The taxman cometh (but only for what he can see)

There have been two great transformations in human affairs. One is the Neolithic Revolution, the transition from foraging to farming. This is a transformation which is still going on, as there are still some foraging groups around the planet (though it is a vanishing way of life). The second is the Industrial Revolution, the shift from reliance on what is produced by land (farming), a factor of production managed but not created by humans, to reliance on factors of production produced by humans, the produced means of production (capital), such that farmers change from being about 80% of the workforce to less than 5%.

Compare and contrast
Both transformations are technological and involve expanded use of energy, setting off dramatic population increases (the second much faster than the first). In the foraging-to-farming transition, humans no longer merely took food from the environment around them; they deliberately grew food. This food was typically storable, so able to cope with variations in food production across the seasons.  Farming both increased the (food) energy to humans and allowed it to be stored for later use, to be actively managed across time. (Hence the very different attitudes to time between foraging and farming cultures.)

Industrialisation used wind, water and (particularly) steam energy to produce things which produced things. Increased agricultural production allowed increased production in general, with expanding sources and use of energy, ushering the creation of, not merely mass prosperity, but increasing mass prosperity. This is in stark contrast for the foraging-farming transition, where it is likely that general standards of living actually fell and, with some exceptions, remained stagnant for thousands of years.

Another contrast is that the foraging-farming transition lead to hierarchical societies with elite-dominated rulerships--whether autocratic, monarchic (i.e. containing powerful noble elites) or deliberative. The last were polities run by elite assemblies, the most democratic of these being some Mediterranean city-states where as much as a third of the adult population got to vote--i.e. male citizens; women, slaves and resident foreigners being excluded. Outside the Mediterranean, assemblies were also important in cities in Lower Mesopotamia and in the kshatriya republics of India. Conversely, with some hiccups, the Industrial Revolution has led to much more broadly-based forms of political life. Another contrast is that the share of output taken by taxation tended to be fairly constant across farming rulerships but has been steadily increasing in modern states.

Why did farming lead to hierarchical societies dominated by controlling elites? The standard answer has been increased production of food led to a surplus above subsistence which allowed a more differentiated society. The problem with this is, why there was any such surplus? Why did not population just increase to consume the surplus? What blocked population increase sufficient to allow the creation of the food surpluses that sustained these elites?

The second problem is, even if there was a food surplus, why did that not just lead to increased specialisation? What happened such that population was blocked from rising to consume the food surplus and that surplus was largely appropriated by a narrow, controlling elite? And, moreover, elites of differing sizes, with different land tenure systems.

Expropriating what you can see
Three Israeli economists have produced a paper (pdf) which provides an elegant answer. Their argument is that the key element is transparency; both in stored food and in expected production. Food had to be stored across the seasons, which made it more vulnerable to expropriation. In their words:


[Read the rest at Skepticlawyer.]

The Civilization of Angkor (2)

This is the second part of my review of Charles Higham’s The Civilization of Angkor. The first part is in my previous post.


"Sun Kings"
Jayavarman IV, the son of Indravarman’s daughter Mahendradevi who married his aunt, Jayadevi, half-sister of Yashovarman, took power. He built a rival centre at Chok Gargyar/Lingapura from whence he ruled. Higham provides statistics that illustrate the enormous scale of construction under these various rulers. Jayavarman IV was succeeded by his son Harshavarman II, whose brief rule was marked by conflict. He was succeeded by Rajendravarman, his uncle and first cousin, who moved the capital back to Yashodharapura (Pp70ff).

Inscriptions tell of the power and authority of provincial leaders, preceded by eulogies to the king. Acts of merit were delineated. Land boundaries and taxes in kind are set out: the latter usually rice, but also other goods of use to the court. Temple foundations included having assigned workers (Pp76ff). That this was a form of bondage is expressed by an inscription stating that a worker born in such temple lands had escaped and, when caught, had his eyes gouged out and his tongue removed, his family being exclusively assigned to the temple (p.79). In the aristocratic families, headship would pass down to sister’s son (p.84).

This was system based on a court with central officials, regional officers and aristocratic landholding families, often descended from supporters of founding ruler Jayavarman II and who intermarried with the royal dynasty. The administrative hierarchy tended to get more complex over time. The king stood at the apex of a legal system that was used by the elite to resolve disputes (typically over land). The service of “slaves” (those with various levels of bonded service) was sold or exchanged. Reservoirs, channels and canals were constructed. Temple foundations, with assigned land and workers, were a major part of the surplus extraction-and-use system. The last king in the first dynasty of Angkor, Jayavarman V, came to the throne as a 10 year old boy: after a period of regency arrangements, he took the throne in his own right. At his death, there was a prolonged civil war that brought a new dynasty to power (Pp79 ff).

Weaving through inscriptions setting out the (contradictory) stated histories of aristocratic families provides some glimpse into a period of civil war and competing kingships which was brought to an emphatic ritual end in 1011 when Suryavarman I held a great ceremony of allegiance where a large number of officials swore undying allegiance and service. The period of civil war seems to have been highly destructive and disruptive and be followed by much re-building (including starting the largest of the baray at Angkor) and widespread assertion of rights over land. His successor Udayadityavarman II was also an extensive builder, though his reign was marked by insurrections. In 1066, Udayadityavarman II was succeeded by his brother Harshavarman III, before another dynasty took the throne (Pp91ff).

A new dynasty
In 1080, Jayavarman VI was ritually enthroned, first of a new dynasty of rulers (ancestors of the current royal family) who seems to have come from the upper Mun valley (in modern Thailand). Inscriptions continue to record land grants and other favours to supporting families and donations to temple foundations. One such inscription records that the land purchased and donated was purchased with cattle, silver, bronze and tin vessels, gold rings, cloth, elephants, vehicles, salt, rice and goats. The donor also gifted workers and built a reservoir (Pp110-2).

Jayavarman VI was succeeded by his brother Dharanindravarman I c.1108, who appears to have been a somewhat ineffectual ruler. He was overthrown and killed by his grand-nephew Suryavarman II who was ritually consecrated in 1113 and set about re-uniting the empire, accepting submissions and building on a monumental. He was the builder of Angkor Wat, which makes him one of the great builder-rulers of history. Higham takes us through the enormous scale of the construction and the labour resources it must have taken (Pp107ff).

Suryavarman II’s reign was followed by a series of short reigns, internal strife and a devastating Cham invasion that included a sack of Angkor. The ruler who defeated the Cham and re-unified the Khmer empire was Jayavarman VII, the greatest of the Khmer ruler-builders, the builder of Angkor Thom and the Bayon. His massive building effort was a particular boon for scholars since he covered his buildings with carved battle and life scenes rather than mythological ones. From the pinnacle of his success he also showered his guru with extensive gifts. The inscriptions reveal the scale of some of the temple foundations (Pp120ff). One had:

Eighteen high priests and 2740 officials lived and worked there, together with 2202 assistants, which included 615 female dancers. In total, 12,640 people had the right to lodge within. Feeding and clothing this multitude involved the provision of rice, honey, molasses, oil, fruit, sesame, millet, beans, butter, milk, salt and vegetables, all these quantities being scrupulously listed for appropriation from the royal foundations and warehouses. Clothing was also required, and even the number of mosquito nets is set down. Assigned to supply the temple were 66,265 men and women, a figure rising to 79,365 if you include Burmese and Chams. The inscription then provides an inventory of the foundation’s assets: gold and silver vessels; 35 diamonds; 40,620 pearls; 4540 precious stones such a beryl; copper goblets; tin; lead; 512 silk beds; 876 veils from China; cushions; and 523 sunshades. There were musical instruments to ‘charm the spirit’ and, with nightfall or for rituals, there were 165,744 wax torches (Pp126-7).

All sustained by an empire built on a barter economy, without any coinage.

An empire that provided healthcare. The foundation was responsible for 102 hospitals (each of which had two doctors and their assistants, two dispensary workers, two cooks, water heaters, specialists in preparing medicines and other attendants, including those who prepared offerings to the Buddha) across the kingdom, to which 81,640 men and women from 838 villages were assigned to supply with rice, clothing, honey, wax and fruit: supplies which included 1960 boxes of salve to ease haemorrhoids (p.127). Another temple had 5324 villages housing 97,840 people assigned to its services (including 1000 dancers). Jayavarman VII was also recorded to have constructed 121 rest houses for travellers (p.129). How much his building program was continued by his successor Indravarman II is unclear. Like his father, he did display a preference for Buddhism. His successor, Jayavarman VIII, whose reign began in 1243, was an ardent Shivaite who destroyed or transformed “every image of the Buddha he could lay his hands on”. He was replaced in a palace coup by his son-in-law Indravarman III in 1295-6(p.133).

In 1296, the Chinese commercial attaché Zhou Daguan visited the Khmer realm. The surviving volumes of his journals are the only surviving contemporary description of the Khmer Empire, which Higham summarises. His descriptions included reference to female palace guards. Higham points out that his description of a royal procession in 1296 was very similar to that from 1901 (Pp134ff).

Diminishing evidence
After Zhou Daguan archaeologists rely on a small and diminishing number of inscriptions. Various rulers ascended the throne, of whom we know little. The last Sanskrit inscription dates from 1327: the high quality of the verse suggests that scholarship was still thriving (p.139). Warfare became endemic as the power of the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya increased in power—to the extent of sacking Angkor in 1430-1 after a long siege. Many statues of Buddha were moved to Ayutthaya. When it was sacked by the Burmese in 1569, they were taken to Pegu and then, in 1734, to Mandalay, where they can still be seen. The capital of Cambodia moved back to the Mekong valley, from whence it had moved seven centuries earlier, and Angkor Thom reverted to jungle (p.140).

Around 1600, the Portugese began to report legends of a rediscovered city, which was discovered by Europeans over the next few centuries: a process interrupted by war and Cambodia’s appalling late C20th history (Pp140ff).

The civilisation in summary
Higham concludes with a summary chapter on the civilisation of Angkor. He reprises the sequence by which the civilisation arose: the prehistoric Iron Age; the Delta state (150-550); state formation in the Mekong Valley (550-800); the capital at Angkor (800-1432). Higham notes that:

It is very difficult to pin down the status of the workers. Some could be bought and sold, some were war captives, while others may well have been in service to members of a noble family for generations and were assigned to develop a new foundation. Tied labour was not unusual in South-East Asia. As recently as the Ayutthaya period in Thailand, which ended in the eighteenth century, workers were tattooed to record their assigned place of work and to maintain a stable workforce (p.152).

His summary is an excellent consideration, showing a fine sense of what is, and is not, in the evidence (Pp 143ff).

High concludes with a comparison of Angkor with other “archaic states” (Pp162-6). Particularly in revealing the processes of state formation:

Robert Carniero, for example, has advanced six conditions for the emergence of a state from preceding chiefdoms. They revolve round the power to defeat neighbours and incorporate them in a larger polity; the power to enslave prisoners; the power to take tribute; the ability to provide a corps of fighting men; and ability to place supporters in control over conquered territory. There is considerable support for these propositions in recent instances of state formation assembled by Kent Flannery. The ritual and physical control of trade is a further variable, which recurs in many cases, while Henry Wright has noted how early stages in state formation are characterised by ‘chiefly recycling’: the ebb and flow of social complexity before the transition to the state has occurred. (Pp162-3).

There are also questions of patterns of expansion and contraction in state power.

Higham notes that rice, strong draught animals and iron technology are obvious differences with the jungle civilisations of Mesoamerica, but that there were considerable other similarities. There is also the issue of what role irrigation and water control played in state formation:

A further widespread feature of early trends towards state formation is the existence of drainage and agricultural improvement to maintain the loyalty of followers (p.164).

As trade, and so the Delta, declined, the shift in power towards the riverine flood plains saw:

two diametrically opposing forces at work. The first involved high chiefs, overlords or kings attempting to control land and labour through force and the projection of a sacred persona. This was offset by other local leaders pursuing independence and their own push for regional hegemony (p.164).

That looks like the same process to me—the struggle to control surplus (production beyond subsistence). Hence the cyclic rise and fall of overlords: a process that, as Higham notes, was also seen in the Near East the Americas.

As part of this process:

One does not need to look far to find evidence for growing social inequality. The very names are sufficient evidence; on the one hand, the Sanskrit title of the king meaning protégé of the great Indra, and on the other hand, workers with Khmer names meaning dog, stinker, black monkey and arse (p.164).

Which raises the question of what role successful kings played, what was their authority based on? He notes one scholar’s recent analysis that Mayan rulers were not much concerned with intensifying agriculture or trade beyond that which supported what they did care about—playing out and demonstrating their role as intermediaries with the divine. Higham holds there is insufficient evidence to support royal control of irrigation as being central to royal power and authority, which suggests more the role of divine intermediary: a suggestion that the scale and form of architecture, and the content of many inscriptions, support. None of which abolished the need to control distant provinces and protect borders: something the rulers of Angkor did with varying success.

But with enough success to produce seven centuries of rulership and dramatic construction which continues to be deeply symbolic to modern Cambodia.

Approaching an unfamiliar civilisation
The Khmer Empire, the civilisation of Angkor, is unfamiliar to most Western readers. In considering an unfamiliar civilisation, there are helpful questions to consider. For example, what is like, or unlike, other civilisations? For example, I am struck by the lack of fortifications: there were a few walled cities, but there seems to have been very limited use of fortification. This is in stark contrast to the Buddhist lands of the Tibetan cultural region, where fortified dzongs, palaces and monasteries are the dominant form of architecture.

But in the dry and cold Himalayan highlands, it is easy to store food for long periods and very hard to either “live off the land” or otherwise supply forces to sustain a siege. The geography also generates strategic “choke points”. Fortification is a very cost-effective strategy. In the hot, humid, teeming-with-life plains of Khmer civilisation, storing food for lengthy periods would be more difficult, sustaining a siege, or even just avoiding fortified points, much easier. Fortification is a much less cost-effective strategy. Walling one’s capital is about as far as it would be worth going.

Nor did it develop a self-aware horse-mounted warrior class such as the azadan of Zoroastrian Iran, the knights of Latin Christendom, or the samurai of Japan. This was in no useful sense a “medieval” society. On the contrary, it was a classical autocracy.

The centralised control, the monumental architecture, the importance of temples and religious institutions, the lack of coinage, means the civilisation of Angkor has a lot of overlap with Pharonic Egypt. Which also works in reverse: the similarities and differences then reflect back on one’s understanding of the civilisations that are more familiar.

Ironically, there is one aspect of medieval Latin Christendom which does seem to have an analogue in the Khmer Empire, the institution of serfdom. Scholars of Khmer history seem to have difficulty understanding how many graduations in forms of human bondage there can be between outright chattel slavery and freedom: something medieval scholars could explain quite readily.

The civilisation of Angkor was one capable of enormous and sustained building projects, with complex economic activity, including trade in assets, that had no coins. It was a barter economy. It had various mediums of exchange, various stores of value but, as far as we can see, no single unit of account. Certainly no medium of account: so no money in any useful sense of the term. A useful corrective example to presumptions and congenial “just so” stories about money: only one way in which studying Khmer civilisation is enlightening. Particularly in such a comprehensive and useful text as Higham’s The Civilisation of Angkor provides.

The Civilization of Angkor (1)

Charles Higham’s The Civilization of Angkor is very much focussed on the rise, achievement and decline of the civilisation of Angkor: of what led to the creation of the amazing constructions of Angkor. As Higham writes, the book:

sets the supreme architectural achievement of the civilization of Angkor in its historic context (p.4).

Higham precedes his narrative with a timeline interposing events from Anglo history with Khmer history from 2300BC to 1600AD—so 410, the year of the Roman abandonment of Britain, becomes “the fall of the Western Roman Empire” (Pp xiii ff).

We start with the European discovery of the ruins of Angkor, their amazement on the scale, the lack of belief that they were created by the local Khmer people and the contemporary (1296) report of the Chinese visitor Zhou Daguan (Pp1ff). Higham then provides a general description of Angkor:

Angkor is the name conventionally given to the cities and the associated monuments that lie between the Tonle Sap and the associated monuments that lie between the Tonle Sap and the Kulen Hills. The name derives from the Sanskrit nagara, meaning ‘holy city’ (p.4).

New temples were built there for seven centuries or more from about AD 700 (and included a reservoir 8km x 2.5km).

As Higham notes:

Illuminating an extinct civilization is a demanding and challenging endeavour … This is particularly the case for the Western scholar where the civilizatioin of Angkor is concerned, because the people, the religion, the environment, indeed virtually all aspects of its life and culture are alien (Pp4,6).

The sequence leading up to the establishment of Angkor Higham sets out as being Iron Age (starting 500BC), the formation of the earliest state around AD 150 in the Mekong Delta which declined “due largely to changing trade patterns” (p.6), then several rulerships competing for power AD 550-800 culminating in the establishment of the Angkor royal centre.

Rulership in context
To put this process in wider context, Higham examines three key questions:

What is a state, how does it come into being, and how is it maintained (p.6)?

Higham provides a brief summary of anthropological understanding of chiefdoms:

in which leaders dominate a social web where individuals are related by kinshipo [which]… usually involve a central settlement in which the chief resides, and one or two categories of smaller, dependent settlements. The chief is usually distinguished by symbols of status, and will often be accorded elaborate mortuary rites (p.6).

From these evolve states in which:

although kinship ties remain, people are also identified by their class within a complex social network … one comprising the ruling elite. The royal tier will usually be accorded a divine origin and the ability to communicate with the gods. There are four levels of settlement hierarchy from the capital down through provincial settlements to villages. The king will live in a palace, and play an important role in rituals. His court absorbs surplus production from a much larger sustaining area than in a chiefdom, and high-ranking members of the court are recognized by special titles, offices and symbols of status. The regulation of labour and the appropriation of surplus production is essential in the support of the administrative machinery for an enforceable legal system, an army, full-time priests and state temples (Pp6-7).

In other words, a state is a chiefdom on steroids, while a chiefdom is a proto-state. Both are about rulership and control of surplus, but a state operates on a greater scale that involves considerably greater social complexity.

To illustrate the processes by which a state can evolve from chiefdoms, Higham goes through the C18th-C19th history of the Yao people of Malawi as:

the recorded course of their development is so similar to what we think might have occurred in the Mekong Delta (p.7).

The Yao started off in villages where a group of sisters appointed their oldest living brother as village headmen. These villages rarely exceeded 50-60 people as:

this social system encouraged young aspiring leaders to leave and found their own settlement (p.7).

Contact with Arab traders seeking ivory and slaves in exchange for beads, cloth and metal wire radically changed this. As the headman traditionally managed trade and distributed its benefits, an upsurge in trade increased their standing while the demand for slaves “engendered much tension among the Yao and their neighbours”. Male slaves were sold, female slaves increased the headman’s retinue:

The transition from village headman to great chief was swift, happening in the space of half a life span. As the emerging chiefs expanded their domains and increased their power through trading for guns, so they adopted the exotic manners and customs of the Arab traders. This enhanced their prestige in the eyes of their followers. Some accepted Islam, and changed their names … They began to use Arab writing to keep their records. As towns developed from villages, it became necessary to grow more food, and irrigation was brought to their fields (p.8).

Swap Islam for Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism, swap Arabic for Sanskrit, and this looks remarkably what happened in the Mekong Delta: including that the process was chosen by the headmen, not imposed from outside.

Prehistory
Higham examines the process of Indianisation, and the key ideas of Hinduism (Pp9-11). Followed by the role of rice (Pp11-12). As he notes:

States are fuelled by the energy supplied by agricultural surpluses (p.11).

Having summarised the key issues, Higham moves onto the prehistoric periods in South-East Asia (2300BC-AD 400) (Pp13ff).

Archaeology is beginning to greatly expand our understanding of prehistoric South-East Asia. These societies:

were vigorous and powerful. They engaged in distant maritime exchange, and their leaders organized large-scale water control measures. They maintained specialized bronze and iron workshops, and were recognized in death with rich burials, which would include gold and silver jewellery and hundreds of bronze ornaments (p.13).

Rice farmers and farming arrived in the region about 4300 years ago, setting in train the normal supplanting of foragers and foraging. As Higham notes:

The pathway to civilization required the energy provided by rice agriculture … the adaptability of this marsh grass, its nutritional value especially when it is consumed with fish, the degree to which the landscape can be modified to expand it production, and the relative ease with which it can be stored. Rice is the solid rock on which South-East Asian civilizations were founded (p.14).

Higham takes us through the interaction between human society and geography (including the importance of the monsoon), the development of the local Bronze Age (1500-500BC), helped by good local supplies of tin, and then the Iron Age:

the Iron Age ancestors of Angkor lived in large communities in which some individuals, both men and women, were interred with opulent grave goods and much ritual. Iron was employed not only to increase agricultural efficiency but to forge weapons of war. Salt processing reached an industrial scale; specialists were able to produce for their leaders outstanding ceramic vessels and ornaments of bronze, glass, gold, silver, carnelian and agate. There was increased competition and conflict, as skilled and intrepid navigators engaged in international trade. Iron Age chiefdoms were now poised for the transition to the state (p.22).

Evidence of trade between the Iron Age communities of central Thailand and India dates back to at least 380BC (p.23). Chinese sources claim South-East Asian ocean-going ships 50m in length and weighing over 600 tons by the C5th. Chinese dynastic records include a report from emissaries Kang Tai and Zhu Ying to the Wu emperor about a state they call Funan operating in the Mekong Delta in the C3rd. Archaeology at a site named Oc Eo confirmed many of the activities in the Chinese reports and a local coinage (which does not seem to have persisted). Oc Eo was linked by a canal with Angkor Borei, a walled city of about 300ha, 90km to the north. The city wall is 2.4m wide and 4.5m high, with a moat of 22m in width—so a considerable construction. There were also water reservoirs—or baray—whose function remains the subject of much scholarly debate (Pp24ff).

Rising complexity
Higham takes us through the archaeological evidence, including early Sanskrit inscriptions. He observes that no prehistoric sites have been found in the Delta, presumably because of the regular flooding. With the development of flood retreat rice farming (where water is stored and released during the dry season) it became able to support substantial populations (including urban centres). Nevertheless, the social and political structures that grew up (including significant specialisation) were clearly dependant on the benefits of maritime trade. How centralised political structures were is unclear (the large canals suggest political centralisation). The rise of Java from the C5th as the maritime connector between China and India massively undermined the Delta, leading to the shrinking and abandoning of urban centres due to loss of trade (Pp29ff).

A C13th Chinese compilation includes description of a C7th Khmer ruler of some power and magnificence. This period seems to be one of competing rulerships, where inland rulers may have achieved varying levels of dominance. Inscriptions reveal various dynasties (one of which seems to have three generations of ruling queens) with fluctuating areas of control. Inscriptions also reveal a mixture of appointed and hereditary (pon) titles with a court-centred social hierarchy. Management of temple foundations, including what appears to have been significant levels of trade (including of assets), seems to have been a path to wealth. This was a barter economy:

there was no system of coinage. Goods were valued by reference to the weight of silver, or quantity of rice or the length or quality of cloth (p.48).

This did not preclude sophisticated economic transactions:

There are records of assets being exchanged through individuals through the aegis of the temple management. On occasion, we find that land was mortgaged, as it were, to a temple in return for silver or cloth, and the product of the land was assigned as a form of interest payment (p.49).

Inheritance was indirectly matrilineal (through sister’s son), though one major dynasty shifted to patrilineal succession along with its assumption of the style of gods while another, for three generations, had direct matrilineal (mother-daughter) succession. Higham argues that direct succession better promoted intergenerational asset accumulation. Jayavarman I was the first king recorded to have divine honours in his own lifetime, an act which went with royal authority superseding those of pon in control of assets. Now the king, not temples, would be the final arbiter of assets and land use. The centralisation of authority from 720-770 coincides with a drastic reduction in the number of inscriptions, limiting our knowledge. Higham summarises the period 550-800 as one where states emerged, conflict was recurrent and a “thin veneer” of Indianisation was adopted over local patterns and worship (Pp50ff).

Empire
From about 800 to about 1000, the aforementioned patrilineal dynasty with divine honours ruled a substantial empire as universal kings. This kingdom, Kambujadesa, was a agrarian surplus rulership which controlled the Delta, the lowlands around the Great Lake and the agricultural lands to the west. It engaged in increasingly substantial temple and baray construction.

The first king of this universal rulership, Jayavarman II, established the tradition of having himself consecrated king-of-kings in an elaborate ritual:

The court was projected at the centre of the kingdom and a representation of heaven, but was sustained by the agricultural surplus. The inscriptions are filled not only with references to the elite aristocrats and their meritorious acts, but also contain details of land ownership, field boundaries and the duties of retainers. We find many references to slaves, but it would be wrong to regard this as a slave-based society. The rural populace donated part of their time and labour to maintain the local temple. Thus part of their production, be it rice, butter, honey, cloth or livestock, was directed to the capital. Our knowledge this, the first dynasty of Angkor, comes from the inscriptions, reservoirs and surviving stone or brick temples. On the one hand, we encounter a dynasty of kings who built on an increasingly massive scale and extended their power through elite aristocrats to the sustaining populace. On the other hand, we find endemic instability rooted within disputes in a dynasty that had no clear rules to govern the succession, and the constant problem of maintaining control over the provinces (Pp53-4).

The concentration of control over surpluses naturally created a target for attempted seizure.

How Jayavarman II came to power is unclear, though sites with relevant inscriptions provide indications of the extent of his power. A map (p.55) usefully charts where inscriptions associated with various rulers have been found. For details about events of Jayavarman II’s reign we are dependant on inscriptions dated about 260 or more years later. Higham takes us through the archaeology, how little is known about his son and successor Jayavarman III then the building, and unclear lineage, of his successor Indravarman I, who describes himself as a great warrior. His son and successor Yashovarman I also described himself as a great warrior and built on an even grander scale (Pp54ff).

The inscriptions of Yashovarman’s reign show royal control over the allocation of land, with a social hierarchy radiating from the king:

The key element in this great architectural achievement is the control of labour … It may be that the same people who worked on the buildings during the dry season would return to their duties in the rice fields with the rains. … The state superstructure … fundamentally relied on the agricultural surpluses, a situation that illustrates the importance given to land tenure and agricultural production (p.69).

Inscriptions from the reign of his sons and successors Harshavarman I and Ishanavarman II tells us of an official in charge of collecting the rice taxation and grants of exemptions from service.


This review will be concluded in my next post.

Angkor and the Khmer Civilization (2)

This concludes my review of Michael D. Coe’s Angkor and the Khmer Civilization. The first part of the review was in my previous post.


Classic Angkor: society
Having traced the path of the Khmer Empire, Coe now takes us through the society of the Empire in The Life and Culture of Classic Angkor. After a survey of the sources (Pp131ff), we start at the top with the imperial compound, which probably had so many people resident (“bureaucrats, servants, slaves, guards, religious specialists and others … including a sizeable corps of pages”) as to resemble a small city. Khmer society lacked a hereditary nobility: instead, royal officials were appointed (mostly from the major landholding families). Membership of the royal family was only recognised out to the fifth degree and entailed “little authority except that conferred by the monarch”. The appointed officials had the title khlon (in the C19th, they were known as okna).

This bureaucratic class was enormous, and existed on all levels of administration from the capital down to the smallest village (p.134).

Caste was never adopted in Khmer society: the notion of varna was used to grade folk at the royal court, but membership was allocated by the king. The king:

seems to have combined the secular, military role of a Kshatriya with the religious functions and ideology of a Brahmin (p.134).

The virtue of being able to pick and choose which parts of Indian culture and civilisation one found useful: the monarchs being the dominant pickers and choosers.

As for the peasant farmers (about 80% of the population in most agrarian societies), such rice farmers were:

subject to regular corvee labour and to occasional military service, and obligated to provide goods and services to the religious foundations, to landlords, to the mandarin bureaucracy, and to the king. Many of these laboured on the estates of large landholders, while others were attached to specific temples; and some were dedicated to providing the palace with certain types of products. Some of these sound like serfs, but little is known about serfdom in ancient Cambodia (p.134).

Where wealth comes from control of labour rather than (plentiful) land, some form of bondage is likely: if they were forbidden to leave without permission, then they were serfs. Either way, it seems likely that labour service was how land rent was paid.

Which leads to the issue of khnum “usually translated as ‘slave’”. In the C19th, outright slaves were of two sorts:

1) debt slaves, a theoretically temporary category, and 2) slaves for life, who were far less numerous, and who were either those who had been sold by their parents during childhood, or aboriginal Mon-Khmer tribesmen captured in the eastern highlands (these were treated abominably by the Khmer majority). The Classic inscriptions describe three kinds of slaves: 1) slaves legally acquired, 2) slaves who are inherited, and 3) religious slaves (p.134).

. Chinese chronicler Zhou Daguan says of the full slaves:

If young and strong, slaves may be worth a hundred pieces of cloth: when old and feeble, they can be had for thirty or forty pieces (p.134).

This being a barter economy based ultimately on control of labour. Indeed, it seems likely that khnum actually described “obligated provider of labour”:

The reality is that while khnum could never be aristocratic or bureaucrats (no individual khnum ever belonged to the varna), the term covered a wide spectrum of society from peasant commoners to the most abject tribal chattels living in degradation on the ground floor with the animals (p.135).

The ultimate font of authority was the raj (Sanskrit) or stach (Old Khmer). He was executive ruler, chief judge and law-giver. He had to rule through agents, who had their own kin and other networks: a clear limitation on his power, a limitation that varied with the “vigour” and circumstances of particular monarchs. There are few surviving portraits of monarchs, who lived in the centre of thousands of servitors. A teenage prince would have a Vrah Guru, a Brahmin teacher entrusted with his instruction according to the classic Indian texts (Pp135ff).

The empire was divided into provinces (likely 23 at its height) that were divided into villages (sruk or grama):

At every level there were mandarin bureaucrats (khlon, ‘chiefs’) representing the central administration, and who ensured that revenues (rice, goods, corvee labour, and the like) flowed smoothly upwards through the system. Most or all of these were appointed by the king (p.141).

The village headman (khlon sruk) was a royal agent: the village elders (mavrddha) represented the village.

An ambitious individual from a prominent family could by a tract of unoccupied land or obtain it from the king, then found a new (sruk with royal approval (p,141).

The incomes of many villages could support wealthy landholders: one C12th monastery within Angkor (Ta Prohm) received the revenue of 3,140 villages. Since Classical inscriptions were overwhelmingly religious in nature, knowledge of the religious hierarchy is much more extensive than that of the secular hierarchy. The latter included a corps of travelling royal inspectors (p.142).
As for law and order:

As in the rest of the Indic world, the Angkor state and empire were governed by rules laid down in the Code of Manu, a great compendium of Brahman law probably composed in the fourth century BC. Of course, modifications had to be made to a legal system that had been devised for the rigid four-caste system of Vedic India. … The Khmer king was the defender of law and order in Cambodia. His law courts, present on every administrative level right down to the village, instituted criminal proceedings against transgressors and guaranteed the integrity of landholdings and the settling of boundary disputes. Not even religious institutions such as temples were immune, since they as well as private individuals could be sued over land.
In theory, the king owned all land in the empire, but in practice he did not … his main function was to serve as umpire in unresolved land disputes, and to sanction transfers of rights to religious foundations and private individuals (p.144).

Much of the countryside is likely to have been largely controlled by such. Zhou reports there was an annual census in the 9th month: if control of labour is central, then keeping track of it would clearly be important.

The economy was an agrarian rice economy. Since the only surviving writings are on stone, there is a great deal that is not known. Including the actual function of the baray, the vast water features regularly constructed by rulers (they covered millions of square metres with volumes of millions of cubic metres). Coe reports the competing scholarly positions (Pp145ff), though recent evidence has confirmed they were used in irrigation.

Zhou was Chinese commercial attaché, so an authoritative contemporary source on such matters:

Because it was generally the women, not the men, who had charge of trade, Chinese merchants … took care to get a Khmer wife (p.149).

According to Zhou:

In small transactions barter is carried on with rice, cereals, and Chinese objects; fabrics are next employed, and, finally, in big deals, gold or silver is used (p.149).

Zhou’s list of trade goods is reproduced: unsurprisingly, the list of Khmer exports is rather shorter than the list of imports (a common situation when production is dominated by primary products).

As for taxes:

The Classic Khmer state was an immense revenue-gathering machine, and every individual in Cambodia except religious functionaries, priests, monks and slaves was subject to taxation, which was paid in kind, since there was no system of coinage. The king was the supreme receiver of taxes—there was a Khmer formula that went svey vrah rajya, ‘he eats the kingdom’ … but officials at every level participated in the system … The king also benefited by revenues from his immense landholdings, as well as from at least part of the booty gained from military victories.
There seem to have been taxes on everything – on land, on rice, on salt, wax and honey, and so forth. Land taxes were based on paddy size and productive capacity … Payments could be made in all kinds of goods, including not only rice but also slaves, buffaloes, elephants and especially cloth (p.150).

The religious exclusion was deemed a metaphysical exchange.

Drawing on Hindu precedent, Brahmins were excluded from taxation by virtue of the theory that they transferred one sixth of their spiritual gains to the king, a notion that was extended to exempt the great private religious foundations, themselves the recipients of vast revenues from land grants (p.150).

There appears to have been a considerable network of roads and bridges as well as use of horses, elephants and carts. Elephants travel around 24-40 km a day, and consume vast quantities of water—supplying the royal elephant herd must have been part of the purpose of the baray. Elephants and two-horse chariots were used in war (Pp151ff).

Wooden buildings do not survive, so inference from stone construction is required. Of such there is a vast amount, all mortarless. Khmer civilisation produced amazing sculpture, not a single piece of which is signed. Many aspects of Khmer civilisation remain little studied (Pp155ff). Zhou Daguan is the main source on daily life in Angkor and there is a clearly an element of exoticism in his descriptions (not to mention projection). He seems to have been particularly struck by the sexual openness of Khmer society, especially the women.

The region’s humidity is not kind to much of human creation:

No costumes, dress or textiles of any kind have survived from Classical times (p.175).

Zhou describes strict sumptuary laws in C13th Angkor. Sculptures depict no one with upper body covering except warrior kings and soldiers, who often have jackets or bodices ending above the waste. Coe takes us through the (limited) information on aspects of daily life (Pp184ff).

The scholarly debates on Khmer history are interwoven into Coe’s narrative. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz developed the notion that the Indic states of SE Asia were theatre states where display was the purpose; that, in his words, ‘power served pomp, not pomp power’ (p.179). Zhou’s quoted descriptions vividly describe massive ritual and ceremonial display centred on the monarch (Pp179ff). The history of modern totalitarianism suggests that display can very be much an aspect of power: of manifesting and expressing a converging set of expectations based on the prestige and dominance of the ruler—given that much more intensity if the ruler is seen as the conduit through which grand cosmic purpose flows.

Coe notes that:

There never seems to have been a time in Cambodia’s history when Khmers were not fighting each other, or waging war on foreign enemies (p.185).

This is hardly surprising, since there was such an enormous, concentrated extraction of surplus to fight over. It does mean there is a great deal of sculpted pictorial material on Khmer warfare, which Coe takes us through. Zhou was less impressed, saying “generally speaking, these people have neither discipline nor strategy” (p.187). It very much seems to be the warfare of “biggest wins”, with little evidence of a dedicated warrior class, rather than paid officers mobilising (possibly conscripted) peasants. Such a mode of warfare encouraged imperial dominance: the universal monarchs would have had little interest in creating a warrior elite that might be difficult to control.

There are over 1,200 surviving inscriptions from ancient Khmer, almost all in the early Kingdoms and Khmer Empire periods. Those in Sanskrit tend to be in poetic form. There was much concern for the cosmological, including astrological but no evidence that literacy extended beyond a small elite: on the contrary, the vast pictorial displays very much are what would impress and communicate to largely illiterate peasants (Pp188ff).

Coe notes John Miksic division of SE Asian cities into the heterogenetic, found along coastlines and borders of ecological zones, with few public monuments, but intensive trade, entrepreneurship and high population densities and the orthogenetic:

… located well inland, and were correlated with the production of a surplus staple crop – that is, rice – which could be commandeered by the authorities. Stability and ritual were the prevailing order, and there were impressive monuments of a religious nature. There was no money and little evidence of large markets and significant trade. … overall population density was very low. From everything that we know about Angkor, it would appear to have been orthogentic (p.191).

The old Thai capital of Ayutthaya (founded 1351, destroyed by the Burmese in 1767) was a “conscious clone” of Angkor. From this city, still little understood as a lived-entity but well-mapped as an archaeological one, the Khmer monarchs ruled an Empire that lasted as long as Rome’s (p.194) (at least the Western Empire).

And after
In the final chapter, The post-Classic Period: Decline and Transformation, Coe takes us through the distinguishing characteristics of post-Classical Khmer civilisation and the many theories (but little clear knowledge) of how and why the Empire collapsed.

Post-Classic Khmer civilisation was marked by:

The monarch is no longer a chakravartin, but merely king of Cambodia.
The capital in various locations between the Great Lake and the Delta.
Theravada Buddhism as the state religion, with Pali rather than Sanskrit as its language.
Stone temple architecture and prasats replaced by wood-built viharas (‘pagodas’) and other monastic buildings.
State and ancestral temples in disuse; or converted to Buddhist worship and made the object of long-distance pilgrimages.
Predominance of the Sangha (Buddhist order of monks) in all aspects of life.
Middle Khmer replaces Old Khmer as the language of the people and the court.
Written royal chronicles, but few contemporary stone inscriptions.
Absence or abandonment of large-scale public works, such as the barays and the major canals in Angkor and elsewhere.
Strong development of maritime trade with China, Japan, and parts of Southeast Asia.
Marked Thai (Siamese) influence in art, architecture, theatre and court life (p.195).

Clearly, the level of extractable surplus was much less. As Coe points out, the expansion of maritime trade gave Khmer monarchs could reason to move their capital to the “Quatre Bras” region “easily reached by junks coming up from the Delta” (p.197). Trade was “almost entirely in the hands of foreigners” (p.210): predominantly Chinese (and Japanese, before the Tokugawa bakufu closed off Nippon to the outside world) but also Malays, Arabs and various Europeans. The lack of a Khmer merchant class may well have seriously limited the standing of mercantile interests at court. The continuation of barter (i.e. the failure to adopt a coinage) probably limited the monarchy’s capacity to profit from maritime trade. While the continuation of monarchical domination of surplus extraction may well have helped foreclose the rise of a Khmer merchant class. (The monarchy displayed a remarkably cavalier attitude to Vietnamese migration into the Delta in the late C17th: this resulted in the subsequent loss of major direct access to oceanic maritime trade with the Vietnamese takeover of the Delta around 1700.)

Coe concludes that:

… civilizations – like biological species – usually fall from multiple causes, not single ones. Alterations in the religious paradigm, military incursions, over-population and ecological collapse, and the shifting of trade routes and patterns, finished off the Classic, monsoon-forest cultures of both Cambodia and the Maya area (p.197).

A civilisation is a system (or, if you like, an interlocked network of systems): if any key part starts to unravel, interactions can easily widen the pattern of unravelling. Resilience in the face of stress can require openness of thinking at least as much as institutional responsiveness and centuries of success can easily close off both.

Coe summarises the sources available for the post-Classic period (p.197ff), examines Theravada Buddhism and its role in Cambodia (Pp201ff), the use of Angkor as a Theravada centre (Pp204-5), Cambodia’s precarious place between Thai and (particularly) Vietnamese expansion (Pp205ff), the course of post-Classic history until Cambodia became a French Protectorate in 1863 (Pp208ff), the operation of post-Classic life and administration (Pp213ff), trade and commerce (p.219), post-Classic warfare:

There was no standing army – in times of war, the patron was expected to muster a force of his clients, and place himself or an officer designated by the king at its head (p.219)

post-Classic art (Pp220-1) and mental life (Pp222ff). This includes the Reamker, a reworking of the Ramayana to reflect Khmer culture and Theravada Buddhism. The chapter finishes with a one-page epilogue of Cambodian history from 1863 to the present, noting that Angkor’s five towers are on its flag, a descendant of its rulers is the monarch and Buddhism is again the state religion (p224).

Coe concludes with a list of rulers of Angkor and known pre-Angkor rulers (p.225) and a note on visiting Angkor (p.226).

Michael D. Coe’s Angkor and the Khmer Civilization is a very accessible survey of a civilisation which did so much to set the patterns of SE Asian history and culture: one that managed great architectural achievements while remaining a barter economy.

Angkor and the Khmer Civilization (1)

Michael D. Coe’s Angkor and the Khmer Civilization is “volume one hundred and nine in the series Ancient Peoples and Places” (p.4), a numbering which nicely indicates how large Khmer civilisation does (not) loom in the Western historical consciousness. Most people would be aware of the Angkor ruins, but have only the vaguest notion of the civilisation that produced it, except as the forerunner of modern Cambodia.

Which is a bit like saying the Roman Empire was the forerunner of modern Italy. Khmer civilisation during its classic period (802-1327) was the seminal civilisation of mainland SE Asia, dominating modern Cambodia, southern Laos, the Mekong delta and central Thailand. Coe’s book is an excellent survey of the rise and decline of this civilisation.

Coe’s scholarly speciality is “the other great monsoon forest civilisation” (p.7), the Maya of Mesoamerica, a comparison that informs his treatment. He divides the trajectory of Khmer society into Early Farmers, Early Kingdoms, Classic and post-Classic (p.9) with a useful full-page timeline (p.10).

The Introduction deals with European discovery and engagement with Angkor and Khmer history (Pp11ff) concluding with a full-page explanation and potted summaries of the various periods: hunters and gatherers to c.3600-3000BC, early farming period to c.500BC, Iron Age to c.200-500AD, early kingdoms to 802AD, Classic 802-1327 and post-Classic 1327-1863 (p.20): or, to put it another way; foragers, farmers, chiefdoms, states, empire, aftermath.

The ruins of Angkor are vast: the first colour plate is a synthetic-aperture radar image of Angkor from the space shuttle Endeavour:

The entire urban complex covers about 1000 square km (386 square miles), and its core area c.200 square km (77 square miles). There is nothing else to equal it in the archaeological world (p.11).

Coe then moves on to the geographical setting (Pp21ff) – the various black-and-white illustrations throughout the book and magnificent colour plates are helpful. So, for example, the picture of the massive Khong Falls (the modern day boundary between Laos and Cambodia) makes it quite clear why they “effectively block all boat communication between the lower and upper reaches of the river” (p.21), which makes the Mekong far less of a conduit for human traffic than it might be. The great waterway of Angkor was not the Mekong but Tonle Sap (the Great Lake) on the Tonle Sap River, a tributary of the Mekong.

The setting
Like much of Asia, Khmer was and is a rice civilisation. Khmer is one of the many Asian languages where the word for ‘food’ is ‘cooked rice’ (bai). Rice and fish are the basis of the economy (p.29), Coe taking us through the varieties of rice cultivation; dry rice, bunded field, flood-retreat and “floating” rice (Pp30ff).

Then it is on to peoples and languages (Pp33ff). A map of languages (p.35) makes it clear that linguistic boundaries do not entirely coincide with modern political boundaries. There is a significant Khmer borderland in Thailand and a minority remnant in southern Vietnam.

In modern Cambodia, there are some Tai (Thai, Lao) speakers along the upper Mekong, significant areas of Mountain Mon-Khmer as well as Mountain Cham and Cham enclaves. But language boundaries have also changed over time. The Mekong delta was Khmer until the late C17th, when the Vietnamese influx began, while the Tai peoples migrated down from Southern China in the C12th and C13th (displaying some similarities in their role vis-à-vis the Khmer Empire as that of the Germanic peoples vis-à-vis the Western Roman Empire). There is also the normal history of language mixing:

It is now generally recognised that Vietnamese is a Mon-Khmer language that shows the effect of long contact with Chinese in its vocabulary, in its use of tones, and its tendency to be monosyllabic (p.36).

The animist-shamanistic Mon-Khmer mountain peoples have been traditionally despised by the Khmer and subject to slave raids. The Cham had a significant rival kingdom before being conquered by the Vietnamese in 1471: the Cham had been Hindu-Buddhist but converted to Islam from the C11th onwards (Pp36-7).

The Khmer script (the first inscription of which dates from 611) is Indic in that it is far more complex than a simple alphabet. The language itself tends to be very concrete, borrowing abstract terms from Sanskrit and, after the adoption of Theravada Buddhism, Pali (still the main source of neologisms in contemporary Khmer). We have about 1200 surviving rock inscriptions, most in Sanskrit, and religious: the surviving Khmer script, while still largely religious in context, tends to deal with more mundane administrative matters (Pp40-1).

Foragers, farmers and early kingdoms
The fourth chapter, The Khmer before history (Pp43ff), deals with foragers, farmers and chiefdoms, the latter apparently the result of the advent of iron tools and weapons and increased social differentiation:

Onto this Iron Age ‘basement culture’ was to be grafted a belief system that had its origins over two millennia ago in the plain of India’s Ganges River, laying the foundation for what was eventually to become the civilisation of Angkor (p.56).

Moving on to the early kingdoms period (Pp57ff), Coe notes that the region known as ‘Indochina’ has culturally far more that comes from India than China: the exception being ‘Tonkin’ or the Red River valley (i.e. the proto-Vietnamese), which was sinicised.

Ironically, there are almost no Indian texts on the region (apart from reference to risky-but-high-return trading opportunities) but several Chinese texts which, given the linguistic difficulties of transliterating from non-tonal polysyllabic languages (Khmer, Sanskrit) to a tonal monosyllabic language (Chinese), and Chinese disdain for ‘barbarian’ peoples, are more ethnographically revealing than historically so (p.57). Coe quotes at length from various Chinese reports on the Mekong Delta Khmer cities and societies:

They have neither rites nor propriety. Boys and girls follow their penchants without restraint (p.59)

conveys the general tone. (The relative freedom of the sexes—and so sexuality—is a recurring comment on Khmer society by outside observers.)

The picture the Chinese chronicles give of a dominant state or states (‘Funan’, ‘Zhemla’) is contradicted by contemporary Khmer inscriptions, which indicate no dominant state or rulership. Scholars relying more on the latter (i.e. contemporary) records have built up a picture of a series of Iron age chiefdoms which, as Chinese demand for luxury goods increased, coalesced in the Mekong delta into trading ports with local rulerships:

The chiefs of these palisaded settlements bore the Mon-Khmer title of pon, an office that was passed down matrilineally (passing from the deceased to sister’s son). The population of a core pon-dom formed its own lineage or clan, with its own deity whose representative was the pon himself …
There was a hierarchy of pon, probably based on wealth and political influence. As early as the fifth century AD, superior pon started claiming kingship, taking on Indian names and titles … although Khmer names linger (Pp61-62).

The earliest Khmer king whose existence is firmly historically established, Rudravarman, ruled the Delta pon in the first half of the C6th (p.62).

This was the period in which Hinduism and Buddhism became firmly established in the region, particularly amongst the Khmer. Indian traders operated from the Red Sea (linking with the Roman Empire) to the Mekong Delta (thereby linking to Chinese trade). Buddhism spread easily along trade routes, being both a congregational and proselytising religion, comfortable with trade. That Brahmanism also spread was more surprising, since it is highly agrarian in its origins and structures (p.62).

It is less surprising if one considers that what actually spread was worship of the Hindu gods, particularly Vishnu and Shiva—figures of awe, power and prestige—and Brahmin status and learning. The caste system never established itself in Khmer society (p.63), except as a vehicle for court language. To put it another way: what spread was those parts of Vedic Brahmanism that were most compatible with royal status-seeking and Buddhism, particularly Mahayana Buddhism. Even better, the Indian states and principalities were not expansionist outside India, so Khmer rulers could pick and choose which aspects of Indianisation suited them: coins, for example, never took on, the Khmer lands remaining a barter economy until the arrival of the French in the mid C19th (Pp62-3). The archaeology of the Delta has been much disrupted by the violence of its C20th history (Pp64ff).

Being a barter economy was another similarity with Pharonic Egypt and Mayan Guatemala—barter societies whose rulers produced great monumental architecture. As the Khmer lands were barter societies, they lacked mechanisms to transfer obligations across time, with (given the hot and humid climate) particularly poor ability to store produce over the longer term. One can see the appeal to Khmer rulers of great projects that soaked up surpluses in ways the kings controlled: hence the constant building by the rulers of the later Khmer empire of yet new “temple mountains”, complexes and artificial lakes.

By the early C7th, political power seems to have shifted from the maritime cities of the Delta to inland cities controlling rice surpluses. Societies became more stratified, kings became more powerful, the pon title faded away, temple foundations spread. This is the period when the first Angkor site, Angkor Borei, was established, linked to the Delta by a long canal, with considerable striking Hindu and Buddhist sculpture based on lively reinterpretation of Gupta styles. Coe takes us through the archaeology of this and other Khmer sites from the period (Pp68ff). Several page inserts take the reader through the central points of Hinduism (Pp80-4) and Buddhism (Pp85-8).

Classic Angkor
Then it is on to the classic Angkorean period of Khmer Empire. Coe lists the defining characteristics (even though some also pre-dated or post-dated the period) as being:

A universal monarch as head of an imperial state.
The capital of the empire almost always based in Angkor.
Hinduism and/or Mahayana Buddhism as the state religion.
Religious architecture primarily in stone (sandstone and laterite) rather than wood.
State and ancestral temples.
Workship of the linga.
Prasats (shrine towers) housing images of the gods, often arranged in quincunx and supported by stepped pyramids.
Massive and extensive public waterworks, including canals and vast reservoirs (barays).
A network of highways, causeways and masonry bridges.
Inscriptions in Sanskrit, as well as Khmer.
Iconography primarily Hindu, mainly derived from the epics and from the Puranas. (p.97)

With no serious geographical barriers to unity, the warring minor kingdoms eventually produced a warlord able to conquer them all. This was Jayavarman II (‘protected by victory’) known posthumously as Parameshvara (‘supreme lord’) whose crowning as universal monarch in 802 in a Brahmin rite is taken as the establishment date of the Khmer Empire (Pp97-100).

An inset explains the somewhat chaotic dynastic succession processes in Cambodia whose tendency to fratricidal conflict was somewhat balanced by a tendency to select for competence (p.100). Jayavarman II established his capital at Hariharalaya (named after the deity that unified Vishnu and Shiva). His son Jayavarman III engaged in significant building in stone in the new capital, establishing styles that persisted through the history of the Khmer Empire including the building of an ancestral temple and a state temple, the last including a representation in stone of Mount Meru, home of the gods (Pp.101-2).

After a fratricidal conflict over the succession, Yashovarman I won and, after building 100 ashrams across his empire and embellishing further his father’s capital, moved to the capital to Angkor, where it remained for the next five centuries, except for “one brief lapse”:

There were probably several compelling reasons for this move – economic, socio-political, military and probably religious (undoubtedly he was advised by Brahmin gurus where and when this should take place), but suffice it to say that the Angkor region is strategically located about halfway between the hills of Kulen and the margins of the Great Lake, on the right bank of the Siem Reap River – not only an abundant source of water for whatever hydraulic schemes the ruler might be contemplating, but also a waterway as holy to the Khmer as the Ganges still and is to Indians (p.103).

A two-page map conveys the scale of what was eventually constructed on the site (Pp104-5). There was much construction:

Each of the major chakravartin who ruled the Khmer Empire felt it necessary to build important public waterworks, an ancestral temple, and a state temple, usually in that order (p.107).

Hence, given the resources at their command, the architectural splendours that so impress to this day in Yashodharapura (‘Glory-bearing City’). One of Yashovarman’s waterworks was 7.5km (4.7m) by 1.8km (1.1m): one estimate is that it must have taken 6 million man-days to build its embankments alone (p.107). In an agrarian barter economy, labour service cannot be “held over”: it must be used each year or lost.

Kings followed kings, until Jayavarman IV (reigned c.928-41) moved the capital to Koh Ker (Chok Gargyar), 90km (56m) to the NE. Why, we do not know. As the site provided easy access to sandstone, the monumental and other statues of this interlude have produced many of the admired masterpieces gracing various collections around the globe. After a period of weak rule and disintegration, Rajendravarman II (r. 944-68) moved the capital back to Angkor and reimposed imperial rule on the breakaway rulerships. He built Banteay Srei, a Shivaite complex that gets its own two-page insert (Pp110-1). He and his son and successor Jayavarman V (r. 968-c.1000) were both pious Buddhists, but Mahayana Buddhism is a tolerant and syncretic faith (p.112).

Then followed a 9 year civil war, won by Suryavarman I (r.1011-49), who demanded of 4,000 officials an oath of loyalty (that if one broke it one would be “reborn in the thirty-second hell as long as the sun and moon shall last”) that was still being used by the Cambodian crown in C20th. Suryavarman also required it be sealed in blood.

The wealth of the Khmer Empire rested on extraction of surplus from rice-growing peasants. Goods and labour service sufficed for the needs of its monarchs: particularly as the surplus was “soaked up” in uses controlled by the monarchs—notably huge building projects. This did, of course, mean that the Khmer Empire’s history was dominated by using and fighting over that surplus—foreign invaders attempting to loot the products of that surplus or acquire surplus-generating territory, internal rebels seeking to gain control of the surplus in their region, usurpers seeking to gain control of the surplus for the entire empire.

The succession of kings continued, marked by grand building projects, revolts and wars. Rulers of such power had to be praised. One inscription tells us of Undayadityavarman II (r.1050-1066 ) that:

He excelled in seducing women to his will by his beauty, warriors by his heroism, sages by his good qualities, the people by his power, Brahmins by his charity (p.114).

The ‘cult of personality’ is a perennial feature of autocracy for, when loyalty is compulsory, how does one successfully signal loyalty? Playing the game of excessive public flattery is a form of signalling that has some costs involved, so is more reassuring. Various kings succeeded to rule of the Khmer Empire. Some were successful, some less so; some favouring Buddhism, some Shiva or Vishnu. Success and grand building projects tended to go together. So, Suryavarman II (r.1113-c1150) extended the empire, defeated the Cham enemies, invaded the Vietnamese realm based on the Red River by land and sea repeatedly (if unsuccessfully) and built Angkor Wat, which gets its own multipage insert (Pp117-121).

A Cham invasion threatened the continuity of the Empire, but Jayavarman VII (r.1181-c.1215):

arguably not only the greatest of all the Khmer kings but also the greatest personage in Cambodian history (p.122)

restored the power of the Empire, crushingly defeated and conquered the Cham, avidly promoted (Mahayana) Buddhism and engaged in the normal grand building projects: including the grandest of all, Angkor Thom (Pp122ff).

Rulers after Jayavarman VII found keeping the Cham within the Empire proved too hard (though the Cham later succumbed to the Vietnamese). At some point in the C13th, there was a massive (royal) reaction against Buddhism, since every single Buddhist sculpture in Angkor was smashed or defaced while Angkor was “re-Hinduised”: this was iconoclasm on a massive scale and a manifestation of religious intolerance previously foreign to the region. Meanwhile, chiefdoms of the Tai people migrating down from Southern China began to put pressure on the Empire’s northern frontiers. In the early C14th, the Empire rapidly declined. The last Sanskrit inscription was carved in 1327, which is taken to be the end of the Khmer Empire. But not, of course, of Khmer civilisation, which transmuted into something different. In particular, it became overwhelmingly Theravada Buddhist, the first Pali inscription being carved in 1309 (Pp128ff).

Rulerships are based on patterns of expectations, incorporating particular framings (such as religion). Stress can lead to shifts in those patterns that can encourage the adoption of new framings. Alternatively, shifts in those framings (such as religious changes) can themselves cause stress that may undermine expectations rulership relies upon. With our limited information, it is very hard to see whether the shift to Theravada Buddhism was a response to stress, a cause of stress or both.


This review will be concluded in my next post.

Civilisation and surplus

I once asked an Israeli archaeologist why archaeologists (and historical anthropologists) seem to be so influenced by Karl Marx. He replied that it was because Marx talked about economic surplus and they study the products of economic surplus. Makes sense.

Civilisation rests on the production of surplus—that is, the production beyond the needs of subsistence. In agrarian civilisations, typically 8 out of 10 people worked as farmers. That meant that they produced enough surplus food (and other agrarian products such as material for clothing) for 1 in 5 people to do something else. That "something else" being all the things that make a civilisation (which may include farmers working on other things in down times).

Early civilisations start off in warm climes near water (i.e. river valleys towards the equator) because you can have a concentrated population cultivating fertile land and less effort is put into staying warm, so it is easier to produce a surplus.

Surplus is not exploitation as such (although there are certainly exploitative ways to extract surplus: the most efficient ever exploitative extractor of surplus being Stalin's regime—he could make mass starvation work for him). Surplus is the basis of civilisation.

As technology improves, being in a warm area becomes less important as better technology means it becomes easier and cheaper to stay warm. Indeed, there is some tendency for the technological "cutting edge" of civilisation to move to colder climes, since they get more pay-off from technology and tend to be more time-conscious due to the need to store food and other supplies over winter. (Climate's effect on temporal outlooks may have had something to do with which parts of Europe adopted the Reformation and which did not, though distance from Rome and consequent command-and-response issues were clearly also important.)

With the transformation of production we call the Industrial Revolution, the ratio of people needed to produce food dropped dramatically as technology allowed more to be produced with less human effort. By 1920, primary production stopped being the biggest employer in the US. (By 1930, services were the biggest employer, so the "manufacturing moment" in US economic history—when secondary industry dominated employment—lasted 10 years.)

Institutions make a difference; some sets of institutions are much better at facilitating transactions (and so gains from trade and thus the production and use of surplus) than others. Clearly, the British institutional heritage of US and Canada works better than the Iberian institutional heritage of Latin American. (Which is why Hispanics flood North: they can earn more income simply by being in a different institutional context.) Scandinavians in the US do considerably better (in terms of average incomes) than do (pdf) Scandinavians in Scandinavia.

Culture (which overlaps with institutions and is profoundly affected by religion) also makes a difference as it affects attitudes to time, willingness to transact, etc. Hindus and Sikhs from South Asia, on average, do considerably better in the UK (in terms of employment and income) than do Muslims from South Asia.

Combinations of differences within cultures and institutional contexts also make a difference: Muslims in the US do considerably better (in terms of income, employment and integration) than do Muslims in Europe.

Geography can make a difference beyond producing food and staying warm. Water transport is generally much cheaper than land transport. It is easier to produce a surplus operating out of water hubs than relying on land transport. Capital markets are about trading in surplus: ideally, directing it to more productive ends. And, if you are a trade hub, the demand for capital will be greater. There is a reason why the Serene Republic of Venice was a persistent financial innovator (inventing bonds in 1171, for example).

So, Marx was correct in that surplus matters: but he was utterly wrong in what it represents and the implications thereof.

[Cross-posted at Critical Thinking Applied.]

A History of Cambodia (2)

This is the second part of my review of David Chandler’s A History of Cambodia (2nd edition). The first part is in my previous post.


Between Thailand and Vietnam
The period when Angkor is abandoned by kings and rule shifts to Phnom Penh is very poorly documented. Likely, the rapid expansion of Chinese maritime trade under the Yuan and early Ming had something to do with the shift from an inland centre to a river port and what seems to have been a much more commercial version of kingship, particularly by the C17th. There were also regular wars between the Thai kingdom centred in Ayudha and Cambodia.

After being permitted to set up customs posts in the Mekong delta in the 1630s, the Vietnamese poured into the region, rapidly reducing the Khmer to a minority in what is now southern Vietnam, cutting Cambodia off from maritime access to the wider world. Increasingly, the pattern grew of Cambodia moving to a shifting pendulum of conflict and alliance between Thailand and Vietnam. Conflict with Thailand in particular seems to have been perennial, with the Thai capture of Lovek in 1587 being seen as a traumatic defeat for the Cambodians. This was also a period of increasing contact with Europeans, with at least one Cambodian king even promising to convert to Christianity if the Spanish would help him against the Thais. One Cambodian king converted to Islam, was defeated by the Vietnamese and carted off to Vietnam in a cage (Pp77ff).

From the late C18th to the mid C19th, Cambodia was a weak state oscillating between its more powerful neighbours Thailand and Vietnam. Succession disputes within the royal family would have aspiring would-be kings attempt to the support of one, leading to the incumbent king to seek the support of the other and successive invasions by both neighbours (Pp99ff).

This culminated in Vietnamese occupation and Cambodia’s (temporary) disappearance as a separate state. Chandler observes that:

Just as Jayavarman VII’s ideology can be compared in some ways to the ideology of Democratic Kampuchea, the first half of the nineteenth century bears some resemblance to the 1970s in terms of foreign intervention, chaos and the sufferings of the Cambodian people (p.117).

Thai and Vietnamese forces fought over Cambodia, with Vietnam essentially attempting to incorporate Cambodia from 1834 to 1847, being defeated by Thai military power and how different Cambodian society and rulership was from Vietnamese patterns. The reign of Duang (1848-1860) saw Theravada Buddhism and the Cambodian kingship restored, although a kingship subservient to the Thai monarchs Rama III and IV (Pp123ff).

Enter the French
In 1863, Cambodia became a French protectorate. Up until 1906, Cambodia was self-governing. After Sisowath’s coronation in 1906, French control intensified. In its last period, 1941-53, the French were reduced to trying to retain their position under pressure from Thais (France and Thailand fought a brief war, which went well for Thailand on land but badly in the sea and air), the Japanese and agitation for Cambodian independence (Pp 137ff).

The picture Chandler paints of French colonialism is of a colonial power that never understood the society it was administering; a colonial rule which was very much, indeed increasingly, driven by its own internal dynamics. As Chandler observes:

… the volume of reports required by residents, and consumed by their superiors in Phnom Penh, Saigon, Hanoi, and Paris, increased dramatically. Residents, more than ever, were tied down to their offices, presiding over a two-way flow of paper; they were seldom in contact, socially or professionally, with the people they were intended to protect. In automobiles, tours of inspection became speedier and more superficial, for residents and their aides were confined to passable roads. In fact, the intensification of French economic and political controls over Cambodia, noticeable throughout the 1920s and after, was accompanied, ironically, by the withdrawal of French officials from many levels of Cambodian life (p.152).

Much of the revenue seems to have gone to support a colonial bureaucracy that was mostly concerned with revenue collection (and one technique of said rule was to supply plentiful free opium to the reigning kings [p.149]). Competence in Khmer declined among French officials (p.156).

There were some rationalising campaigns such as abolishing “slavery”—a campaign pursued without much sign of understanding the role bondage played in the economy and society, nor how to replace its functions (though a cynical view would be that there was in fact a deliberate intention to disconnect the local elite and replace them with French officials: either way, it provoked a major popular revolt in 1885-6 [Pp144-5]). But there was not much concern with, for example, suppressing brigandage in outlying areas (p.155), providing any education, electricity or similar C20th intrusions (p.156). They did succeed in creating a small, French-speaking intelligentsia whose aspirations they mostly frustrated and many of whom, ominously, picked up Sorbonne/Ecole-style Marxism.

Comparing the post-colonial experience of South-East Asian countries, clearly it was much better to be subject to British colonialism (Malaya, Singapore: though Burma is a bit of a black mark), retaining independence (Thailand) or Dutch colonialism (Indonesia) than suffering French colonialism (Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam). This was not merely a matter of the direct colonial experience but also what framings your post-colonial elite imbibed. Even given the drag the Permit Raj has been on Indian economic growth, clearly it was better to have your post-colonial elite be Oxbridge/LSE-educated by such as Harold Laski than Sorbonne/Ecole-educated by Louis Althusser and his ilk. But Western intelligentsia criticisms of “colonialism” rarely consider the responsibility of folk such as themselves for post-colonial disasters.

From the 1930s, a sense of Cambodian nationalism began to arise among the small, French-educated elite. Including Saloth Sar (better known as Pol Pot) whose elder sister was one of King Monivong’s concubines (p.162). But, up until the fall of France in 1940, no doubts were offered by French officials about the permanence of French control: there were certainly no policies directed at a post-French rule future (p.164). The experience of French weakness from June 1940 to October 1945 changed everything:

By the end of 1945, Cambodian independence, impracticable and almost unthought of in 1939, had become primarily a matter of time (p.165).

In April 1941, a shy young prince, Norodom Sihanouk, became King: he was do dominate the country and its politics for most of the next half century (p.167).

The French continued their “improvement” projects, including an attempted replacement of the Khmer alphabet with roman letters; one of the first acts of Cambodian government after the Japanese pushed aside the French in March 1945 was to rescind this decree:

… as so often in Cambodian history, what the French saw as self-evident improvement in the status quo the Cambodians saw as an attack on the essential character of their civilisation, defined in part by what had been passed down from Angkorean times (p.170).

At Japanese request, King Sihanouk declared Cambodia independent. There followed a brief period (March – October 1945) when patriotic politics operated openly: along with the beginnings of anti-French guerrilla resistance. By 1946, Cambodia was once again a French protectorate, the French having control over defence, foreign affairs and finance, with the Cambodians promised the right to a constitution and to form political parties (p.172).

The re-imposition of French dominance turned out to be temporary. While Cambodia largely avoided the guerrilla warfare that convulsed Vietnam it (though the Thai government did finance anti-Japanese and anti-French guerrillas along the Thai-Cambodian frontier [p.174]), along with the rest of Indochina, became independent.

From what Chandler writes, it is clear that the model of modern statehood the French provided was little connected to the wishes or perspectives of the general populace, still less concerned with service delivery. It was marked by “rationalising” projects that arose out of the framings of the officials, not the needs, wants and perspectives of the ruled. This was an ominous model to impart.

Becoming independent
In the years prior to independence, political parties formed. Politics rapidly devolved into the Democratic and Liberal Parties, both led by Princes. The former proved to be much more electorally popular, leading it to a position to make the Constitution as it wished. Sihanouk resisted, eventually being able to achieve complete dominance over politics by effectively turning Cambodia into a one-Party state under his control, starting with his June 1952 French-assisted coup against his own government. In the lead-up to Sihanouk’s seizure of power, the Democrats faded, various right-wing groupings organised and the guerrilla movement transformed into the Cambodian Communist Party eventually led by Saloth Sar (Pp173ff).

Having achieved political dominance within Cambodia, Sihanouk then led the campaign for independence. In October 1953, the French caved, granting Cambodia control over its defence and foreign policy while the lack of fighting in Cambodia gave Sihanouk’s delegation a strong position at the Geneva peace conference. Sihanouk’s government, the French and the Vietnamese communists all agreed to freeze out the Cambodian communists (Pp184ff). As for the last:

For several thousand of them, 1954 marked the beginning of a “Long March” that that would take them to exile in Hanoi, not to return to Cambodia until the 1970s when almost all of them were killed by U.S. bombing, Lon Nol’s army or internal Communist purges at the instigation of Pol Pot, by then the leader of the Cambodian Communist party. A few hardy survivors of this group were given cabinet positions in the post-1979 government of Cambodia (p.186).

The story of Cambodia thereon is a countdown to disaster and its aftermath.

Sihanouk dominated Cambodian politics until 1970, treating the Cambodian people as his children, dissent as treachery, engaging in endless hard work, weaving a path between Americans and North Vietnamese, trying various (generally unsuccessful) economic schemes and eventually retreating more and more into making films he starred in and directed (Pp186ff).

One dynamic was that commercialisation basically meant more wealth to the Chinese and Sino-Cambodian minority: the association of “capitalism” with ethnic difference encouraged state-driven economic policies (p.201) even beyond confidence in state action being so much a dominant theme in intellectual and policy debates at the time.

After Sihanouk
In 1970, Sihanouk’s own Assembly (whose 1966 election he had failed to supervise with his normal care, giving priority to a major state visit by President de Gaulle [p.194]) voted him out of office and installed Lon Nol as Chief of State. Sihanouk retreated to exile in China and made common cause with the Cambodian Communists, who began to steadily win the civil war that now broke out in earnest. This culminated in the total victory of Pol Pot’s forces (Pp204ff).

For three-and-a-half years, Pol Pot’s surreal regime tyrannised, destroyed, slaughtered and starved: about a million Cambodians, or one in seven, of the population died. Chandler manages to tell the bizarre and horrid story in dispassionate language. Eventually, Pol Pot’s revolutionary hubris provoked a Vietnamese invasion, which rapidly subdued most of the country and installed a puppet government, to the relief of the vast majority of the population (Pp209ff). In all the appalling global record of Leninist tyranny and slaughter, Pol Pot’s regime remains the epitome of utopian madness: of the attempt to transform people and society by totally centralised control, heedless of human cost, aimed at creating the “final society”.

In the second edition, Chandler concludes with a chapter on post-Pol Pot Cambodia, up to 1991 (Pp227ff). So the edition does not include the UN intervention, the the 1993 restoration of the monarchy and a multi-party democracy. Hun Sen, one of the leaders brought to power by the Vietnamese invasion, remains PM; having been such since 1985, the longest-serving head of government in South East Asia. With Cambodia once again a monarchy, those elements of continuity in Cambodian history that are so much a part of Chandler’s narrative manifested again.

Precisely because the details of Cambodian history are so limited for so long, Chandler is forced to concentrate on patterns. Even better, he does so in a way that is clear, perceptive and revealing. Throughout the book, he keeps the reader well informed on the sources used and available. A History of Cambodia is a useful and enlightening work of history.

A History of Cambodia (1)

I mentioned to a friend that I was interested in why Buddhism and won out over Hinduism in South-East Asia, when matters had gone the other way in India. She loaned me David Chandler’s A History of Cambodia (2nd edition) which a Quaker friend who had worked in Cambodia had told her was the best history of Cambodia.

And a fine history it is too.

The Introduction sets out several themes of Cambodian history: from the mid C18th onwards, the effect of its location between Thailand and Vietnam; the relationship of C20th Cambodia to its past; the “pervasiveness of patronage and hierarchical terminology in Cambodian thinking”; and the inertia of a largely peasant society:

Until very recently, alternatives to subsistence agriculture and incremental social improvements of any kind were rarely available to most Cambodians and were in any case rarely sought, as the outcome could be punishment or starvation. In the meantime, crops had to be harvested and families raised as they had been harvested and raised before as they had been harvested and raised before (p.2).

This social inertia encouraged a myth of “changelessness”.

Given my interests, this caught my eye:

the spread of Theravada Buddhism (and its corollary, Thai cultural influence) diminished the importance of the brahmanical advisers to the kind and broke down the influence of brahmanical families who crowded around the throne looking for preferment. In Angkorean times, these families controlled much of the land and manpower around Angkor through their connections with royally sponsored religious foundations. As these foundations were replaced by wats (Buddhist temples) the forms of social mobilization that had been in effect at Angkor diminished in importance; so did extensive irrigation. The two or three annual harvests of rice that had been reported at Angkor diminished in importance came to a halt. The elite undoubtedly grew less numerous as a result (p.3).

That brahmin power and wealth depended so much on royal patronage would clearly be very important in explaining how a series of Buddhist dynasties and kingships replacing Hindu ones would lead to religious change.

It is striking to learn that Cambodia’s population at independence was four times the size it had been when the French originally took over (p.5).

Continuity seems to be the main theme in Cambodian economic history: a peasant subsistence economy based particularly on wet rice with a persistent technology and, prior to colonisation, exports largely limited to what grew wild in the woods—notably rhinoceros horn, hides, ivory, cardamom, lacquer, and perfumed wood (Pp6-7).

Beginnings
People who knew how to make pots lived in caves in north-western Cambodia as early as 4200BC. Skulls and human bones from c1500BC suggested they looked much like modern Cambodians, given recent infusions of Chinese and Vietnamese bloodlines. Khmer is likely a very old language, dating back in its local origins thousands of years. A certain conservatism:

perhaps, is characteristic of a subsistence-oriented society, in which experimentation can lead to famine and in which techniques of getting enough to eat are passed from one generation to another (p.10).

Likely continuing elements in Cambodian life and thinking across thousands of years are:

the village games played at the lunar new year; the association of ancestor stones (nak ta) with stones, the calendar, and the soil; the belief in water-spirits or dragons; the idea that tattoos protect the wearer; and the custom of chewing betel, to name a few (p.11).

. But lots of continuity does not mean there has not also been considerable change.

Indian Asia
The first set of revolutionary changes being Indianisation; the adoption of aspects of Indian life and thinking over a thousand years of Cambodian history, likely starting around two thousand years ago. Cambodians came to dress in Indian styles, eat with fingers and spoons, carried goods on their head, wore turbans and skirts, use Indian forms and styles of musical instruments, jewellery and manuscripts—living and acting more like Indians than like their neighbours the Vietnamese. One scholar suggested it was a matter of a common “monsoon culture” converging on Indian models (Pp11-12). Up to about 500BC:

India provided Cambodia with a writing system, a pantheon, meters for poetry, a language (Sanskrit) to write it in, a vocabulary of social hierarchies (not the same thing as a caste system), Buddhism, the idea of universal kingship, and new ways of looking at politics, sociology, architecture, iconography, astronomy, and aesthetics (p.12).

Cambodia was thus very much part of “Indian Asia”.

This being a process of neither conquest nor colonisation, Cambodia’s relationship with India lacked the angst that characterised Vietnam’s response to China. It seems to have been very much a process of Cambodians adopting what worked for them; the caste system never took root in village life and its use at court seems to have been more a ritual respect for Indian traditions than anything more substantive (Pp12-13).

For the first few centuries, written sources about Cambodia are almost entirely Chinese, and so filtered through Chinese framings. Remains of a port active in C2nd and C3rd—which include Roman coins and Indian artefacts—suggest trade between and with India and China, likely including warehousing facilities. The port likely declined in the C4th and would have been a useful conduit for Cambodia exports of forest products, such as elephants, feathers, wild spices and the products listed previously. How developed or centralised a political authority underpinned this is still an open question (Pp14ff).

A crucial feature of social dynamics is that:

People, rather than land per se, are needed to cultivate wet rice. … as well as the low density of the population in the entire area (always excepting Java, Bali, and the Red River Delta in Vietnam), it is easy to see why throughout Southeast Asian history overlordship and power were so often thought of and pursued in terms of controlling people rather than land. … territory per se (mere forest in most cases) was never as important as people.
Indeed, the notion of alienable ownership of land, as distinct from land use, does not seem to have developed in traditional Cambodia. Land left fallow for three years reverted to state control. The king, theoretically at least, was the lord of all the land in the kingdom, which meant he could reward people with the right to use it. Many of the Cambodian-language inscriptions from the Angkorean period … dealt with complicated quarrels about access to land resources (Pp.16-7).

Land-controlling, land-dispensing kings whom brahmin families were dependant on, plus no caste system for brahmins to administer, left them in a much weaker position than their Indian equivalents. If the kings switched to Buddhism (particularly Theravada Buddhism), then the brahmins had little or no basis for social power.

It is likely that, in the first 8 centuries A.D., Cambodia was divided into lots of small states with a local king and elite, operating both as Indian “universal” kings and local Cambodian chieftains, their power resting on their perceived ability to provide protection, both practical and divine (Pp17-8).

In this period, Hinduism and Buddhism both flourished in Cambodia, operating similar notions of merit and reward across a chain of lives. Localized religious cults seemed to have stressed community welfare:

for without communities to perform the work, irrigated rice cannot be grown (p.19).

A concern that, at least one location (Ba Phnom) included an annual human sacrifice to a consort of Shiva at the beginning of the agricultural year, this continuing to occur as late as 1877 (Pp18-19).

If land use was granted by royal authority, and private landownership was unknown, then genealogies mattered less:

Because genealogies were not maintained in Cambodia, except among the elite, the nak ta, or ancestor people, had no family names. They became the symbolic ancestors of people in a particular place, or by dying in a place they came to patronize its soil. Nak ta in inhabited sites could be spoken to and tamed; those in the forest or in abandoned places were thought to be more powerful and more malignant (p.19).

There is much similarity with the kami of Japanese Shinto. But a similar sensibility pervades animism generally and feeds easily into polytheism. Chandler is surely correct to suggest that Hinduism was more likely to adopt and blend with such sentiment than confront it. Indeed, the nak ta could become gods during periods of high Indianisation while the gods could blend back into ancestors when such receded (Pp19-20).

The first dated Khmer-language inscription was incised in 611, the earliest Sanskrit one being carved in 613. For centuries, the two languages served different roles: Sanskrit spoke in prose and poetry to the gods, Khmer (always in prose) to the people. Sanskrit was the language of poetry, praise and merit; Khmer of the founding of temples and temple administration (such as how many slaves were attached to a particular place, inventories, duties and protective curses). Recording land grants on stone provided recognition and protection while curses sought to protect the same. Sanskrit was the language of those few “rescued from the mud” as Khmer was of those whose rice-growing labour supported all (Pp21-2).

Bondage
Chandler then tackles the vexed issue of what knjom (usually translated as “slave”) meant. Wherever land has been more plentiful than labour, bondage has been a normal social mechanism to extract a usable surplus. But how much, in Cambodian usages, we are talking of slaves—full property who were bought and sold—or some sort of bondsperson or “serf”—bound to a place, is not entirely clear from the available evidence and may have varied considerably (Pp23ff).

It is likely the region remained a welter of small principalities. Indian notions:

seem to have played a prominent role in molding and directing these societies, perhaps because ideas of this hierarchical kind were useful in legitimizing the extraction of surpluses more or less by force (p.27).

Or, at least (if one accepts a recent critique of the notion of legitimacy) providing a common framework for expectations.

Angkor
Having set out the themes of Cambodian history and its beginnings, Chapter 3 moves on to Kingship and Society at Angkor, the most architecturally dramatic period of Cambodian history. Conventionally dated by historians as 802-1431, Chandler points out that Khmer-speaking peoples had inhabited the Angkor region for centuries; that the royal city was briefly re-occupied in the 1570s; that Buddhist statuary continued to be placed there every century to the C19th; that the latest inscriptions date from 1747; and that:

When the Angkor complex was “discovered” by French missionaries and explorers in the 1850s, Angkor Wat contained a prosperous Buddhist monastery inside its walls, tended by more than a thousand hereditary slaves (p.29).

(Though ‘bondsfolk’ is likely a better translation of knjom in this instance: as for any shock to our sensibilities about Buddhism or monastic life, there were Christian monasteries in Western Europe supported by bondsfolk up until the late C18th.) Still, the dates are useful because:

they mark off Cambodia’s period of greatness. At various times in those six hundred years, and only then, Cambodia—known in its own inscriptions as Kambuja-desa—was the mightiest kingdom in Southeast Asia, drawing visitors and tribute from as far away as present-day Burma and Malaysia as well as what were later to be Thai kingdoms to the west … these periods of systematic domination were infrequent and relatively short (p.29).

One gets the distinct impression that Southeast Asian rulership was more fluid, and embedded in less dense and resilient institutional networks and connections, than was the case for Latin Christendom in the same period. There was also clearly no warrior class even vaguely equivalent to knights, samurai, azadans, mamluks, or even iqta or similar: these are not medieval societies in any useful sense of that term.

It is also worth noting that the notion of ‘tribute’ was likely often a particular way of framing trade relations (such appears to be a feature of Chinese history, for example).

Even during the Angkorean period, the historical sources are seriously limited (Pp29ff). Historical inference has to be gleaned from inscriptions, made for particular purposes and often referring to events decades or more earlier. The likely third Angkorean ruler (Indravarman r.877-889) followed what seems to have been (or became) a conventional pattern of building: irrigation works, followed by honouring of his parents and capped off by creating a temple-mountain (Pp37-8).

His son, Yasovarman (r.889-c.910) created the royal city at Angkor (Yasodharapura as it was known until the C14th) and was the first of the grandiose temple builders, bespeaking ability to command considerable labour resources (Pp39ff).

A succession of kings either rejected or (more commonly) extended the Angkor complex. Chandler examines Angkorean kingship through the prisms of the king’s relationship with Shiva, their public role as hero of Indian epic and their connection to everyday life (Pp46ff). While Cambodia stopped short of importing the Indian caste system, the vocabulary of varna provided a way of framing the radiating patterns of patronage through which kings ruled (p.48).

Manifesting the fluid religious framings, the largest Angkor complex—Angkor Wat—was dedicated to Vishnu (Pp49ff). Chandler suggests that Angkorean rulership was, in its close relationship between water management, priesthood and temple foundations, was much like that of Pharoanic Egypt and Mayan Guatemala (Pp53-4).

Jayavarman VII, who was crowned in 1181, shifted the dominant model from Hindu to Buddhist kingship. Where Hindu kingship focused on the king as the fount whose approval all sought, Buddhist kingship celebrated the king’s merit manifested in his compassion for his subjects:

Put very starkly, the difference … resembles the difference between a monologue that no one overhears and a soliloquy addressed to an audience of paid or invited guests. A “Hindu” king’s rule was an aggregation of statements—rituals, temples, poems, marriages, inscriptions and the like—and his grandeur and godliness. A Buddhist king made similar statements, but he addressed them, specifically, to an audience consisting of his people. This made the people less an ingredient of the king’s magnificence … than objects of his overwhelming compassion, an audience for his merit-making and participants in his redemption (p.58).

Jayavarman VII’s dramatic break with the past seems to have been connected to the traumatic Cham invasion of 1177 and 1178. Having defeated the Cham in battle prior to his coronation, he spent his reign of about 30 years essentially turning Cambodia from a Hindu kingship to a Buddhist society. He seems to have been a man in a hurry, imposing his personal stamp on Cambodia more than any other ruler before modern times (Pp58ff). Chandler notes some ominous parallels in:

his break with the past, his obsession with punitive expeditions, the impetuous grandeur of his building program, and his imposition of a national religion rather than his patronage of a royal cult (p.69).

The only feature of Angkorean life:

singled out for praise by Democratic Kampuchea was precisely the full-scale mobilisation of the people that Jayavarman VII, but very few other kings, managed to carry out (p.69).

He was a devotee of Mahayana Buddhism. Over the next 50 years, Mahayana Buddhism gave way to Theravada Buddhism as the dominant Cambodian religion. While we know that missionaries from the Mon-language parts of Siam, Burma and Ceylon played a role, the reasons for the shift are unclear, though the lack of inscriptions at Angkor during this period imply an interaction between political and religious upheaval (Pp68ff).

A Chinese traveller, Chou Ta-Kuan, wrote an account of his visit to Angkor in 1296-7, by far the most detailed picture of everyday life and appearance at Angkor. Brahmanism, Shaivism (whose followers Chou calls ‘Taoists”) and Theravada Buddhism co-existed. The former seem to have been largely an official class while Shaivism was clearly in decline—monastic Shaivism disappeared entirely after Angkor was abandoned, though Indian cults persisted. Chou was struck at how accessible the king was, with his twice-daily audiences (Pp71ff).


This review will conclude in my next post.