Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 288 pp. (Map.) US$228.00, cloth. ISBN 978-94-6372-372-5.
In their ambitious edited volume, Racial Difference and the Colonial Wars of 19th Century Southeast Asia, Farish Noor and Peter Carey recentre global military history by focusing on race and colonial violence in Southeast Asia. Striking back at literature that views the region as a periphery or reactionary to colonial dynamics elsewhere, Noor, Carey, and the volume’s contributors make an excellent case for how constructions of racial difference in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia were central to militarized violence and colonial expansion. They insist that colonial conflicts “need to be understood as race wars” to comprehend the entwined nature of racial violence and colonial military action (9).
Seven well-crafted case studies take readers through Southeast Asia’s experiences of British, French, Dutch, and American colonial violence. The authors explore varying types of violence, from civil wars, to anti-piracy campaigns, rebellions to military occupations. More, perhaps, could be said about the categorization and terminology of conflicts. As contributor Yvonne Tan astutely observes, ambiguous terminology such as “small war” really meant “asymmetric warfare when the balance of force is asymmetrically distributed between opponents” (136). However, the articles do provide compelling and diverse examples of racialized violence, including the portrayal of “headhunters” or communities such as Dayaks as “warlike” and “savage,” the emphasis on ethnicity as a marker of violence or “loyalty,” and the perseverance of colonial concepts of identity in nations such as Thailand and the Philippines. Each chapter supports the editors’ views that “[t]heories of racial difference and white supremacy were at the very heart of the empire-building process in the nineteenth century” (15). Colonial conflicts legitimized violence as “wars of civilization” which hinged on the construction of an “adversarial Other” that was “inferior both racially and culturally” (15). Not only military and colonial leaders, but novelists, adventurers, and illustrators contributed to the framing of conflicts through “racial ideas and understandings” (15).
Many contributors go beyond simple binaries to note the layers and contradictions of colonial categorization. For example, Noor examines how the British war on piracy led to categorizations of Malays as cowardly, Chinese as corrupt, and Dayaks as wild and uncivilized. At the same time, some British illustrators used Dayaks as stand-ins for all Malays to justify war. Yvonne Tan’s dynamic chapter similarly emphasizes how a revolt led by Mat Salleh (1894–1905) inspired colonial leaders to cast Bajaos and Suluks—Mat Salleh’s communities of origin—as savage and warlike. By contrast, they framed groups like Dusuns as docile, even as they challenged British power. Brian Shott and Mesrob Vartavarian also consider contradictions in the racialization of the American war in the Philippines, examining soldiers’ experiences, press responses, and the fraught position of Filipino Muslims. To Shott, members of the Irish-American press worried about the anti-Catholic implications of ousting the Spanish. Black American soldiers in the Philippines gained limited acceptance for being English-speaking and Christian, compared to Asian opponents. Such accounts indicate the shifting and unstable nature of inclusion within and beyond the military and even among those fighting on the same “side.”
Another compelling feature of the volume is the authors’ nuanced accounts of the everyday material violence of colonial occupation. Carey suggests that taxation imposed by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles in Java forced many cultivators “into the hands of Chinese moneylenders,” which then prompted widespread dissension and anti-Chinese violence in 1825 (46). For Noor, an attack on a British colonial resident in Malaya in 1875 was a response to British demands for further taxation (74). The Mat Salleh Rebellion, for Yvonne Tan, similarly had foundations in the increased taxation on rice and boat licensing imposed by the British North Borneo Company (107). During the Pahang Civil War (1891–1895), Netusha Naidu shows, local leaders’ loss of a historic role in tax collection prompted violence (186). These accounts indicate that racialization was never just about legitimizing the exceptional violence of war, but also facilitating the endemic violence of colonial extraction. As Yvonne Tan observes, the Mat Salleh Rebellion “provided not merely an effective challenge to a foreign colonial power, but also a moment when the compartmentalizing logic of racialized colonial capitalism was undermined from within” (143).
One area in which the volume might have gone further is to show how gendered violence was mutually constituted with racial violence. Several chapters hint at these dynamics, with Carey indicating that European officials often behaved in a “sexually predatory fashion” (52). Carey notes that the Java War (1825–1830) led to the marginalization of Eurasians, indigenous Indonesians, and women due in part to anxieties about European men’s sexual behaviour. Engagement with Barbara Watson Andaya and Michael Peletz could have clarified that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century trading networks relied on women acting voluntarily as sexual partners with travelling men to forge kinship networks (Barbara Watson Andaya, “From Temporary Wife to Prostitute: Sexuality and Economic Change in Early Modern Southeast Asia,” Journal of Women’s History 9, no. 4 [Winter 1998]: 11–34; Michael G. Peletz, Gender Pluralism: Southeast Asia Since Early Modern Times, Routledge, 2009). Understanding how and why these dynamics changed over time might have benefitted from Indrani Chatterjee’s work, which suggests that European experiences of the transatlantic slave trade and for-profit overseas trading companies created a greater emphasis on the legitimacy of heirs (“When ‘Sexuality’ Floated Free of Histories in South Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 4 [November 2012]: 945–962). Differentiating between slaves and wives challenged and undermined temporary unions in colonial spaces. While several authors in the volume rightly observe that the European “Enlightenment” and revolutionary era facilitated the “scientific racism” of the nineteenth century, a richer understanding of women’s roles as sexual labourers could have enhanced the volume’s emphasis on race and conflict.
Overall, this volume is an admirable study that centres Southeast Asia in a pivotal moment of colonial expansion. The authors are aware that histories of Southeast Asia tend to over-emphasize the twentieth century, owing to the world wars and the geopolitical consequences of Chinese, Russian, and American military intervention. By centring the era of rapid imperial expansion, Noor and Carey’s volume offers a rich and exciting intervention into the fields of military history, histories of colonialism, and Southeast Asian studies. This book would make a fine addition to graduate and undergraduate classrooms, and provides ample food for thought for researchers. It is a bold and refreshing reminder to readers of how racial hierarchies have deep roots in the histories of warfare and colonialism and continue to influence governance and conflict in the present.
Kate Imy
University of North Texas, Denton