Monthly Archives: August 2026

by | 26 August 2026 · 7:09 am

Hindu and Buddhist Texts in Nusantaria

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 98-101:

Both Hindu and Buddhist beliefs benefited over time from gifts of land made by the pious. Gradually and with royal support temples and communities of monks and priests expanded and became centres of crafts and religious art. However, adoption of Indian ideas remained selective. For instance, though societies became more hierarchical as wealth and sophistication increased, the Indian caste system was not followed. Throughout the region women played a more active role in economic life – as they still do – than in India. Balinese Hinduism always displayed different characteristics from that of India as the imported religion adjusted itself to fit existing beliefs and practices. Nusantaria borrowed writing and many words, but imported languages never supplanted the various Austronesian tongues.

Despite the rise of direct links to Java and Sumatra from India and China, the isthmus trade remained important, providing links between eastern India and the Mon, Siamese and Khmer mainland. Trade also brought Buddhism, which made inroads in competition with both Hinduism and older beliefs, though both were probably still confined to the courts and surrounding townships. Buddhism was also spurring pilgrims and missionaries to travel on merchant ships.

…

Elsewhere, too, the adoption of Indian ideas was selective rather than wholesale. While writing systems were borrowed and Indian languages used for the earliest local writing, the languages both of the court and the common people remained the local Austronesian or Khmer ones. Sanskrit for a while may have served the same priestly and official role as Latin in medieval Europe. But in time Indian Pallawa script was used to write local languages, the oldest found so far being in old Malay dating to the seventh century in Sumatra. The following century saw the development of Kawi script, derived from Pallawa but used to write old Javanese.

This script became the basis for other scripts including later Javanese and Balinese, which are still in use today. The first writing in Khmer also dates to the seventh century and uses an adaptation of Pallawa script. Six hundred years later this became the basis of Thai writing. The origin of Indian language influence also varied. Only Sanskrit words, those of religious and classical texts, not Prakrit or other common Indian speech, entered early writing in Java, but Tamil ones appeared in Sumatra. Despite the import of Indian religions, social structures appear to have remained indigenous. The maritime cultures borrowed Indian ideas in art and architecture but then adapted them so that they have distinctive aspects which are readily recognizable.

Apart from religion and script, the biggest influence was on legal and governance issues. The Indian text on statecraft, Arthashastra, and the ancient Brahman legal code, Manusmriti, were widely studied by ruling elites and had a major influence on the development of state systems. The Arthashastra, written in the fourth century BCE during the north India-based Maurya empire, which supposedly followed the peace-loving Jain religion, required rulers to be ruthless in protecting the interests of the state but disciplined, hardworking and learned. It was a secular recipe for enlightened despotism applicable to rulers of any faith. The Hindu notion of divine kingship was especially attractive to rulers, seeming to make the exercise of power something higher than mere personal leadership: a mandate from above. Buddhism on the other hand (and also Jainism) was more sympathetic to merchant interests and the accumulation of wealth. Its practitioners were also less constrained by caste issues and religious rituals, which for the devout were an obstacle to long sea journeys.

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by | 25 August 2026 · 5:29 am

Indianization of Nusantaria

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 92-93:

Local rulers imported Indian practices as a means of strengthening their own power. They used kingship systems allied to priests and religious practices to formalize power structures, and founded dynasties from what had been often transient political entities reliant on the strength of individuals. There was no sudden transition, and it was probably not until around 400 CE that Indian cultural influence was well advanced beyond the ports, and states were using an Indian calendar and adding Indian words to local vocabulary. Indian cultural and political ideas also spread gradually up the Mekong through the Tonle Sap lake to much of modern Cambodia and Thailand’s Chao Phraya valley. Indian influence was stronger on the peninsula because of the greater presence of Indian merchants who conducted the westward trade, while those from Nusantaria took charge from there eastward. By about 300 CE Indian cultural influence reached the Vietnam coast, where the Cham states emerged as an Indianized evolution of the Sa Huynh culture.

For the whole of the first millennium CE Indian cultural and economic influence on the maritime zone, as on most of mainland South East Asia, was predominant. China itself had little direct impact. Given the later regional role of China and particularly of the Chinese diaspora, this may seem puzzling. The reasons included China’s late development of ocean-going vessels; the complexity of its writing system; the possible lack of portability of the Confucian system compared with Hindu and Buddhist teachings; the northern, landward orientation of Chinese strategic thinking; and the lack of experience with foreign trade compared in particular with the merchants of coastal India and the sailors of Nusantaria. Transport of Chinese goods was a catalyst for trade, but not by the Chinese.

Quite how far Indians themselves were the leading force in Indianization is a matter for conjecture. Writing in the mid-20th century, Indian historian R.C. Majumdar argued that the region was effectively colonized by a large number of Indians – Brahmans, merchants and others who established ruling groups throughout the region, supplanting indigenous leaders and bringing a complete culture and kingship system to the backward Austronesian and Khmer entities. French historian of the region Georges Coedès proposed a milder version of the Majumdar thesis, suggesting Brahmans were prime movers whether by imposing their rule, allying with local rulers for mutual benefit or marrying into the local elite.

…

The shortage of evidence leads history books to telescope time when, in reality, the process of Indianization was a gradual one over several hundred years and from both north and south India. Early Indian influence appears mainly to have come from northern India via Bengal. But links with the Tamil south, and with Buddhist Sri Lanka grew in importance. There is evidence from Tamil sources of extensive trade with Java as early as the second century CE. A Tamil inscription from the third century CE has also been found in Thailand, which indicates that a Tamil merchant had settled there. This was a time when many Tamils, like the Sinhalese, followed Buddhism. The Pallawa script of southern India became the basis of many others, including Lao, Khmer, Javanese and Balinese. Its rounded form is said to be especially suited to palm leaves, the main writing material used in India and most of South East Asia until around the seventeenth century CE.

Indian culture may have come later to Java than to the peninsula and mainland, with Hindu beliefs preceding Buddhist teaching. Brahmanism was introduced first but then Buddhism. The slow spread of Buddhism was indicated by a report from the fifth century CE by Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Fa Xian, who found that on Yeh Po Ti (Java): ‘various forms of error and Brahmanism are flourishing while the faith of Buddha is not worth speaking of.’

 

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by | 24 August 2026 · 5:42 am

Far Western Reaches of Nusantaria

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 67-73:

We do not yet know how products from Nusantaria came to arrive at the plush homes of a literate, urbanized Babylon. But that merely says how little we know about unwritten history. Sailing techniques which took Austronesians to Samoa were equally capable of taking them to the west coast of India where people from Harappa, the city of the Indus valley civilization which flourished between about 4500 and 3900 BP, had a settlement in Gujarat. At the least, sailing to the south-east coast of India from Sumatra or the Malay peninsula would have been well within their reach. There is evidence that the single outrigger sailing craft found in southern India was brought from the east around this time. The use in Arabic and Persian of Dravidian- rather than Sanskrit-derived words for Indian items such as ginger and rice indicates very early south Indian connections, and Nusantarians may also have taken coconut cultivation to Sri Lanka and southern India.

Other indications of trade links between the eastern archipelago and the west come from ancient Egyptian, Hebrew and Greek sources. An Egyptian text from around 1500 BCE refers to an expedition to the Land of Punt, most likely a kingdom on the Horn of Africa and source of various exotic products including gold, ivory and fragrant woods from tropical regions, possibly a reference to aloeswood which came only from the islands, peninsula and the far south of China. The expedition also returned with an item believed to be cinnamon, possibly from south India but more likely from the Malay peninsula or Sumatra. There are also Hebrew references to cinnamon from the seventh century BCE and a Greek one from the fourth century BCE. Hebrew texts from the time of King Solomon (around 950 BCE) make references to sandalwood, which may have come from south India, but the best came from drier places like Timor in the eastern archipelago. The first century CE Jewish historian Josephus mentioned trade expeditions sailing to the east from the Red Sea which took three years to complete.

…

Roman ships, built of cedarwood planks and with pitch caulking and lead-lined hulls, carried an average 220 tonnes of cargo according to the Musiris document but could be up to 35 metres in length with a deep draught and have a capacity of 350–500 tonnes.

Major Roman exports were wine, glassware and metals, but imports were invariably greater in value, so the difference had to be paid in silver. In addition to luxury items such as ivory, tortoiseshell, pepper, frankincense and silk, the Romans even imported special sands from India and Africa to facilitate the cutting and polishing of marble for their many magnificent buildings.

The Romans had several trading bases with semi-permanent settlements on the Malabar coast of India, and at least one on the Coromandel coast: Arikamedu, near Pondicherry in Tamil Nadu. This was active from the second century BCE or earlier until the third century CE. Although trade would have suffered as Roman power declined in the face of rebellions and the onslaughts of Germanic tribal confederation, access to the east remained on such a scale that large quantities of pepper and silk were among the demands of Visigoth leader Alaric in return for not sacking Rome in 408.

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Filed under Africa, economics, language, Mediterranean, South Asia, Southeast Asia, travel

by | 23 August 2026 · 7:45 am

Peopling Nusantaria

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 39-41:

Even at the lowest sea levels of the last ice age, there was deep water between Bali on the edge of the Sunda Shelf [SE Asia] and the Sahul Shelf [Australia, New Guinea]. But the distances were small enough for humans – though not for many animal species – to cross. It was during the last great glaciations that modern humans reached Australia, most likely arriving via Wallacea [between Borneo & New Guinea]. New Guinea was reached about the same time and became, around ten thousand years ago, probably the first place on earth – long before Egypt or Mesopotamia – where settled agriculture was practised.

… The sea rise also created a genetic and cultural rift. By modern times there was a clear racial divide between the Malay-Polynesians, speaking Austronesian languages, and Papuan-Melanesian physical types and cultures. Despite their remarkable east to west dispersal, the former left little trace in lands that were relics of the Sahul Shelf other than in the Bismarck Archipelago. However, some Melanesians remained further west. Findings from Niah cave in Sarawak dated to about 40,000 years ago and at Tabon on Palawan dated to 25,000 years ago have genetic characteristics similar to ancient Australians and Melanesians. So it is likely that the first Homo Sapiens in the region were of the same stock as the Australo-Melanesians who settled the forests and highland valleys of New Guinea and the bush country and great deserts of Australia. The Tabon caves were inhabited from around 30,000 BP, but while they now overlook the sea they were once on a hillside far from the shore. Thus far, no similar finds have been made on other islands, which may suggest that Tabon man walked there and that early man in that region had yet to gain sufficient skills to cross from Palawan to Mindanao or the Visayas.

The deep water gaps between Wallacea and the Sahul and Sunda landmasses had a huge impact on fauna and flora. Until later introduced by humans, large placental mammals never crossed that divide from Sundaland to Wallacea nor did large marsupials move in the other direction. Wallacea had its own separate but rather limited indigenous fauna and flora due to its weak links to the great landmasses and the distance in time since it had drifted from Gondwanaland [continental Southern Hemisphere].

The ending of the last ice age must have been a catastrophe for many of the people of Sundaland, the relatively flat land between what is now the Asian mainland and the coasts of Sumatra, Java and Borneo. While global warming enabled areas such as northern Europe to become habitable, in Asia it destroyed large numbers of human settlements in a region which previously should have been very conducive to habitation. By the same token, the creation of many islands and a huge expansion of coastlines produced the environment for the world of the Nusantarians, living on and by the sea, developing sailing craft and navigational prowess and building the coastal exchange networks which eventually evolved into ocean-spanning movements. They were behind the expansion of human settlement and of trade around half the globe. The same people, originating from Nusantaria, settled almost every island between Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Madagascar, between Taiwan and New Zealand.

Today, the majority of people from Nusantaria are defined as ‘Austronesians’ – a Greek-derived word meaning ‘southern islands’ but now applied to a language group. Austronesian is in the first instance a linguistic marker though also with shared genetic and cultural characteristics. As a language group it was the world’s most widely dispersed until Europeans settled the Americas 500 years ago. Austronesian expansion across the Pacific and Indian oceans was enabled primarily by mastery of the sea and driven forward by the confines of their many, mostly rugged, islands.

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Filed under Pacific, language, migration, Philippines, Polynesia, Southeast Asia, South Asia

by | 22 August 2026 · 6:13 am

Languages of Nusantaria

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 29-31:

Language is also a divide between maritime and mainland. The island and peninsula people all speak very similar atonal Austronesian languages, as did those of much of Vietnam and Taiwan until relatively recent times. Mainland South East Asia on the other hand is the domain of Austro-Asiatic, Thai and Sinitic languages, all of them tonal.

Maritime and mainland have some history in common, with the sea as a link. But they are otherwise divided by geography. The mainland has broad, fertile river basins such as the Mekong, Ayeyarwady and Chao Phraya, and are able to support large populations and urban development. The islands are often mountainous, with a limited amount of good alluvial and volcanic soil and many experiencing excessive rainfall that leaches the soil. Their populations tend to be small and their political entities fragmented. Vast China has mostly looked inward. It has always generated much of the trade which supported the maritime states. Its coastal people have long interacted with the Nanyang, but China overall shares limited history and culture with Nusantaria.

As boatbuilders and navigators the maritime peoples were also suppliers and carriers of the spices and tropical forest merchandise which attracted global demand. These successively brought Indian culture, Muslim religion and western domination in their wake.

This is also the story of their seafaring gifts to the world, with many ideas copied by or exchanged with India, Arabia, China and the west. It is a story of their adaptation of imported artistic, religious and political ideas to their own circumstances, and accomplishments such as the Borobudur temple. This is the story of communities mostly living on or close to the sea, of loose and changing political entities but communities sharing common cultural traits, such as cockfighting, betel chewing and the takraw ball game. They have the same linguistic roots and have long been reliant on trade with each other as well as with the outside world. Traditionally, the sea was for many the primary means of survival and transport. Apart from in Java and Bali, where fertile soil and self-sufficiency accounted for what have been called their ‘quiet habits and contented dispositions’, the island peoples were ‘maritime and commercial, devoted to speculation of gain, animated by a spirit of adventure, and attached to distant and hazardous enterprises’. The bigger picture was that neither Java nor the myriad other islands could be important without the interaction between them.

The transience of states is one reason why the region’s history is poorly known. Modern states prefer to build their own identities, which may require ignoring the past, especially if it is inconvenient in the context of religious, border and other contemporary issues. Another is the lack of pre-colonial written history. Of the little that exists almost all comes from outside sources, many of which make references to places whose identity can only be guessed at. Yet another is the absence of major archaeological remains other than temples, and they are significant only in Java and coastal Vietnam. Indigenous work such as writings on palm leaves and palaces of wood rotted away long ago.

Modern archaeology and attendant scientific advances in genetics and the origin of materials are gradually filling some gaps. Aerial photography and new dating systems are gradually adding to knowledge. But there remain huge blank spaces between the written references to cities, power and wealth found in foreign texts and what can be proven. Even archaeology can mislead. Ceramics are a favoured marker because they survive better than any man-made product, but that can lead to an over-emphasis on the importance of particular designs as cultural markers, or on the role of China as principal exporter in historic times. Almost certainly, cotton textiles and forest products were for centuries the prime traded goods, not ceramics. Even bones decay quickly in tropical climates and acidic soils.

A vast amount of scholarly material exists on specific topics, such as ceramics, linguistics, genetics, boatbuilding, religious art, anthropology, folk myths, music and botany, as well as on the various written sources. Weaving the strands of knowledge – not to mention the many areas of academic disagreement – into a readable but coherent whole is the goal of this book written by a non-specialist who acknowledges his debt to the many experts cited in the footnotes and bibliography. Such a book for the general reader is needed, to acknowledge better the peoples of Nusantaria’s shared identity and their role in world history.

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by | 21 August 2026 · 7:08 am

Naming ‘Maritime Southeast Asia’

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 29-31:

This region is often referred to as ‘maritime South East Asia’, with the more general term ‘South East Asia’ dating only to World War II. Although Japan used the term ‘Tonan Ajiya’ (‘South East Asia’ [lit. ‘East South Asia’]) from the late nineteenth century, in European languages its use did not become widespread until the 1950s, bringing together mainland states between China and India with the islands. The formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967 added to the notion that mainland and maritime were one, yet in practice they have divergent interests and religion, now as in the past.

Europeans had long termed the islands the ‘Indian archipelago’ or ‘Insulindia’. Alternatively they referred to them as the ‘Malay archipelago’, neither term distinguishing between the Indonesian and Philippine island groups. The area corresponded roughly to ‘Nusantara’, a name dating to the thirteenth century and the Java-based Majapahit empire. Nusa is a Sanskrit-derived word meaning ‘island’.

‘Nusantara’ defined the region of islands and coasts over which Majapahit rule, tribute or mercantile influence extended. It covered most of what is now Indonesia, part of the Philippine archipelago, the central Vietnam coast and the Malay peninsula. Beyond its Javanese heart it did not rule directly but held sway over the many small mercantile states of the region. ‘Nusantara’ in Malay today has a narrower meaning: ‘archipelago’, specifically the Indonesian archipelago. So this book uses ‘Nusantaria’ to denote a broader zone, the single maritime region between the northern entrance to the Melaka and Luzon straits, and the Banda islands in the extreme east of the archipelago. While predominantly describing the wider Malay world, and touching too on Taiwan, Madagascar and the Marianas, Nusantaria links to the coastal Thai, Chinese, Tamil and other players in the history of the exchange of goods, people and ideas both within the region and with peoples to the west and north-east. It corresponds also to the use by the distinguished archaeologist of South East Asia, Wilhelm Solheim, of the term ‘Nusantao’ to define the mostly Austronesian-speaking peoples of the ancient trading networks of the islands and coasts (tao means people in many Austronesian languages).

The maritime zone is now mostly associated with its largest component, the South China Sea. But even that is a misnomer. The Chinese themselves used the term ‘Nanhai’ or ‘Nanyang’ (‘South Sea’ or ‘Southern Ocean’) for seas that included the South China Sea but could also refer to southern seas generally. Likewise, the Vietnamese used geographical location, calling it the ‘East Sea’ as it lay to their east. More recently and in response to Chinese claims to almost the whole sea, the Philippines has begun to refer to at least its adjacent water as the ‘West Philippine Sea’. The term ‘Philippine Sea’ had been used by early seventeenth-century European mapmakers. Indonesia refers to its portion as the Natuna Sea, after the island group of that name off the Borneo coast. This includes its archipelagic seas north of the islands, which fall within China’s extravagant claims to sea extending 1,600 kilometres from its mainland.

The name ‘South China Sea’ is a European invention of relatively recent date. When the Portuguese first got there in the sixteenth century they called it the ‘Cham Sea’, after the mercantile state which had long existed on the coast of what is now central Vietnam. Arabs at one time called the southern part of it the ‘Malay Sea’ or the ‘Spice Sea’ because it was close to the Spice Islands.5 The more northern part was known as the ‘Sanf Sea’, a reference to Champa.6 Others called it the ‘Luzon Sea’ after the main island of today’s Philippines. Westerners long referred to these seas as part of the Indian Seas. The name ‘Indonesia’ (‘Indian islands’) reflects this. ‘China Sea’ only came into western use around 1800. ‘South’ was added in the early twentieth century.

A few hundred years ago, before the territorial expansion of China to Taiwan and southwards by Vietnam, Nusantaria was almost entirely Malay – to use the term ‘Malay’ in its broad cultural and linguistic sense. Even today these generic Malays of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei own most of its coastline. They are peoples who have traded with and occasionally paid tribute to China, and have absorbed Chinese immigration but, at least until very recently, have been more influenced by ideas from India, the Arab and Persian worlds and Europe than by China.

To the Chinese, the whole region was the ‘Nanyang’, meaning ‘Southern Sea’, a region inhabited by darker-skinned people and thus often seen as inferior in a system that associated skin tone with social status. For many Indians it was an overseas extension of their Hindu-Buddhist culture. Even now the marks left by Indian religion, writing and art are more evident than those of China. As for the peoples who actually lived in this region, they mostly saw it in terms of individual entities, of spheres of political influence, religion and trade, which had long been linked through dynasties and rivalries.

The maritime zone now comprises two modern archipelagic states: all of the Philippines and most of Indonesia, Brunei and the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak on Borneo. To these island entities must be added the Malay peninsula, where Malays remain in charge, and, until quite recently, much of coastal Vietnam. These last two share similarities to the island states because their peoples are wedged between forest and water and so traditionally looked seaward.

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by | 20 August 2026 · 4:17 pm

Empire of the Winds Introduction

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 27-29:

In 1498 the crew of the ships of Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama became the first people known to sail between Europe and India, landing at Calicut on the south-west coast of India. By 1512, the long arm of Portuguese merchant adventurism had reached almost 5,000 kilometres further, to its ultimate eastern destination, the Banda archipelago, most distant of the fabled Spice Islands.

But this historically crucial surge of European expansion was a minor navigational achievement compared with those of the maritime peoples whose lives the Portuguese were now disrupting. Some 1,500 years earlier sailors from this region had pioneered voyages which linked the Spice Islands to India and China and on to the coasts of Arabia and Africa. These were the pioneers who settled Madagascar, traded along the African coast and may well have sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and north as far as the Gulf of Guinea.

By 500 CE, and probably earlier, the sea, not the more famous overland Silk Road, was the pre-eminent mode of east–west trade. The sea was unquestionably hazardous, but it was easier and sometimes quicker to move 50 tonnes of goods on a ship compared with having to lead camels and pack animals over mountains and deserts, fending off robber bands, and across political boundaries where rulers were eager to extract tolls. According to Roman estimates it was 27 times more expensive to transport goods by land rather than water. Similar estimates were made for eighteenth-century Europe.

It was these sailors who guided the Portuguese from Melaka to the Bandas. That was a journey through the heart of a zone which rivals the Mediterranean as a locus of global trade and cultural interaction. This region comprises the almost countless islands and coastlines of the interlinked South China, Java, Sulu, Sulawesi and Banda seas and is joined to the Indian and Pacific oceans by the straits of Melaka, Sunda, Lombok, Makassar and Luzon. Its land is primarily composed of the islands of the vast Malay archipelago but includes the Malay peninsula and touches modern Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, as well as southern coastal China. India is a hop away across the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal.

This is a story of seafaring, of the drivers of global commerce, of cultural interchange and of the rise and fall of states and political systems. It is the story of a sea-girt region that remains predominantly Austronesian-Malay by language and original culture but has been subject to successive waves of influence from India, Islam, the west and China. It is the story of a sea which enabled ancient Rome to know cloves and camphor, of sailboats and of navigators who linked Maluku to the Bab el Mandeb and the coast of Africa and settled Madagascar. While ships and goods moved westward other ships and merchants moved eastward, bringing Indian and Islamic cultures to east Asia. Trade in spices was also the spur to Europe’s involvement in the region, which began more than 500 years ago. Nusantaria lost its leadership in boatbuilding and navigation, but to this day remains at the heart of global commerce, supplying some 40 per cent of merchant marine crews.

Despite its illustrious past, the region’s sense of identity is not what it was even in the 1880s when mariner and novelist Joseph Conrad was sailing its seas and José Rizal was awakening the nationalist aspirations of a wider Malay world. Steamships, airplanes and, above all, new nation states created from maps drawn haphazardly by western empires have eroded its sense of itself. Religious divisions have done the same. The economic dominance of western and east Asian countries has for now marginalized indigenous Nusantarian strengths. Many books of ‘South East Asian’ history are written with scant, if any, acknowledgment of the separate identity of the Austronesian linguistic and cultural heritage of the islands and coasts. For their different reasons, Indian, western and Chinese writers tend to generalize about ‘South East Asia’ mainly by reference to the mainland. Although the populations of states of the archipelago and Malay peninsula outnumber by 40 per cent those of the mainland they receive far less attention, partly because of a shortage of early documentary history.

But nothing can obliterate the common history and shared culture of the maritime region. So this is a book which largely ignores modern state boundaries to give a picture over time of the region, of the role of the sea and of the peoples who have lived near its shores for the past 2,500 or so years.

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Filed under China, economics, language, migration, Philippines, Portugal, religion, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Taiwan

by | 19 August 2026 · 9:21 am

Migration into Mindanao

From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 183-187:

The island of Mindanao is the most misunderstood part of the nation. Decades of on and off conflict in its Muslim region has long stolen the headlines. Under President Duterte, this provided an excuse for declaring martial law over the whole island. The reality is that for decades the island proved a land of opportunity for hundreds of thousands who moved from over-populated islands, mostly the Visayas, to the relatively underpopulated Mindanao…. Movement from the Visayas to Mindanao long pre-dates the Spanish.

…

The big boost to settlement came with the Commonwealth government, President Quezon recognizing the agricultural and forestry potential of the region as a way to underpin the national economy and raise the Christian population to counterbalance the Moros.

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The big boost to settlement came with the Commonwealth government, President Quezon recognizing the agricultural and forestry potential of the region as a way to underpin the national economy and raise the Christian population to counterbalance the Moros.

…

The Davao region, meanwhile, had attracted large numbers of Japanese to develop timber and plantation industries and Davao city was on its way to becoming the largest in Mindanao, with far more Japanese than Americans. Japanese ran shops, restaurants, fish canneries and export enterprises, often with sleeping Filipino partners to get around alien laws. The 1930s Japanese-led developments were key to making Davao the premier city of the island that it soon became. Although many Japanese left in 1945, their lands and enterprises were quickly taken over by immigrants from the Visayas and Luzon.

…

The scale of the internal colonization after 1935 was only partly a result of colonial rule or the Quezon initiatives. The underlying demographic driver was that because of improved government in the late Spanish period, and the impact of the US on public health, the population in the Visayas and Luzon in particular grew exceptionally fast. The people of Mindanao had far more land than they were able to occupy and cultivate.

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Worst off have been the Surigao provinces where few benefit from mining and forest wealth. The Paper Industries Corporation of the Philippines (PICOP) once employed more than 10,000 people in and around Bislig on the coast of Surigao del Sur. At its peak it was the biggest pulp and paper operation in Asia.

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Caraga encapsulates many of the problems of the wider nation. In theory, it is endowed with great forests, well-watered lowlands and lakes, a variety of mineral deposits, a coastline which offers opportunities for fisheries, and beaches and scenery to lure tourists. The regional capital, Butuan, is the oldest identifiable city in the country, dating back more than 1,000 years and with trading links to Java and China. In recent times, however, Butuan has been overshadowed by the growth not only of Davao City but also Cagayan de Oro to the west.

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One large mining company, Nickel Asia, operates modern mines but much mining is small- to medium-scale and uncontrolled, raising little if any revenue for the government while polluting rivers and lakes.

Well, this will have to be my last post from this book, since I’ve nearly reached the publisher’s limit for copying. (I appreciate the warnings when I hit 80% of the limit.) The book has a fair number of little proofreading errors, and navigation to the helpful maps on the Kindle often drops you back into the Table of Contents. But the author covers a wide range of topics in great detail.

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Filed under Japan, military, language, U.S., religion, migration, Philippines, economics, industry

by | 18 August 2026 · 5:01 pm

Overseas Filipino Workers

From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 157-158, 164:

Economic and social failures combine with demography to create the issue for which Filipino people are world-renowned – migration. Of all the populous nations of the world which rely heavily on migrant remittances – Bangladesh, Egypt, Mexico, etc. – none equals the Philippines either in its contribution to GDP (9 per cent) or in the diversity of its migrants or the range of the locations where they make their livings. Even the range of their occupations may come as a surprise to those overseas who may tend to identify them with specific occupations such as domestic helper or seafarer.

There are indeed plenty – 20–25 per cent each – in both of those categories but at least until the pandemic, the world had witnessed nearly five decades of steady expansion in both numbers and locations. By 2019, the total employed overseas and on ships had reached about 2 million. In addition, there has been a steady stream of permanent migrants, mostly to the US and Canada but also to Australia, and, more recently, Japan, the United Kingdom, Italy and other European countries. The US community has been growing steadily for decades and now totals some 4.1 million, roughly half migrants and half locally born. There are about 1.6 million in California though at 13 per cent, Hawaii has the highest percentage of the state population, partly reflecting the migration of agricultural workers in the 1930s (see Chapter 3). The established communities of settled migrants in high income countries have been as important a source of remittances as those of the OFWs on contracts. Permanent migrants also on average have higher qualifications than OFWs. Although their links to the motherland may gradually weaken, higher incomes ensure continuing large scale financial support.

…

As for permanent migrants, the relative ease with which they have melded into their new nation works against developing strong community organizations. They are for example far less visible than Chinese in California, though their numbers are only a little less. The organizations that they create among themselves are mostly based on province or other local identity not on the notion of Filipino. Further complicating their self-identity is the reluctance of many to be identified as Asian, which many, at least in the US, associate with being Chinese, Korean or Japanese. Culturally, many feel closer to Latinos or South Pacific Islanders because of Church and language links. That most permanent migrants have gone to English-speaking countries has had an impact back home. It helps sustain some of the links and cultural affinities created by 350 years of Spanish and American rule. Awareness of common linguistic and cultural bonds to Malay neighbours, Indonesia and Malaysia, is weak despite the legacy of Rizal and of Macapagal’s Maphilindo proposal.

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by | 18 August 2026 · 8:48 am

Duterte’s Response to COVID

From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 109-110:

The last two years of Duterte’s presidency were dominated by the pandemic. Although blame for what, at least by the standards of its Asian neighbours, was a disastrous outcome did not fall on Duterte in particular, but it did show up the weakness of the Philippine state and the low quality of many of Duterte’s political appointees to important ministries and operational departments – not least a chaotic and overburdened Department of Health. Duterte’s own inclinations added to the problems of the pandemic. His instinct was for controls and lockdowns over testing and tracing. The country was very late in acquiring vaccines – and Duterte’s seeming preference for China’s Sinovac rather than Western ones. The severity of lockdowns in 2020 caused the economy to shrink 7 per cent, far higher than elsewhere in southeast Asia, and brought particular hardship to the millions in the informal sector. The lockdowns were no more successful in curbing the virus than less stringent ones in Indonesia. The Philippines also kept its schools closed for longer than almost any country.

The disastrous GDP performance in 2020 was followed by recovery of only about 5 per cent in 2021 due to renewed lockdowns. Meanwhile, the government debt burden was expected to rise 11.6 trillion pesos in July 2021 from 9.6 trillion a year earlier, despite the efforts of a conservative fiscal policy team to restrain spending. Given the low debt level in 2019, the rise was not especially alarming, particularly as only one-third was in foreign currency. However, the speed of the rise showed the compounding cost of lockdowns.

Duterte took his style of government from Davao to Manila, but the nation was a more complicated place and he had little time for details or issues other than a few such as the drug war. On those details he expected immediate obedience. Cabinet meetings were largely irrelevant and ministerial access to the president was difficult. Competent ministers could get on with their jobs but incompetents often stayed in place if they were unquestionably loyal. Appointments were weighted towards associates from Davao, and to retired generals, men accustomed to following orders In Philippine politics, as elsewhere, friends and benefactors were rewarded with positions and deals, but Duterte raised this to a level well above that of his predecessor. He behaved as one seeing himself as above the law, ruling from a bully pulpit.

As the 2022 election loomed, Duterte saw a need to protect himself from prosecution should the opposition win.

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