While there are universalizing trends in global urbanization currently taking place, several Southeast Asian cities will adopt these new frameworks and institutions at least partly within a local model that is already several centuries old. Particular to the region, this model does not parallel South and East Asia's urban evolutions, the two regions traditionally regarded as the well-springs of Southeast Asian culture. Rather, it contradicts it. The cities of this arena have been and will continue to be primarily their own creatures from a variety of vantage points. Yet it is only by first examining the pattern of these cities' evolutions that we can hope to gain any insight into how these urban centers may unfold in the future. It is in the distant and colonial past that we can sift for geographic and demographic clues that auger how the new Asian “super-capitals” sitting astride the equator may evolve in the years to come.
I am very grateful to the Journal of Urban History's anonymous referees for their comments and critique on this article. I alone assume all responsibility for the content.
2.
See, for example, Lewis Mumford's classic The City in History (New York, 1961/1989, reprint) which describes the nature and evolution of a host of cities over several millennia, but which leaves non-Western cities entirely out of his analysis. Correctives on this lacuna have come fast and furious, but are of uneven quality in describing the mechanics and growth of non-Western cities. For Asia, the most sophisticated study of a regional city is probably William Rowe's Hankow, 2 vols. (Stanford, 1984 and 1989), which describes this central Chinese city as it entered into the age of modern global capitalism. For Southeast Asia, see the pioneering work of Terry McGee, which set the stage for Southeast Asian urban studies in the 1960s (Terry McGee, The Southeast Asian City: A Social Geography of the Primate Cities of Southeast Asia [London, 1967]) and then ushered in the new study of urbanism in the region with his recent co-edited volume, Terry McGee and Ira Robinson, eds., The Mega-Urban Regions of Southeast Asia (Vancouver, 1995). For an examination of some of the ideas of how to think about “Third World” cities generally, see M. Santos, The Shard Space: The Two Circuits of the Urban Economy Underdevelopment Concept (London, 1979).
3.
By Greater Southeast Asia, I am referring here to the eleven contemporary nation-states of the Association of Southeast Asian nations (ASEAN), plus parts of the nearby shores of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, which have been bound into the history of the region.
4.
Hans-Dieter Evers and Rudiger Korff, Southeast Asian Urbanism: The Meaning and Power of Social Space ( Singapore, 2000).
5.
The term is Anthony Reid's; see Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 2 vols. (Ithaca, 1993), especially (II), chap. 2, “The City and its Commerce” for a picture of the evolution of Southeast Asian cities in the Early Modern Age.
6.
It should be stated from the outset that the nature of extant sources helps to determine some of the comparisons put forward in this article. Sources on pre-modern and colonial Southeast Asian port cities are relatively abundant in comparison with the surrounding hinterlands; they are also relatively abundant (as a percentage) in comparison with surviving materials on the South and East Asian pasts, where cities were often merely parts of larger political entities.
7.
Many of the historical cities mentioned in this article were embedded in territorial states. The types of states, the scale of these states, the relations between the various nodal points—which were often simultaneously the capitals of elites and the shifting bases of overlapping mercantile diasporas—differed both by the type of state and longitudinally over time. This overall point needs to be made within the larger schema of the argument.
8.
Anthony Reid , “The Structure of Cities in Southeast Asia, 15th—17th Centuries,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies11 (1980), 235-250.
9.
Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, 800-1830 Volume 1: Integration on the Mainland. (Cambridge, 2003).
10.
Tony Day, Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia. (Honolulu , 2002).
11.
Of course, there were urban centers in classical Southeast Asia that were primarily religious and agricultural in nature, and not dependent on the sea. Angkor, Pagan, and Hanoi are all good examples of these cities, but as a category of “place,” they seem to have been outnumbered over the centuries by the combined port/polities discussed in this article. For further information on these land-locked cities, see Georges Coedes, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (Honolulu, 1968) and Kenneth Hall and John Whitmore, eds., Explorations in Early Southeast Asian History: The Origins of Southeast Asian Statecraft (Ann Arbor, 1976).
12.
O.W. Wolters , Early Indonesian Commerce: A Study of the Origins of Srivijaya (Ithaca, 1967); Rebecca D. Catz, transl. and ed., The Travels of Mendes Pinto/Fernão Mendes Pinto (Chicago, 1989); and Heather Sutherland, “Trepang and Wangkang: The China Trade of Eighteenth Century Makassar” in R. Tol, K. van Dijk, and G. Accioli, Authority and Enterprise Among the Peoples of South Sulawesi (Leiden, 2000). See also generally in this respect Kenneth Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development in Early Southeast Asia (Honolulu , 1985) and Paul Wheatley, The Golden Chersonese: Studies in the Historical Geography of the Malay Peninsula Before AD 1500 (Kuala Lumpur, 1961).
13.
David E. Mungello , The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800 (Lanham, 1999) and Michael Smitka, The Japanese Economy in the Tokugawa Era, 1600-1868 (New York, 1998). Explications on Chinese and Japanese xenophobia during these periods have been substantially revised in recent decades by the work of John Wills, Jonathan Spence, Joanna Waley-Cohen, Ronald Toby, and Martha Chaiklin. See, for example, John Wills, Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K'ang-hsi, 1666-1687 ( Cambridge, 1984); Jonathan Spence and John Wills, eds., From Ming to Ch'ing: Conquest, Region, and Continuity in 17th-Century China (New Haven, 1979); Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History ( New York, 1999); Ronald Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu (Princeton, 1984); and Martha Chaiklin, Cultural Commerce and Dutch Commercial Culture: The Influence of European Material Culture on Japan, 1700-1850 (Leiden, 2003).
14.
Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: How the Shogun's Ancient Capital Became a Great Modern City, 1867-1923 (Cambridge , 1991).
15.
Chaiklin, Cultural Commerce.
16.
Chin Keong Ng, Trade and Society: The Amoy Network on the China Coast ( Singapore, 1983) and John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company ( New York, 1991).
17.
On this point see Chapter 1 in Gerrit Knaap, Shallow Waters, Rising Tide: Shipping and Trade in Java Around 1775 (Leiden, 1996) which lays out the history of the northern Javanese pasisir prior to Knapp's discussion of the eighteenth century.
18.
Dhiravat na Pombejra, “ Ayutthaya at the End of the Seventeenth Century: Was There a Shift to Isolation ?” in Reid, ed., Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era, 250-272; Barbara Watson Andaya, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Honolulu, 1993); and Victor Lieberman, “ Was the Seventeenth Century a Watershed in Burmese History?” in Reid, ed., Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era, 214-249.
19.
The most important theorist on urbanism in the Philippines has been the Berkeley geographer Robert Reed, whose publications on Manila and also hill stations further north in Luzon have put Philippine urbanism on the scholarly map.
20.
For Jakarta, see Zeffry Alkatiri, Dari Batavia Sampai Jakarta, 1619-1999: Peristiwa Sejarah dan Kebudayaan Betawi-Jakarta Dalam Sajak ( Magelang, 2001) and Ewald Ebing, Batavia-Jakarta, 1600-2000: A Bibliography (Leiden, 2000 ); for Rangoon, see Michael Adas' classic text on the Burma delta (Michael Adas, The Burma Delta: Economic Development and Social Change on an Asian Rice Frontier, 1852-1941 [Madison , 1974]).
21.
For the colonial period in particular on this topic, see Reid, “The Structure of Cities.”
22.
A notable exception here might be Batavia (contemporary Jakarta), which was used as the Dutch East India Co's “mother-city” in Asia for two hundred years. On the VOC and its place in these transoceanic urban networks, see H.K. s'Jacob, “ De VOC en de Malabarkust in de 17de Eeuw”, in M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz, ed. De VOC in Azie ( Bussum, 1976), 85-99; Om Prakash, The Dutch Factories in India, 1617-1623 (Delhi, 1984); Sejarah Daerah Bengkulu (Jakarta, nd.); J. Steur, Herstel of Ondergang: De Voorstellen tot Redres van de VOC, 1740-1795 (Utrecht, 1984), 17-27; Stevens, Harm, De VOC in Bedrijf, 1602-1799 (Amsterdam, 1998); and Femme Gaastra, Bewind en Beleid bij de VOC, 1672-1702 (Amsterdam, 1989).
23.
Sriwijaya Dalam Perspektif Arkeologi dan Sejarah ( Palembang, 1993).
24.
Kay Kim Khoo , “Melaka: Persepsi Tentang Sejarah dan Masyarakatnya” in Omar Farouk Bajunid Esei-Esei Budaya dan Sejarah Melaka (Kuala Lumpur, 1989 ) and Kernial Singh Sandhu and Paul Wheatley, eds., Melaka: The Transformations of a Malay Capital, c. 1400-1980 (Kuala Lumpur, 1983).
25.
Bennet Bronson , “Exchange at the Upstream and Downstream Ends: Notes Toward a Functional Model of the Coastal States in Southeast Asia ,” in K. L. Hutterer, Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia: Perspectives from Prehistory, History, and Ethnography (Ann Arbor, 1977); Tania Li , “Marginality, Power, and Production: Analyzing Upland Transformations” in Tania Li , ed., Transforming the Indonesian Uplands: Marginality, Power, and Production (Amsterdam, 1999 ), 1-44.
26.
James Warren, The Sulu Zone: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State (1768- 1898) (Singapore, 1981) and Eric Tagliacozzo “ Onto the Coast and Into the Forest: Ramifications of the China Trade on the History of Northwest Borneo, 900-1900” in Reed Wadley, ed., Histories of the Borneo Environment (Leiden, 2005).
27.
Susan Russell, ed., Ritual, Power, and Economy: Upland-Lowland Contrasts in Mainland Southeast Asia (DeKalb, 1989) and Ann Hill Maxwell, Merchants and Migrants: Ethnicity and Trade among Yunnanese in Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1998), 33-94.
28.
Roy Ellen, “ Environmental Perturbation, Inter-Island Trade, and the Relocation of Production along the Banda Arc; or, Why Central Places Remain Central” in Tsuguyoshi Suzuki and Ryutaro Ohtsuka, eds., Human Ecology of Health and Survival in Asia and the South Pacific (Tokyo, 1987), 35-62.
29.
Bertil Lintner , Cross Border Drug Trade in the Golden Triangle (Durham, 1991); Moshe Yegar, Between Integration and Succession: The Muslim Communities of the Southern Philippines, Southern Thailand, and Western Burma/Myanmar (Lanham, 2002); and Gerald Hickey, Sons of the Mountains: Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese Central Highlands to 1954 (New Haven, 1982).
30.
The most sophisticated elucidation of traditional Southeast Asian political, religious, and economic concentricities remains Paul Wheatley's Nagara and Commandary: Origins of the Southeast Asian Urban Traditions ( Chicago, 1983).
31.
Kernial Sandhu and A. Mani , eds., Indian Communities in Southeast Asia ( Singapore, 1993); and Aiwha Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, 1999).
32.
Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900-1936 (Chicago, 2001).
33.
For a discussion of pan-ASEAN conceptions of a shared culture, including urban culture, see Donald Emmerson, “Security and Community in Southeast Asia: Will the Real ASEAN Please Stand Up?” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 2006.
Ironically, these are many of the same problems discussed in Clifford Geertz's prescient Agricultural Involution (Berkeley, 1963) which dealt with trends in Java 150 years ago.
36.
On a fieldwork trip to Manila in 1990, I completed interviews with spice merchants in the Binondo and Divisoria warehouse districts of the city. The crumbling infrastructure of these parts of Manila was all too apparent; I had to take hand-pulled rafts across a river strewn with garbage to reach several of my informants' warehouses. Interview notes, Manila, January, 1990.
37.
Jakarta is an interesting case in this regard, as many of the factors that could potentially backwater it are inherited from colonial times. See Zeffry Alkatiri, Dari Batavia Sampai Jakarta and Ebing, Batavia-Jakarta, for this city. The relationship of Indonesian port cities to their hinterlands and to each other is a fascinating one, given the size and complexity of the Indonesian archipelago. For analysis pertaining to this issue in Sumatra, see Makmun Abdullah, Kota Palembang Sebagai Kota Dagang dan Industri (Jakarta, 1985); Sejarah Daerah Bengkulu; and Mardanas Sofwan, Sejarah Kota Padang (Jakarta, 1987). For Kalimantan see Lisyawati Nurcahyani, Kota Pontianak Sebagai Bandar Dagang di Jalur Sutra (Jakarta, 1999); for Java see Susanto Zuhdi, Cilacap (1830-1942): Bangkit dan Runtuhnya Suatu Pelabuhan di Jawa (Jakarta, 2002); and for Eastern Indonesia, see Restu Gunawan, Ternate Sebagai Bandar Jalur Sutra (Jakarta, 1999) and G. A. Ohorella, ed., Ternate Sebagai Bandar di Jalur Sutra (Jakarta, 1997).
38.
In a recent trip (April, 2005) to Xiamen, Fujian Province, the links and outward cadence of this city with and toward Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and indeed maritime Asia in general were unmistakable. One eye is kept toward Beijing for funding and political purposes, but one eye of Xiamen's government and business is most definitely rooted east and south.
39.
Schell stressed that these fractured outlines have been visible for some time now, though it may be decades or even centuries before some kind of pressure or event comes along to split these divisions at the seams. Interview notes, Berkeley, California, May 1992.
40.
The idea of “other Chinas” has received attention from John Wills, but before him earlier suggestions to this effect were put forward by G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1977).
41.
Valerie Hansen , The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600 (New York, 2000), 221-224 and Joseph Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley, 1987).
42.
Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo (edited and revised from William Marsden's translation by Manuel Komroff) (New York, 2001); Frederick Hirth and W.W. Rockhill, Chau Ju Kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the 12th and 13th Centuries (Chu Fan Chih) (New York, 1966).
43.
Frank Welsh, A Borrowed Place: The History of Hong Kong (New York, 1993).
44.
Mohamed Jamil bin Mukmin, Melaka Pusat Penyebaran Islam di Nusantara (Kuala Lumpur, 1994).
45.
Dian Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast (Stanford, 1987).
46.
These conversations took place with Chinese merchants in several parts of Southeast Asia. Echoing the political-speak of the American government in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, many of these merchants saw Vietnam as “lost” to them, especially in familial and economic terms. Interview notes, Singapore (October, 1989); Kuala Lumpur (November, 1989); and Bangkok (February, 1990).
47.
Ernest Chew and Edwin Lee, eds., A History of Singapore ( Singapore, 1991).
48.
For the unfolding of this particular dialectic of the city-state as the object of anger and envy by surrounding polities, see Robert Griffith and Carol Thomas, eds., The City-State in Five Cultures ( Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1981).
49.
K.L. Hutterer , Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia: Perspectives from Prehistory, History, and Ethnography (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Southeast Asia Program, 1977).
50.
Anthony Reid, Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency in Southeast Asia (St. Lucia, 1983); Ben Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion (Berkeley, 1977); and Paul van het Veer, De Atjeh Oorlog (Amsterdam, 1969).
51.
For Indonesia alone, see Irena Cristalis, Bitter Dawn: East Timor, a People's Story (London, 2002); for East Timor and for Aceh and West Papua, see Daniel Dhakidae, Aceh, Jakarta, Papua: Akar Permasalahan dan Alternatif Proses Penyelsaian Konflik (Jakarta, 2001).
52.
Eric Tagliacozzo , “Border Permeability and the State in Southeast Asia: Contraband and Regional Security” Contemporary Southeast Asia23, no. 2 (2001), 254-274.
53.
The most detailed expose of these complicated vectors remains Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (New York, 1991, reprint).
54.
Martin Smith, Burma: Insurgency and the Politics ofEthnicity (London, 1999).
55.
Theodore Friend, Indonesian Destinies (Cambridge, 2003 ); Franz Magnis-Suseno, ed., Suara dari Aceh: Identifikasi Kebutuhan dan Keinginan Rakyat Aceh (Jakarta, 2001); and Zadrak Wamebu and Karlina Leksono, Suara dari Papua: Identifikasi Kebutuhan Masyarakat Papua Asli (Jakarta , 2001). It is interesting that one of the urban areas of China least involved in the 1989 demonstrations was Guangzhou, which makes for a fascinating parallel with Indonesia. “It was as if the political pressures originating at the center—both the protests against power and the recovery of control by the power structure—ran up against the primary concern shared by all in the south of preserving the wealth attained since 1978 and not jeopardizing the development under way.” See Marie-Claire Bergere , “Tiananmen 1989: Background and Consequences ,” in Marta Dassu and Tony Saich, eds., The Reform Decade in China: From Hope to Dismay (London, 1990), 137.
56.
Evan Gottesman , Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge: Inside the Politics of Nation Building (New Haven, 2003).
57.
J. K. Wells and John Villiers, eds., The Southeast Asian Port and Polity: Rise and Demise (Singapore, 1990); Frank Broeze, Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia From the 16th-20th Centuries (Kensington, 1989); and Frank Broeze, ed., Gateways of Asia: Port Cities of Asia in the 13th-20th Centuries (London, 1997). For a general appraisal of this relationship on a theoretical, not a Southeast Asian plane, see M. Castells, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach (London, 1979).
58.
For a fascinating meditation on the nature of the Southeast Asian city over time, see Richard O'Connor, A Theory of Indigenous Southeast Asian Urbanism (Singapore, 1983). O'Connor engages with Tonnies and the Frankfurt School on ideas of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, and whether or not Western-generated models of urban theory can be applied to Southeast Asian urbanism as a whole.
59.
Several interesting projections on where Southeast Asian cities may be heading into the future can be found in Y. M. Yeung and C. P. Lo, eds., Changing Southeast Asian Cities: Readings on Urbanization (Oxford, 1976).
