Conclusion

The South China Sea has a history that is at once local and trans-local; it has been the great space of separation between Asian polities for thousands of years, but also the main connective tissue to knit this space into a single web of contact and interaction.

It is this inherent paradox that makes this particular sea interesting. Though we can indeed see something of ‘East’ and ‘Southeast Asian’ worlds developing over the longue duree for much of this period the politics and economics of these regions were linked, and were in fact continually maintained through the seasonal passage of vessels heading north and south. Some of these ships were engaged in diplomacy, keeping the centuries-old pattern of vassalage and semi-vassalage to China amongst the polities of the Nanyang intact, and regulated over time. But even more of the vessels had commercial motives, trading in a wide variety of goods that both the northern and southern rims of the South China Sea wanted, each from one other. High-status and often high-technology goods (for the time) travelled south, for the most part, and ecological produce, both of the seas and of the forests of Southeast Asia, one of the world’s most bio-diverse regions, travelled north. Each side received something it desired, whether luxury goods (in the case of China) that helped to power the rise of a new and increasingly vigorous commercial class, or status-items (in the case of the Nanyang), showing investiture and recognition by the Middle Kingdom, the great medieval hegemon to the north.

work provided in Chin Kin Wah and Leo Suryadinata, eds., Michael Leifer: Selected works on Southeast Asia (Singapore, 2005).

⁷³ See Alice Ba, ‘ASEAN’s stakes: The South China Sea’s challenge to autonomy and agency’, Asia Policy, 21 (2016): 47-53; Alex Calvo, ‘China, the Philippines, Vietnam and international arbitration in the South China Sea’, The Asia-Pacific Journal, 13, 43, 2 (26 October 2015): http://apjjf.org/-Alex-Calvo/4391 (accessed 31 March 2017).

By the early modern age, some of these patterns began to change in the encircling waters of the South China Sea.

A quickening of commerce, brought about by the entrance of a variety of new actors to the scene (some of them Asian, some of them not), pushed the rate of travel and contact to new heights. Ethnic actors from both previously marginalised parts of the South China Sea region and beyond it came in greater numbers; they brought more wealth with them too. And for the first time, they began to stay in the region in larger numbers than just a trickle of men trading in ports. This re-aligned some of the commercial and political relations of Southeast Asia, empowering some (such as the Sulu Sultanate) and enslaving others (such as many of the region’s ‘sea peoples’), in new bonds of hierarchical integration. Where the China market had been the engine for much of this sea’s trade in the past, the world market started to take on more importance into the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By that time, some of the Europeans who had trickled into the region took on a more menacing aspect, as they planted flags in the ground and claimed some coasts abutting this most central of seas. We have seen the beginnings of that process here, and those seeds brought out a bitter fruit in the form of colonialism and empire, different versions of which stretched from parts of the South China coasts all the way down to the land- and sea-scapes of Southeast Asia. We still, in fact, live with the legacy of those times even now, as we run our fingers over the colours of the map that make up the various margins of the modern South China Sea.

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Source: Armitage David, Bashford Alison et al. (eds.). Oceanic Histories. Cambridge University Press,2018. — 338 p.. 2018

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