State rebels

In teaching a course on modern Southeast Asian history, I always go into some detail in my lectures on the ways in which the polities in that region came to be colonised. The students in my classes tend to have a very black-and-white view of colonialism. It is as if they think that someone in Europe or the United States suddenly got the idea one day to conquer and colonise a different part of the globe and went off to do that. The reality, of course, was much more complex, and that is what I try to emphasise. In most cases colonisation was the end result of a protracted period of interactions. Those interactions often began on relatively equal terms, but then, over time, as the two sides engaged in ever more complex relations, the Europeans gained the upper hand, and eventually made a move toward the imposition of colonial rule, be it direct or indirect.

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