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Annotation "The Princess of the Flaming Womb," the Javanese legend that introduces this pioneering study, symbolizes the many ambiguities attached to femaleness in Southeast Asian societies. Yet despite these ambiguities, the relatively egalitarian nature of male-female relations in Southeast Asia is central to arguments claiming a coherent identity for the region. This challenging work by senior scholar Barbara Watson Andaya considers such contradictions while offering a thought-provoking view of Southeast Asian history that focuses on women's roles and perceptions. Andaya explores the broad themes of the early modern era (1500-1800)--the introduction of new religions, major economic shifts, changing patterns of state control, the impact of elite lifestyles and behaviors--drawing on an extraordinary range of sources and citing numerous examples from Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, Philippine, and Malay societies

1. Naval warfare in South Asia : 1500-1850 -- 2. The changing pattern of later Mughal warfare -- 3. Army, state and political economy of the East India Company -- 4. Armies, warfare and political economy of Mysore : 1760-99 -- 5. The Maratha Confederacy : armies, economy and warfare -- 6. Khalsa Kingdom against the East India Company : 1780-1849.

Perceptions of the emergence and spread of modern humans have changed recently through the reanalysis of fossils, an improved geochronological framework, and the discovery of a few specimens. Early modern humans in various portions of the Old World exhibit complex and varying mosaics of archaic, modern, and regional morphological characteristics. On the basis of this pattern, in conjunction with the emerging chronology of the earliest modern humans, the paleontological data indicate an assimilation model for modern human origins, in which the earliest modern humans emerged in eastern Africa, dispersed briefly into southwestern Asia, and then subsequently spread into the remainder of Africa and southern Asia, eventually into higher latitude Eurasia. The earliest modern humans outside of the core area of eastern Africa can be understood only if a variable degree of admixture with regional groups of late archaic humans occurred. Current and expected fossil and molecular data are unlikely to illuminate the degree of assimilation that took place in most regions of the Old World. However, the current chronological and phylogenetic framework provides the basis for ongoing investigation of the nature of this Late Pleistocene transitional period.

The identity of "Southeast Asia" has been debated since the 1950s, when the region began to develop as an area of academic viability around which courses could be constructed, programmes built, and research published. Much less controversy has accompanied the growing use of "early modern", a term which seems set to displace "precolonial" in periodizing Southeast Asian history. The phrase, of course, comes from scholarship on Europe, where it was popularized as a result of efforts to find shared "periods" that would facilitate the writing of a general history. It would be surprising if questions as to the applicability of "early modern" in Southeast Asia do not spark off some debate, especially in light of subaltern writings that reject the notion of modernity as a universal. For such historians the very invocation of the word implicitly sets a "modern Europe" against a "yet to be modernized non-Europe". But whatever decision is made regarding terminology, scholarship on Southeast Asia is increasingly viewing a period that stretches from about the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century as rather different from those traditionally described as "classical" and "colonial/modern". The term "early modern" itself is at present a convenient tool for historical reference, and only time will tell whether it will find general acceptance.

During the height of Muslim power in South Asia, Muslim nobles of the Mughal Empire (1526-1857) patronized the translation of a large body of Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language, including the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad Gītā, and numerous other works. In Translating Wisdom, Shankar Nair reconstructs the intellectual processes that underlay these translations, traversing an exceptional linguistic scope including Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian materials. Using the 1597 Persian rendition of the Sanskrit Yoga Vāsiṣṭha as a case study, Nair traces the intellectual exchanges by which teams of Muslim and Hindu translators, working collaboratively and drawing upon their respective religio-philosophical traditions, crafted a novel lexicon with which to express Hindu philosophical wisdom in an Islamic Persian idiom. How did these translators find a vocabulary through which to convey Hindu, Sanskrit articulations of God, conceptions of salvation and the afterlife, Hindu ritual notions, etc., in Islamic Persian terms? How did these two communities of scholars devise a shared language with which to communicate and to render one another's religious and philosophical views mutually comprehensible? Translating Wisdom illustrates how these early modern Muslim and Hindu scholars found the words and the means to put their traditions into conversation with one another, achieving a nuanced inter-religious and cross-philosophical dialogue significant not only to South Asia's past, but also its present.

This article focuses on the social existence of the Jain community, as exhibited in literary production in early modern India. The existing historiography sometimes tends to make Jain epistemology subservient to contemporary political culture. One must be cautious in approaching the tension between identitarian stability and identitarian volatility and between social textures and cultural mobility beyond the binarities of literary cultures and mundane survival with reference to our existing knowledge of Jainology. The volatile world of religiosity in early modern India tended to shape circumstances that both enforced and drew upon polemical meanings arising out of hybrid identities and cultural intermediacy. Therein lie diverse and multiple possibilities of literary discourse on the multiple religious identities at the core of the histories of Jainism in early modern South Asia.

AbstractIdentities and ideas can lead to international order contestation through the efforts of international actors to socially position themselves and perform their identities. International actors try to shape the world to suit who they want to be. To substantiate this argument, I examine the contestation of international orders in early modern Southeast Asia. The prevailing view portrays a Confucian international order which formed a consensual and stable hierarchy in East Asia. However, instead of acquiescing to hegemonic leadership, both Siam and Vietnam frequently sought to assert their equality and even superiority to the Chinese dynasties. I argue that both polities engaged in political contention to define their places in relation to other polities and the broader social context in which they interacted. I examine how international order contestation emerged from efforts to define and redefine background knowledge about social positioning, social categorization, and the political ontologies and beliefs about collective purpose on which they are based. I claim that agents seek to interact with others in ways that reify their sense of self, and challenge the background knowledge embedded in performances of other actors that threaten their ability to perform their identity. I also argue against theories that attribute international order contestation to hegemonic decline or the breakdown of a tacit bargain, which assume that orders are held together by a dominant power. One implication is that hegemony and hierarchy are based on dominant ideas, not dominant states.

Long before European merchants working for the Dutch and the English East India Companies sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, there were caste-based Indian family firms operating heavily-capitalized commercial institutions throughout north India. The directors of these firms enlisted many thousands of agents and placed them in markets strategic to their engagement in a variety of commercial activities, including large-scale transregional trade, brokering, money changing, and the financing of complex systems of rural credit and industrial production. Rather than triggering the decline of such indigenous commercial institutions, it is during the very period of European expansion into the Indian Ocean that the Indian family firms began to geographically diversify their portfolios by sending their agents to distant markets in port cities, villages, and major and minor urban centers as far away as Moscow.In a recent work, Stephen Dale has uncovered the existence of an early modern Indian merchant diaspora with communities dispersed throughout Central Asia, Iran, the Caucasus and much of Russia.

AbstractFemale slaves in VOC-controlled Southeast Asia did not fare well under a legal code which erected a firm partition between free and slave status. This codification imposed a rigid dichotomy for what had been fluid, abstract conceptions of social hierarchy, in effect silting up the flow of underclass mobility. At the same time, conventional relationships between master and slave shifted in the context of a changing economic climate. This article closely narrates the lives of several eighteenth-century female slaves who, left with increasingly fewer options in this new order, resorted to running away.