The immense cultural diversity of Southeast Asia and the linguistic skills required to approach the sources have tended to encourage localized rather than general studies of the region. The yawning gaps in our knowledge, the difficulties in interpreting information and the very real differences within even the larger divisions of ‘island’ and ‘mainland’ do not facilitate efforts to draw the Southeast Asian past together. What can the highly literate, Sinicised élite of seventeenth-century Vietnam have in common with the more oral, Muslim courts of the Malay states? Is it possible to conceive of a Shan community in the hills of upper Burma as sharing in any sense the same world as villagers on a small isolated island in eastern Indonesia? At times it seems that the more closely one approaches the material, the more elusive a common history becomes. Yet the longer view may make the task less formidable. From a contemporary vantage-point the most significant development of the pre-modern period is the slow movement towards the larger political groupings which were to form the bases of later nation-states. This movement was by no means irrevocable, nor was it everywhere apparent. But whereas throughout Southeast Asia the ‘states’ at the beginning of the sixteenth century only generally approximate those we know today, three hundred years later the current shape of Southeast Asia is clearly discernible. It is the process which brought this about which we shall now examine.