How have national and state governments the world over come to “own” huge expanses of territory under the rubric of “national forest,” “national parks,” or “wastelands”? The two contradictory statements in the above epigraph illustrate that not all colonial administrators agreed that forests should be taken away from local
 people and “protected” by the state. The assumption of state authority over forests is based on a relatively recent convergence of historical circumstances. These circumstances have enabled certain state authorities to supersede the rights, claims, and practices of people resident in what the world now calls “forests.”

/pdf/genealogies-of-the-political-forest-and-customary-rights-in-1fuwav8fbv.pdf

Genealogies of the Political Forest and Customary Rights in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand

List of illustrations. Series editor's preface. Preface. Map of the Indian Ocean. Introduction. 1. Deep structure 2. Humans and the sea 3. The beginning of the ocean 4. Muslims in the Indian Ocean 5. Europeans in an Indian Ocean world 6. The early modern Indian Ocean world 7. Britain and the ocean 8. History in the ocean Notes. Select bibliography. Index.

The Indian Ocean

Hunter-Gatherers and Their Neighbors from Prehistory to the Present [and Comments and Replies]

Blending fine-grained case studies with overarching theory, this book seeks both to integrate Southeast Asia into world history and to rethink much of Eurasia's premodern past. It argues that Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, China, and South Asia all embodied idiosyncratic versions of a Eurasian-wide pattern whereby local isolates cohered to form ever larger, more stable, more complex political and cultural systems. With accelerating force, climatic, commercial, and military stimuli joined to produce patterns of linear-cum-cyclic construction that became remarkably synchronized even between regions that had no contact with one another. Yet this study also distinguishes between two zones of integration, one where indigenous groups remained in control and a second where agency gravitated to external conquest elites. Here, then, is a fundamentally original view of Eurasia during a 1,000-year period that speaks to both historians of individual regions and those interested in global trends.

Strange parallels : Southeast Asia in global context, c 800-1830

▪ Abstract The late twentieth century has seen far-reaching changes in the translocal cultural regimes known as world religions. This review examines the politics and meanings of recent changes in three such religions: Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. It highlights the nature of the forces reshaping religious meanings and authority, the processes promoting conversion and standardization, and the implications of these religious refigurations for our understanding of late modernity itself. Though modernity is multiple and every tradition unique, this review suggests that all contemporary religions confront a similar structural predicament, related to the globalization of mass societies and the porous pluralism of late modernity.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/223364.pdf

MULTIPLE MODERNITIES: Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in a Globalizing Age

Humanities Open Book Program, a joint initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Maritime Trade and State Development in Early Southeast Asia

L'histoire maritime de la mer de Chine meridionale : le developpement des techniques de contruction des bateaux, leurs consequences economiques, depuis le debut de notre ere d'apres les decouvertes archeologiques.

Trading Ships of the South China Sea

This article will concentrate on one aspect of a major question in Southeast Asian maritime history: an attempt will be made to describe and determine the origins of the type of ship that was the main form of transport for the trade of the maritime kingdoms of the western half of Southeast Asia until the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Surprisingly enough — if the general importance of the commercial network of maritime Southeast Asia is considered — such a study has not yet been attempted. The very few authors dealing with the economic history of the region are usually content to dismiss the problem by saying that the ships are locally called “junks”, and that their tonnage is small. (The reader is thus left with the idea that Chinese ships were being used, since the word “junk” has long been applied almost exclusively to this very specific type of ship.) The general conclusion of this study is that Southeast Asian maritime powers built, owned, and operated ocean-going ships of respectable size as early as the first few centuries of the first millennium A.D. Needless to say, this has a considerable historical significance (which will not be examined here).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/20070359.pdf

The Southeast Asian Ship: An Historical Approach

Trading Ships of the South China Sea. Shipbuilding Techniques and Their Role in the History of the Development of Asian Trade Networks

This article surveys epigraphy, Malay literary texts, and the archaeological data to better understand the socio-spatial structuration process of western Southeast Asia’s ancient political systems, more specifically, Sriwijaya (7th-13th cent.) and its successor, the Melaka Sultanate (15th-17th cent.). Representations of their polities, as offered by the Malays themselves in a variety of literary genres, all allude to the centre and peripheries of their city-states, as well as to the movements of their fleets, construed as metaphors of the whole social group, which provide a graphic illustration of the centripetal forces that structure them both politically and economically. The central places of these harbour-based city-states are entities loaded with symbolic values, with no marked or spatially extended territorial base. The peripheral space of such political systems, however, forms a social space extending, in concentric circles, much farther than the limits of insular Southeast Asia. These vast peripheries comprise places of exchange and international trade—each of which often commands its own periphery—and also religious places. This model once more confirms the intimate relationship between political power, trade relations, and religion in Southeast Asia.

Pierre-Yves Manguin

Papers

Maritime Trade and State Development in Early Southeast Asia

Trading Ships of the South China Sea

The Southeast Asian Ship: An Historical Approach

Trading Ships of the South China Sea. Shipbuilding Techniques and Their Role in the History of the Development of Asian Trade Networks

The amorphous nature of coastal polities in insular Southeast Asia: Restricted centres, extended peripheries