An Embryonic Peasantry

To speak of Southeast Asian peasants today might immediately conjure up images of immensity and profusion: vast landscapes segmented into tiny, brilliantly green rice fields away to the horizon, tightly bunched and dusty villages thronged with legions of people — and their cattle, pigs, chickens and ducks—threading their way evenly about their business, a great bulk and multiplicity of crops to feed surging populations, the busy and fastidious exploitation of nature to the limit of its gifts. Whatever one might think of the aptness of such images in capturing the reality of the contemporary Southeast Asian rural world, there can be no question that they bear little correspondence to peasant life at the turn of the nineteenth century. Then, the ecology of the region remained largely undisturbed; a few foreboding exceptions to one side, the region consisted, from mountain top to often swampy shore, of enormous expanses of unexploited and thickly vegetated land; even as late as 1888, indeed, the Pahang region of Malaya ‘had a forest cover that extended from the seashore to the top of all but the highest mountain ranges’.1 One European spoke romantically in the mid nineteenth century of the ‘dense forests’ of Borneo and Sumatra: ‘trees of gigantic stature, of abundant foliage, and hung with a thousand creeping plants, entangled, fantastic, brilliant with flowers, and equal in their gaudy splendour to the growth of the Brazilian woods’.2 Such forests and woodlands were home to a great diversity of wildlife: elephants, tigers, rhinoceroses, deer, wild pigs, to name the most obvious; according to one European observer, peasants guarding their crops at night from small watch platforms were ‘at the eminent risk at night of being picked off by a tiger’.3