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WITH THE PUBLICATION OF THE SECOND VOLUME of Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450-1680, Anthony Reid has completed his path-breaking overview of early modern Southeast Asian civilization. Inspired by Fernand Braudel's call for "historians who are ambitious" and using the interdiscipinary approach of Braudel and the Annalistes, Reid has sought to capture both the enduring subterranean structures of social and material life and the more dramatic cultural and political transformations that absorbed contemporary attention.
Accordingly, volume 1, The Lands Below, the Winds, which was already reviewed in this journal (Chandler 1989), explored demography, village life, diet, housing, crafts, social organization, sexual relations, festivals, and amusements. In effect, it sought to identify those elements which were characteristic of the area as a whole, which separated it from other regions of Asia, and most of which endured, with only limited permutations, well into the nineteenth century. Volume 2, Expansion and Crisis, now seeks to identify those economic, cultural, and political changes which separated the period c. 1450-1680 from antecedent and subsequent eras and which thus lent the so-called Age of Commerce its peculiar character.
Without doubt these volumes, particularly Expansion and Crisis, will alter the terms of regional inquiry for years to come. By providing the first thematic book-length overview of Southeast Asia during the early modern era, Reid has sought to integrate what has always been a depressingly confused, geographically fragmented historiography. Beyond this, Reid is arguably the first precolonial historian to escape from the elite-centered paradigm of political narrative to discuss a broad array of economic, cultural, and social transformations affecting the population at large. Not least among these phenomena are the rapid growth of cash-cropping, spice exports, indigenous intraregional trade, and urbanization, patterns which Reid has discovered virtually single-handedly and for which he provides carefully derived statistics. It is difficult to overstate the importance of these findings. Finally, he is the first to show the full possibilities of European travelogues and memoirs for nonnarrative reconstruction; indeed these materials, many hitherto ignored, are often his principal sources of information. While this essay will take issue with Reid's view of mainland-archipelagic congruence, there is no question that his research has raised early modern historiography to a new level of sophistication and synthesis. For sheer...