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.

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.

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.

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

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.

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.

Centralism vs. Federalism in Philippines

From The Making of the Modern Philippines: Pieces of a Jigsaw State, by Philip Bowring (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Kindle pp. 128-130:

The 1987 Constitution was intended to promote ‘maximum decentralization short of federalization’. It was imprecise about decentralization of public finances, merely referring to ‘just shares’ and allowing local taxation subject to rules made by Congress. It also provided for significant devolution of functions and to enable this a 1991 law saw allocation of 40 per cent of the Bureau of Internal Revenue collection go to local government units (LGUs). This was further allocated by a complex formula to 23 per cent for provinces and cities, 34 per cent for municipalities and 20 per cent for barangays. The law also set rules for taxes on property, mining and other local economic activity.

...

In the Philippines, the decision-making power of the executive was centralized, the administrative sinews needed for implementation were weak. So, too, was the justice system, a mix of Spanish and US influences. In principle, it was centralized with all judges, including those at the lowest level, the Municipal Trial Courts, chosen by Manila. In practice, however, local politics played a role in the choice of judges. The reputation of the court system for corruption and delay was a further obstacle to administrative efficacy.

Discussion of federalism has long been impeded by the assumption that it requires a change in the constitution. That in turn raises fears of presidents trying to perpetuate themselves by changing to a parliamentary system or allowing two terms. The existing constitution allows for autonomous zones in Muslim regions – the ARRM predates 1987 – and the Cordillera, home to various indigenous groups in northern Luzon. However, Cordillera autonomy has never happened thanks to a lack of unity. It remains possible within the constitution for Congress to grant more administrative and fiscal power to all regions or provinces. However, even if desirable in principle there are fears that perpetuate, even strengthen, dynastic dominance. Would it spread national wealth better, or simply increase divisions between the city hubs and the resource rich areas on the one hand and the rest of the country on the other?

There was an argument that the Philippines needed more centralization, not less. The gap between policy made in Manila and its implementation was partly due to the inadequacies of central ministries but also to the small size, politicization and frequent corruption of local government units. Regional councils could collect data, advise and make plans which cover provinces and cities, but they have no decision-making or implementing authority. Whilst there has, naturally, been a desire by the members of the House to see an increase in LGU funding by Manila, there have been differing views on whether local spending power is more or less productive. The existing regions have been a starting point for discussing the federal system, but are seventeen regions (including the BARMM [B = Bangsamoro 'Moro Nation'] and Cordillera) too many? Or too few – Sulu for example wanted its own, separate from the BARMM? Or was division by geography not in keeping with any real sense of identity?

The existing regions are also imbalanced with the contiguous National Capital Region, Central Luzon and Calabarzon (Southern Tagalog) all far more populous than others. As of 2015 Calabarzon, had a population of 14 million, Caraga 3 million. Little of the discussion on federalism has got to grips with the issues of indigenous peoples (IPs) or lumads as they are known in Mindanao. The need for protection of their land and language rights has long been accepted in principle but in practice remains subject to erosion and conflict. They are too numerous to be ignored but too disparate to make into coherent units as the failure to establish autonomy for the Cordillera has shown. Despite the fact that, with the exception of the pre-Austronesian [Aeta/Agta] groups, they are no more or less indigenous than the average rice farmer from Tarlac. Yet the IPs are often treated as inferior citizens, lacking the ‘civilization’ of those more impacted by the centuries of colonial rule. In effect, they are subject to abuse with their schools ‘red-tagged’, communal lands seized by settlers and plantation owners, and their leaders accused of supporting the NPA. Alternatively, they may be subject to well-meaning paternalism by earnest NGOs which emphasizes their differences not their similarities to the wider population. The use of English in education and official documents also diminishes the role of the national language and hence the identity of regional languages whether widespread like Cebuano or confined to small IP communities.

The basic argument for federalism is that the Philippines’ fragmented geography made centralization costly and inefficient. It was unresponsive to differing local needs and was a dampener on local initiatives and was unable to harness regional pride in a country where a sense of regional identity was strong – as senate elections also showed. It limited competition between regions and held up resource development.

Decline Under Marcos

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.