Into Modernity: New Political, Ecological and Economic Systems

The Chinese clearly looked south at the South China Sea and saw ungoverned, maritime space. The idea that travelling beyond the pale of civilisation led to dangerous realms was commonplace; geographies beyond the orbit of Chinese administration were often described as being wild, and completely untamed.

In his moving exegesis on T’ang exotics, The vermilion bird (1967), Edward Schafer showed how the T’ang described Vietnam, for example, as a place of screaming monkeys and miasmic mists - covered by impenetrable and unhealthy jungle.^[398] This notion of exile is one that comes up again and again in Chinese descriptions of the southern frontier, from descriptions of parts ofYunnan in the southwest (bordering Siam and Burma) to other borders during the Ch’ing (16441911 CE). Even spaces as comparatively ‘familiar’ as maritime Taiwan were deemed to be frontiers, sites where Ming rebels like Koxinga, the Spanish, the Dutch and assorted other ‘bandits’ and ‘pirates’ (some of them Japanese, such as the famous wako of the sixteenth century) held sway. Chinese pioneering families who visited Taiwan often began as adventurers, but eventually became elites over generations in their adopted homes, still out on the polity’s distant extremities.^[399] A number of these patterns and their political and cultural legacies along China’s South China Sea borders are crucial even now, both vis-à-vis Taiwan on China’s southeastern coasts, as well as in other places.^[400]

The South China Sea may have been deemed beyond the pale of what the Chinese considered ‘civilisation’, but there was clearly bounty there to be exploited. This ecological history of this particular sea, which brought it into a complex union with an increasingly globalised modernity, is still being pieced together by historians.^[401] One of the most important classes of goods were sea-products.

Regional sea peoples such as the Bajau, for example (scattered throughout much of Southeast Asia), had traditionally devoted most of their labour in food collection for their own needs, gathering crustaceans, fish and turtle eggs from the sea. Yet as the importance of trade with China grew in the South China Sea over the eighteenth century, they often began to be pressed into unwilling service by more martial peoples. The Taosug of the southern Philippines (and other groups) used them to provide different sorts of marine resources: mother-of-pearl, tortoise shells, rattan and trepang, all of which the Chinese valued highly. Tortoise- and turtle-shell of several species - leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea), green (Chelonia mydas) and hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata) - had been traded up to China from Southeast Asia’s waters for centuries already. By the time of Dalrymple’s and Forrest’s visits in the late eighteenth century (two prominent European travellers/observers), coastal peoples had made these commodities a vital mainstay of the trade.^[402]

Mother-of-pearl exports were also very profitable by the beginning of the nineteenth century,^[403] the finest specimens being extracted from the same coral beds - often thirty miles wide and ringing whole islets - from where pearls were collected.^[404] Rattan, too, was gathered for bulk-shipment to South China, with early commentators noting that Southeast Asian bays were overgrown with the plants, the supply of which would grow back even if hundreds of tons were extracted annually for export.^[405] The pliable fibres of the plant were very cheap, as a single piece of cotton trade-cloth could fetch hundreds of strands of rattan in the late nineteenth century.^[406] The Bajau even became skilled manufacturers of salt, some of which was procured by the solar evaporation of brine, other portions coming from the bleaching of nipa palm ashes. What was not utilised locally, was traded inland for other China export products.^[407] In these ways local Bajau economies across a decent-sized swathe of the South China Sea was re-fashioned along entirely new lines, all in the interests of the money to be made from the rising marine goods commerce to the Middle Kingdom.^[408]

Still another important product exported out of Southeast Asia and up across the South China Sea to Canton was pearls.

Garnered from the mollusc Melegrina margarita, the placuna was pounded into powder for use in Chinese pharmacopeias, while larger and finer specimens were traded, and eventually soldered into jewellery.^[409] Writings about the quality and value of Southeast Asian pearls extend all the way back in European records to Tome Pires’ time, when the Portuguese itinerant sailor described pearls being traded as ‘beads’ to Chinese sellers in 1515.^[410] Only a few years later, Southeast Asian pearls were disparaged as being of inferior quality, though Pigafetta said that they were still pricey enough to use as ransom-items to obtain the freedom of political hos- tages.^[411] These exports of Southeast Asian waters largely kept their reputation over the next several hundred years, however, with Chinese texts like the Huang Ching Zhi Gong Tu (‘Illustrations of the tributaries of the Ch’ing Empire’) outlining them as among the most vital products of the region.^[412] The Chinese court understood that these items were vital to the littoral communities on Southeast Asia’s coasts; Western observers also understood this, and eventually figured out ways to get their own share of this lucrative trade.^[413]

However, no single product illustrates the mechanics of marine goodsextraction across the South China Sea - and the politics that attended this extraction - better than trepang (edible sea- cucumber), which found a useful habitat for itself in the placid waters off much of insular Southeast Asia. The region’s sea peoples never took to eating these animals, even in times of significant hardship, yet by the nineteenth century Taosug datus (princes) had organised through regional slaving expeditions an estimated 20,000 sea-peoples per year for their collection, often in fleets of scores of boats.^[414] More than five-dozen species of these holothurians were local to Southeast Asian waters, and these were graded into qualities of first, second and third class, depending on size, colour and the difficulty of procurement.^[415] China preferred the whitish-grey trepang, which were normally found on coral bottoms and at considerable depths.

Dark-grey or black varieties were less valued but were eaten nonetheless. Southeast Asians often went to much trouble to get these animals, with Aboriginal Australians still remembering the sea-cucumber voyages of Makassarprahus to the coasts,^[416] and Bajau mythology eulogising ‘trepang heroes’ who outwitted sharks and giant stingrays.^[417] The Taosug even built a series of freshwater wells on isolated islands as an encouragement for ‘Free Bajaus’ to search for holothurians offshore.^[418] New technologies were also brought to the coasts of various parts of Southeast Asia to better facilitate the gathering process, altering further local modes of livelihood.^[419] Warren has estimated that by the 1830s almost 70,000 people - most of them slaves and other appropriated ‘sea-peoples’ - were involved in marine products procurement, most of them under the auspices of the Sultan of Sulu.^[420] Almost all of the ocean produce they collected was eventually heading north to the coasts of Ch’ing China, across the placid waters of the South China Sea.

This confluence between the ecological and the political is important because it shows how mastery of the sea became equated with entrance into the wealth of the modern world system, which was expanding exponentially at this time, as Kenneth Pomeranz and others have shown.^[421] The littoral strand of southern China - Guangdong and Fujian provinces in particular - were becoming the site of an enormously complex exchange, with China being pried open to global commerce by an increasingly voracious Western world. The ‘Canton system’, as the broad outlines of the process of trade were called, functioned for decades, but became more and more unequal in nature until the Opium Wars of 1839 to 1842 permanently shifted the balance toward exploitation. Over the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, South China was gradually turned into an economic cash-cow for Western trade interests, who flooded the market with opium to pay for the very great variety of goods that were in demand back in Europe and the Americas.^[422] The Spanish conquest of the southern Philippines in the last third of the nineteenth century put an end to the Sulu Sultanate as the main conveyor belt for some of this intra-Asian commerce.^[423] In coastal Vietnam, too, a period of great instability ensued in the early nineteenth century, as the Tay-Son rebellion (1771-1802) displaced old elites, and the maritime sea-scape between that country and China was thrown into chaos for two decades.

The resulting Nguyen Dynasty which took over the Vietnamese court in 1802 was Confucian, and largely anti-trade, but was eventually humbled later in the century by the French, who landed in the Mekong delta region in 1859, and in a series of steps between 1862 and the late 1880s proceeded to take over the entire country. The South China Sea coasts of Cambodia followed as a protectorate around that same time.^[424]

Further to the south, in the bottom extremities of the South China Sea, the dynamics of incorporation were eventually similar. The British began with a few small bases, including the tiny island of Balambangan in 1763, and gradually carved out more of a trading presence in the region, especially with the acquisition of Singapore in 1819. The so- called ‘Straits Settlements’ proved not to be enough to slake the thirst for influence in this arena, however, with the pull of the China market too strong, and Southeast Asia too tempting to provide an entrance to it from the comparative safety of the lower South China Sea. Portions of the Malay Peninsula and Borneo followed in terms of British incorporation, sometimes indirectly and at other times more directly, with the Pangkor Engagement signalling a real ‘forward policy’ in 1874.^[425] Only a year earlier the Dutch made their own intentions clear at the very bottom of the South China Sea, as centuries-old settlements were eventually expanded from 1873 onward with the start of the Aceh War to include most of the rest of what we now term to be ‘Indonesia’.^[426] These processes were political and were accomplished through treaties, but they were also very much technological feats, marrying the new technologies of hydrography, surveillance and military hardware with epidemiological sciences, all in the service of the state.^[427] The sea was eventually marked off and cordoned; empires which had existed mostly in name as putative ‘spheres of influence’ now resembled polities closer to the reality of the name.

By the twentieth century it is no exaggeration to say that the South China Sea - for so long in its history the epitome of an open mare liberum - was now more of a closed sea. Trade and travel still crossed its seas, but lines on the map had politically cordoned off its shores.^[428] This is the world of the South China Sea that we have inherited today, and which now makes up part of a nation-state-driven world.^[429]

It is, in fact, the South China Sea of the twentieth into the twenty-first centuries that shows us how fragile this history of movement, trade and political accommodation has become. This broad maritime space is still criss-crossed by shipping as it always has been; indeed, the raw tonnage of transport is higher now than it ever has been in historical time. Yet there are worrying signs that an epoch of mare clausum - closed seas - could be approaching. China has claimed most of the islands of the South China Sea - including the Spratly and Paracel chains - and has begun fortifying them, building atolls into islets and islets into actual bases. The neighbouring countries of the region, including Japan, Taiwan and the nations of ASEAN, have reacted by putting forth their own claims.^[430] American sea-power has tried to guarantee rights of international navigation and adjudication by international courts of disputes but it is anyone’s guess if there is the willpower present to deny actual encroachments on territory. The Hague makes occasional pronouncements on the issue but is remote. As further resources are discovered in the region (including offshore oil and natural gas), and as jockeying continues over balance- of-power issues astride the sea-routes, the world will be watching to see if the status quo is kept. Abandoning centuries of free access and free travel - the historical legacy of human interaction in this arena - seems not to be in the interest of practically any of the interested parties.⁷³

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

Into Modernity: New Political, Ecological and Economic Systems

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