Southeast Asia: A Very Short Introduction

VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way into a new subject. They are written by experts, and have been translated into more than 45 different languages.

The series began in 1995, and now covers a wide variety of topics in every discipline. The VSI library now contains over 500 volumes—a Very Short Introduction to everything from Psychology and Philosophy of Science to American History and Relativity—and continues to grow in every subject area.

Very Short Introductions available now:

ACCOUNTING Christopher Nobes ADOLESCENCE Peter K. Smith ADVERTISING Winston Fletcher AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGION Eddie S. Glaude Jr AFRICAN HISTORY John Parker and Richard Rathbone AFRICAN RELIGIONS Jacob K. Olupona AGEING Nancy A. Pachana AGNOSTICISM Robin Le Poidevin AGRICULTURE Paul Brassley and Richard Soffe ALEXANDER THE GREAT Hugh Bowden ALGEBRA Peter M. Higgins AMERICAN HISTORY Paul S. Boyer AMERICAN IMMIGRATION David A. Gerber AMERICAN LEGAL HISTORY G. Edward White AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY Donald Critchlow AMERICAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND ELECTIONS L. Sandy Maisel AMERICAN POLITICS Richard M. Valelly THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY Charles O. Jones THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION Robert J. Allison

AMERICAN SLAVERY Heather Andrea Williams THE AMERICAN WEST Stephen Aron AMERICAN WOMEN’S HISTORY Susan Ware ANAESTHESIA Aidan O’Donnell ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY Michael Beaney ANARCHISM Colin Ward ANCIENT ASSYRIA Karen Radner ANCIENT EGYPT Ian Shaw ANCIENT EGYPTIAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE Christina Riggs ANCIENT GREECE Paul Cartledge THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST Amanda H. Podany ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas ANCIENT WARFARE Harry Sidebottom ANGELS David Albert Jones ANGLICANISM Mark Chapman THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR Tristram D. Wyatt THE ANIMAL KINGDOM Peter Holland ANIMAL RIGHTS David DeGrazia THE ANTARCTIC Klaus Dodds ANTHROPOCENCE Erle C. Ellis ANTISEMITISM Steven Beller ANXIETY Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman APPLIED MATHEMATICS Alain Goriely THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS Paul Foster ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn ARCHITECTURE Andrew Ballantyne ARISTOCRACY William Doyle ARISTOTLE Jonathan Barnes ART HISTORY Dana Arnold

ART THEORY Cynthia Freeland ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY Madeline Y. Hsu ASTROBIOLOGY David C. Catling ASTROPHYSICS James Binney ATHEISM Julian Baggini ATMOSPHERE Paul I. Palmer AUGUSTINE Henry Chadwick AUSTRALIA Kenneth Morgan AUTISM Uta Frith THE AVANT GARDE David Cottington THE AZTECS Davíd Carrasco BABYLONIA Trevor Bryce BACTERIA Sebastian G. B. Amyes BANKING John Goddard and John O. S. Wilson BARTHES Jonathan Culler THE BEATS David Sterritt BEAUTY Roger Scruton BEHAVIOURAL ECONOMICS Michelle Baddeley BESTSELLERS John Sutherland THE BIBLE John Riches BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY Eric H. Cline BIG DATA Dawn E. Holmes BIOGRAPHY Hermione Lee BLACK HOLES Katherine Blundell BLOOD Chris Cooper THE BLUES Elijah Wald THE BODY Chris Shilling THE BOOK OF MORMON Terryl Givens BORDERS Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen

THE BRAIN Michael O’Shea BRANDING Robert Jones THE BRICS Andrew F. Cooper THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION Martin Loughlin THE BRITISH EMPIRE Ashley Jackson BRITISH POLITICS Anthony Wright BUDDHA Michael Carrithers BUDDHISM Damien Keown BUDDHIST ETHICS Damien Keown BYZANTIUM Peter Sarris CALVINISM Jon Balserak CANCER Nicholas James CAPITALISM James Fulcher CATHOLICISM Gerald O’Collins CAUSATION Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum THE CELL Terence Allen and Graham Cowling THE CELTS Barry Cunliffe CHAOS Leonard Smith CHEMISTRY Peter Atkins CHILD PSYCHOLOGY Usha Goswami CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Kimberley Reynolds CHINESE LITERATURE Sabina Knight CHOICE THEORY Michael Allingham CHRISTIAN ART Beth Williamson CHRISTIAN ETHICS D. Stephen Long CHRISTIANITY Linda Woodhead CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS Russell Foster and Leon Kreitzman CITIZENSHIP Richard Bellamy CIVIL ENGINEERING David Muir Wood CLASSICAL LITERATURE William Allan

CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY Helen Morales CLASSICS Mary Beard and John Henderson CLAUSEWITZ Michael Howard CLIMATE Mark Maslin CLIMATE CHANGE Mark Maslin CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY Susan Llewelyn and Katie Aafjes-van Doorn COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE Richard Passingham THE COLD WAR Robert McMahon COLONIAL AMERICA Alan Taylor COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE Rolena Adorno COMBINATORICS Robin Wilson COMEDY Matthew Bevis COMMUNISM Leslie Holmes COMPARATIVE LITERATURE Ben Hutchinson COMPLEXITY John H. Holland THE COMPUTER Darrel Ince COMPUTER SCIENCE Subrata Dasgupta CONFUCIANISM Daniel K. Gardner THE CONQUISTADORS Matthew Restall and Felipe Fernández-Armesto CONSCIENCE Paul Strohm CONSCIOUSNESS Susan Blackmore CONTEMPORARY ART Julian Stallabrass CONTEMPORARY FICTION Robert Eaglestone CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY Simon Critchley COPERNICUS Owen Gingerich CORAL REEFS Charles Sheppard CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY Jeremy Moon CORRUPTION Leslie Holmes COSMOLOGY Peter Coles

CRIME FICTION Richard Bradford CRIMINAL JUSTICE Julian V. Roberts CRITICAL THEORY Stephen Eric Bronner THE CRUSADES Christopher Tyerman CRYPTOGRAPHY Fred Piper and Sean Murphy CRYSTALLOGRAPHY A. M. Glazer THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION Richard Curt Kraus DADA AND SURREALISM David Hopkins DANTE Peter Hainsworth and David Robey DARWIN Jonathan Howard THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS Timothy H. Lim DECOLONIZATION Dane Kennedy DEMOCRACY Bernard Crick DEPRESSION Jan Scott and Mary Jane Tacchi DERRIDA Simon Glendinning DESCARTES Tom Sorell DESERTS Nick Middleton DESIGN John Heskett DEVELOPMENT Ian Goldin DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY Lewis Wolpert THE DEVIL Darren Oldridge DIASPORA Kevin Kenny DICTIONARIES Lynda Mugglestone DINOSAURS David Norman DIPLOMACY Joseph M. Siracusa DOCUMENTARY FILM Patricia Aufderheide DREAMING J. Allan Hobson DRUGS Leslie Iversen DRUIDS Barry Cunliffe EARLY MUSIC Thomas Forrest Kelly

THE EARTH Martin Redfern EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE Tim Lenton ECONOMICS Partha Dasgupta EDUCATION Gary Thomas EGYPTIAN MYTH Geraldine Pinch EIGHTEENTH‑CENTURY BRITAIN Paul Langford THE ELEMENTS Philip Ball EMOTION Dylan Evans EMPIRE Stephen Howe ENGELS Terrell Carver ENGINEERING David Blockley THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Simon Horobin ENGLISH LITERATURE Jonathan Bate THE ENLIGHTENMENT John Robertson ENTREPRENEURSHIP Paul Westhead and Mike Wright ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS Stephen Smith ENVIRONMENTAL LAW Elizabeth Fisher ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS Andrew Dobson EPICUREANISM Catherine Wilson EPIDEMIOLOGY Rodolfo Saracci ETHICS Simon Blackburn ETHNOMUSICOLOGY Timothy Rice THE ETRUSCANS Christopher Smith EUGENICS Philippa Levine THE EUROPEAN UNION John Pinder and Simon Usherwood EUROPEAN UNION LAW Anthony Arnull EVOLUTION Brian and Deborah Charlesworth EXISTENTIALISM Thomas Flynn EXPLORATION Stewart A. Weaver

THE EYE Michael Land FAIRY TALE Marina Warner FAMILY LAW Jonathan Herring FASCISM Kevin Passmore FASHION Rebecca Arnold FEMINISM Margaret Walters FILM Michael Wood FILM MUSIC Kathryn Kalinak THE FIRST WORLD WAR Michael Howard FOLK MUSIC Mark Slobin FOOD John Krebs FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY David Canter FORENSIC SCIENCE Jim Fraser FORESTS Jaboury Ghazoul FOSSILS Keith Thomson FOUCAULT Gary Gutting THE FOUNDING FATHERS R. B. Bernstein FRACTALS Kenneth Falconer FREE SPEECH Nigel Warburton FREE WILL Thomas Pink FREEMASONRY Andreas Önnerfors FRENCH LITERATURE John D. Lyons THE FRENCH REVOLUTION William Doyle FREUD Anthony Storr FUNDAMENTALISM Malise Ruthven FUNGI Nicholas P. Money THE FUTURE Jennifer M. Gidley GALAXIES John Gribbin GALILEO Stillman Drake GAME THEORY Ken Binmore

GANDHI Bhikhu Parekh GENES Jonathan Slack GENIUS Andrew Robinson GENOMICS John Archibald Geography John Matthews and David Herbert GEOPHYSICS William Lowrie GEOPOLITICS Klaus Dodds GERMAN LITERATURE Nicholas Boyle GERMAN PHILOSOPHY Andrew Bowie GLOBAL CATASTROPHES Bill McGuire GLOBAL ECONOMIC HISTORY Robert C. Allen GLOBALIZATION Manfred Steger GOD John Bowker GOETHE Ritchie Robertson THE GOTHIC Nick Groom GOVERNANCE Mark Bevir GRAVITY Timothy Clifton THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL Eric Rauchway HABERMAS James Gordon Finlayson THE HABSBURG EMPIRE Martyn Rady HAPPINESS Daniel M. Haybron THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE Cheryl A. Wall THE HEBREW BIBLE AS LITERATURE Tod Linafelt HEGEL Peter Singer HEIDEGGER Michael Inwood THE HELLENISTIC AGE Peter Thonemann HEREDITY John Waller HERMENEUTICS Jens Zimmermann HERODOTUS Jennifer T. Roberts

HIEROGLYPHS Penelope Wilson HINDUISM Kim Knott HISTORY John H. Arnold THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY Michael Hoskin THE HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY William H. Brock THE HISTORY OF CINEMA Geoffrey Nowell-Smith THE HISTORY OF LIFE Michael Benton THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS Jacqueline Stedall THE History of Medicine William Bynum THE HISTORY OF PHYSICS J. L. Heilbron THE HISTORY OF TIME Leofranc Holford‑Strevens HIV AND AIDS Alan Whiteside HOBBES Richard Tuck HOLLYWOOD Peter Decherney HOME Michael Allen Fox HORMONES Martin Luck HUMAN ANATOMY Leslie Klenerman HUMAN EVOLUTION Bernard Wood HUMAN RIGHTS Andrew Clapham HUMANISM Stephen Law HUME A. J. Ayer HUMOUR Noël Carroll THE ICE AGE Jamie Woodward IDEOLOGY Michael Freeden THE IMMUNE SYSTEM Paul Klenerman INDIAN CINEMA Ashish Rajadhyaksha INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Sue Hamilton THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Robert C. Allen INFECTIOUS DISEASE Marta L. Wayne and Benjamin M. Bolker INFINITY Ian Stewart

INFORMATION Luciano Floridi INNOVATION Mark Dodgson and David Gann INTELLIGENCE Ian J. Deary INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Siva Vaidhyanathan INTERNATIONAL LAW Vaughan Lowe INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION Khalid Koser INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Paul Wilkinson INTERNATIONAL SECURITY Christopher S. Browning IRAN Ali M. Ansari ISLAM Malise Ruthven ISLAMIC HISTORY Adam Silverstein ISOTOPES Rob Ellam ITALIAN LITERATURE Peter Hainsworth and David Robey JESUS Richard Bauckham JEWISH HISTORY David N. Myers JOURNALISM Ian Hargreaves JUDAISM Norman Solomon JUNG Anthony Stevens KABBALAH Joseph Dan KAFKA Ritchie Robertson KANT Roger Scruton KEYNES Robert Skidelsky KIERKEGAARD Patrick Gardiner KNOWLEDGE Jennifer Nagel THE KORAN Michael Cook LAKES Warwick F. Vincent LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE Ian H. Thompson LANDSCAPES AND GEOMORPHOLOGY Andrew Goudie and Heather

Viles LANGUAGES Stephen R. Anderson

LATE ANTIQUITY Gillian Clark LAW Raymond Wacks THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS Peter Atkins LEADERSHIP Keith Grint LEARNING Mark Haselgrove LEIBNIZ Maria Rosa Antognazza LIBERALISM Michael Freeden LIGHT Ian Walmsley Lincoln Allen C. Guelzo LINGUISTICS Peter Matthews LITERARY THEORY Jonathan Culler LOCKE John Dunn LOGIC Graham Priest LOVE Ronald de Sousa MACHIAVELLI Quentin Skinner MADNESS Andrew Scull MAGIC Owen Davies MAGNA CARTA Nicholas Vincent MAGNETISM Stephen Blundell MALTHUS Donald Winch MAMMALS T. S. Kemp MANAGEMENT John Hendry MAO Delia Davin MARINE BIOLOGY Philip V. Mladenov THE MARQUIS DE SADE John Phillips MARTIN LUTHER Scott H. Hendrix MARTYRDOM Jolyon Mitchell MARX Peter Singer MATERIALS Christopher Hall

MATHEMATICS Timothy Gowers The Meaning of Life Terry Eagleton MEASUREMENT David Hand MEDICAL ETHICS Tony Hope MEDICAL LAW Charles Foster MEDIEVAL BRITAIN John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffiths MEDIEVAL LITERATURE Elaine Treharne MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY John Marenbon Memory Jonathan K. Foster METAPHYSICS Stephen Mumford THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION Alan Knight MICHAEL FARADAY Frank A. J. L. James MICROBIOLOGY Nicholas P. Money MICROECONOMICS Avinash Dixit MICROSCOPY Terence Allen THE MIDDLE AGES Miri Rubin MILITARY JUSTICE Eugene R. Fidell MILITARY STRATEGY Antulio J. Echevarria II MINERALS David Vaughan MIRACLES Yujin Nagasawa MODERN ART David Cottington MODERN CHINA Rana Mitter MODERN DRAMA Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr MODERN FRANCE Vanessa R. Schwartz MODERN INDIA Craig Jeffrey MODERN IRELAND Senia Pašeta MODERN ITALY Anna Cento Bull MODERN JAPAN Christopher Goto-Jones MODERN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE Roberto González

Echevarría

MODERN WAR Richard English MODERNISM Christopher Butler MOLECULAR BIOLOGY Aysha Divan and Janice A. Royds MOLECULES Philip Ball MONASTICISM Stephen J. Davis THE MONGOLS Morris Rossabi MOONS David A. Rothery Mormonism Richard Lyman Bushman MOUNTAINS Martin F. Price MUHAMMAD Jonathan A. C. Brown MULTICULTURALISM Ali Rattansi MULTILINGUALISM John C. Maher MUSIC Nicholas Cook MYTH Robert A. Segal THE NAPOLEONIC WARS Mike Rapport NATIONALISM Steven Grosby NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE Sean Teuton NAVIGATION Jim Bennett Nelson Mandela Elleke Boehmer NEOLIBERALISM Manfred Steger and Ravi Roy NETWORKS Guido Caldarelli and Michele Catanzaro THE NEW TESTAMENT Luke Timothy Johnson THE NEW TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE Kyle Keefer NEWTON Robert Iliffe NIETZSCHE Michael Tanner NINETEENTH‑CENTURY BRITAIN Christopher Harvie and H. C. G.

Matthew THE NORMAN CONQUEST George Garnett NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green NORTHERN IRELAND Marc Mulholland

NOTHING Frank Close NUCLEAR PHYSICS Frank Close NUCLEAR POWER Maxwell Irvine NUCLEAR WEAPONS Joseph M. Siracusa NUMBERS Peter M. Higgins NUTRITION David A. Bender OBJECTIVITY Stephen Gaukroger OCEANS Dorrik Stow THE OLD TESTAMENT Michael D. Coogan THE ORCHESTRA D. Kern Holoman ORGANIC CHEMISTRY Graham Patrick ORGANISED CRIME Georgios A. Antonopoulos and Georgios

Papanicolaou ORGANIZATIONS Mary Jo Hatch PAGANISM Owen Davies PAIN Rob Boddice THE PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI CONFLICT Martin Bunton PANDEMICS Christian W. McMillen PARTICLE PHYSICS Frank Close PAUL E. P. Sanders PEACE Oliver P. Richmond PENTECOSTALISM William K. Kay PERCEPTION Brian Rogers THE PERIODIC TABLE Eric R. Scerri PHILOSOPHY Edward Craig PHILOSOPHY IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD Peter Adamson PHILOSOPHY OF LAW Raymond Wacks PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Samir Okasha PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Tim Bayne PHOTOGRAPHY Steve Edwards

PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY Peter Atkins PILGRIMAGE Ian Reader PLAGUE Paul Slack PLANETS David A. Rothery PLANTS Timothy Walker PLATE TECTONICS Peter Molnar PLATO Julia Annas POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY David Miller POLITICS Kenneth Minogue POPULISM Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser POSTCOLONIALISM Robert Young POSTMODERNISM Christopher Butler POSTSTRUCTURALISM Catherine Belsey PREHISTORY Chris Gosden PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Catherine Osborne PRIVACY Raymond Wacks PROBABILITY John Haigh PROGRESSIVISM Walter Nugent PROJECTS Andrew Davies PROTESTANTISM Mark A. Noll PSYCHIATRY Tom Burns PSYCHOANALYSIS Daniel Pick PSYCHOLOGY Gillian Butler and Freda McManus PSYCHOTHERAPY Tom Burns and Eva Burns-Lundgren PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION Stella Z. Theodoulou and Ravi K. Roy PUBLIC HEALTH Virginia Berridge Puritanism Francis J. Bremer THE QUAKERS Pink Dandelion QUANTUM THEORY John Polkinghorne RACISM Ali Rattansi

RADIOACTIVITY Claudio Tuniz RASTAFARI Ennis B. Edmonds THE REAGAN REVOLUTION Gil Troy REALITY Jan Westerhoff THE REFORMATION Peter Marshall RELATIVITY Russell Stannard Religion in America Timothy Beal THE RENAISSANCE Jerry Brotton RENAISSANCE ART Geraldine A. Johnson REVOLUTIONS Jack A. Goldstone RHETORIC Richard Toye RISK Baruch Fischhoff and John Kadvany RITUAL Barry Stephenson RIVERS Nick Middleton ROBOTICS Alan Winfield ROCKS Jan Zalasiewicz ROMAN BRITAIN Peter Salway THE ROMAN EMPIRE Christopher Kelly THE ROMAN REPUBLIC David M. Gwynn ROMANTICISM Michael Ferber ROUSSEAU Robert Wokler RUSSELL A. C. Grayling RUSSIAN HISTORY Geoffrey Hosking RUSSIAN LITERATURE Catriona Kelly THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION S. A. Smith SAVANNAS Peter A. Furley SCHIZOPHRENIA Chris Frith and Eve Johnstone SCHOPENHAUER Christopher Janaway Science and Religion Thomas Dixon

SCIENCE FICTION David Seed THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION Lawrence M. Principe SCOTLAND Rab Houston Sexuality Véronique Mottier SHAKESPEARE’S COMEDIES Bart van Es SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS AND POEMS Jonathan F. S. Post SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDIES Stanley Wells SIKHISM Eleanor Nesbitt THE SILK ROAD James A. Millward SLANG Jonathon Green SLEEP Steven W. Lockley and Russell G. Foster SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY John Monaghan and Peter

Just SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Richard J. Crisp SOCIAL WORK Sally Holland and Jonathan Scourfield SOCIALISM Michael Newman SOCIOLINGUISTICS John Edwards SOCIOLOGY Steve Bruce SOCRATES C. C. W. Taylor SOUND Mike Goldsmith THE SOVIET UNION Stephen Lovell THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR Helen Graham SPANISH LITERATURE Jo Labanyi SPINOZA Roger Scruton SPIRITUALITY Philip Sheldrake SPORT Mike Cronin STARS Andrew King Statistics David J. Hand STEM CELLS Jonathan Slack STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING David Blockley

STUART BRITAIN John Morrill SUPERCONDUCTIVITY Stephen Blundell SYMMETRY Ian Stewart TAXATION Stephen Smith TEETH Peter S. Ungar TELESCOPES Geoff Cottrell TERRORISM Charles Townshend THEATRE Marvin Carlson THEOLOGY David F. Ford THINKING AND REASONING Jonathan St B T Evans THOMAS AQUINAS Fergus Kerr THOUGHT Tim Bayne TIBETAN BUDDHISM Matthew T. Kapstein TOCQUEVILLE Harvey C. Mansfield TRAGEDY Adrian Poole TRANSLATION Matthew Reynolds THE TROJAN WAR Eric H. Cline TRUST Katherine Hawley THE TUDORS John Guy TWENTIETH‑CENTURY BRITAIN Kenneth O. Morgan THE UNITED NATIONS Jussi M. Hanhimäki THE U.S. CONGRESS Donald A. Ritchie THE U.S. CONSTITUTION David J. Bodenhamer THE U.S. SUPREME COURT Linda Greenhouse UTILITARIANISM Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES David Palfreyman and Paul Temple UTOPIANISM Lyman Tower Sargent VETERINARY SCIENCE James Yeates THE VIKINGS Julian Richards VIRUSES Dorothy H. Crawford

VOLTAIRE Nicholas Cronk WAR AND TECHNOLOGY Alex Roland WATER John Finney WEATHER Storm Dunlop THE WELFARE STATE David Garland WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Stanley Wells WITCHCRAFT Malcolm Gaskill WITTGENSTEIN A. C. Grayling WORK Stephen Fineman WORLD MUSIC Philip Bohlman THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION Amrita Narlikar WORLD WAR II Gerhard L. Weinberg WRITING AND SCRIPT Andrew Robinson ZIONISM Michael Stanislawski

Available soon:

Criminology Tim Newburn Autobiography Laura Marcus Demography Sarah Harper Geology Jan Zalasiewicz Sexual Selection Marlene Zuk and Leigh W. Simmons

For more information visit our website

www.oup.com/vsi/

James R. Rush

SOUTHEAST ASIA A Very Short Introduction

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a

registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New

York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate

reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rush, James R. (James Robert), 1944- author.

Title: Southeast Asia : a very short introduction / James R. Rush. Description: Oxford : Oxford University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017043737 (print) | LCCN 2017044526 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190248772 (updf) | ISBN 9780190248789 (epub) |

ISBN 9780190248796 (online component) | ISBN 9780190248765 | ISBN 9780190248765q (pbk. ;qalk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Southeast Asia. Classification: LCC DS521 (ebook) | LCC DS521 .R87 2018 (print) |

DDC 959—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043737

Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this

work.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in Great Britain

by Ashford Colour Press Ltd., Gosport, Hants. on acid-free paper

Contents

List of illustrations

Introduction

1 What is Southeast Asia? 2 Kingdoms 3 Colonies 4 Nations 5 The past is in the present

References

Further reading

Index

List of illustrations

1 Contemporary Southeast Asia and its nation-states

2 Wet-rice farmers in Vietnam © Jimmy Tran/Shutterstock

3 Premodern Southeast Asia through c. 1800

4 Mandalas

5 Angkor Wat © Tom Roche/Shutterstock

6 Map of las yslas Philipinas, Pedro Velarde Murillo Boston Public Library, Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, 06_01_003750

7 Rijsttafel Tugu Kunstkring Paleis, Jakarta

8 Chinese migrants in Dutch Borneo KITLV, 6549

9 Sukarno, first president of Indonesia UN photo, 332531

10 Southeast Asian heads of state at 2016 ASEAN-UN Summit UN photo/Eskinder Debebe, 690363

Introduction

Southeast Asia is a region of vast complexity, and scholarship about it is equally vast and complex. This slender book draws upon a broad body of scholarship. Barely a sentence fails to reflect the ideas and scholarly writing of my mentors and colleagues and others from whom I have learned. Readers familiar with the literature will discern the footprints of Harry Benda, John Smail, O. W. Wolters, Benedict Anderson, Anthony Reid, James Scott, J. S. Furnivall, Thongchai Winichakul, and a host of others whose work has shaped the field.

This volume is a “very short introduction,” and so it does not attempt to capture fully the deep research and nuanced arguments of this scholarship. Instead, its purpose is to tell a complicated story simply and legibly. Its historical arc focusing on kingdoms, colonies, and nations is deliberately formulaic, designed to provide a structured narrative around which otherwise random events and anecdotal information about Southeast Asia (or the day’s news, for that matter) can be understood in the context of larger patterns of history, politics, and society. This narrative can be—indeed, it is meant to be —explored, elaborated, and critiqued through further study. The “Suggestions for Further Reading” at the back will get you started.

Southeast Asia: A Very Short Introduction is also intentionally colloquial. Terms are used such as trade hubs, traffic patterns, and mini-kings, for example, the latter to describe an array of persons who ruled over small territories (mini-kingdoms) throughout Southeast Asia under many different

titles. Likewise, certain terms are employed that are often applied more narrowly in scholarship—mandala, for example—to describe general patterns applying to the region at large. Thongchai Winichakul’s use of the term geo- body, to mean a modern border-bounded nation-state, is another example. The word Native, capitalized, is used here to convey the colonial-era practice of categorizing indigenous Southeast Asians officially (and subordinately) in the law.

Southeast Asia also prioritizes the familiar. East Timor will be East Timor, although it is officially known as Timor-Leste and also as Timor Lorosa’e. Burma will be Burma, except when referring to the contemporary state of Myanmar. Burmans will be Burmans, not Bama. And so on. The spellings of Southeast Asian names can vary considerably when rendered in English. I have followed familiar scholarly conventions.

One cannot possibly acknowledge everyone who has contributed to a general book like this one. But I am grateful to my undergraduate students at Arizona State University (ASU), in dialogue with whom the narrative of this book has evolved, and also to several former graduate students whose work has informed my work. These include Maria Ortuoste, Christopher Lundry, Duan Zhidan, Zhipei Chi, Sze Chieh Ng, and Alex Arifianto. Particular thanks go to William McDonald, an ASU student at Barrett, the Honors College, who worked diligently collecting data about the contemporary region. I am also indebted to my faculty colleagues in Southeast Asia studies at ASU from whom I am constantly learning. They include Sheldon Simon, Juliane Schober, Ted Solis, Karen Adams, Christopher Duncan (now at Rutgers), Leif Jonsson, James Eder, Mark Woodward, Pauline Cheong, Sarah Shair- Rosenfield, Peter Suwarno, Sina Machander, Le-Pham Thuy-Kim, and Ralph Gabbard. Finally, I want to express my gratitude and love to my wife, Sunny Benitez-Rush, who enriches everything I do, including this book.

Chapter 1 What is Southeast Asia?

Southeast Asia is a sprawling neighborhood of hot countries that straddles the equator. Its eleven nations lie between India and China and form the great tropical cusp of Asia. Here societies drawing from Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and Confucianism (alongside myriad other traditions) have rubbed shoulders over centuries and created a vast profusion of distinctive yet ever-shifting cultures. It is among the most dynamic regions on earth.

Mainland Southeast Asia, the southern apron of the continent of East Asia, is home to hundreds of ethnic groups that are today the citizens of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Island (or maritime) Southeast Asia includes the Malay Peninsula and two huge archipelagos whose even more diverse populations are now citizens of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, and the Philippines. The entire region stretches some 3,000 miles from end to end and 2,500 miles north to south, an area larger than Europe. It contains 625 million people, around 9 percent of the world’s population.

For the most part, Southeast Asia is verdant and wet, with rainfalls averaging 60 inches a year and, in many places, monsoon rains that arrive reliably each year to water the rice fields, vegetable gardens, and fruit trees that for

centuries have sustained its rural villages. But here and there drier patches are found where rain is scarce. In eastern Indonesia people say that their arid islands are the dirt flicked from the fingernails of the Creator after he finished making the rest of the world.

Although Southeast Asia’s complex wind, water, and elevation patterns have created multiple human habitats, scholars have found it useful to begin with two archetypal ones: hills and plains. Large expanses of the region rise above 1,000 feet. Until very recently, these hills and mountains have been a world apart, an alternative human habitat dominated by dense old-growth forests interlaced by free-flowing rivers and streams. In these vast and inaccessible uplands, farmers developed strategies for living sustainably by creating temporary hill farms amid the forest—by cutting down a patch of trees, burning the debris, and planting rice and other crops amid the charred remains. A hillside “swidden” like this could be bountiful for a year or two, after which the farmers moved on to another patch as the old one wooded over again and restored the forest.

Hill farms of this kind existed everywhere in Southeast Asia, enabling highly diverse customs and characterized by distinctive textiles, jewelry, tattoos, handcrafts, and spiritual practices. From Myanmar to the Philippines hundreds of such groups could be found. One may have heard of the Lisu, Mien, and Hmong of the Burma-Thai-Lao uplands, the Rhade and other Montagnards of Vietnam, the Iban of Malaysia and Indonesia, and the Ifugao and Mangyan of the Philippines. Hill peoples like these maintained a variety of contacts with their lowland neighbors, most especially an up-river and down-river exchange of forest products (rattan, damar, bird’s nests) for lowland valuables such as heirloom porcelains and outboard motors. Otherwise, they remained aloof, clinging to the sanctuary provided by their inaccessible habitat.

These small populations of resilient, adaptable, and often-shifting hill folk built their longhouses and villages along the free-flowing mountain rivers that eventually flowed downward, aggregated with other branches, and formed the great tidal rivers of Southeast Asia’s lowland plains.

Just as slash-and-burn farming became the dominant agricultural pattern of the hills, wet-rice farming dominated the plains. Instead of temporary swiddens, in the lowlands farmers created permanent, bunded fields designed to capture water and manage its depth as green rice plants sprouted, rose through the shallow waters of the artificial pond, and finally matured and yellowed as farmers drained the paddies to make dry fields at harvest time. For centuries past and until today, paddy fields have dominated the cultivated landscape of lowland Southeast Asia and supported its large sedentary populations, even as vast tracts of lowlands also remained forested until recent times.

Interspersed with vegetable gardens, fruit orchards, and lush groves of trees, this verdant lowland habitat has supported large populations of farmers as well as the region’s major societies and states throughout history. It is the plains that host Southeast Asia’s larger ethnic groups—the Burmans, Thai, Khmer, Vietnamese, Malay, Javanese, Filipino—as well as the greater concentrations of people adhering to major world religions. Most of Southeast Asia’s Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and Hindus are people of the plains. In short, almost always when we speak of Southeast Asia, we are speaking of the lowland societies of the plains.

Today, the old dichotomy of hills and plains is breaking down. Once a lightly populated region, Southeast Asia is now bursting with people. And they are changing its old landscapes—penetrating the hills to open giant mines and to harvest logs and palm oil; overtaking forests, vacant wetlands, and vast acres of village rice paddies to create a modern landscape of exploding megacities, sprawling suburbs, and burgeoning industrial zones; and blanketing great swaths of countryside with agribusiness plantations that produce bananas, coconuts, sugar, and rubber. Shrimp and fish farms now cover the region’s coasts, which once were lined with mangroves.

1. Contemporary Southeast Asia and its nation-states

In Southeast Asia today, no one is wholly off the grid. Even the most remote mountain sanctuaries and islands are within reach of the capital, technology, and machinery of government that are pulling every group and place into the matrix of globalization. For the Iban of the hills of central Borneo, it is logging and oil-palm plantations. For the Ifugao of upland Luzon, it is hydroelectric dams. For the Montagnards of Vietnam, it is robusta coffee farms. For the forest Tiboli of Indonesia’s remote Halmahera island, it is nickel mines. Everywhere it is the same. Meanwhile, as the long arms of the global marketplace reach deep into Southeast Asia, so do the tax collectors, engineers, and schoolteachers of the region’s national governments, asserting their claims of sovereignty over far-flung and disparate citizens and their valuable resources. Armies also play a role, keeping restive minorities in check and disciplining, often by use of violence, the state’s claim to power.

In this climate of tectonic change, millions of people are on the move, shifting from forests into timber and mining camps, from villages into towns,

and from towns into cities and megacities. Great numbers are migrating across national borders to seek work in neighboring countries. Tens of thousands every year are being trafficked as sex workers, domestic servants, and fishing-fleet boatmen. Others are fleeing violence and harassment into refugee camps and to new homes abroad. Southeast Asia is static only on the map.

Complicating these large forces is a mind-boggling heterogeneity of languages, dialects, ethnicities, religions, and customs. In Southeast Asia, multiple complex societies exist side by side. These societies have been shaped by centuries of interaction not only with each other but also with India and China and, in recent centuries, with newcomers from the West—the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, French, and Americans, whose colonies in the region prefigured today’s nation-states. The region’s complex roots and its contemporary character are belied by the simplicity of the map and of popular perceptions. We talk glibly of Burmese, Filipinos, Indonesians, and Thais as though they were essential human types. Likewise, we speak of Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Singapore as entities fixed in time. These are convenient constructions, it is true, but, as in all such constructions, they mask complex realities.

Snapshots from the neighborhood

Today, all of Southeast Asia’s countries conform to the model of the nation- state. Yet as nation-states they are remarkably different. Some are democratic federations and republics, others are “people’s democratic republics,” still others are kingdoms. They are led by prime ministers, presidents, party secretaries, sultans, and kings. As national societies, writ large, they are Muslim, Buddhist, and Christian. Two are officially Marxist. But they contain within them adherents of almost every other religion on earth as well as legions of spirit and ancestor cults—since even in these most modern of times, the spirits must be attended to. Each country in its unique way is typically Southeast Asian.

Among the predominantly Buddhist countries of the mainland, Thailand stands out as the largest by territory and second largest by population (c. 69 million in 2017). It is significantly more prosperous than its neighbors. A sometime democracy and oftentimes a military-led state, it coalesces around the memory of its famous nineteenth-century kings and its still-revered royal family. Cunning political actors, Thai elites avoided overt colonialism (the only Southeast Asian kingdom to do so), dodged the ravages of World War II by collaborating with Japan, and maneuvered astutely through the dangerous years of the Cold War by aligning themselves with the United States. Thailand’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is on the rise, its strong economy is drawing migrants from neighboring countries, and its middle class is blossoming. Its capital, Bangkok, shines as a leading Southeast Asian mega city with a vibrant arts scene, business sector, and an alluring cosmopolitan face, including its smiling generals.

Meanwhile, Thailand’s neighbor to the west, Myanmar (Burma), a Buddhist society much like Thailand with a population almost as large, paints a different picture. By the numbers, it is one of Southeast Asia’s poorest. (Thailand’s GDP per capita is seven times higher.) Once a proud kingdom like Thailand, its nineteenth-century kings were defeated by British armies and then banished as Burma was subsumed within the British Empire. It was a heavily contested theater of war in World War II, when its emergent

national leaders both collaborated with and resisted the Japanese. With independence in 1948 came a dysfunctional democracy, then decade upon decade of military rule under Ne Win and his development program that wedded Buddhism and socialism. By the 1980s, Burma was backward, isolated, and riven by armed rebellions. A democracy movement led by Aung San Suu Kyi and subsequent political and economic reforms in recent years have weakened the grip of the army, ended the country’s isolation, and brought elected governments to power, alongside a flood of new investments. Yet the house of Myanmar remains bitterly divided. As the world is rushing in, hundreds of thousands of Myanmar’s beleaguered minority subjects are taking desperate measures to rush out.

Cambodia, to the east of Thailand, is the site of one of Southeast Asia’s monstrous modern atrocities. The dark clouds of the Khmer Rouge and their “Killing Fields” (1975–1978) still hang over the nation today. Heirs of the once-monumental kingdom of Angkor (800s–1400s), Cambodia’s kings of the nineteenth century attempted to steer their much-diminished kingdom to safety under French protection. Cambodia thus entered the twentieth century and the travails of World War II as part of French Indochina with its residual monarchy neutered but intact. Hence it was a king, Norodom Sihanouk, who, repackaged as a president, took over when France departed in 1953 and who attempted to steer his small Buddhist kingdom to safety through the treacherous shoals of the Cold War, including the hot war in neighboring Vietnam. His failure and intensive U.S. bombing in Cambodia led directly to the triumph of the Khmer Rouge and the murder and manslaughter of more than two million people and, after 1979, to a long recuperation involving occupation by both Vietnam and the United Nations. Cambodia survives today as a small Buddhist kingdom of 16 million people with a constitutional monarch—Sihanouk’s son—and a quasi-elected strongman prime minister who is also a former Khmer Rouge commander.

In Thailand, Burma, and Cambodia today, national leaders invoke the language of democracy and representative government even though in practice this remains largely an aspiration. Thailand is ruled, off and on, by an army junta; in Myanmar and Cambodia elections are held, but one might say that democracy as it is practiced remains highly compromised by authoritarian power structures. Southeast Asia’s two other mainland states are

unapologetically one-party states.

Modern Laos, a traditionally Buddhist society much like its neighbors, was formed from an amalgamation of princely domains into another French protectorate in the 1890s. The colony’s affiliation with French Indochina drew it into Vietnam’s long war for independence, which ended after years of confusion and turmoil in 1975 with a government led by the Communist Party in both countries. One of the quieter corners of Southeast Asia, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic remains a highly agrarian and still largely Buddhist society where the largest city, Vientiane, hosts fewer than 1 million people. The former royal capital at Luang Prabang, upriver from Vientiane and much smaller, is renowned for its grace. The lowland Lao majority populates the country’s narrow river valleys, yet a full 90 percent of the country’s territory rises above 600 feet and is populated by non-Lao, swidden-farming hill peoples. Today, the long arm of globalization is reaching deep into Laos from every side, including from China, the country with which it shares a porous 263-mile-long border.

Vietnam’s independence movement led by the Communists under Ho Chi Minh and its eventual triumph over both France and the United States is a legendary epic in modern Southeast Asian history. This is how the once domineering Confucian kingdom of Vietnam, humiliated and colonized by France in the nineteenth century, abandoned its feudal trappings to rise as Southeast Asia’s strongest and, today with more than 95 million people, largest Communist state. Vietnam’s victorious revolutionary struggle gave its Communist Party great authority, and the party rules up until now, despite having long since abandoned many tenets of communist ideology. In today’s fast-changing Vietnam, the market is in full play and old enemies are becoming new allies.

In island Southeast Asia, Indonesia dominates. With a population of more than 263 million people, it is not only the largest country in Southeast Asia but the fourth-largest country in the world. This far-flung archipelago once hosted literally hundreds of kingdoms before being patched together into a massive tropical colony by the Dutch—a project that took three hundred years. In the early twentieth century young nationalists reimagined the Dutch

East Indies as Indonesia. Through the violent interruption of World War II and after four years of revolution, in 1949 it came to be. Islam is the dominant religious culture here. And among the country’s hundreds of ethnicities, the Javanese rule the roost.

Like Cambodia, Indonesia also became the site of mass killings during the region’s wrenching left-right power struggles of the Cold War era. In Cambodia, Communists were the perpetrators. In Indonesia, in 1965, Communists were the victims, with some 500,000 party members and affiliates dead in army-led executions and massacres that lasted months. The military regime that followed continued for more than thirty years but it has been followed by a substantial new experiment in democracy. This includes, these days, suspenseful, hotly contested multiparty elections.

Two of Indonesia’s near neighbors in the same great archipelago, Malaysia and Singapore, also owe their modern configurations to European empire- building. These territories—including the Malay Peninsula and adjacent islands as well as a large swath of northern Borneo—were cobbled together piecemeal by generations of builders of the British Empire. The territories included several Malay sultanates or mini-kingdoms, two privately held colonial domains in Borneo under British protection (Sarawak and Sabah), and two offshore island trade emporiums populated largely by Chinese migrants and other newcomers that were created by the British (Singapore and Penang). As Britain retreated from empire following World War II, it fashioned this odd collection of colonial remnants into a nation-state called Malaysia. In 1965, Singapore, the larger, richer, and most conspicuously Chinese of the trade hubs, subsequently withdrew to strike out on its own. The others have become today’s Federation of Malaysia, another of Southeast Asia’s authoritarian democracies in which a single political party dominates in collaboration with multisectarian coalition partners. A constitutional monarch is the symbolic face of the nation: Malaysia’s king is a Malay sultan. One of Southeast Asia’s smaller states, at 31 million, Malaysia is also one of its more prosperous ones, with a GDP per capita twice that of Thailand.

But Singapore is far richer. Indeed, Singapore’s GDP per capita tops that of

the United States. An anomaly in Southeast Asia as a predominantly ethnic Chinese city-state, Singapore is also one of the region’s smallest countries, with six million people. Politically, it is a parliamentary democracy in which a single party wholly dominates. The People’s Action Party (PAP) has no coalition partners. This has been true since Singapore’s founding days under Lee Kuan Yew, the island nation’s extraordinary prime minister, founder of the PAP, architect of the country’s remarkable rise, and author of its unique way of doing things in which Confucianism, capitalism, socialism, and state- sponsored social engineering all play a part.

The final major nation of island Southeast Asia is anomalous in another way. Spain aggregated the islands of Southeast Asia’s other large archipelago more than four hundred years ago and called the new entity Las Philipinas (the Philippines), after King Philip II. Under Spanish sway, the archipelago’s lowland people adapted Christianity and evolved as a Southeast Asian society with considerable Spanish influence until being seized by the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The Philippines today, with more than 103 million people, reflects this dual heritage. It is flamboyantly democratic and election-loving and at the same time strikingly oligarchic, with a governing class whose members compete aggressively with each other for public office and seldom yield power to the masses below. In the Philippines, elite-led democracy has proved stronger than dictatorship, an option famously tested by Ferdinand Marcos beginning in 1972 and rejected in a popular nonviolent mass movement led by Corazon Aquino in 1986. Subsequent elected presidents have included a retired general, a movie star, and the daughter of one former president and the son of another (Aquino’s son, Benigno Aquino III) as well as the strong-arm populist Rodrigo Duterte, yet another scion of the governing class.

Two countries remain. The sultanate of Brunei, which rests in a tiny molar- shaped pocket of territory surrounded by Malaysian Borneo, is all that remains of a kingdom that once was much larger. But that which remains rests on one of the richest oil and gas deposits in Asia, making tiny Brunei, population 500,000, a source of stupendous wealth both for its sultan and the royal family and for Brunei Shell Petroleum. Once a British protectorate like its immediate neighbors, the sultanate declined Britain’s offer to join Malaysia and carries on today as Southeast Asia’s only remaining absolute

monarchy.

East Timor, or Timor-Leste, is not so lucky. Occupying the eastern half of the island of Timor in the eastern Indonesian archipelago and with a per capital income of less than U.S. $4,000, it has few resources and little wealth. Evolving for centuries as a remote outpost of Portugal’s increasingly impoverished empire, East Timor was jolted into the contemporary world in 1975 when Portugal moved out and Indonesia moved in, claiming the territory as a province. Its current generation of leadership emerged under the turmoil and brutality of the unwelcome Indonesian occupation and the small country’s eventual liberation in 1999 and full sovereignty in 2002.

Even this poor, remote, and small Southeast Asian country illustrates the region’s underlying pluralism and complex entanglements with the wider world. The 1.2 million people of East Timor comprise ten and more distinct Malayo-Polynesian and Papuan ethnic groups spread across a hilly, hardscrabble terrain. Sixteen indigenous languages are spoken in addition to the vernacular lingua franca, Tetum. During the recent twenty-nine-year Indonesian occupation, many people also learned to speak Indonesian. Today, they are learning English. Even so, the country’s small elite chose Portuguese as the official national language. The Roman Catholic Church claims 90 percent of the population, yet everywhere local spirits vie with the saints for people’s devotion. Aside from some coffee, cinnamon, and cocoa, East Timor’s modern economy produces little for the world’s hungry markets, and its hopes for prosperity lie offshore in oil and gas deposits that are also claimed by Australia. With global markets in mind, the country’s leaders have adopted as its national currency the U.S. dollar.

Southeast Asia and the world

These quick portraits of today’s Southeast Asian countries reveal the degree to which they have been shaped by engagements with the wider world. In modern times, the expansive powers of the West have played the dominant role. But geography is destiny. Over the long haul nearby states and civilizations in Asia have played a greater role. The archipelagos, waterways, and riverine lowlands of Southeast Asia lie adjacent to, and exposed to, two of the world’s great radiating civilizations. Traffic from India and China began early in history and has remained constant through the centuries. The Straits of Melaka have been a heavily traveled maritime passageway for two thousand years. Southeast Asians established harbor-town entrepôts to capture this trade. Through them the luxury goods of India and China penetrated the region’s inland kingdoms, along with new gods and goddesses, art forms, languages, and words.

Southeast Asians were especially attracted to India’s civilizations and borrowed heavily over many centuries, shaping innumerable aspects of Southeast Asia today. During the same centuries, China’s merchants penetrated from the north bearing porcelains, silks, useful tools, and everyday objects to Southeast Asian harbor towns large and small. In these entrepôts, the goods of India and China changed hands alongside the spices, aromatic oils and woods, birds’ nests, sea slugs, and pearls that Southeast Asians themselves brought to the market. No Indian kingdom ruled territories in Southeast Asia, but several Chinese dynasties occupied the Vietnamese homeland of Dai Viet for a thousand years before the Vietnamese broke away in 939 CE, placing an indelible Chinese stamp on the independent kingdom that emerged. China also pressed into the small kingdoms along Southeast Asia’s northernmost tier and accepted tribute from others farther south on the mainland and in the islands, including the tiny gold-rich kingdom of Butuan in the south Philippine Archipelago, which sent five missions to China in the early 1000s.

The wave of Western imperialism in the modern era hemmed in the power of China for more than one hundred years and brought India wholly within the

British Empire. Even so, during these same years migration from China to Southeast Asia greatly expanded, profoundly altering the region’s demography and economy. Today, a resurgent China is reprising its historical role in Southeast Asian commerce and also in asserting its regional preeminence. It is a primary trading partner of virtually every Southeast Asian country and the source of billions in investment annually. It looms large. More than India, it also figures centrally in Southeast Asia’s security calculations.

Aside from Thailand, none of today’s Southeast Asian nations existed as independent states seventy years ago. In 1945, each one was reeling in the wake of the dramatic rise and fall of imperial Japan, whose empire during World War II embraced all of Southeast Asia. After the war, some of Southeast Asia’s newly independent nations formed security alliances with their former colonizers. This was true of the Philippines, which in 1954 joined the United States–led Cold War pact called the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), alongside Thailand, which also placed itself within the anticommunist camp. Malaysia and Singapore did the same in alliance with Britain through the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA).

In Vietnam, after being rebuffed by the United States, Ho Chi Minh aligned his eventually successful revolutionary movement and the post-1954 Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam with the Soviet Union and China, even as the post-1954 state of South Vietnam was supported and defended by the United States and its regional allies. Meanwhile, others took a neutral path and declared themselves nonaligned. Alongside Burma, these countries included Cambodia and Indonesia, whose famously mercurial leaders Sihanouk and Sukarno, respectively played to both sides in the great global rift.

The 1965 massacres of Communists in Indonesia and the onset of military rule under Suharto, following Sukarno’s fall, led to a significant shift. Suharto quickly brought his country into the U.S.-led anti-communist orbit. This set the stage for the region’s first successful regional organization. In 1967, Indonesia, together with Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, formed the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The association was emphatically not a security alliance; rather, it was formed as a platform for mutual cooperation. Through its early meetings and nascent committee structure, the five disparate countries began working out many of the practical aspects of living in one neighborhood, such as aligning their postal services, air traffic control, and telecommunications.

ASEAN’s founding members signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in 1976 that struck at the heart of their security fears: they pledged to respect each other’s sovereignty and to renounce the use of force in their relations with each other. This became the basis for the “ASEAN Way,” an approach to resolving differences that avoided confrontation and favored patience over haste. What happens inside your borders is your business, not your neighbor’s business. What cannot be agreed upon will be postponed. Although following the ASEAN Way meant that problem-solving could be glacial, it also meant that on the existential matter of state sovereignty member states could feel safe with one another. This proved to be a great boon.

At first and for many years, ASEAN represented Southeast Asia’s anticommunist club; the sultanate of Brunei joined in 1984 upon its independence from Britain. But as the fate of Vietnam was resolved after 1975 and the fires of the Cold War eventually abated, the usefulness of the organization and the value of its philosophy became apparent to other members of the neighborhood. The communist states and other outliers all applied to join. Vietnam was first in 1995 followed by Laos and Myanmar in 1997 and Cambodia in 1999. East Timor awaits membership.

In the intervening years, ASEAN has served as the scaffolding for an elaborate structure of diplomatic relations both among the member states and between the collective members and the rest of the world. ASEAN coordinates officially with China, Japan, and South Korea in ASEAN+3, and its dialogue partners in the annual ASEAN Regional Forum include the major powers of Europe, Asia, and the Americas. ASEAN enjoys observer status at the United Nations General Assembly, and in 2001 it became officially a nuclear-weapons-free zone. Although ASEAN’s honor-thy-neighbor policy has thwarted some much-needed reforms, its tolerant philosophy has allowed

the association to endure and remain relevant. Today it is the format through which the region is exploring more advanced levels of cooperation in areas such as free trade, labor exchanges, and a monetary union.

ASEAN is only one mechanism through which Southeast Asian countries seek security today. With an eye to China and to new security threats represented by terrorism, unruly population flows, and environmental alarms, many of the nations maintain close ties with the West and also cultivate good relations with China, Japan, and South Korea, which are important trading partners, aid givers, and potential diplomatic allies. Militarily, no Southeast Asian country is in a position to secure itself independently. Only Vietnam has raised a large standing army in recent history, and despite rising military budgets and larger fleets of (mostly aging, secondhand) warplanes and warships, none of them today possesses the wherewithal to stand alone. Instead, each one engages in a variety of balancing tactics designed both to engage with the large powers of the world, on the one hand, and to keep them at a distance, on the other.

In this process today, China is all important. All of Southeast Asia’s countries welcome Chinese investments to a degree. Chinese goods pour across the porous borders of the mainland states and fill the provincial markets and city stores and malls. It is hardly different in the islands. Chinese private and state-connected companies are aggressively expanding in Southeast Asia in the mining, agribusiness, and tourism sectors as well as in transportation and hydroelectricity. (In Laos, where China accounts for 40 percent of foreign investment, Chinese companies are building casinos, five-star hotels, banana and rubber plantations, and dozens of hydroelectric dams.) Meanwhile, China is expanding its strategic presence into Southeast Asia in the South China Sea. Diplomacy can contain these mounting pressures to a degree, but momentum on the Chinese side and weak leverage on the Southeast Asian side make this penetration more or less unstoppable. China cannot be contained. It must be engaged.

These days, Southeast Asian officials meet with Chinese officials at every level, both bilaterally and through ASEAN’s consultative structures. More significantly, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Myanmar, Cambodia,

Malaysia, and the Philippines have established military-to-military links with China to facilitate aid and loans, joint training exercises, and joint production of military equipment, as well as a forum for discussing security issues. China has claimed ASEAN as a strategic partner. In 2003 it signed ASEAN’s foundational Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, pledging to eschew armed conflict and to respect the sovereignty and internal integrity of its neighbors.

At the same time, most of the ASEAN countries also have security ties with the United States and welcome the presence of the American Seventh Fleet, which patrols the all-important Melaka Straits and posts some twenty thousand military personnel in the region at any given time. Singapore serves as the logistics center of the American fleet and provides both its naval base and its airfields. Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia have signed military access agreements, and both Thailand and the Philippines have been granted special access to U.S. intelligence as major non-NATO allies. Under a visiting forces agreement signed in 1999, the Philippines has invited thousands of U.S. soldiers to assist in its war against Muslim separatists and to engage in war games. Indonesia is happy to buy advanced weapons from the United States under special agreement and sends its officers for training in the United States. Even Vietnam is slowly opening its ports to the American navy and receives a modest U.S. military aid package. (Vietnam continues to acquire most of its arms from Russia, however—another balancing strategy.) Meanwhile, Britain and other members of the Five Power Defence Arrangements continue to support Malaysia.

Writ large, these complex arrangements balancing China and the United States (and other powers such as Great Britain, Japan, and Russia) are not designed with specific quid pro quos in mind, although much fine print is involved. Their real purpose is to create a web of interlocking and overlapping alliances and relationships that mitigates against predatory behavior and the resort to force. This is a familiar Southeast Asian approach to things. When trouble looms, rally your friends. Indonesian president Joko Widodo was not being glib when he described his country’s foreign policy as “a thousand friends and no enemies.”

Elites and national economies

The governing classes in Southeast Asia today have their roots in the deep past and also in more recent history. Lineage matters in Southeast Asia. In Thailand, Malaysia, and Cambodia constitutional monarchies reveal the contemporary appeal of aristocracy. Princes and princesses and hierarchies of titled people continue to exist. In Thailand, virtually all of the country’s elected and nonelected leaders (conspicuously its power-seizing generals) pledge their loyalty to the king. In Malaysia, a parliamentary democracy, all but one of the country’s prime ministers since independence has hailed from a royal lineage. In places where these feudal trappings have been officially abandoned, such as Indonesia, politicians and even military dictators routinely claim aristocratic roots. Sukarno did so, as did Suharto, through his wife. The Philippines lacks such an aristocracy but most of its leading politicians descend from wealthy provincial clans whose preeminence dates from Spanish times. Indeed, virtually everywhere in the region, many of today’s elites are descendants of families that have enjoyed privileged status for generations, if not for centuries.

The colonial states that dominated Southeast Asia until World War II did not supplant indigenous elites; they subordinated them. Everywhere members of upper-class families continued to serve as officials in the colonial states. More importantly, colonial regimes generally limited education in Western languages and advanced subjects to members of high-status families. (This is how Sukarno became a Dutch-speaking engineer and how Tunku Abdul Rahman became an English-speaking lawyer.) This status enabled them to come forward as modern leaders in the twentieth century—to lead reformist and nationalist movements and, at independence, to become the governing classes of the region’s new nations. (Sukarno as Indonesia’s founding president, Tunku Abdul Rahman as the founding prime minister of Malaysia.) Independence and the advent of military rule opened new paths to political leadership; as armies became institutionalized and matured, officer corps merged into the governing classes in Burma, Thailand, and Indonesia. In Vietnam and also in Laos, it was the Communist Party that offered new avenues to power, as senior cadres and their families formed the country’s

new elite.

These people of high status emerged as governing classes in societies with largely agrarian economies and only rudimentary processing and manufacturing sectors. For the most part, they themselves and their families were not people of business. They tended to draw their wealth and incomes from landed properties, rent-seeking, and the perquisites of officialdom. For the most part, business and industry and the realm of money were the domains of Southeast Asians of Chinese descent. The roots of this phenomenon also lay in the colonial period when a combination of new opportunities in the Western colonies and catastrophes in China led hundreds of thousands of migrants to the region. Colonial laws and policies steered them away from rural landowning and into towns and cities, where they flourished as laborers, artisans, shopkeepers, and capitalists large and small. This occurred everywhere in Southeast Asia but was complemented in British domains by the arrival of Indians, who played similar roles but on a smaller scale. Chinese migrants became modern Southeast Asia’s essential urbanites —Kuala Lumpur was founded by the mining camp boss Yap Ah Loy—and formed a distinctive commercial class.

The majority of these migrants were men, and their marriages to local women created mixed Chinese-Southeast Asian families everywhere. In the Philippines and Thailand, this mestizo class blended with high-status indigenous families and became an integral part of the nascent national elite. Corazon Cojuangco Aquino, former president of the Philippines, is exemplary of this important trend: her great-grandfather was a certain Co Yu Hwan, who migrated to the Spanish Philippines from China in the nineteenth century. Her family and many others like it are quintessentially Filipino by culture. Elsewhere, the evolving Chinese and Chinese-mestizo communities remained distinctively apart. This is true in today’s Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. New migrations in the twentieth century and the arrival of ever larger numbers of Chinese women also created distinctively Chinese communities even in societies with a high level of assimilation, so that we may speak of Chinese Filipinos, Sino-Thai, and Sino-Vietnamese.

The pride of place of the Chinese in the region’s economy and the

community’s conspicuous well-being compared with the region’s indigenous majorities have long been sore points. A common feature of policies following World War II in many Southeast Asian countries has been an attempt to use the powers of government to place more of the nation’s wealth and potential wealth in the hands of its indigenous elites—and to enrich its indigenous populations as well. To a degree, they have succeeded.

Southeast Asians have long profited by participating in trade, introducing their own valuable products into the vital stream of commerce that connected India to China and to the wider world. (Cloves, which once grew only on a cluster of remote Southeast Asian islands, were mentioned in Pliny’s Natural History [first century CE] and have been identified in the archaeological remains of an ancient Mesopotamian pantry.) Under European rule in recent centuries, commodities from Southeast Asia, such as coffee, sugar, tea, tobacco, and rubber, reached global markets alongside timber, minerals, and petroleum. Up until independence, the immense profits of this economy accrued mainly to the European and American capitalists, and their employees and shareholders, and to the local Chinese merchants, shippers, contractors, agents, and suppliers who made it logistically possible. For the most part, indigenous Southeast Asians participated in this economy as laborers, clerical workers, and small-time cash croppers and traders.

Following independence, Southeast Asian governing classes strove to redirect many of these profits to Southeast Asians themselves and, at the same time, to diversify their national economies by advancing manufacturing and other sectors. In this project, government has itself played a key role everywhere. By intervening directly in key sectors (such as rice, petroleum, and energy), licensing lucrative subsectors (importing automobiles, machinery, food additives, medicines), granting monopoly concessions to, say, harvest timber on government land or to establish telecommunication grids, and controlling access to loans from government banks and serving as brokers between foreign aid givers and local aid recipients, Southeast Asian governments and their regime elites have enriched themselves. They have also nourished their supporters through vast patronage networks connecting politicians, army generals, and dictators at the top to tiers of bureaucrats, officials, supplicant businesspeople, and party members on down to the lowest tiers, which, in some places, actually include voters.

Patron-client pyramids like this vary from society to society and regime to regime and take on new shapes and functions as rural people become city people, but in Southeast Asia today they underpin social structures everywhere. Built upon personal obligations and connections—who do you know?—they privilege loyalty over the law. They are vulnerable to nepotism, bribery, and other corruptions, but they are also highly resilient and flexible and make it possible for societies to cohere even as economies flounder and governments change. In democratic systems, patron-client pyramids realign after elections as new members of the governing class achieve top positions. They undergo major realignments with major regime changes. This occurred when Ferdinand Marcos seized power in the Philippines, for example, and when Suharto’s dictatorship collapsed in Indonesia.

These underlying social constructs help to explain why Southeast Asia, despite many disruptions, is a relatively stable global region in which governing elites of various kinds seek prosperity and security by both co- opting and resisting the entreaties of greater powers—balancing this one against that one—and opportunistically manipulating access to the national economies.

Although in the early years of independence several Southeast Asian governments attempted to protect nascent home industries behind tariff walls in a strategy called import substitution, most of them eventually concluded that opening their economies to foreign investors paid higher dividends, as did prioritizing their historical strengths exporting commodities, minerals, and petroleum. Today commodities from Southeast Asia are pouring into China as well as into the rising economies of South Korea and Japan and the industrial West. This development is enriching many people in Southeast Asia, and it also accounts for the transformation of the region’s environment.

Meanwhile, in most countries of the region, governments have also promoted industrialization and the growth of high-tech manufacturing that complements the resource sector and protects national economies against the vagaries of shifting global commodity prices. In Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia—Southeast Asia’s newly industrialized countries (NICs)—these sectors are advanced. In Singapore they are so advanced,

alongside cutting-edge banking and financial services, that the country is one of the richest in the world as measured by GDP per capita and other measures. (The Sultanate of Brunei is rich for another reason.) A huge gap separates Singapore from Malaysia, the second most prosperous country in the region, and a large gap again separates Malaysia from the other NICs. Burma, Cambodia, Laos, and East Timor remain poor by any standard, with a large majority of their populations still bound to the land and only nascent modern sectors. Even so, in each one, resource extraction in the form of logging, hydroelectricity, raw materials, and, in Burma’s case, petroleum, is generating wealth for rulers and their clients as new investments from China are drawing even these slow-growing states into the needy matrix of globalization.

The rich complexities of modern Southeast Asia—its radical heterogeneity; its hills and plains; its great cities and agricultural hinterlands; its dynamic engagement with the outside world; its presidents, prime ministers, domineering military men, and kings; and its asymmetrical prosperity—all have roots deep in history. Southeast Asia is unquestionably of the moment. It is modern, but it is modern in distinctively Southeast Asian ways.

Chapter 2 Kingdoms

Rice is the foundation of Southeast Asian life. The discovery of rice cultivation appears to have occurred in southern China. People living in Southeast Asia were its early adapters. By the second or third millennium BCE, they were growing rice, domesticating pigs, chickens, and cattle, and forming the region’s earliest settled communities in several mainland areas congruent with present-day northern Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaya. By the 5th century BCE, they had become iron and bronze workers. Their large and elaborate funnel-shaped bronze drums decorated with frogs, birds, and warriors in long boats—often called Dong Son drums from a key archaeological site in northern Vietnam—became one of the region’s first items of luxury trade and dispersed throughout much of Southeast Asia.

In these early centuries, people occupied particularly favorable niches of the region’s habitat, taking advantage of abundant fish, fruits, and animal life as they formed settled rice-growing (and in places millet-, sago-, taro-, and yam- growing) communities. These people, alongside later arrivals, were the ancestors of today’s Southeast Asians, whose small communities barely altered the landscape as they formed amid Southeast Asia’s vast tropical forests.

2. Wet-rice farmers work in the paddy fields of Vietnam. For centuries past and until today, paddy fields have dominated the cultivated landscape of lowland Southeast Asia and supported its large sedentary populations.

We know little about the organization of these early societies or about how these early farmers and fisherfolk at some point first morphed into nascent polities or mini-states under the leadership of local strongmen and their kin and allies. In these times when land was plentiful and people were few, the key to amassing power lay in controlling people, not in amassing territory. By c. 250–540 CE, a large early state had emerged in a coastal area adjacent to the lower Mekong River: Funan, Southeast Asia’s first “recorded” kingdom, that is, recorded by Chinese observers, who may have been exaggerating. For practical purposes, Funan marks the beginning of Southeast Asia’s political history.

From Funan and for many centuries afterward, evidence is strong that the vast majority of Southeast Asian polities were small and local, consisting of

local lords and strongmen, petty kings, perhaps, ruling over pockets of population amid the domineering forest. Many of these early polities lay nested along the fertile plains of the Mekong, Chao Phraya, Irrawaddy, and Red Rivers, and along similar but shorter rivers that formed fertile plains in Java, Luzon, and other island sites. Other favored sites were river mouths and coastlines where abundant fish and opportunities to trade led to the establishment of early harbor towns augmented by nearby villages of farmers. Here and there, fertile upland valleys also hosted small states based on wet- rice farming and the presence of gold or gem mines and other resources. This occurred, for example, in West Sumatra and in the Shan and Thai highlands.

These early pockets of settled people may have been no larger than a few hundred or a few thousand people, although some grew larger; the permanence and fecundity of wet-rice farming made this possible. At any given time in these early centuries there may have been hundreds of such mini-states spread across the mainland and islands, each with a king or raja or, later, when Islam took hold in the islands, a sultan of its own. This pattern of extreme disaggregation reflected the radical heterogeneity of the people themselves, with their hundreds of languages and dialects and emerging ethnicities. Such small polities were the norm.

But occasionally, one such king or strong man succeeded in establishing domination over a larger area by conquering or otherwise subordinating his neighbors, thus making a larger kingdom from several smaller ones, that is, by subordinating more people to himself. And thus, amid a vast realm of small states, some larger ones rose that came to dominate entire river valleys and their plains, or a network of affiliated harbor towns or coastal communities. And a few of these grew to become truly large states or empires. For the most part, it is only these that we know much about.

Funan appears to have been the first of these and dominated the lower Mekong River basin in the first centuries of the Common Era. By the 700s and 800s CE, kings of the Sailendra dynasty had created a great densely populated kingdom in central Java and built immense and beautiful monuments in stone. (Borobudur and Prambanan are their legacy.) Between the 700s and 1200s, powerful rulers based at Palembang in southern Sumatra

ruled a vast sea-based thalassocracy known as Srivijaya that controlled the Straits of Melaka by dominating the surrounding coastal and harbor-town polities. And by 900 or so, the Khmer kings of Angkor had achieved domination over the rice plains of the Tonle Sap and lower Mekong basin in the great kingdom of classical Cambodia that prevailed in varying degrees of strength from the late 800s to the 1400s; their architectural legacy is the monumental temple complex of Angkor. By the time of Angkor, Vietnam (Dai Viet), which controlled the Red River delta of northern Vietnam, had already evolved as a frontier territory of China for nearly a thousand years. It broke free to stand on its own in 939.

In subsequent centuries, other large states emerged in ecologically predictable sites—along the Irrawaddy River basin and delta (kingdoms of Mons, Burmans, and Pyus); along the Chao Phraya River (the Thai); along the central Vietnam coast (Chams); and again in Java (the great Javanese kingdom of Majapahit [1300–1500]) and the Melaka Straits (Malay Melaka). Although the physical and literary remains of these big kingdoms dominate the historical record, we should understand them as only part of a wider pattern in which a few big states like these nested amid hundreds of smaller ones—with the autonomy of the smaller, peripheral ones either losing or gaining in relation to the constant waxing and waning of the larger ones, and with hill peoples always on the periphery.

A world of mandalas

The concept of the mandala helps us to explain this dynamic political world. Indians of the classical age adopted this image to visualize the world and the cosmos; Kautilya used it in his famous Arthashastra (c. 300 BCE) to discuss diplomacy and war. Southeast Asians borrowed the concept and the Sanskrit term from them. Think of a small circle that is encircled by increasingly larger and potentially infinite concentric circles. The circles represent a kingdom. Power rests in the center, the site of the capital and the locale of the king and his core officials and also of the kingdom’s core population of farmers, urbanites, and slaves over which the ruler exercises power directly and whose labor and food production—through compulsion, taxation, and religious donations—forms the economic basis of the state. Here also, in the center, dwell the holy men and scholars of the king’s religious cult and the artisans, musicians, and scribes who embellish the capital with monuments, music, and (a veneer of) literacy.

In what we shall call a mandala kingdom, the king’s power radiated out from the capital and, as it passed by degree through each successive concentric circle, attenuated and eventually died out altogether or overlapped with the outer circles of another mandala—all without crossing any clear border. In the outer circles of his mandala, a king may not have controlled or drawn resources from people directly but, rather, indirectly through local lords and strong men. These vassals professed loyalty and rendered tribute, taxes, soldiers, and slaves to the center as long as the ruler was strong enough to coerce them. But they may have stinted on their obligations or broken free altogether when the king was weak and ruled as independent mini-kings over their own domains of followers and resources. Or, perhaps, they may have been sucked into the orbit of a competing mandala whose gravity pulled from another direction. Keep in mind that in Southeast Asia, adjacent mandalas may well have involved different ethnicities; the underlying tensions of mandala politics was more than a raw power struggle.

One can think of premodern Southeast Asia as a world of mandala kingdoms, large and small, with the larger mandalas expanding and contracting by

absorbing their smaller neighbors into their orbits and contracting when outlying domains subsequently wrested free, and with the large mandalas competing with other large mandalas for domination of their large domains and populations. This occurred, for example, in great wars between the Burmans and the Thais in the 18th century.

3. Premodern Southeast Asia through c. 1800.

We think of Southeast Asia’s mandala chiefs as “men of prowess.” Their skills included not only prowess in war but also prowess in mobilizing followers to develop and sustain agricultural resources (in complex wet-rice regimes, for example), to engage in trade, and to execute essential religious rites. They were what we might today call entrepreneurs, and also politicians in the sense that their prowess involved superior rhetorical skills and diplomatic acumen. In the turbulent world of competing mandalas, high royal birth placed one in competition for power but did not guarantee it. Kings had many sons, not to mention brothers and legions of royal cousins. Queens and their progeny formed factions at court and intrigued for position;

occasionally, they ruled. Succession disputes were routine and often violent. It was men of prowess (and on occasion women) who prevailed.

The power of a Southeast Asian mandala’s king was measured in part by the size and splendor of his capital with its monuments and royal trappings and public pageantry designed to glorify the king and his cult. All this was embellished with tiers of officials and priests and scribes, soldiers, artisans, and other urbanites and the sea of the capital’s immediate supporting population of farmers and slaves. Smaller kings ruling smaller mandalas attempted to mimic this display of power with similar elements of grandeur on a lesser scale. Underlying such displays of power were the relationships of deference and loyalty that linked the lords of outlying circles of the mandala, or the lords of smaller mandalas that were satellites of a greater one, to the center.

Coercion was a factor. Small states were conquered and seized by neighboring larger ones. But diplomacy also played a part. A mandala lord might simply acknowledge his deference to the center by sending gifts and tribute—Malay sultans sent gold flowers (bunga mas) to the Siamese king. He might contribute men to the king’s arm

Our website has a team of professional writers who can help you write any of your homework. They will write your papers from scratch. We also have a team of editors just to make sure all papers are of HIGH QUALITY & PLAGIARISM FREE. To make an Order you only need to click Ask A Question and we will direct you to our Order Page at WriteDemy. Then fill Our Order Form with all your assignment instructions. Select your deadline and pay for your paper. You will get it few hours before your set deadline.