In chapter 1, I argued that most pre-colonial Southeast Asian societies were relatively state-averse. The identities which gave human societies a sense of belonging were shaped by forces other than those of the bureaucratic state. Kinship networks, market cycles, water-sharing for irrigation systems, sacred sites, religious rituals and popular performance helped to shape coherences which in most cases were more enduring and concrete than the states which competed over them. Before the nineteenth century, most of the Indonesian Archipelago's populations were in uplands away from the dangerous coast, and its states were not theirs; they were coast entrepots dependent on international commerce and ideas (Reid 1997: 67–77). Sriwijaya, Majapahit, Melaka and the Batavia-based Dutch Company (VOC) all developed some economic power and political charisma from their role as mediators of international commerce to populated interior regions. But they did not ‘rule’ those hinterlands in a sense which could create permanent identities in their subjects. Their legacies were a charisma to which various subsequent dynasties laid claim, not the shaping of a single self-conscious ethnie-state.

Within this pattern, however, Burma and to a lesser extent Siam went some way down a path of equating ethnic identity with the state. In Southeast Asia's ‘age of commerce’, a few Archipelago port-states also developed enough internal power as novel ‘gunpowder empires’ to give rise to new ethnies.