Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief.

This collection of ten distinguished essays on aspects of Southeast Asian history between the fifteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries is both a worthy stand-alone contribution to the scholarly literature and a strong sequel - one almost thinks of its as a third volume - to Anthony Reid's imposing two-volume study, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce (1988-1993). Because it expands upon, details, clarifies, qualifies, and even disagrees with some of the ideas of Reid's often highly generalized larger work, it is especially helpful to the Southeast Asia area specialist. The globalist, however, should not pass it by, for despite the essayists' intention to focus on smaller sections of Reid's original canvas, they remain very much aware of its broader pattern of economic forces and its bold washes of cultural and political color.

The essays are of uniformly high quality, and they display not only firmly grounded scholarship, but turns of originality in approach and deftness in expression that we seldom see in collections of this sort. Each essay has special strengths and points of interest, but to my mind the two most thoroughly captivating are by Pierre-Yves Manguin (on the question of the decline of Southeast Asian fleets by the late seventeenth century) and Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells (on the problem of why merchant capitalism did not develop in early modern Southeast Asian societies). Working from an Annales-style examination of ships and shipbuilding, Manguin concludes that "it is incorrect to ascribe to the Portuguese . . . the main responsibility for the disappearance of [Southeast Asian] long-distance trading fleets" (p. 209) and throws the spotlight instead on Southeast Asian dynamics. Kathirithamby-Wells, taking a more open-angle summary-and-illustration approach, emphasizes how "inherently political" trade was in Southeast Asia (p. 129), and how the conflicts associated with it "ruled out conditions for a mutually supportive separation between public and private agencies and their respective spheres of influence which had, to a large extent, fostered early merchant capitalism in Japan and the West" (p. 148). Views such as this force us to consider less cliche-ridden, more complex renditions of the story of European-Southeast Asian relations in this critical pre-colonial period.

These essays reveal how profitable has been the enterprise of the past decade or two of combining the rereading (often with radically new questions in mind) of a vast and familiar array of European published and unpublished contemporaneous sources, with thorough and sensitive examination of a rather smaller number of much less well known indigenous sources. The effect is not to produce a rather soppish "truth must lie in the middle" conclusion, but to replace a monocle with a real pair of spectacles: we see things more nearly in the round, and can make much better judgements as to what was happening and why. Already a highly internationalized venture, with the perfecting of this approach, the writing of early modern Southeast Asian history at both local and regional levels may have at last and ever so thankfully escaped the confines of the "Euro-centric versus Asia-centric" mode of thought which until comparatively recently trapped so many authors and still bedevils student essays and much tertiary writing on Southeast Asia.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that Anthony Reid's "Introduction: A Time and A Place" (pp. 1-19) is, besides an effective preparation for the contributions that follow, the most eloquent yet judicious statement available of Southeast Asia's status and nature as a distinctive region. Those still under the impression that Southeast Asia is nothing more than a wildly diverse jumble of societies which, because they didn't fit nicely in to China or India, were given a name in World War II, need to spend some quality time with what Reid has to say here on the issue.

WILLIAM H. FREDERICK Ohio University, Athens, U.S.A.