Christianity made its appearance in the early 16th century, brought by the Portuguese, Spanish, and, somewhat later, the French. It spread easily in the northern Philippines, where Spanish missionaries did not have to compete with an organized religious tradition and could count on the interested support of a government bent on colonization. Unlike the religions with which Southeast Asia had been familiar, Christianity showed no interest in syncretic accommodation of local animist or other beliefs. The Spanish friars rooted out whatever they could find in the way of indigenous tradition, destroying much of cultural value, including, it appears, a native writing system. By the 18th century, most of the Philippines, except the Muslim south, was Roman Catholic, and a society that was both Filipino and Christian had begun to evolve. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, however—with the exception of Vietnam and parts of the Moluccas island group of eastern Indonesia—Christianity attracted little interest. It did not go unopposed and was resisted, for example, by Buddhist monks in Thailand and Cambodia in the 16th century, but Christian doctrines do not appear to have attracted the general populace. There were few conversions, and rulers were not unduly disturbed by the presence of missionaries, except on occasions when they were accompanied by political and economic adventurers; these people were crushed.
Manila CathedralManila Cathedral.© iStockphoto/Thinkstock
Islam, however, captured the imagination of Southeast Asians in the archipelago. It was proselytized primarily by Malacca and Aceh after 1400 and by the late 17th century was the dominant faith from the western tip of Sumatra to the Philippine island of Mindanao. The conversion process was gradual, for Muslim traders from the Middle East and India long had traveled the sea route to China; it seems likely that they traded and settled in the port cities of Sumatra and Java as early as the 9th or 10th century. Perhaps as a result of weakening of the Hindu-Buddhist courts and the rise of smaller, independently minded trading states and social classes, Islam made important inroads among both ruling elites and others.
World distribution of Islam.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Conversion was comparatively easy and promised certain practical advantages, especially in trade, to members of the Islamic community (the ummah). In addition, Islam was itself diverse, offering a spectrum of approaches from mystical to fundamentalist, and in practice Muslim proselytizers often were tolerant of syncretic behaviour. In addition, Islamic culture, especially poetry and philosophy, was particularly attractive to courts anxious to enhance their status as cultural hubs. While the spread of Islam throughout the archipelago was not entirely peaceful, for the most part it proceeded in evolutionary fashion and without remarkable disturbance. Javanese Muslims, perhaps even members of the court, lived peacefully in the capital of Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit, for example, and Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere continued to trade, enter into alliances, and inhabit the same general cultural world. What change there was tended to occur slowly in the face of robust and deeply rooted tradition. In some societies the cultural response was original and lively. Along the northern coast of Java, for example, architecture, batik cloth-dyeing motifs, and the literature and performance of the wayang (shadow-puppet theatre) were deeply affected by Islamic ideas and produced vital new forms to accompany the old. Chinese and Western incursions
Southeast Asia, unlike many other parts of the world on the eve of European expansion, long had been a cosmopolitan region acquainted with a diversity of peoples, customs, and trade goods. The arrival of Europeans in force in the early 16th century (others had made visits earlier, beginning with Marco Polo in 1292) caused neither wonderment nor fear. Long-distance travel by then was no novelty, and already there was impressive precedence for the arrival of foreign delegations rather than of individual trading vessels. A century before the Portuguese first arrived at Malacca in 1509, that port and a number of others in Southeast Asia had been visited by a succession of Chinese fleets. Between 1403 and 1433 Ming-dynasty China had sent several enormous flotillas of as many as 63 large vessels and up to 30,000 people on expeditions that carried them as far as Africa. The purpose of these journeys, led by the Muslim court eunuch Zheng He, was to secure diplomatic and trade advantages for the Chinese and to extend the sovereign lustre of the ambitious Yongle emperor. Yet, except for efforts to regain Dai Viet (Vietnam) as a province, these expeditions had no permanent military or colonial ambitions and did not much disturb the Southeast Asian region. Perhaps in part because of the sound defeat the Vietnamese handed a Ming occupying army in 1427, China lost interest in its new and far-flung initiatives, and the voyages came to an abrupt end.
Europeans presented a rather different prospect for Southeast Asia, however, above all because they sought riches and absolute control over the sources of this wealth. The Europeans were few in number and often poorly equipped and generally could not claim great technological superiority over Southeast Asians, but they were also determined, often well-organized and highly disciplined fighters, and utterly ruthless and unprincipled. Except for the Spanish in the Philippines, they were not interested in colonization but rather in the control of trade at the lowest financial cost. These characteristics made Europeans a formidable—though by no means dominant—new force in Southeast Asia. Except in a few locales and special circumstances, for the better part of 250 years Europeans could accomplish little politically or militarily without strong Southeast Asian allies. Individual adventurers often were useful to a particular Southeast Asian ruler or aspirant to the throne, but they were carefully watched and, when necessary, dispatched. Constantine Phaulkon, the Greek advisor to the Siamese court who was executed in 1688 on charges of treason, was only the most dramatic example.
In economic affairs, Europeans soon discovered that they were quite unable, even by the most drastic means, to monopolize the spice trade for which they had come. They generally were forced to engage in commerce by Southeast Asian rules and soon found themselves dependent on the local carrying trade for survival. For these reasons, the celebrated Portuguese conquest of Malacca in 1511 did not signal the dawn of an age of Western dominance in Southeast Asia. The majority of the population and much of the trading activity deserted the port, the sultan moved his court elsewhere, and by the end of the 16th century Malacca was a backwater; the Malay trade flourished elsewhere into the 18th century.
Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that the Western presence represented nothing more than a minor irritant. European commercial tools, especially the ability to amass large amounts of investment capital, were different and, from a capitalistic point of view, more sophisticated and dynamic than those of the Southeast Asians. The Dutch and British East India companies often were able to make inroads on certain markets simply by having a large amount of money available, and it was possible for them to adopt long-term strategies by carrying large deficits and debts. Although company directors in Europe warned against the dangers—and costs—of involvement in local affairs, the representatives on the spot often could see no other course. Thus, soon after permanently establishing themselves on Java in 1618, the Dutch found themselves embroiled in the succession disputes of the court of Mataram and, by the late 1740s, virtual kingmakers and shareholders in the realm. Finally, Europeans did bring with them much that was new. Some items shaped Southeast Asian life in unexpected ways: the chili pepper, which the Spanish introduced from the New World, came to hold such an important place in the region’s diet that today Southeast Asian cuisine can hardly be imagined without it. Another import, however, was coffee, with a more ominous effect. Smuggled into Java in 1695 against Dutch East India Company rules, coffee by the early 18th century had become a company monopoly produced through a unique relationship between the Dutch and the local Javanese elite in a system that prefigured the one adopted by the 19th-century colonial state. Patterns of a colonial age Crisis and response