridge illustrated history of the middle ages, Volume II: 950–1250, ed. Robert Fossier(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 5.29 Arlette Higounet-Nadal, ‘La croissance urbaine: XII –XIV siecles’, in Histoire de la populationFrancaise, t. I: Des origines a la renaissance, ed. Jacques Dupaquier (Paris: Quadrige, 1988), p. 267.30 R.I. Moore, The first European revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 35–6.31 Michael McCormick, Origins of the European economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2001), pp. 578–9. For similar views see George Duby, The early growth of the European economy(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 10; Adriaan Verhulst, The Carolingian economy(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 113; S.R. Epstein, Freedom and growth (London:Routledge, 2000), pp. 70–1.32 Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 2, pp. 135–39, 164–70.


from North China and government incentives, the key elements in this boom were theopening of private estates capable of marshalling labour for large-scale reclamationand irrigation; improvements in cultivation technique; the introduction of hardy,quick-ripening rice strains from Champa; the dissemination of advanced hydraulictechnology; and the creation of ever more ramified inland and coastal-shipping net-works along which surpluses could move to market. Grain sales freed regions andproducers to specialise in non-subsistence crops, in raw materials and in diverse man-ufactures. Commercial intensification and the sheer increase in the size of the consu-mer population also favoured new credit procedures, monetisation and retailspecialisation. A broader, more mobile, more literate provincial elite, with commercialaccess to printed texts, in turn provided a social foundation for the unprecedentedlyroutinised, literate, permeative, examinations-based political order of the Song. In thismultifaceted economic and social transformation, rising overseas commerce played avalued, but subsidiary role. This was true even in Chinese coastal regions whose invol-vement in maritime trade exceeded that of Pagan or Angkor.33

In South Asia in this period, long-distance trade, both overland and maritime,arguably was more critical to urbanisation and state formation than in much ofEurope or China; while the political-cum-economic contribution of Inner Asian con-quest elites lacked entirely a West European analogue. Suffice it to say, however, thatacross much of South Asia (particularly northwest India and the Deccan) as inEurope, China, and the more densely settled parts of Southeast Asia, the principalsource of economic and commercial strength between c. 900 and 1300 wasagrarian-cum-demographic expansion.34

If, as the Early Age of Commerce thesis argues, Southeast Asian vitality in thesecenturies derived overwhelmingly from extra-regional inputs, explaining correlationswith other Eurasian areas poses no particular challenge. Maritime routes simply trans-mitted to Southeast Asia a dynamism that originated in China and India and, moreindirectly perhaps, in medieval Europe and the Levant. But if economic expansion inkey sectors of Southeast Asia had a primarily or substantially local root, three ques-tions immediately arise: (a) Why did growth correlate in Pagan, Angkor, Đai Viêt andJava, whose agrarian economies had no significant contact with one another?; (b)Why did economic and political vitality in these same regions correlate withSrivijaya and parts of the archipelago that relied overwhelmingly on maritimetrade?; (c) Why did economic/political vitality in mainland Southeast Asia andJava correlate with trends in China, South Asia — and most curiously, in distantEurope?35

These are tremendously complex issues to which, in concluding this brief note, Ican proffer only schematic answers.36 Part of the answer may have involved synchro-nised disease immunities, which were aided by maritime exchange but which also hadtheir own dynamic. In the late first and early second millennia, modest cumulativepopulation growth around much of the Eurasian perimeter – including western

33 See discussion and citations at Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 2, pp. 510–19, 548–56.34 Again, see discussion at Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol., pp. 681–91.35 Although I focus here on Western Europe, Kiev and much of eastern Europe enjoyed a similar vital-ity c. 900 to 1240.36 For detailed discussion, see Lieberman, Strange parallels, vol. 2, chs. 2, 5, 6, 7.


and northern Europe, South China, lowland Southeast Asia, Japan and perhaps SouthIndia – joined closer contacts with long-settled Eurasian cores to convert infrequentbut extremely lethal epidemics, chiefly smallpox and measles, into endemic diseases ofchildhood. Once a disease has become endemic, universal childhood exposure pre-cludes the horrendously destructive virgin-soil effects associated with smallpox inthe New World and Oceania or with the Black Death in Europe. This would havefavoured coordinated demographic and agrarian vitality between c. 800 and 1300in far-flung Eurasian regions where trade-assisted exposure to foreign disease wasmost common and where populations needed to sustain local chains of endemicinfection had become sufficiently dense.

A second explanation for intra- and extra-regional synchrony is the roughly coor-dinated opening of new agrarian zones. In post-Roman Europe and post-Han Chinaimperial collapse, by empowering ‘barbarians’ from beyond the frontier, encouraged agradual shift in the political centre of gravity to potentially highly productive buthitherto neglected agricultural frontiers, from the Mediterranean to NorthwestEurope and from North to South China. New frontier environments then calledforth innovative agrarian technologies along with new manorial systems. AlthoughSoutheast Asia and South Asia lacked an antecedent imperial collapse, those regionsalso saw (albeit in certain cases at a somewhat later date) the opening of fresh ecologi-cal zones, together with more efficient systems of agrarian and labour organisation.37

What is more, in mainland Southeast Asia, China and South Asia alike, interventionsby mobile warriors from beyond the frontier – Tais, Jurchens, Mongols, Turkicpeoples, Yadavas and Hoysalas – redrew the political map while in some cases accel-erating commercial or agrarian expansion.

Third, closely related to ecological shifts and perhaps most decisive was theso-called Medieval Climate Anomaly c. 850–1250/1300, which assisted agriculturein much of Southeast Asia, South China, South Asia and northern Europe alike.Precipitated by changes in solar radiation and by oscillations in the heat economyof ocean currents, the Medieval Climate Anomaly (also known as the MedievalWarm Period) contributed to the rapid demographic and economic growth character-istic of the European high middle ages by extending the growing season, reducingexcessive late summer rains, and drying rich bottom lands. But, ironically, thissame period of hemispheric warming as helped cultivation in northern Europe by‘drying it out’, aided agriculture in parts of Southeast Asia, South Asia and SouthChina by strengthening regional monsoons. This it did by increasing water vapourin the tropical atmosphere, by swelling vegetation-dependent convection, and mostcritical, by raising spring–summer temperatures in the interior of Asia and thus mag-nifying the land–sea thermal contrast on which monsoons rely. The ensuing increasein the strength and reach of seasonal rains enhanced cereal production, often dramati-cally, in hitherto arid zones of South Asia, in much of South China, in East Java, innorthern Vietnam and in those interior dry zones where Pagan and Angkor were

37 Whereas the economic shift from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe, from North to SouthChina, and from coastal to interior Cambodia all gained momentum from the 8th to 10th centuries,intensive cultivation of key dry zone districts in northwest India and the Deccan began in the 10thand 11th centuries. Large-scale reclamation of hkayaing areas in Burma started in the 10th and 11thcenturies, and of taik frontiers in the 12th century.

538 V I C TOR L I E B E RMAN

based. Hence, in part, the coordinated opening of new agrarian frontiers. TheMedieval Climate Anomaly allowed considerable temporal (not to mention regional)variation, but as a whole it was reasonably distinct from both earlier and later climaticregimes. It can hardly be accidental that dry-zone Pagan and Angkor as well as earlyĐai Viêt began to prosper with the onset of the Medieval Climate Anomaly and col-lapsed with the end of that regime and the onset of appreciably drier conditions in thefourteenth century.38 The post-1350 political shift from interior to coast in what arenow Burma/Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia responded both to commercial luresand to the fact that the coast enjoyed higher rainfall. In Europe and China, and to alesser extent South Asia, calamitous weather in the fourteenth century also was associ-ated with severe economic, demographic and political upheavals.

Although these three factors – new disease patterns, the ‘barbarian’-aided open-ing of new ecological zones and climate shifts – were closely intertwined, in manycontexts climate may have been primary. By magnifying agrarian output and popu-lation, the Medieval Climate Anomaly helped to push local peoples over the thresholdneeded to convert epidemic diseases to endemicity, accelerated colonisation andencouraged mobile warrior groups to enter sedentary spaces. In the eleventh to thir-teenth centuries more ramified commercial and cultural ties to settled populationsprovided Inner Asian cavalry on the borders of China and India, and Tai warriorbands in Southeast Asia, with the cultural capital needed to rule agrarian states. Atthe same time, by enhancing demand and supply in one region after another, coor-dinated population growth across Eurasia powerfully boosted long-distance trade,both overland and by sea. Insofar as Southeast Asian products commanded highprices in China and India, and insofar as all East–West maritime intercourse – luxu-ries and germs included – flowed through Southeast Asia, global contacts both stimu-lated Southeast Asian commercial production and accelerated disease domestication.In heavily settled areas, maritime trade thus reinforced, and in some measure recon-figured, a prosperity that derived more basically from climatic amelioration, localpopulation increase and frontier reclamation.

In sum, maritime trade does indeed seem able to explain economic, and by exten-sion political, vitality between c. 900 and 1300 in Champa, the peninsula and much ofthe archipelago, although even in these areas one must treat carefully the interplaybetween local demographic/political forces and foreign demand. But in Central andEast Java and in mainland cores, economic rhythms were governed to a more substan-tial – if still unquantifiable – extent by internal processes that, at first glance, appearloosely comparable to those in other agrarian sectors of Eurasia. These considerationssuggest that before 1300 Southeast Asia not only received from afar, but also helped togenerate historical dynamics fundamental to Old World evolution.

38 For recent studies of dramatic 14th-century climatic deterioration in central and eastern mainlandSoutheast Asia, see Richard Stone, ‘Tree rings tell of Angkor’s dying days’, Science, 323 (20 Feb.2009): 999; Richard Stone, ‘The end of Angkor’, Science, 311 (10 Mar. 2006): 1364–68; Diamond,‘Maya, Khmer and Inca’; Buckley, ‘Climate and collapse of Angkor’. See Lieberman, Strange parallels,vol. 2, pp. 121, 239–40, 370–1.


Documents

Maritime influences in Southeast Asia, c. 900–1300