The Art of Not Being Governed An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

standardized concept of kilometers or miles. If you ask a Southeast Asian peasant how far it is to the next village, say, the answer will probably be in units of time, not of linear distance. A peasant quite familiar with watches might answer "about half an hour," and an older farmer, less familiar with abstract time units, might reply in vernacular units, "three rice-cookings" or "two cigarette-smokings" -units of duration known to all, not requiring a wristwatch. In some older, precolonial maps, the distance between any two places was measured by the amount of time it took to travel from one to the other.21 Intuitively this makes obvious sense. Place A may be only twenty-five kilometers from place B. But depending on the difficulty of travel, it could be a two-day trip or a five-day trip, something a traveler would most surely want to know. In fact, the answer might vary radically depending on whether one was traveling from A to B or from B to A. If B is in the plains and A is high in the mountains, the uphill trip from B to A is sure to be longer and more arduous than the downhill trip from A to B, though the linear distance is the same. A friction of distance map allows societies, cultural zones, and ~ven states that would otherwise be obscured by abstract distance to spring ,suddenly into view. Such was the essential insight behind Fernand Braudel's analysis of The Mediterranean World. Here was a society that maintained itself by the active exchange of goods, people, and ideas without a unified "territory" or political administration in the usual sense of the term.22 On a somewhat smaller scale, Edward Whiting Fox argues that the Aegean of classical Greece, though never united politically, was a single, social, cultural" and economic organism, knit together by thick strands ,of contact and exchange over easy water. The great "trading-and-raiding" maritime peoples, such as the Viking and Normans, wielded a far-flung influence that depended on fast water transport. A map of their historical influence would be confined largely to port towns, estuaries, and coastlines.23 Vast sea spaces between these would be small. The most striking historical example ofthis phenomenon was the Malay world a seafaring world par excellencewhose cultural influence ran all the STATE SPACE 49 way from Easter Island in the Pacific to Madagascar and the coast of Southern Africa, where the Swahili spoken in the coastal ports bears its imprint. The Malay state itself, in its fifteenthand sixteenth-century heyday, could fairly be called, like the Hanseatic League, a shifting coalition of trading ports. The elementary units of statecraft were ports like Jambi, Palembang, Johor, and Melaka, and a Malay aristocracy shuffled between them; depending on political and trade advantages. Our landlocked sense of a "kingdom" as consisting of a compact and contiguous territory makes no sense when confronted with such maritime integration across long distances. An agrarian kingdom is typically more self-contained than a maritime kingdom. It disposes ofreserv~sof food and manpower close to home. Nevertheless, even agrarian kingdoms are far from self-sufficient; they depend for their survival on products outside their direct control: hill and coastal products such as wood, ores, protein, manure from pastoralists' flocks, salt, and so on. Maritime kingdoms are even more dependent on trade routes to supply their necessities, including, 'especially, slaves. For this reason, there are what might be called spaces of high "stateness" that do not depend on local grain production and manpower. Such locations are strategically situated to facilitate the control (by taxes, tolls, or confiscation) of vital trade products. Long before the invention of agriculture, those societies controlling key deposits of obsidian (necessary for the best stone tools) occupied a privileged position in terms of exchange and power. More generally thyre were certain strategic choke points on land and water trade routes, the control ofwhich might confer decisive economic and political advantages. The Malay trading port is the classical example, typically lying athwart a river junction or estuary,allowing its ruler to monopolize trade in upstream (hulu) export products and similarly to control the hinterland's access to trade goods from downstream (hilir) coastal and international commerce. The Straits ofMalacca were, in the same fashion, a choke point for long-distance trade between the Indian Ocean and China and thus a uniquely privileged space for state-making. On a smaller scale, innumerable hill kingdoms sat astride important caravan routes 'for salt, slaves, and tea, among other goods. They waxed and waned depending on the vagaries ofworld trade and commodity booms. Like their larger Malay cousins, they were, at their most peaceful, "toll" states. Positional advantages of this kind are only partly a matter of ~he terrain and sea lanes. They are, especially in the modern era, historically contingent 0n revolutions in transport, engineering, and industry: for example, rail and road junctions, bridges and tunnels, coal, oil, and natural gas deposits. Our crude first approximation ofstate space as the concentration ofgrain