Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott

Author:James C. Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2009-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

State-Making as a Cosmopolitan Ingathering

The founders of the early padi state had to assemble their subjects from among hitherto stateless populations. And when, as so often happened, a state disintegrated, subsequent state-makers had to reassemble subjects from among the shards available by raiding other states or incorporating stateless hill peoples. Earlier “wave” theories of migration supposed that large numbers of Burmans and Tais swept down from the north into the alluvial plateaus suitable for irrigated rice and defeated or chased off the earlier inhabitants. This view, now discredited for lack of evidence, implicitly assumed that the Burmans and Tais came as whole societies, rulers and subjects, to establish themselves as conquerors. It now appears far more plausible that the Burmans and Tai who appeared were a kind of militarily and politically adept pioneer elite with the skills to organize and dominate a padi core. Their subjects, on this reading, were gathered in from the surrounding stateless hills and confected into the node of power we have called the padi state. Providing that we take the long view, then, most of the people today known as Shan are ex–hill people who have, over time, been completely incorporated into the Shan valley polity. Most of those who appear today as Burman are the descendants—recent or long ago—of non-Burman populations from both hill and valley (Shan, Kachin, Mon, Khmer, Pyu, Chin, Karen, and so on). Most Thai are, in the same fashion, ex–hill people, and, on the longest view, the creation of “Hanness” itself should be seen as the most successful, longterm, state-based ingathering of all time. The early need for manpower was such that none of these states could afford to be too particular about where its subjects came from.

The most carefully observed and elaborated model of such ingathering comes to us from the studies of the Malay maritime trading center—the negeri— largely because Europeans have been describing it since before the sixteenth century. Designed as an “interstitial” polity to mediate between hill collectors and international trade, and to defend its strategic location, the negeri amassed manpower both by force and by the attraction of commercial gain. Its water-borne slaving expeditions cast a wide net, and the captives thus assembled were incorporated into the negeri. The formula for full incorporation was minimal: becoming a retainer of a Malay chief, professing Islam, and speaking Malay, the lingua franca of trade in the archipelago. A negeri was less an ethnicity than a political formula for membership in the polity. As a result of the vagaries of trading and raiding, each Malay trading negeri took on a different cultural complexion depending on the mix of peoples it had incorporated over time: Minangkabau, Batak, Bugis, Acehnese, Javanese, Indian, and Arab traders and so on. At its most successful, a negeri such as Melaka would become a magnet for traders from far away, rivaling Venice. Its radical dependence on fluctuating overseas trade, however, made the negeri a very fragile affair.

The small Tai or Shan muang (polity), though

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