#austronesia

So to avoid confusion Bowring has coined a new term, Nusantaria, to describe Austronesian homelands on the islands and coasts of South-East Asia, from where they sailed and traded much more widely. The term comes from the Sanskrit-derived, Malay-Indonesian nusantara (‘the islands between’), referring to the archipelagos that stretch from China and South-East Asia towards Australasia. (In English this was sometimes ‘the Malay archipelago’, the title of Alfred Russell Wallace’s magnificent magnum opus published precisely 150 years ago.)

The Nusantaria concept keeps the focus on this vital maritime mercantile heartland, whereas some of the Austronesian family sailed so far away – to Micronesia, Polynesia and Madagascar – that they eventually lost contact with the ancestral sail-trading network.

The major defining feature of Nusantarian societies was their mastery of navigation with ingenious vessel technologies, which included outriggers, unique fore-and-aft sailing rigs and hull-construction techniques that distinguished them from the Arab, Persian, Indian, Chinese and (much later) European ships that also plied these seas. This was the key to their expansion and settlement of maritime Southeast Asia over the last four or five millennia, displacing or absorbing earlier migrants. Other original features of Nusantarian societies included ancestral cults and shamanism, headhunting, and the independence and high standing of their women.

Bowring takes an even-handed approach to the fascinating question of Nusantarian origins. He acknowledges the well-accepted ‘out of China via Taiwan’, north-to-south thesis of Peter Bellwood et.al., but seemingly gives equal credence to alternative, south-to-north theories of migrations that were forced by the last inter-glacial flooding of the Sundaland basin (Stephen Oppenheimer, William Sondheim).

From ancient times the islands of Nusantaria supplied key trade commodities including the rarest and most costly spices – cloves, nutmeg and mace – exported in its own ocean-going ships. But more crucially, these home waters were the cross-roads of all the extensive sea trade between East Asia and the Indian Ocean.

Controlling these sea lanes led to the rise of diverse Nusantarian trading centres and entrepôts, kingdoms and empires in Sumatra, Java, Malaya and elsewhere in their region. Bowring vividly depicts a cosmopolitan trading world exchanging ceramics, metals, gems, silks and other textiles, spices, forest products, slaves – the vast majority shipped by sea.

‘A Persian writing in Arabic in the tenth century,’ he tells us, ‘noted that parrots in Palembang [the Sumatran centre of the Srivijaya empire] could speak many languages including Arabic, Persian and Greek.’ Those polylingual parrots would certainly also have spoken Malay, the Austronesian language native to both shores of the Straits of Malacca – the narrow funnel through which most of this trade passed. It became the lingua-franca of the region’s sailors and traders well over a thousand years ago, and is the basis of the modern Indonesian national language.

The major religions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam entered the region from the Indian Ocean, spread peaceably by maritime trade and adopted through influence and prestige. Nusantarian societies transformed these religions, as much as they transformed Nusantaria. Rare seaborne invasions such as that of the Tamil-Indian Cholas in 1025, and later Mongol and Ming interventions, made no lasting impacts due to the dispersal of the islands and the skills of its sailors and traders.

European and Christian incursions began more forcibly five centuries ago, lured by the fabulous wealth of the ‘Spice Islands’ and advantaged by the superior gunnery of these aggressive newcomers. The shock is well expressed in the famous words of 17th-century Makassan Sultan Alauddin, refusing monopolist Dutch demands to exclude their rivals: ‘God made the land and the sea. The land he divided among men and the sea he gave in common. It has never been heard that anyone should be forbidden to sail the seas.’

This new era would lead eventually to a severe downturn of Nusantarian fortunes and a loss of common identity as they were fragmented into the post-colonial states we know today. Bowring makes the valuable point, however, that it’s easy to exaggerate the effect of the first few centuries of European activity, as disruptive as it was. It was not until ‘a final land-grabbing spasm around the turn of the 20th century that European imperialism reached its final apogee’, drawing Nusantaria’s modern borders.

Journalist, author and yachtsman Philip Bowring has lived in Asia for decades as a correspondent for leading financial and international newspapers, and was editor of the prestigious Far Eastern Economic Review. His earlier history book was about a distant ancestor, Sir John Bowring, who as Plenipotentiary in China in 1856 precipitated the Second Opium War, and who negotiated a key trade treaty between Britain and King Mongkut of Anna and the King of Siam fame.

Having read history at Cambridge and, during his working life, absorbed himself in the history and economy of maritime Asia, Philip Bowring is well placed to attempt this ambitious synthesis of vast amounts of scholarship and primary sources for a non-specialist readership. Its magnitude is attested by a nine-page bibliography. Given the breadth and depth of material consulted, errors (in this reviewer’s fields, at least) were few and minor.

At times the work suffers from the formidable weight of historical detail that it encompasses. There are occasions where condensing complex events and multiple players creates sentences that are rather too opaque, unless you’re already well-versed in that history. Places, people or processes can sometimes flash by, for the first and last time, unexplained.

This is less criticism than acknowledgement of the dilemma of treating an intricate subject encompassing so very many cultures, eras and episodes in a single volume – as best I know, for the first time. You could push the book out by an extra hundred or two pages – but then, good luck finding a publisher. Or do you simplify the story by sacrificing some of the richness and texture of complex events and processes? Any reader finding themselves a bit lost in the detail might return to the contents list, which has been well constructed with snappy chapter titles and a clever 30-word synopsis for each. This can usefully be returned to as a summary or a road map.

The attractive illustrations in both colour and mono have been very well selected for variety and quality, with many outstanding works of art, artefacts or historical sources. It might have been helpful to reference them more in the text, however, to make their relevance clearer to readers unfamiliar with the subject.

Bellwood (1984-1985:109) states, “The question of Austronesian origins is basically a linguistic question,” and while the question is no longer exclusively a linguistic one, “Austronesian” is still essentially a linguistic construct. The Austronesian family comprises more than 1,000 languages spread over a vast area between Madagascar and Easter Island. Overwhelming linguistic evidence shows an origin for the Austronesian languages on Taiwan (Blust !995), and we do not dispute this. On the other hand, we question the nature of the linguistic “dispersal” out of Taiwan and into ISEA. We should note that the “Austronesian dispersal” might betterbe termed a “Malayo Polynesian dispersal,” since nine ofthe 10 primary subgroups of Austronesian are attested to only on Taiwan and only the Malayo-Polynesian branch has members outside Taiwan (and none on mainland Taiwan}. Therefore, we hereafter refer to “Malayo-Polynesian” rather than “Austronesian” where the former is more appropriate.

The standard version of the Austronesian linguistic phylogeny is very hierarchical, with bifurcations corresponding to inferred movements from Taiwan (the Proto Austronesian [PAN] homeland, where nine of the 10 first-order subgroups are found) through ISEA (the various languages designated as Western Malayo-Polynesian, including groups that have since moved to the Southeast Asian mainland and Madagascar) and eastern Indonesia (Central Malayo-Polynesian), across northern New Guinea (the South Halmahera-West New Guinea branch of Eastern Malayo-Polynesian), and finally into the Pacific (Oceanic, including Polynesian and Micronesian; e.g., Blust 1995; Tryon 1995; see fig. lA).

In recent years, this Austronesian phyiogeny has been shown to be flatter at multiple levels (fig. Iii). Linguistic subgrouping and the consequent construction of a layered hierarchy rely on the sharing of innovations in the inherited linguistic signal to define phylogenetic subgroups. For instance, the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup, comprising all of the Austronesian languages spoken outside Taiwan, can be defined asa valid subgroup on the basis of a number of shared innovations, both regular and irregular (see table 1, abbreviating material in Blust 2001). However, it is recognized that the same is not true of Western Malayo-Polynesian, in which languages show the Malayo-Polynesian innovations but nothing unique relative to Malayo-Polynesian languages to the east, namely, those assigned to Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (e.g., Ross 1995). The Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian branch contains the Central Malayo-Polynesian and Eastern Malayo-Polynesian subgroups and comprises the Austronesian languages of eastern Indonesia and northwestern New Guinea, as well as those of Oceania. Problematically, the evidence for the Central Malayo-Polynesian and Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian sub-groupings is not conclusive, since many of the innovations that have been proposed for each of these subgroups (e.g., Blust 1993) are present in languages in the Western Malayo-Polynesian area and, in some cases, even as far north as in Taiwan (Donohue and Grimes 2008). As a result, while we can group the “extra-Formosan” languages together as Malayo-Polynesian against those groups that did not migrate from Taiwan, we cannot justify^ any large sub-groupings that would link the languages of the Philippines and western Indonesia together, as opposed to the languages spoken near and east of New Guinea. This fact represents a major challenge to computational models that claim success in replicating large subgroups within this nonexistent clade (e.g., Gray and Jordan 2000) and weakens their conclusion that linguistic evidence supports the so-called express-train model of a rapid Austronesian dispersal.

The linguistic evidence for Malayo-Polynesian presents us with additional methodological challenges. The lexical conservatism ofthe family is remarkable (Blust 2000/?). Outside a Melanesian area, both west and east of New Guinea, where various kinds of “aberrancy” are prominent (Pawley 2006), the languages retain a very high proportion of the reconstructed vocabulary of PMP (fig. 3). The overt similarities between languages are so striking that relationships between far-flung members of the family were recognized 300 years ago (Reland 1708), long before the Indo-European languages were seen as being related. When we compare Austronesian with other language families, it is apparent that the amount of lexical change found in Austronesian is consistent with either a much younger or a much smaller language family (Joseph and Janda 2003; Peiros 2000; Wichmann, forthcoming). Smaller language families tend to be more compact geographically and show less change because of continued contact between the different members of the family. Young language families, on the other hand, have in the main not had the time required to spread and diversify. The Austronesian family, however, is neither small nor seemingly recent, and these discrepancies must be addressed.