ABSTRACT
The concept of the “moral economy,” which E. P. Thompson suggests in The Making of the English Working Class and develops more on “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” provides a broad and compelling framework for the analysis of a wide variety of forms of popular protest. The poor vertical integration of pre-colonial Southeast Asian states extended beyond the relationship between the court center and the provincial lords into the administrative hierarchies of the regions themselves. The low level of integration and diffusion of power in the contest state meant that force and military process played key roles at all levels. The “contest-state” structure of pre-colonial politics in Southeast Asia provided the peasantry with many buffers against oppressive demands on the part of the ruling elite. The peasants’ all-pervasive and unrelenting struggle for subsistence provides the starting point for James Scott’s application of the theory of the moral economy.
