ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 the author advanced a definition of imperialism, focusing on control, and on the period 1870-1910. The second chapter sought to place that definition in the longer-term context of the emergence of a world economy and a world of states, and in the history of the Southeast Asian region. This chapter and the next tackle the question of imperialism in Southeast Asia from another vantage point, by investigating in some detail the ‘imperialist’ interventions in Southeast Asia in the 1870-1910 period. Such interventions did not necessarily result in ‘control’, but rulers were displaced or lost their autonomy under regimes of ‘protection’. Intervention resulted from a variety of circumstances and a variety of
motives, and a detailed approach may help both to sort them out and to indicate their interrelationships. The focus of these chapters is on the decision to ‘intervene’, to displace or protect. Who took that decision? under what circumstances? with what purposes? Such case studies may sustain or amplify generalisations, modify or undermine them. It is the author’s conclusion that they tend to support an interpretation that puts an emphasis on the recrudescence of rivalry among the major powers, while also taking account of the failure of existing states to cope with the pressures of the world economy alongside those exerted by that rivalry, and recognising the personal ambition and zest for adventure that marked the Europeans of the second sixteenth century as they had those of the first. The rivalry, the earlier chapters suggest, is driven both by the prospects
held out to states by ‘nationalisation’ and ‘industrialisation’, and by the fears of insecurity that their differential application was bound to enhance. It is seen not only among the various states but also between them and the state that had secured a primacy among them in the period up to 1870. Though not the most ‘nationalised’ of the states, it was the most industrialised. It had ordered the world, not to secure territorial dominion, but to give scope to its advantaged trade. The spread of industrialisation to other powers, and the further globalising of commerce and communications, outdated the arrangements it had made and brought them into question. The system of the 1860s as a result gave way to the ‘imperialism’ of the subsequent decades.
