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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Southeast Asia, long known as an intermediate zone between the ancient civilisations of China and India, is also an area that scholars have long portrayed as historically subject to influences coming from its west, beginning with Indianisation, then islamisation and finally westernisation. However, this article argues that it would be far more insightful, and historically more accurate for the last several centuries at least, to treat Southeast Asia and southern China as part of one region, in the same way that Fernand Braudel approached the history of the Mediterranean.
[1] This is an edited translation by Nola Cooke of an article by the late French scholar, Denys Lombard. It was first published in 1998 in a special edition of the French geographical journal, Hérodote, devoted to Indonesia as Islam's “Orient”. See Hérodote, no. 88, 1988, pp. 184-92. References in brackets have been added to the original text. Many thanks to Claudine Salmon for her assistance with aspects of the translation.
[2] Lombard refers here to the Cambodian problem, and the monetary crises of the mid-1990s, especially the difficulties of the Thai baht and the Indonesian rupia.
[3] An epiphyte is a plant that grows on another without being parasitic on its host.
[4] Lombard refers to the highly influential history of the Mediterranean world by Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen aÌ€ l'époque de Philippe II [The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Era of Philip II], first published in France in 1949 and reprinted several times since. It was translated into English by Sian Reynolds as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, published by Collins in 1972-73 and recently reprinted by the University of California Press in 1995.
[5] Mare nostrum is Latin for “our sea”.
[6] Koiné was an ancient Greek mixture of Attic and Ionian elements that became the common Greek language, thus by extension it means any common tongue shared by speakers of difference languages or dialects over a large geographical space.
[7] J. Dumarcay, “La faîtieÌ€re tendue (histoire d'une technique)”, Bulletin de l'EÌ□cole française d'Extrême-Orient, no. 49, 1959, pp. 632-36.
[8] D. Ziegler, “Entre ciel et terre: le culte des ‘bateaux-cercueils’ de mont Wuyi”, Cahiers d'Extrême-Orient, no 9, EFEO Kyoto, 1996-97, pp. 203-31; T. Harrison, “The Great Cave of Niah: A Preliminary Report”, Man, No 57, 1957, pp. 161-66.
[9] See especially Glen Dudbridge, China's Vernacular Cultures, “Inaugural lecture”, University of Oxford, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996.
[10] Double funerals are found throughout the Austronesian world, as far away as Madagascar.
[11] Jean Guilaine, La Mer partagée, Flammarion, Paris, 1994.
[12] A Persian Manichean religion that believed the world was locked in struggle between the followers of Good and of Evil.]
[13] E. H. Schafer, The Empire of Min, Charles Tuttle, Tokyo, 1954.
[14] S. A. M. Adshead, Central Asia in World History, MacMillan Press, London, 1993.
[15] Charnvit Kasetsiri, The Rise of Ayudhya. A History of Siam in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, Oxford University Press-Duang Kamol, Bangkok, 1976.
[16] On the difficulties of the French Company in its trade with China, see the excellent study by L. Dermigny, La Chine et l'Occident. Le commerce à Canton au XVIIIe sieÌ€cle, 1719-1833, SEVPEN, Paris, 1964, 4 vols.
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