Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago

“Empire of the Winds” covers nearly 20,000 years of history in 336 pages, about a pivotal part of the world, maritime Southeast Asia, that rarely makes big news in the United States; it does so in exhaustive detail and with the insight of a journalist who has spent the last 50 years closely observing the region. On the basis of those numbers alone, I’d say the book is a shrewd buy for anybody wanting to familiare themselves with this set of interlocking archipelagoes, today home to 400 million people, that author Philip Bowring calls Nusantaria. More about this invaluable book in a second, but first a disclosure.Forty-three summers ago, I got my first big break in journalism, when the Far Eastern Economic Review, a Hong Kong-based weekly, hired me to help cover Japan. Bowring, the magazine’s business editor, was one of my new bosses. (He eventually became the magazine’s editor-in-chief.) Working for the Review, tossed into that pool of talented and not infrequently idiosyncratic Asia hands, was a dream come true, and a thoroughgoing education. Bowring and the others drummed into me the importance of using history as a primary tool for developing context so that readers might see beyond and below the headlines. How could you hope to dig into a story without having a feel for the soil from which it had sprung? Sage advice, to be sure.Bowring’s history of Nusantaria is the sort of all-embracing book I suspected he’d write. As he explains it: “This is the story of seafaring, of the drivers of global commerce, of cultural interchange, and the rise and fall of states and political systems.” It’s also the story of the evolution of human civilization and the importance of a geographically bound identity. It tells how the inroads of Western imperialists thwarted that identity; and how the clout of Europe, the United States, Japan and China have inhibited it in the post-colonial era. Thus, the tantalizing question: What will the Nusantaria of the future look like? Will Nusantarians use their common threads of culture, language and enterprise, to come more properly into their own? Where China is concerned, can they “cooperate sufficiently to avoid again being the subject of imperialism, this time from a closer neighbor with a history of seeing itself as the centre of the civilized world”? If past is prologue, “Empire of the Winds” provides the perspective necessary to trace the region’s trajectory from earliest times and into news reports and analyses to come.Students of current affairs will find helpful Bowring’s discussion of the extent to which China and its traders have influenced the region over time. His solid historiography gives the lie to Beijing’s current outsized claims to ownership of the South China Sea, while honoring China’s role in supplying the alliances, immigrants and capital that played prominent roles in the growth of Nusantaria’s trading nexus. Speaking for myself, I found the first part of the book particularly intriguing, dealing as it does with a succession of now-ghostly empires that, variously, ruled the waves, plied trade in scandal wood and spices, and explored the seas as far west as Madagascar and the east coast of Africa—and did so well before the famous Ming dynasty admiral Zheng He got there. Mapping such distant realms has set historians a challenging task, seeing as how wooden buildings and records inscribed on banana leaves have long since rotted away in tropical heat. Luckily, master reporter that he is, Bowring is able to tell us what we can know, what we can’t, and the ways in which the story might have unfolded—all based on impressive research.In his 1990 book, “From Milton to McLuhan: The Ideas Behind American Journalism,” J. Herbert Altschull writes: “To say that a journalist needs a sound sense of history is to state the obvious.” Too bad, then, that journalists today are often “lacking the long-term perspective required to explain and analyze the complex web of political, economic, social and psychological events that are the stuff of news reports … No job or profession requires a higher order of cultural literacy than does journalism.”Philip Bowring is a prime example of how history works thorough a good journalist and how our sense of it can benefit from the alchemy.

Bowring's "Empire of the Winds" fills a much-needed hole in popular histories of Southeast Asia. Most books tend to focus on individual countries, or regional histories that are too sweeping. Bowring brings to life the undocumented, pre-historic civilization of the seafaring people that linguists refer to as Austronesians. These are the people, united by lingual and maritime roots, whose descendants populate Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, parts of Vietnam, Polynesia, and beyond. The first half of the book is a great contribution to our knowledge of the origins and achievements of these people, whom Bowring collectively dubs the "nation" of Nusantara. Once we get to the early modern age and the entry of European powers into the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the book loses some of its power: we are now in familiar territory and the traditional narratives of colonialism, imperialism and modernity take over. At this point, Bowring is left mainly to put Nusantara into context - instead of framing the story he is filling in the framework of others. But for anyone with an interest in Asian and Southeast Asian history, including its interactions with China, India, and Europe, this is a very accessible, knowledgeable, and timely book.

Pivotal and mind-expanding, a history that places Austronesian speaking people at the center of the narrative. Accessible, comprehensive, easy to read. It is rare to find a book that presents you with a whole new way of looking at the world. This one does that...and does it brilliantly. Highly recommended.

Centuries before the Chinese eunuch Zheng He made his epic seven voyages of discovery across the southern seas, the Austronesian peoples of the vast archipelago to the south of China had conquered the seas all the way to Madagascar, 7,000 km across the Indian Ocean.The region, according to author Philip Bowring, should be known as “Nusantaria,” an empire encompassing the world’s greatest maritime and cultural crossroads and one equivalent to the Mediterranean on the other side of the earth.The word Nusantaria is taken from the Sanskrit word Nusantara, meaning “outer islands.” It is a region that has been given relatively short shrift by historians unaware of its importance in comparison to seafaring peoples in other areas. It should not have been, as Nusantaria played an outsize role in the creation of the modern world.This is a densely-packed book, one that should be on the shelf of every student of Southeast Asia, a tour de force combining history, linguistics and archaeology that is thickly footnoted, authoritative and containing hundreds of references to other scholarship. And, whether intended or not, by describing the history of Nusantaria from the ice age to the present in minute detail, and by giving the peoples of the region their historic due, it puts to bed the modern-day claim of Beijing that its so-called “nine-dash line” gives China hegemony over a region that actually had been settled and developed by its indigenous peoples hundreds, perhaps thousands of years before Chinese traders made their way down into the region.Bowring starts 17,000 years ago when the most recent ice age meant there was no Strait of Melaka or Java Sea and the region’s denizens could cross the area on foot. Rising seas would ultimately flood the Sahul Shelf, forcing them to take to the sea. They would become some of the world’s greatest mariners, as exemplified by the depiction of a four-masted ship on the wall of Borobudur, the world’s biggest Buddhist edifice, on the island of Java. The waters would form a corridor that connected Asia to the rest of the world.There is evidence of trade links as long ago as 1,500 years BCE between the eastern archipelago and Egypt, Greece and China. They were able to sail from Samoa to the west coast of India. By the 15th Century, the Javanese were sailing ships 50 meters long and carrying as much as 1,500 tonnes of freight including “rice, meat of cow, sheep, pig and deer dried and salted, many chicken, garlic and onions. They also bring hither many weapons for sale, that is to say, lances, daggers and swords worked with inlaid metal and of very good steel.”Because of the geology of the region, where heat and rain can combine to create an astonishing variety of vegetation, the Austronesians had plenty to trade. Spices abounded. According to other sources, nutmeg was so valuable that Dutch traders sewed their stevedores’ pockets together on the docks of the Netherlands to make sure they couldn’t steal part of the cargo.“The story here is of vessels which were large, stable and long-lasting, and sailed from Java to the Arabian peninsula, and presumably to the Spice Islands.” In short, Bowring writes, “the unvarnished, contemporary, on-the-spot, Portuguese accounts of ships and trade make and interesting if largely ignored counterpoint to the latter-day accounts of the celebrity voyages of Zheng He.”Here were astonishingly rich kingdoms that mostly have disappeared into the overwhelming vegetation, including Palembang and others in Indonesia, an empire built on trade whose buildings were all of wood, whose records were written on palm leaves and whose people lived on rafts, all of which would disappear. Another was Srivijaya, one of the leading trading centers on the Sumatran coast that was known to the Chinese as early as the 7th century during the golden age of the Tang dynasty, when China developed a taste for camphor, pepper and aromatic woods and oils.The region’s power topped out during the Mahajapit Empire, which gave the name Nusantara to the islands and coasts with a shared culture and seaborne trade. It was a period during which maritime trade expanded as demand from both China and Europe increased, Bowring writes. Mahajapit strength “came from its control of the three-cornered trade involving rice from the interior, spices from the east, and the sales of ceramics, textiles and other manufactures from China and India which had markets throughout the archipelago.”Chinese traders had long been active in the region and during the Song dynasty were followed by the huge ships of Zheng He – which apparently weren’t as huge as advertised, according to Bowring, because their method of manufacture simply wouldn’t have supported that much weight. But in any case, other influences began to permeate the region, followed by the colonial period.Today, he writes, Nusantaria “now has bigger states but no longer the seafaring prowess and technology which protected it until the arrival of the Europeans. Nor does it seem likely that it will acquire them in the foreseeable future.Nonetheless, trade is likely to continue to grow between East Asia and the countries of the Indian Ocean: the subcontinent, Iran, Arabia and East Africa. “If this is so, it will simply be a return to the situation 2,000 years ago when eastern spices and silks reached Cairo, Rome and Baghdad by sea via Sumatra, India and Eritrea, and sailors from the archipelago were regular visitors to Madagascar and the east African coast.“If so,” according to the book, “Nusantaria’s role is assured as a place for exchanging goods and ideas without it being a pawn of China, India or the west.” It is a role that is essential to understanding of a region that is still dynamic and not eclipsed by China.

Such an interesting book! If you are interested in how and why the Indo Pacific region became populated and who the prime movers were - this book is for you!

Good reading ; learned plenty of things about maritime Southeast Asia