Les Indes et l ' Europe. Histoires connectées XVe-XXIe siècles (India, Southeast Asia and Europe. A New History from 15th Century to 21st Century)

Citation

Jean A. Berlie (2016), "Les Indes et l ' Europe. Histoires connectées XVe-XXIe siècles (India, Southeast Asia and Europe. A New History from 15th Century to 21st Century)", Asian Education and Development Studies, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp. 132-134. https://doi.org/10.1108/AEDS-08-2015-0036

Indies and Europe

This book covers a vast region currently divided in two macro-regions, South Asia and “Oriental India”, or Southeast Asia, between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries.

Seen from Europe, this huge tropical region is “a very large open trade space” (p. 9) and in the year 1498, Vasco da Gama’s Atlantic route to the Cape and India “remains a symbolic date” of the “Euro-Asiatic history” (p. 31), especially as it established Spice Trade, as the exchange of gold to buy pepper was a surprise.

The two authors each have already published original historical books on this region. Claude Markovits is an Emeritus Director of Research at CNRS, and an expert in colonial and contemporary India. Markovits’ publications include Indian Business and Nationalist Politics (1985), The Global World of Indian Merchants (2000) and The Un-Gandhian Gandhi. Jean-Louis Margolin teaches at the University of Aix-en-Provence and is also a researcher at CNRS (IrAsia). He is the author of numerous books co-written with Karl Hack, including Singapore from Temasek to the 21st Century: Reinventing the Global City. He is an expert on Southeast Asia and has, among other research, analysed the complex question of Communism.

Colonial oppression and imperial nostalgia undoubtedly exists and this book presents the issues in a fresh historical perspective. Margolin and Markovits’ new study courageously tries to put the issues in context to appeal to both Europeans academics as well as South and Southeast Asian scholars and intellectuals.

There are many European studies of this particular Asian region, but very few local studies of the Europeans as they were seen by the local Asians (p. 737) and consequently Asian and European academic visions have often not been compatible. This study aims to cover a new synthetic colonial history.

Here, the Indochina study is less developed because there are numerous publications in French on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos than there are on many other parts of Southeast Asia.

The aim of the European settlement in the region was initially oriented towards finding “Christian(ity) and spices” and the topics of societies, colonialism, culture and the complex relationship between the west and the east have not yet been explained in a synchonised manner.

The first to reach this distant Oriental India were the Portuguese, and this easy to read publication offers many details about this journey. John II (1481-1495) was responsible for the rapid expansion of the Portuguese empire as economic motivations were considered essential, but the Portuguese empire also aimed to be universal and messianic. In 1501, the Portuguese were the first in the race to buy spices from Cochin (and kept the solo trade until 1663) and bring them to Portugal by way of the Cape of Good Hope. The Portuguese, however, through their devotion and advocacy for conversion to Catholicism was visible, did not want to transform colonised people; on the contrary, they believed that there should be “no promotion of European triumphant capitalism” (pp. 738-739). The authors prefer to describe a dominant Lusitano-Venetian spice trade structure than a version of pure Portuguese capitalism. In the beginning of trade, the Europeans were established in Goa, Malacca, Batavia and Manila and Goa had controlled Portuguese Timor in the past. Margolin described in detail the smallest country of Southeast Asia, East Timor. East Timor’s early Portuguese history, the end of colonialism, the period 1975-2000 with the annexation by Indonesia, the United Nations electoral role (referendum) and its independence in 2002 (if not exactly mentioned in the chronology) are all well detailed. The European “connection” for Tetum, namely the national language with its Portuguese vocabulary, was sealed and marks the difference between Indonesia which sometimes seems to forget that Dutch, its colonial language, is still very useful for studying the past history and archives (p. 755). Useful monographic descriptions appear, such as the “slow progression of knowledge” (cartography, study of political systems) (pp. 206-216), or “natural resources and nothing else?” (pp. 399-402). The economic development in Southeast Asia was locally organised by the Chinese, Indian Chettiars or Chettys, and Eurasians (pp. 401, 472). Before the twentieth century, Europeans were considered “birds of passage”, but often risked their life in tropical Asia. Both communities, colonisers and locals, did not really try to understand each other and any “connection” between Europe and Asia was “limited, and discontinuous, in space and time” and the immigration of Asians to Europe didn’t start in earnest until after Second World War (pp. 702-710). The British and Spanish colonisation of India and the Philippines, and the Dutch’s domination of Java in the eighteenth century showed a new type of imperialism in the region. The intensive economic colonisation and important revolutionary transfer of population to Assam, Ceylon (tea), Malaysia (rubber) and the Philippines (sugar cane), from Tonkin (Northern Vietnam) to Cochin China had certainly created a “complete disruption” (p. 741). In fact, intensive production constituted a turning point in colonisation. A case in point given is British Burma which became the first exporter of rice in the world before Second World War, thanks to the Indian Chettiars who replaced the deficient British banking system.

After the mid-eighteenth century a dangerous “binary constructions” occurred, dividing “them and us” (Asians and Europeans). Consequently racial conflicts appeared in India at the end of the eighteenth century and in 1900, a good counter-example, was the French education system in North Vietnam which was more balanced to preserve traditional education (p. 746).

Markovits and Margolin set out to write a new version of history that is more coherent for both Asia and Europe. In “Indochina”, the French “protectorate” over Cambodia (1863-1953) has left obvious scars, but the idea to create an encounter between the East, in a quest for an identity, and the West, dreaming of greatness, is worth considering. The question is to understand if there was a genuine cultural encounter and, if so, did it have a positive impact on the local Asian culture? Modernisation has been regularly mentioned in the colonial discourse of model colonial governance in an effort to justify “French imperialism” (p. 757). Angkor Vat became the Star Project for both World and Colonial Exhibitions. But, by chance, the education of the future King Sihanuk of the Khmer focused on his astrological orientation, but was also considered modern, because he liked to watch football matches. Nevertheless, both, French and Khmer cultures have had their own political and economic aspirations but “all that was in constant re-configuration”, depending of the different geopolitical Asiatic and European contexts.

It is worth noting that the three main Franco-Germanic wars (1870, First World War and Second World War) were not mentioned in the text but chapter 9 covers the period from 1910 to1960 called and is entitled “The stages of the disengagement”.

However, even if the book is mainly centred on the specific 300 years in question, it still takes the fairly drastic viewpoint influenced by the desire for Asians and Europeans to look together at history despite their very different viewpoints. Finally, it is acknowledged that the loss of “face” of the French in Indochina, of the British in Burma and of the Dutch in “Indonesia” played a role radically shaping a new Asian vision of history which ultimately led to the independence of the colonial “Indies”.

Markovits’ European Domination and Indian Resistance, in India, Between 1765 and 1947 and Margolins’ Economic Foundation, Actors and Institutions in Southeast Asia are among the best elements of this study. But overall it is a useful book for historians and readers who want to reconcile the East and West historically, and to know more about the past and present vision of history in the “Indies”, India and Southeast Asia and in Europe and is undoubtedly a really challenging idea.