Southeast Asia had been one of the first destinations for
European adventurers en route to the East. Lured by the
riches of the Spice Islands (at the eastern end of presentday
Indonesia), European adventurers sailed to the area
in the early sixteenth century in the hope of establishing
contacts with societies in the area and seizing control of
the spice trade from Arab and Indian merchants. A century
later, the trade was fast becoming a monopoly of the
Dutch, whose sturdy ships and ample supply of capital
gave them a significant advantage over their rivals.
In 1800, only two societies in Southeast Asia were under
effective colonial rule: the Spanish Philippines and
the Dutch East Indies. The British had been driven out of
the Spice Islands trade by the Dutch in the seventeenth
century and possessed only a small enclave on the southern
coast of the island of Sumatra and some territory on
the Malay peninsula. The French had actively engaged in
trade with states on the Asian mainland but were eventually
reduced to a small missionary effort run by the Society
for Foreign Missions. The only legacy of Portuguese
expansion in the region was the possession of half of the
small island of Timor.
During the second half of the nineteenth century,
however, European interest in Southeast Asia grew rapidly,
and by 1900, virtually the entire area was under colonial
rule (see Map 2.1). The process began after the end
of the Napoleonic Wars, when the British, by agreement
with the Dutch, abandoned their claims to territorial possessions
in the East Indies in return for a free hand in the
Malay peninsula. In 1819, the colonial administrator
Stamford Raffles founded a new British colony on a small
island at the tip of the peninsula. Called Singapore (“City
of the Lion”), it had previously been used by Malay pirates
to raid ships passing through the Strait of Malacca. When
the invention of steam power enabled merchant ships to
save time and distance by passing through the strait
rather than sailing with the westerlies across the southern
Indian Ocean, Singapore became a major stopping point
for traffic to and from China and other commercial centers
in the region.
During the next few decades, the pace of European
penetration into Southeast Asia accelerated. At the beginning
of the nineteenth century, the British had sought
and received the right to trade with the kingdom of
Burma. A few decades later, the British took over the entire
country and placed it under the colonial administration
in India.
The British advance into Burma was watched nervously
in Paris, where French geopoliticians were ever
anxious about British operations in Asia and Africa. The
French still maintained a clandestine missionary organization
in Vietnam despite harsh persecution by the local
authorities, who viewed Christianity as a threat to internal
stability. In 1857, the French government decided to
force the Vietnamese to accept French protection to prevent
the British from obtaining a monopoly of trade in
South China. A naval attack launched a year later was
not a total success, but the French eventually forced the
Vietnamese court to cede territories in the Mekong River
delta. A generation later, French rule was extended over
the remainder of the country. By the end of the century,
French seizure of neighboring Cambodia and Laos had
led to the creation of the French-ruled Indochinese
Union.
With the French conquest of Indochina, Thailand was
the only remaining independent state on the Southeast
Asian mainland. During the last quarter of the century,
British and French rivalry threatened to place the Thai,
too, under colonial rule. But under the astute leadership
of two remarkable rulers, King Mongkut (familiar to millions
in theWest as the king in The King and I) and his son
King Chulalongkorn, the Thai sought to introduceWestern
learning and maintain relations with the major Euro-
pean powers without undermining internal stability or
inviting an imperialist attack. In 1896, the British and the
French agreed to preserve Thailand as an independent
buffer zone between their possessions in Southeast Asia.
The final piece of the colonial edifice in Southeast
Asia was put in place in 1898, when U.S. naval forces under
Commodore George Dewey defeated the Spanish
fleet in Manila Bay. PresidentWilliam McKinley agonized
over the fate of the Philippines but ultimately decided
that the moral thing to do was to turn the islands into an
American colony to prevent them from falling into the
hands of the Japanese. In fact, the Americans (like the
Spanish before them) found the islands convenient as a
jumping-off point for the China trade (see Chapter 3).
Not all Filipinos were pleased to be placed under U.S.
tutelage. Led by Emilio Aguinaldo, guerrilla forces fought
bitterly against U.S. troops to establish their independence
from both Spain and the United States. But America’s
first war against guerrillas in Asia was a success, and
the resistance collapsed in 1901. President McKinley had
his stepping-stone to the rich markets of China.
World History
