Writing the Histories of ‘Traditional’ Agriculture in Southeast Asia

Abstract

A necessary preliminary to this introduction to the historiography of agriculture in the region is to define terms. Obviously there are many kinds of histories of agriculture; those linking trade, politics or economics with agriculture, histories of agricultural technology in general or particular (much neglected), histories at all scales from the region as a whole to single villages or social groups. Both pre- and proto-histories may be subsumed within ‘histories’. By ‘traditional’ is meant those forms of agriculture that have been so long established that this term can be legitimately applied to them. Such are far more than simply ‘subsistence’, a term that begs a further set of questions, not to be addressed here. ‘Traditional’ clearly excludes those forms of agriculture involving high levels of capitalization and export orientation of non-food commodities though it includes those with some degree of centralized management, whether this was the form of the metayage that developed in colonial-era Cochinchina or in the religious foundations of early Cambodia. Even if partly market-oriented, ‘traditional’ agriculture includes a significant subsistence component and its methods are those of long standing rather those of modern agricultural science though clearly in more recent times, some modern aspects may be included, such as large-scale irrigation from stored water, written titles to land or the use of fertilizers. ‘Traditional’ agriculture is also economically part of an over-arching and at the family level, an integrated system of obtaining the necessities of life from cultivation, the rearing of animals and from foraging, some of the last in the fields. (It may be argued, with some justification, that conceptually extracting agriculture from such a system fatally damages what in reality and in the eyes of its practitioners is a single entity).