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"
Read more about this topic: Mandala (Southeast Asian Political Model)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)