Middle Power Statecraft: Indonesia, Malaysia and the Asia-Pacific by Jonathan H. Ping

Author:Jonathan H. Ping [Ping, Jonathan H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351153027
Google: ofdADwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-11-30T11:12:43+00:00

How did the states of the archipelago, prior to the complete loss of their states, hybridise their statecraft and PP in relation to (towards) the European influences in order to take advantage of the opportunity they initially perceived in the Europeans? This is related to the goals of the European powers and how they dealt with the archipelago’s shared geography, economy and population. The main policies, which the archipelago states responded to, were the attempted Christianisation of the archipelago and the use of force first to exclude archipelagic states and then colonial competitors in order to obtain a monopoly of specific commodities. Dependency on a single buyer resulted in reduced prices.

Most historians would accept that the monopoly the Dutch established over supplies of nutmeg (in 1621) and cloves (by the 1650s), their conquest of such key commercial centers as Makassar (1669) and Banten (1682), and their strong-armed quasi-monopoly over most of the other export centers of the Indonesian Archipelago constituted a major setback to indigenous commerce in the Islands and weakened the control of maritime states over their hinterlands. (Reid 1993, 18)

The limited population was addressed by the European powers through the importation of Chinese and Indian coolie labour. The long-term impacts came in Indonesia from the Dutch policy of transmigration, and in Malaysia by the British policy of encouraging the coolie labourers to settle permanently (Gungwu 1996, 9).

By the end of the middle of the 1600s, the statecraft and PP of independent archipelago states had been removed and replaced by the slow draining process that would result in a transformed understanding of statecraft and PP through oppression rather than hybridisation. What was introduced by the oppression of the Europeans through their imperialist interaction with the archipelago and what changed in the statecraft and PP of the archipelago states in their final stands before defeat?

The introduction of new military technology and the change in the nature of warfare had the greatest impact on the structure of the states in the archipelago. As Reid states: ‘Southeast Asian states quickly devoted themselves to acquiring Portuguese-style arquebuses and cannon and the means to manufacture them’ (Reid 1993, 13). The new technology and the ongoing conflict for economic and political control also eventuated in the formation of professional standing armies. Previously the military was drawn regionally from slave labour and able combatants, normally merchants and other functionaries of the sultanate.

The perpetual state of conflict caused a redistribution of resources away from the traditional trade investments and concentrated more wealth in the sultanates, which then invested in war fleets rather than trading junks. The sixteenth century as a result of the Portuguese presence (beyond military activities) resulted in the disappearance of the large Malay and Javanese trading junks. The archipelago junks succumbed to Chinese and Gujarati competition (Manguin 1993). As mentioned above, the archipelago was first to feel the strangling effects of the Europeans, and the archipelago’s traditional Chinese and Indians competitors took advantage of the opportunity this presented.

Systems of government became more centralised as Sultans had access to greater military power and became less dependent on PP.

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