Volume 36, Number 2 · February 16, 1989
A South Sea Renaissance
By Clifford Geertz
Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680: Vol. I, The Lands below the Winds
by Anthony Reid
Yale University Press, 275 pp., $25.00
Of impossible books asking to be written, a 'total history' of Southeast Asia in the manner of Fernand Braudel, immediately before the region came under European dominion, would seem very near to the top of the list. The materials are sparse: a traveler's tale here, a merchant's report there, some shipping records, some religious inscriptions, various myths, legends, dynastic chronicles, a scattering of half-worked archaeological sites. The region is a hodgepodge of languages, religions, races, civilizations, economies, and microstates strewn through forests, along deltas, and across archipelagoes. It usually includes the places that now go under the names of Indonesia, Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines, among others. A continental edge and a maritime crossroads, its identity was imposed on it by encroaching outsiders searching out its riches: 'The Southern Ocean' of the imperial Chinese, 'The Lands below the Winds' of the Arab, Persian, and Indian navigators, the Achter-Indië of the oncoming Dutch. Yet it does seem a place, a period, and a cast of mind unlike others, and one of rather special significance, before the Fall: a Grand Something, somehow graspable.
Review, 2518 words
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