SYNOPSIS

One could be forgiven for imagining that, like the upland peoples who preoccupied James Scott, Southeast Asia’s mariners expended great effort to find ways to avoid the state. This image of seaborne state-avoidance would not be completely wrong, even with a thorough historical deconstruction of colonial ideologies bent on the portrayal of sea-gypsies and pirates. Nevertheless, the long history of regional and interregional maritime dynamics also entangled Southeast Asia’s mariners in polities large and small, as well as in the relations among them. Recent histories of the early modern region have begun to take account of their presence, though continue to depict regional mariners as non-state people. This talk foregrounds the importance of Southeast Asian “sea people” in early modern interpolity relations, particularly in effectuating power shifts among ports, and also situates that period’s maritime dynamics in a much broader temporal arc. The broader picture not only suggests the prevalence of watery lifeways in the region. It also emphasizes the centrality of regional mariners in processes of exchange, competition, conflict, and alliance central to polity differentiation and state formation in the coastal and island world.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jennifer L. Gaynor is an historian and anthropologist of Southeast Asia and its surrounding seas. She writes about Southeast Asia’s maritime and littoral worlds, the region's transnational and global interconnections, and relations between society and politics. Currently a Research Fellow in the Baldy Center at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, School of Law, she is the author of Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia: Submerged Genealogy and the Legacy of Coastal Capture (Cornell University Press, 2016).