Mandala (Southeast Asian Political Model) - History

History

Historically, the main overlord states were Khmer Empire of Cambodia, Srivijaya Empire of Sumatra, successive kingdoms of Java (Mataram, Kediri, Singhasari and Majapahit), Ayutthaya in Thailand, Vietnam and China. China occupies a special place in that the other three often in turn paid tribute to China, although in practice the obligations imposed on them were minimal. The most notable tributary states were Cambodia, Lan Xang (succeeded by Vientiane and Luang Prabang) and Lanna. Cambodia in particular, was described by the Vietnamese emperor Gia Long as "an independent country that is slave of two" (Chandler p. 119). The system was eventually ended by the arrival of the Europeans in the mid-19th century. Culturally, they introduced Western geographical practices, which assumed that every area was subject to one sovereign. Practically, the colonisation of French Indochina, Dutch East Indies, British Malaya and Burma brought pressure from the colonisers for fixed boundaries to their possessions. The tributary states were then divided between the colonies and Siam, which exercised much more centralised power, but over a smaller area, than hitherto.

The historian Stuart-Fox uses the term "mandala" extensively to describe the history of the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang as a structure of loosely held together "Mueang" that disintegrated after Lan Xang's conquest by Siam starting in the 18th century

The Thai historian Sunait Chutintaranond made an important contribution to study of the mandala in Southeast Asian history by demonstrating that "three assumptions responsible for the view that Ayudhya was a strong centralized state" did not hold and that "in Ayudhya the hegemony of provincial governors was never successfully eliminated"