Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

12 MICHAEL PINCHES
heavily upon trading relations, both within and beyond their domains of influence
(Skinner 1957:97; Riggs 1966:251; Wickberg 1965:3—41; Brenner 1991; Fairbank
1994:179—82). In some cases independent merchants were controlled through state
repression; in others they were incorporated through the bestowal or sale of noble
titles (Skinner 1957:149; Shamsul). Nobles or gentry commonly had to enter into
alliances with powerful merchants, and in some cases, they themselves operated
as merchants. In imperial China, tributory relations, linking the emperor with other
peoples and states, served as a principal vehicle for commercial exchange
(Fairbank 1968; Mancell 1968). There were also ideological challenges, notably
from the great tradition of Islam, introduced through South and Southeast Asia by
Arab traders and missionaries, which attributed relatively high status to the activity
of commerce. Notwithstanding these tensions, and the increasing importance of
commerce, the state, class and status structures found within the region continued
to be organised around ruling nobilities, whose chief claim to legitimacy lay in
hierarchical principles based on aristocratic birthright, spiritual authority or
scholarly achievement, not in economic entrepreneurship.
The impact of European expansion and colonisation on indigenous status
hierarchies and class configurations was contradictory. On the one hand, economic
life in colonised societies was increasingly commercialised and made more
dependent on international as well as internal trade, thereby elevating the power of
local trading communities. On the other, colonial rule subordinated, yet also
reinforced, the local political authority and social rank of indigenous elites through
their incorporation into the colonial state, and through the consolidation of agrarian
social and economic structures, linked through merchant capital to the
industrialising West. The exclusive courtly privileges of old royal families, and the
principles of noble birthright, continued to be honoured, and social prestige
continued to be organised largely in reference to aristocratic ideals, even if
somewhat modified, as in the case of the Javanese priyayi tradition (Legge 1964:
107—8). In the case of the Philippines, which for the most part lacked a pre-colonial
state tradition, Spanish and American colonial rule produced a quasi-aristocratic
indigenous elite whose power lay in landownership and political office. The status
markers and way of life of this elite were modelled largely on those of the Spanish
nobility, though they developed their own unique form of patrimonialism (Lopez-
Gonzaga 1991; Anderson 1988).
While the colonial bureaucracy provided a vehicle through which indigenous
nobilities continued to exercise administrative power and high social rank, it also
generated opportunities for a new class of officials, not recruited on the basis of
ascription or noble patronage. In India, Indonesia, Malaya, the Philippines and
elsewhere, colonial rule thus generated a substantially new bureaucratic middle
class whose prestige rested principally on occupation rather than birthright (Misra
1961; Legge 1964:107—8; Doeppers 1984; Shamsul). Of particular significance was
the expansion of formal education as an associated meritocratic means of upward
social mobility, and, more generally, of Western education as a new pathway to,
and indicator of, social power and prestige (Legge 1964:109; Lakha). In Thailand,