The influence and imperialism of Western Europe and associated states peaked in Asian territories from the colonial period beginning in the 16th century and substantially reducing with 20th century decolonization. It originated in the 15th-century search for trade routes to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia that led directly to the Age of Discovery, and additionally the introduction of early modern warfare into what Europeans first called the East Indies and later the Far East. By the early 16th century, the Age of Sail greatly expanded Western European influence and development of the spice trade under colonialism. European-style colonial empires and imperialism operated in Asia throughout six centuries of colonialism, formally ending with the independence of the Portuguese Empire's last colony Macau in 1999. The empires introduced Western concepts of nation and the multinational state. This article attempts to outline the consequent development of the Western concept of the nation state.
Southeast Asia is the geographical south-eastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of China, east of the Indian subcontinent, and north-west of mainland Australia which is part of Oceania. Southeast Asia is bordered to the north by East Asia, to the west by South Asia and the Bay of Bengal, to the east by Oceania and the Pacific Ocean, and to the south by Australia and the Indian Ocean. Apart from the British Indian Ocean Territory and two out of 26 atolls of the Maldives in South Asia, Maritime Southeast Asia is the only other subregion of Asia that lies partly within the Southern Hemisphere. Mainland Southeast Asia is entirely in the Northern Hemisphere. East Timor and the southern portion of Indonesia are the parts of Southeast Asia that lie south of the Equator.
The history of Southeast Asia covers the people of Southeast Asia from prehistory to the present in two distinct sub-regions: Mainland Southeast Asia and Maritime Southeast Asia. Mainland Southeast Asia comprises Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Peninsular Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam whereas Maritime Southeast Asia comprises Brunei, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Christmas Island, East Malaysia, East Timor, Indonesia, Philippines and Singapore.
Mainland Southeast Asia is the continental portion of Southeast Asia. It lies east of the Indian subcontinent and south of Mainland China and is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the west and the Pacific Ocean to the east. It includes the countries of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and Peninsular Malaysia.
Asia is home to hundreds of languages comprising several families and some unrelated isolates. The most spoken language families on the continent include Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Japonic, Dravidian, Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Turkic, Sino-Tibetan, Kra–Dai and Koreanic. Many languages of Asia, such as Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Tamil or Telugu, have a long history as a written language.
The Malay Archipelago also called Insulindia or the Indo-Australian Archipelago is the archipelago between Mainland Southeast Asia and Australia. It has also been called the "Malay world," "Nusantara", "East Indies", and other names over time. The name was taken from the 19th-century European concept of a Malay race, later based on the distribution of Austronesian languages. The term is controversial in Indonesia due to its ethnic connotations and colonial undertones, which can overshadow the country's diverse cultures.
Nusantara is the Indonesian name of Maritime Southeast Asia. It is an Old Javanese term that literally means "outer islands". In Indonesia, it is generally taken to mean the Indonesian Archipelago. Outside of Indonesia, the term has been adopted to refer the Malay Archipelago.
The Minahasans or Minahassa are an indigenous ethnic group from the North Sulawesi province of Indonesia, formerly known as North Celebes. The Minahasa people sometimes refer to themselves as Manado people. Although the Minahasan pre-Christian creation myth entails some form of ethnic unification, before the nineteenth century the Minahasa region was in no way unified. Instead, a number of politically independent groups (walak) existed together, often in a permanent state of conflict.
Maritime Southeast Asia comprises the countries of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and East Timor.
The Mardijker people refer to an ethnic community in the Dutch East Indies made up of descendants of freed slaves. They could be found at all major trading posts in the East Indies. They were mostly Christian, of various ethnicities from conquered Portuguese and Spanish territories, and some with European ancestry. They spoke Mardijker Creole, a Portuguese-based creole, which has influenced the modern Indonesian language.
Greater Indonesia was an irredentist political concept that sought to bring the so-called Malay race together, by uniting the territories of the Dutch East Indies with British Malaya and British Borneo. It was espoused by students and graduates of Sultan Idris Training College for Malay Teachers in the late 1920s, and individuals from Sumatra and Java, including Mohammad Natsir and Sukarno, on 28 September 1950. Indonesia Raya was adopted as the name of what later became the Indonesian national anthem in 1924.
There are 1,340 recognised ethnic groups in Indonesia. The vast majority of those belong to the Austronesian peoples, with a sizeable minority being Melanesians. Indonesia has the world's largest number of Austronesians and Melanesians.
The concept of a Malay race was originally proposed by the German physician Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), and classified as a brown race. Malay is a loose term used in the late 19th century and early 20th century to describe the Austronesian peoples.
Company rule in the Dutch East Indies began when the Dutch East India Company appointed the first governor-general of the Dutch East Indies in 1610, and ended in 1800 when the bankrupt company was dissolved and its possessions were nationalized as the Dutch East Indies. By then it exerted territorial control over much of the archipelago, most notably on Java.
The Malay world or Malay realm is a concept or an expression that has been used by different authors and groups over time to denote several different notions, derived from varied interpretations of 'Malay' either as an ethnic group, as a racial category, as a linguistic group or as a cultural group. The use of the term Malay in much of the conceptualisation is largely based on the prevalent Malay cultural influence, manifested in particular through the spread of the Malay language in Southeast Asia as observed by different colonial powers during the Age of Discovery and spread of Islam. The term remains highly controversial in Indonesia and outside the Malay-speaking areas, because it is considered politically charged and irredentist rather than purely cultural.
Indonesia is the common and official name to refer to the Republic of Indonesia or Indonesian archipelago; however, other names, such as Nusantara and East Indies are also known. Some names are considered obsolete and confined to certain periods of history, while some might be more geographically specific or general.
Malays played a significant role in pre-Hispanic Philippine history. Malay involvement in Philippine history goes back to the Classical Era with the establishment of Rajahnates as well as the Islamic era, in which various sultanates and Islamic states were formed in Mindanao, the Sulu Archipelago, and around Manila.
The first phase of European colonisation of Southeast Asia took place throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. Where new European powers competing to gain monopoly over the spice trade, as this trade was very valuable to the Europeans due to high demand for various spices such as pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. This demand led to the arrival of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and British marine spice traders. Fiercely competitive, the Europeans soon sought to eliminate each other by forcibly taking control of the production centres, trade hubs and vital strategic locations, beginning with the Portuguese acquisition of Malacca in 1511. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, conquests focused on ports along the maritime routes, that provided a secure passage of maritime trade. It also allowed foreign rulers to levy taxes and control prices of the highly desired Southeast Asian commodities. By the 19th century, all of Southeast Asia had been forced into the various spheres of influence of European global players except Siam, which had served as a convenient buffer state sandwiched between British Burma and French Indochina. The kings of Siam had to contend with repeated humiliations, accept unequal treaties among massive French and British political interference and territorial losses after the Franco-Siamese crisis of 1893 and the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909.
The Maritime Silk Road or Maritime Silk Route is the maritime section of the historic Silk Road that connected Southeast Asia, East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Arabian Peninsula, eastern Africa, and Europe. It began by the 2nd century BCE and flourished until the 15th century CE. The Maritime Silk Road was primarily established and operated by Austronesian sailors in Southeast Asia who sailed large long-distance ocean-going sewn-plank and lashed-lug trade ships. The route was also utilized by the dhows of the Persian and Arab traders in the Arabian Sea and beyond, and the Tamil merchants in South Asia. China also started building their own trade ships (chuán) and followed the routes in the later period, from the 10th to the 15th centuries CE.
Bedil is a term from Maritime Southeast Asia which refers to various types of firearms and gunpowder weapons, from small pistols to large siege guns. The term bedil comes from wedil and wediluppu in the Tamil language. In their original form, these words refer to gunpowder blast and saltpeter, respectively. But after being absorbed into bedil in the Malay language, and in a number of other cultures in the archipelago, Tamil vocabulary is used to refer to all types of weapons that use gunpowder. The terms bedil and bedhil are known in Javanese and Balinese. In Sundanese the term is bedil, in Batak it is known as bodil, in Makasarese, badili, in Buginese, balili, in Dayak language, badil, in Tagalog, baril, in Bisayan, bádil, in Bikol languages, badil, and in Malay it is badel or bedil.
