Spruyt’s previous book detailed the development of the sovereign state system in medieval Europe. In The World Imagined, Spruyt looks at how the sovereign state system spread across the world during the Early Modern Era. He contrasts it with other international systems: the Chinese tributary system, the Islamic Cultural Community, and the Galactic Empires of Southeast Asia.
Prerequisites: My book review of The Sovereign State and Its Competitors by Hendrik Spruyt (1994). Some understanding of Early Modern Eurasia would be helpful, but not necessary.
Originally Written: January 2021.
Confidence Level: Not my ideas.
If you read my book review of The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, you can guess some of what this book is about. A sovereign, territorial state is an institution which claims a monopoly on violence and justice within certain lines on a map and no authority elsewhere. States are often associated with a particular cultural community, the nation. The international system of sovereign, territorial states has become so dominant that it’s hard to conceive of anything else. This has not always been the case.
In The Sovereign State, Spruyt looked at how the sovereign state developed in Western Europe from the interaction of feudalism and urbanization, and how other institutions arose in the same circumstances but were ultimately outcompeted. In The World Imagined, Spruyt shifts his focus later in time and broader in geography. He looks at three Early Modern international societies: the Chinese tributary system, the Ottoman / Safavid / Mughal Islamic Empires, and the galactic polities of Southeast Asia. Each of these international systems interacted with colonial Europe, with its already established sovereign states. Although this interaction ultimately led to the dominance of the sovereign state system, each developed in response to the other.
This book isn’t as good as The Sovereign State. Spruyt is farther from his area of expertise, so his knowledge is less deep. Instead of having good, specific examples for each of his claims, he is much more likely to quote another scholar. He also spends more time debating other schools of political philosophy. Although I don’t really care about why the early English school is wrong (for example), I wouldn’t really mind it – except that it leaches into his history. There are multiple places where I think that the stories he tells are designed more to support his position in academic debates than to accurately represent the past. Despite these criticisms, it has led me to some interesting thoughts. My responses to Spruyt’s ideas are in italics.
Like The Sovereign State, this book begins with a literature review that places Spruyt’s ideas in the broader academic context. If you don’t know or care what ontology is, you can safely skip this section.
[Ontology is the study of what it means for something to exist. Do the pen I am currently holding, the number twelve, and the country of Poland all exist in the same sense? Should some notions of existence be prioritized over others?]
Current political theory is dominated by disagreements between Realists, who think that states primarily pursue their own material ends, and Neoliberals, who think that states primarily try to cooperate with other states to promote their values (from democracy to free flow of capital to the immutability of borders). Both theories assume that international affairs is the study of the interactions between states. Since there is no world government, there is anarchy between the states.
Spruyt is especially critical of the positivist / empiricist trend in the social sciences. Partially I think that this is him defending his turf against encroachment from the harder sciences. But he does make several compelling points. In their search for general laws, empiricists tend to try to understand all historical systems using modern ideas, instead of trying to understand the system as the people who lived it would. Empiricists also tend to prioritize measurable explanations such as relative economic or military strength over unmeasureable explanations such as ideas of honor and shared ritual identities. The empiricist approach is especially likely to go astray because political systems are not things outside of ourselves that we can impartially measure. Instead, the political system is created by how we collectively imagine the world:
Our understanding of the social world is co-constitutive of that world. That is, our theories, our beliefs of what the world is or should be, simultaneously create the social world which is the object of study.
– p. 43
I will include two more quotes from this section.
The first describes how Spruyt understands the Westphalian system of sovereign, territorial states:
The Westphalian system enshrines the principle that the governing authority should be defined territoriality, with borders demarcating the sphere of domestic politics. Within this sphere, individuals ideally identify themselves as a nation, the imagined community whose identity is linked to the territory in question. Territorial state and national identity are thus fused, to define the in-group in which individuals find purpose and mutual obligation. Beyond the borders, interactions between states occur in the realm of anarchy. Nations in other states thus constitute the natural and oppositional “Others” or out-groups. In the Westphalian system inclusion and exclusion are thus spatially defined.
Historical reflection suggests that this perceived ontology of the contemporary state system is not a necessary and natural reflection of a material phenomenon. By assuming that all international relations can be understood as a set of interacting elements under anarchy, social creations have been interpreted as if they were brute fact.
– p. 31-32
The second describes Spruyt’s definition of an international society, without assuming states:
I define international societies as a set of polities that share foundational collective beliefs – a collective imagination regarding the nature and purposes of political and social organization. These beliefs thus serve to define the nature of the political order and legitimate authority. Second, collective beliefs demarcate the boundaries of the political community. Who is rightfully considered a member? Who is deemed an outsider? Third, they contain formal and informal principles that govern the interaction between members in the system as well as with polities outside the system. Fourth, collective beliefs influence the status of polities that are not part of that international society.
– p. 52
We now turn to our first alternative international system.
Chinese Tributary System
China was ruled by an emperor. He claimed the authority to rule “All under Heaven”.
China was the dominant power in its neighborhood. Whoever ruled the North China Plain had access to far greater resources than any of their neighbors. Despite this economic and military dominance, there were limits to their power. China could not militarily control the ends of the earth.
Nevertheless, the Chinese tributary system was remarkably successful at reducing interstate warfare. There were only two interstate wars in East Asia in the 500 years preceding the Opium Wars between China and Britain.
I am much less impressed by this claim than Spruyt is, because it only looks at wars between states. War within states also existed – especially in Japan. But more importantly, most of China’s neighbors weren’t states. Spruyt notes that the nomadic peoples who lived to the north and west typically rejected the Sino-centric system. This is very significant: two of the last three dynasties to rule China were founded by invading nomads. Spruyt doesn’t even seem to be aware of the hill peoples to the southwest, who were explicitly anti-state. Uncommon wars between states is much less impressive when states are uncommon.
Instead of military power, China insisted on its cultural superiority. Nearby states (especially Vietnam, Korea, & Japan) were expected to recognize this superiority and adopt Chinese practices, especially their calendar, writing system, and Confucian civic rites. Other states would send diplomats to the emperor and ritually submit to him. The emperor could claim that his rule extended over China’s neighbors as well. The diplomats would give tribute to the emperor and he would bestow gifts to them in return. The value of the gifts from the emperor often exceeded the tribute given. States that ritually submitted to the emperor would also be given trade privileges in China and a guarantee of no military interventions. They could use the legitimacy granted by the emperor in their struggles against internal rivals.
The ritual submission underlies much of Chinese culture, not just interstate politics. People understood their social status through prescribed ceremonies between unequal status: between heaven and earth (represented by the emperor), between the emperor and governors, between state officials and commoners, and between ancestors and children. The inferior would give honor and tribute and the superior would bestow gifts.
Chinese monumental architecture is designed around concentric circles (representing Heaven) and squares (representing Earth). The emperor would ensure the continuation of the seasons by harmonizing Heaven and Earth at these sites. Entire cities were laid out as models of the cosmos.
Chinese maps similarly reflect the cosmological-moral world, with China at the center. When European maps reflecting the physical world became available, China did not adopt them, because maps fulfilled a different role in society.
Somehow I think that someone would have a harder time navigating the cosmological-moral world using a Chinese map than the physical world using a European map.
The emperor would also write histories and regulate knowledge to further his claims of superiority. Chinese histories regularly describe how foreign rulers are embracing Chinese culture (although histories in other languages would not). The emperor claimed to be able to predict signs in the heavens, so unauthorized dabbling in astronomy was outlawed. Ritually performed and recorded obedience was more important than actual obedience. The emperor’s power lay in his ability to get other people to treat him as emperor.
The tributary system was a framework for understanding interaction, rather than a rigid system of rules. Different people within the system could use this framework to promote their own interests. In Korea, potential heirs of a king would persuade the Chinese emperor to recognize their claim, which helped to establish their legitimacy within Korea. In Japan, the emperor declared a ritual superiority over local rulers (and, in theory, over foreign powers), despite having little material power. Ming histories record the “benevolent gifts” offered to Mongol hordes who had to “pay tribute” to the emperor, even when the material balance of power did not reflect the ritual one. The Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty fulfilled the appropriate Confucian rites to establish their legitimacy, while still promoting their own ethnicity within the government. As long as the actors fulfilled the appropriate roles in the system, they could use the system as they wished.
I expected more from this section. East Asia clearly had multiple worldviews: the Confucian agrarian state, the anti-state societies of the hills of southern China and southeast Asia, the extremely flexible sovereignty of the nomadic confederations on the steppe, and the Buddhist theocracy in Tibet. These worldviews competed and overlapped for hundreds, if not thousands of years before the Western powers arrived. Spruyt mentions the idea that the Qing dynasty had learned to successfully combine or operate within multiple worldviews, which allowed them to expand into areas traditionally not part of China: Manchuria (the Qing homeland), Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Yunnan, but he hasn’t developed the other worldviews enough to show how they were synthesized.
Spruyt then describes and criticizes the traditional narrative of the interaction between the tributary system and the sovereign states.
The traditional narrative emphasizes the incompatibility between the two systems of international relations. The Chinese proved to be unable to adapt ideologically and institutionally and so declined relative to the West. Japan, which was not as closely tied to the tributary system as other East Asian states, was able to adapt and redefine itself in the terms of the Western powers.
Spruyt’s response is that China did adapt to Western ideas and modernize its institutions after the Opium Wars. This process was resisted by conservative factions within China, and hindered by unequal treaties with Western powers and later Japan. The reason why we think that China didn’t adapt is because the West wanted China to remain an Other with an illegitimate government, so it could be subject to imperialism.
I think Spruyt missed a main point of the traditional narrative. China’s ideological and institutional stagnation was less important than its economic and military stagnation. The real or imagined offenses to the British ambassador when both sides refused to ritually submit to the other are less important than the fact that Britain’s military was stronger than China’s, despite having a tenth the population. Similarly, Spruyt’s description of Japan’s transformation focuses on how they mastered Western diplomacy and were able to convince China and European powers to sign treaties as equals. He doesn’t mention that in 1853, Japan couldn’t deal with 4 American ships, while in 1905, Japan crushed the entire Russian navy.
This is one of the times that Spruyt’s focus on the academic debate undermines the history. Spruyt thinks that we should understand history in terms of collective imagination, not realist power calculations, so Spruyt ignores the power balance. This refusal to think in terms of power makes his narrative incomplete. Why didn’t China go on voyages of discovery?[1]Except for Zheng He in the early 1400s. Why didn’t China industrialize? Why didn’t China institute an effective military draft? These questions are not answered by Spruyt, so he does not provide an alternative to the traditional narrative.
Some modern Chinese scholars have suggested that we look at the Chinese tributary system as a more peaceful and harmonious alternative to the Western state system. Scholars among China’s neighbors are skeptical because China has spent a lot of time conquering its neighbors, not just harmoniously assimilating them.
Spruyt’s discussion here could be much stronger if he considered whether there are any relevant modern examples. I can think of two:
The most obvious one is the “one country, two systems” in Hong Kong. Hong Kong (and the British) agreed that Hong Kong would be officially under China’s control and the People’s Republic of China agreed to respect Hong Kong’s autonomy and legal system. China has actually been gradually forcing its institutions onto Hong Kong, against Hong Kong’s will.
Tibet and Xinjiang were colonial projects of the last Chinese dynasty. Currently, both of them are officially autonomous regions within the People’s Republic of China. However, the Tibetans and Uighur who live there are significantly less free than people elsewhere in China.
In both cases, we have something sort of like the tributary system: smaller polities near China officially recognize Chinese suzerainty, while China officially recognizes their autonomy and local traditions. Except, the People’s Republic of China actually imposes its institutions on the smaller polities using military force. These modern examples show that we should be skeptical when the People’s Republic of China promises to respect the autonomy of territories officially under their rule.
Islamic Cultural Community
During the Early Modern Era, the Islamic world was dominated by three Turkic Empires: the Ottomans in the Mediterranean, the Safavids in Persia, and the Mughals in India.
The Turks were originally nomads from the steppe. They first entered the Middle East as mercenaries for the Islamic caliphate, which itself had been built by nomads from the deserts of Arabia. During the conquests of Genghis Khan, many Turkic tribes allied with the Mongols – and those that didn’t were annihilated.
Unsurprisingly, steppe nomads were not organized as states:
The political organization of the steppe people was confederate rather than hierarchical in any strict sense. Individuals identified with the tribe as the critical marker of differentiation from others. Periodically, when waging war, tribes would create larger entities on a loose confederate basis with war leaders, khans, giving direction to the affiliated tribes. The success of the war leader conferred legitimacy. The lack of success demonstrated the converse, loosening the obligation to follow the leader.
– p. 207
The Mongol Empire did not last for long. The steppe practice of dividing your inheritance among your sons works better for flocks of sheep than for transcontinental empires. Timur (Tamerlane) was the last to try to reconquer all of Genghis Khan’s empire. The Turkic Empires all claimed to be heirs of the world conquerors: Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Timur.
It’s interesting the three people who appear on this list.
Once the Turkic Empires conquered lands filled with farmers, they adopted the administrative practices, and titles, of the previous rulers. They were not only khans (a Mongol term) and sultans (an Arabic term), they were also the Kaysar (Caesar) / Basileus of Byzantium or the Shah of Persia. Nomadic practices that made less sense in a settled society were adapted. The sultan led the annual military campaign, instead of being present during the continual raids. To avoid the problems with dividing inheritance, when the Ottoman sultan died, one of his sons would kill all of his brothers.
Islam was extremely important to these three empires. Each also claimed the title Caliph, ruler of the Muslim community.
Spruyt downplays some of the evidence he presents here because he is worried that people will use it to the support the “Clash of Civilizations” narrative that sees the Islamic world and the West as fundamentally incompatible.
Unlike Christianity (but like Judaism), Islamic scripture contains a legal code: Shari’a. Law is not something that is chosen by our representatives in a legislature or constitutional convention; law is something that is given by the divine. Along with the law contained in the scriptures, there are also centuries of commentaries on the law, much like how American constitutional law contains both the Constitution and the Supreme Court cases about the Constitution. There are disagreements in the commentaries: Sunni Islam alone recognizes four different schools. But it is clear that political leaders should be enforcers of the divinely mandated law, as interpreted by religious scholars, not creators of the law.
The Qur’an divides the world into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the House of Islam and the House of War. Some scholars argue that there should also be a third House, which is at peace with Islam, consisting either of tributary states to Muslim leaders or of states that have signed treaties with Muslim leaders who allow Muslims to live peacefully. But this third House was not always recognized, especially in the Early Modern Era. Muslim states often considered themselves continually at war with all non-Muslim polities. Cease-fire agreements that lasted for less than ten years were allowed, but not peace treaties.
I think it is more accurate to interpret Dar al-Islam as the territories ruled by Muslim law, not the territories where Muslims are a majority. Spruyt deemphasizes the division of the world into two parts by showing how Muslim rulers ruled over significant numbers of non-Muslims. That does establish that the dichotomy doesn’t advocate for genocide (like the people who want to create a caliphate today do), but it doesn’t mean that they didn’t divide the world this way.
How long was the nuclear agreement that wasn’t a treaty between Iran and Obama (and others) supposed to last? Ten years.
This ongoing religious war to expand Islam (jihad) was merged with the older Turkic practice of continually raiding your neighbors for horses and slaves (ghazi). Throughout the Early Modern Period, the Turkic Empires were continually at war with their non-Muslim neighbors.
Within the Islamic Empires, there was significant religious and cultural diversity:
Karen Barkey describes the Ottoman policy to deal with this diversity as “separate, unequal, and protected”. Religious boundaries were recognized and maintained. Ottoman rulers decreed dress codes, marriage, and other markers for distinguishing the non-Muslim groups from Muslims, although the degree of enforcement is open to question. The underlying idea revolved around maintaining religious and ethnic boundaries and giving them protected, dhimmi, status. Groups would be self-policing with their leaders acting as conduits between the Ottoman state and the minority group membership.
Tolerance and protection, however, did not mean equality. In law courts, evidence from Muslims was privileged over that of unbelievers. Tax rates for non-Muslims were also higher. Muslims paid the lowest rates, dhimmis (Christians and Jews) resident in Muslim polities paid the jizya at an intermediate rate. Foreigners, those from Dar al-Harb, paid the highest rate as harbis. Demonstrative public behavior such as giving way to Muslim pedestrians, and more importantly prohibitions against worshiping in proximity of mosques, all served to reinforce the secondary status of Christians and other non-Muslims.
The effect was to create material incentives to convert to Islam. At the same time it also induced local elites to maintain these boundaries, since they could exercise patronage and control over the group members, as conduits with the center. The later millet system, which formally recognized the extrajudicial character of non-Muslims, only formalized much earlier practices.
– p. 198-199
The Mughals were more tolerant of religious diversity than the Ottomans. A majority of their subjects were polytheists. The Safavids were less tolerant of religious diversity. Especially in their later years, they pursued policies that caused the conversion of the majority of the population from Sunni Islam to Shi’a Islam, the religion of the rulers.
The Turkic Empires were not tolerant by modern standards. One of the reasons I included the lengthy quote is to point out that this system could be called apartheid. Apartheid is better than genocide, which was not uncommon in Early Modern Europe, but it hardly is tolerance.
This is even more clearly seen from the devshirme system. The Ottomans would take boys from Christian households as slaves and force them to convert to Islam. Later in their life, they could rise to high ranking positions in the military and administration of the empire. Spruyt repeatedly uses this as an example of inclusivity. I definitely would not.
European observers of the Ottoman and Mughal courts were impressed by how tolerant they were, which helped to influence the development of liberalism in the West.
This is the second time recently that I’ve seen a claim that liberalism has non-European roots, the other being Mann’s claim in 1491 that freer Native American societies influenced American liberals who influenced Europe. This is a bold claim and should be backed up by serious scholarship. The idea that societies should be free and democratic is easily one of the best ideas to spread out of Europe, so everyone wants to claim it as their own. The debate over whether Christianity was necessary for the birth of liberalism or hostile to it has gone on for centuries. The debate over non-European influences on liberalism deserves no less scrutiny. Spruyt’s evidence is the sentence:
Seventeenth-century scholars such as Locke and Voltaire and European ambassadors remarked on the tolerance of these dynasties compared to European Christian rulers. For all the contributions of the Enlightenment, tolerance was neither a European invention nor a European monopoly.
– p. 206
There is no reference to a more thorough investigation or even to the specific remarks. This is sloppy scholarship and makes me wonder if it is included, not because the author has good evidence to support this claim, but because he likes the political conclusions it implies.
The three Turkic / Islamic Empires had shared cultural and religious understanding that they constituted a single international system.
The Safavids and Mughals had many reasons to go to war: they both claimed to be world conquerors, the Safavids ruled the Mughal homeland, they both claimed to be the lord of all Muslim, and they belonged to different sects of Islam. But because of their shared cultural heritage, they only went to war occasionally and usually recognized each other as equals.
The Safavids and Ottomans were less amicable. The Ottomans considered the Shi’a Safavids to be infidels, so they were part of the House of War. There was continual war between these two empires for almost the entirety of the Safavids’ reign. Despite this war, there were extensive trade and cultural connections. Persians were always allowed to go on the hajj to Ottoman controlled Mecca. Even though they were enemies, they had similar understanding of the foundations for politics and society.
Both the Safavid and Mughal Empires collapsed to internal challenges before the sovereign state system was imposed by the West. The Ottomans adapted to survive.
The Ottoman policy of continual war with their non-Muslim neighbors lasted as long as they were still expanding into Europe. After the failed Siege of Vienna in 1683, they started losing ground to European powers and began to adapt to the European state system.
The Siege of Vienna was broken by the Winged Hussars of Poland. Yes, they did wear wings into battle. The largest and most consequential charge by fully armored cavalry occurred almost 200 years after the end of the Middle Ages.
Delineation of borders was not a problem: first with the Safavids in 1639 (Treaty of Zohab) and then in Europe in 1699 (Peace of Carlowitz), although frontier zones with lower levels of conflict existed in both places. Ottoman maps were geographic, like European maps, but with Istanbul at the center.
Modern diplomacy, with “permanent missions, extraterritoriality, reciprocity, and the gathering of intelligence” emerged among the Italian city-states in the fifteenth century [226]. From the Muslim perspective, this looked more like exchanging hostages than diplomatic immunity. The Ottomans did not participate until the 1830s. After this, they were part of the European state system. The Ottoman Empire was not invited to the Congress of Vienna in 1815 at the end of the Napoleonic Wars because the Holy Alliance (Russia, Austria, and Prussia) found them barbaric. They did participate in the Treaty of Paris in 1856 ending the Crimean War.
Before then, there were numerous temporary and semi-permanent emissaries between the governments. An agreement with France was signed as early as the 1500s (both really hated the Habsburgs), but most European countries didn’t diplomatically engage the Ottomans until the 1700s. Even then, both sides viewed the other with continual mistrust. European powers repeatedly took territory from the Ottomans until the nation-state of Turkey emerged after WWI.
Spruyt shows that Europeans thought of the Ottomans as Others and that the Ottoman Empire lost territory to European states, but I do not think he shows causation. While the boundaries of Western European states haven’t changed much since 1700 (with a few notable exceptions), the boundaries of Central and Eastern European states certainly have. European powers that lost major wars were divided up among their neighbors, including the Swedish Empire, Poland (multiple times), and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Even if the Ottomans had been accepted as Europeans, they probably still would have lost their empire. There is a case to be made that the Arab protectorates were formed because Arabs were Others, but Spruyt doesn’t make it.
The bigger ideological problem for the Ottoman Empire, and all multi-ethnic empires, was nationalism. This can most clearly be seen in the Greek revolt of 1830, which established a small independent state of Greece, while the majority of Greeks still lived under Ottoman rule.
Nationalism is the idea that people can be divided into linguistic / religious / cultural groups. Each nation has the right to a sovereign, territorial state which includes everyone in their nationality.
While there are some hints of this idea as early as the Hundred Years War between France & England in the 13-1400s, nationalism wasn’t fully articulated and widespread until the 1800s. In Western Europe, the logic worked the other direction: states created nations instead of nations creating states. The uniform culture of France, for example, was created through hundreds of years of public education, national historiography, religious genocide, and military drafts. Peasants had to be made into Frenchmen [Weber, 1976].
Nationalism is an extremely problematic idea, especially in a multi-ethnic society like the Ottoman Empire. It led to large forced migrations between Greece and Turkey after WWI. It caused the Balkans to become, well, balkanized. It caused the newly nationalistic Turkey and the new Arab states to repeatedly genocide the Armenians and Kurds.
This isn’t something unique to the Ottoman Empire: Europe only has nation-states because of centuries of genocide and forced migrations. While there were some attempts to make political borders follow cultural borders, more often, people in the wrong state were relocated, assimilated, or killed. Nationalism is still a major cause of forced assimilation and rebellion.
The Ottoman Empire did not react passively to the encroachment of the West. It adapted and reformed its institutions until it became the sovereign, territorial nation-state of Turkey.
This is why the Ottoman Empire was the first non-European / non-Christian country to be included in the sovereign state system and why Turkey survived colonialism better than almost all other non-European countries.
Galactic Empires of Southeast Asia
Spruyt’s main point of these chapters is that, despite their diversity, Southeast Asian states had a shared political understanding of the world and so could be considered a single international system. This shared understanding developed without the unifying influence of a dominant power or a shared religion.
I do not know enough about the historical states of Southeast Asia to evaluate this claim.
I have read one other book on Southeast Asia recently, Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed[2]Book review coming soon. about the anti-state peoples of the hills. Spruyt is completely unaware of them. He even quotes another scholar who refers to the frontiers of states as “broad zones of emptiness” [257]. The frontiers were empty of states and written records, but they were certainly not empty of people. The single international system of Southeast Asia that Spruyt describes only applies to the people living in the lowland states.
Both Hinduism and Buddhism heavily influenced Southeast Asia, and Islam spread into Malaysia and Indonesia starting in the 1400s (only a few decades before the European traders and colonizers). Despite having different religions, the states had a shared vision of cosmological order that they reproduced politically.
To understand Southeast Asian states, we need at least a basic understanding of Indian religious cosmology and sacred numerology. This is summarized in a mandala diagram. I will describe a characteristic version. Other variations, both in the diagram and its political realization, exist.
“Mandala” itself is a combination of core (manda) and enclosing (la) parts. A mandala is a set of concentric circles, with 8 lines radiating out from the central circle in the cardinal and ordinal (NW, SE, …) directions. These circles are surrounded by several concentric squares. The mandala is also supposed to be three-dimensional, so two-dimensional depictions of them typically have additional details to convey height.
The central circle, from which the 8 lines radiate, represents Mount Meru, the home of the gods. It is surrounded by seven rings of ocean and seven ranges of mountains. You must pass through these mountains and oceans on the way to enlightenment. Beyond the outermost mountain range is an ocean with four continents, in the cardinal directions. People live on the southern continent.
The mandala scheme was repeated in many aspects of Southeast Asian states.
The capital city was designed as a mandala. At the center of the capital, a tall temple or palace, hopefully built on a hill, stood as a representation of Mount Meru. The king stands at the center, on the axis between earth and heaven, creating order out of chaos, and causing the world to turn.
The geography of the state was also configured using this pattern. Along with a capital, there should be four core provinces and four outer provinces. Local rulers valued the numerology over their material interests, even when the central authority was weak or non-existent. The Maluku island chain, now in central Indonesia, always had four kingdoms. The two most powerful were always rivals, on opposite sides of cosmic dualism. Nevertheless, they were happy to cooperate in maritime trade. One side allied with the Dutch and the other with the Portuguese. After the Dutch subdued Jailolo, one of the four kingdoms, they tried to incorporate it administratively with other islands. This led to a revolt, even on the islands which had been rivals with Jailolo. Maluku had to consist of four kingdoms.
The ruler of each province would create his own capital using the mandala pattern, leading to a nested political structure. “Galactic” kingdoms refers to how lesser political replicas revolved around the central core. Power radiated out from the king, diminishing in radiance the farther you are from the center.
This is a model of a solar system, not a galaxy. Galaxies do have a central object (a supermassive black hole), but it is not radiant and contains only a very small fraction of the total mass of the galaxy.
The king had an inner circle of four inner advisors and an outer circle of four advisors. Each direction corresponded to a particular advisor. For example, the military advisor had authority over the south province.
The mandala system was understood more as personal ties between the king and his subordinates, not as the kingdom’s ties with the land.
Scott has a better explanation for why Southeast Asian states emphasized ruling people over ruling land. States want to produce as much as possible, and before the Industrial Revolution, this means as much agriculture as possible. When there are more people then are needed to farm the land, then states focus on ruling land. When there is more land than the people can farm, then states focus on ruling people. The goal of war is not to seize territory, but to seize captives to bring back to the capital. Early Modern Southeast Asia had a low population density, so it was focused on ruling people. The first states in Mesopotamia similarly dealt with low population densities, and focused on ruling people and seizing captives, rather than conquering land.
Spruyt would not like Scott’s explanation because it shows how ideology follows from material conditions. Spruyt prefers to show how material conditions follow from ideology.
A king was expected to rule according to dharma. While this could be translated as ‘virtue’, the meaning is different from the virtue expected from a divinely appointed righteous European king. Because the gods reward dharma, success implies that a person has dharma, perhaps accumulated in past lives. Control of ritually significant sites and performance of the pomp expected from a king showed accumulated dharma and inherently make the king legitimate. Correct descent is not as significant. Many Southeast Asian languages don’t even have a word for ‘usurper’, not because usurping rule was uncommon, but because the new ruler automatically became legitimate.
Kings did not recognize each other as equals. There could be only one central capital around which the rest of the world revolves. Major kings would try to assert their dominance over all other surrounding kings, while lesser rulers would recreate the pomp of kingship as much as possible and look for opportunities to assert their independence or dominance.
Natural borders, like mountains or rivers, were sometimes recognized, but artificial borders were not. The first people in Thailand to encounter European maps thought that there were vertical planes dividing the countries. Frontiers were more often regions where the diminishing power radiating out of multiple great kings overlapped.
The combination of great kings refusing to recognize each other, many local power centers that symbolically mimicked the capital, and the fact that success automatically granted legitimacy made Southeast Asia extremely politically unstable. Wars between major states were common and could be genocidal. The focus was usually on taking captives and forcing assimilation more than on killing your enemies, although some island societies maintained headhunting traditions. The succession of kings was contested more often than not. There was a continual struggle between centralization efforts by the king and the periphery’s desire for autonomy.
Islam began spreading into Southeast Asia in the 1400s, followed a few decades later by the Europeans.
In most places where Islam is predominant today, Islam arrived first by the sword, then through the law, then with mass conversions. This pattern did not hold in Southeast Asia, where Islam spread through maritime trade networks. The mystic Sufi branch of Islam spread first. Islamic law did not become significant until the 1800s. Islam thus initially added to, but did not replace, older political frameworks. Islam also only spread readily in maritime Southeast Asia (Indonesia & Malaysia today). The mainland states continued to follow Indian religions.
The European colonial powers also initially adapted to local norms. Early colonial expansion into Southeast Asia was mostly done by companies like the East India Company which had been granted a monopoly for all trade in the region by their government. These companies did far more than trade. They also raised navies, conquered territory, and tried to completely control the production of their trade goods. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, all of these companies were nationalized and their colonies brought under formal control of a European government.
As the European colonial powers became increasingly successful, Southeast Asian states began to copy both their military organization & technology and their civil administration. Nevertheless, all of Southeast Asia except Siam (Thailand today) eventually came under European colonial rule.
Spruyt contrasts four different international systems that existed during the Early Modern Era. Although each provided an ideology that allowed states to interact with each other, they differed wildly in what that ideology was. The nature of interstate relations was determined by how the people imagined their world.
The European system of sovereign states developed in the High Middle Ages and became the norm in Europe in the Early Modern Era. States recognize each other as legally equal entities which agree on precisely defined borders. The state is sovereign within its borders, recognizing no other authority equal or greater to its own, and claims no authority outside of those borders. During the 1800s, nationalism was added to the European idea of sovereign states. People can be divided into cultural groups, each of which deserves its own state.
The Chinese tributary system had a single power which was culturally dominant. Economic and military dominance were less relevant. Other nearby states were expected to adopt Confucian culture and ritually submit to the Chinese emperor. In return, they were given favorable trading rights. This system made wars between states extremely rare. It also had to compete with (and sometimes lost to) other systems, especially the nomadic and semi-nomadic societies to the north and west.
The Islamic cultural community had several large empires, none of which was clearly dominant. Their worldview was instead dominated by a shared religion and culture. Law was not created by governments, but was instead divinely inspired and interpreted by religious scholars. Each empire had Turkic rulers who claimed decent from Genghis Khan, the world conqueror, and tried to expand the House of Islam against the House of War. This caused them to have significant numbers of non-Muslim subjects, who were given protected, but inferior, status.
Although Southeast Asia had neither a dominant cultural power nor a shared religion, a shared Indian cosmology infused their political worldview. A king in a ritually significant center stands at the axis between earth and heaven and creates order out of chaos. His power radiates out from this center but diminishes with distance. Local power centers reproduce this pattern on a smaller scale. Controlling the ritual site and performing the pomp of the state showed that the king had accumulated dharma in a past life and automatically conferred legitimacy. Political instability was common, both as attempts to seize a ritual center and as conflicts over what was the true axis the world turns around.
As European trading networks and colonial empires spread across the globe, these international systems came into conflict. Europeans were eager to classify alternative systems as illegitimate because it provided legal justification for their colonial ambitions. Europe did not just colonize the world because it could. Colonization also had to be acceptable or even good. Although Asian powers increasingly adopted European military and administrative organization to remain competitive, most fell under direct European colonial rule. Even with the decolonization of the twentieth century, the political idea of sovereign, territorial nation-state remains the foundation for our understanding of international politics.