New Perspectives on the History and Historiography of Southeast Asia by Aung-Thwin Michael Arthur; Hall Kenneth R.;

Author:Aung-Thwin, Michael Arthur; Hall, Kenneth R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

7 Maritime Subversions and Socio-Political Formations in Vietnamese History

A Look from the Marginal Center (Mien Trung)

Charles Wheeler

Introduction

This study considers the role that piracy and smuggling in the South China Sea (broadly defined) played in the creation and reproduction of states in lands and waters that nowadays constitute a part of Vietnam. It contributes to a larger agenda that addresses the ways in which such ostensibly deviant practices played central roles in the creation of new political regimes, social hierarchies, and cultural orthodoxies in Vietnamese history. By doing this, the study also sheds light on the historical importance of Vietnam’s often overlooked Center (Trung bo in Vietnamese)—a region once politically central, commercially wealthy, and culturally dynamic, but now marginal, poor, and underdeveloped—in the creation of a centralized Vietnamese state across eastern mainland Southeast Asia.

Three episodes in the history of Vietnam’s marginal center illustrate the past role that maritime predation and subversive exchange played in economic restructurings and political contests in its societies. They illustrate that the relationship between polities and pirates–smugglers was not always antagonistic. Sometimes, in fact, these deviant groups were “intrinsic to the functioning of the state,” similar to other places in world history.1 If so, their standing in Vietnamese state and society depended “above all from change in the political realm,”2 a realm that encompassed multiple states engaged (willingly or not) with each other and the world through the maritime medium of piracy and smuggling networks. In these ways, the state’s attitude toward pirates and smugglers in Vietnamese history followed patterns already noted in other parts of the world, recalling Victor Lieberman’s list of “strange parallels” that liken state formation patterns in mainland Southeast Asia to those in Western Europe.3

These newer approaches to piracy and smuggling also complement the continuing quest to create autonomous histories of Southeast Asia, by providing a more accurate sense of economic scales during “ages of commerce” in the South China Sea and the social networks that realized them.4 The events described underscore the important role that maritime culture and amphibious exchange has played in complex social ecology that shaped Vietnamese political economies throughout history, and the new challenges to established power that arose—whether that power lay in the North, the South or the Center itself. In each of these scenarios, political and economic outcomes depended as much upon little boats as they did upon big ships, on fisherfolk as much as great pirates, merchants, or navies, whenever states or their subversives appealed to the maritime as a source of power.

Piracy and the Coastal Center

Historians of Vietnam have only recently begun to pay attention to the role of the maritime in Vietnamese economy, beginning with Tana Li, Shiro Momoki, and myself.5 Since then, a number of studies have established the importance of carrier trade, coastal communities, and inland/upriver exchange to the political economy of Vietnamese states.6

However, neither historians nor contemporary area analysts have paid attention to maritime commerce beyond the pale of Vietnamese state sanction. Like most characterizations of piracy and smuggling, such phenomena are recognized only for their potential threat to normative socio-political order.

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