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Timothy P. Barnard. Multiple Centres of Authority: Society and Environment in Siak and Eastern Sumatra, 1674-1827. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2003. 206 pages.
This work by Timothy Barnard exploring Siak's history between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth century provides an important complement to other recent regional studies of precolonial Sumatra.1 From these studies, a picture is emerging of the internal relationships among many of the island's component societies in the eighteenth century, their upstream-downstream (ulu-hilir) contacts, and their ties not only to the sultanates on the Malay peninsula but also to the orang laut (sea nomads) of the South China Sea and other coastal trading communities throughout the archipelago.
Barnard's detailed description of Siak's periods of success and turmoil during the eighteenth century contrasts the nature of successful governance there with that in other Malay and Sumatran polities. In examining Siak's place within the Malay world, he emphasizes a number of the factors that differentiate it from "the Malay model." He lays particular stress on the region's geography, the character of its populations, and the personalities of the rulers who, with varying degrees of success, shaped its political development.
With respect to Siak's geography, Barnard describes the diverse character of coastal East Sumatra, where the "dense tropical rainforest slowly shifted into lowland swampy mangrove forest before meeting the cosmopolitan trading world of the Straits." (p. 3) The geographical diversity of this "riverine and coastal trading empire," (p. 2) was matched by the diversity of its population, which incorporated "the orang asli, Minangkabau migrants and Malays, as well as Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Buginese, Javanese, and other groups." (p. 32) This mixed or kacu region "lent itself to the development of multiple centres of authority not only in the ulu, but downstream as well." (p. 83) The societies that made up Siak also felt the impact of multiple forces from outside East Sumatra. Until the emergence of Raja Kecik in the early eighteenth century, Siak's coastal areas were largely under the domination of the sultanates on the Malay peninsula, first Melaka and then Johor, although they were ruled by an elite originating in Sumatra's central highlands. While the hinterland was particularly subject to the authority of Minangkabau leaders, the coastal areas were open to constant attack from...