It has been conventional to assume a new era began in Southeast Asia in 1500 with the arrival of Europeans, if for no better reason than that the sources become much richer and more accessible at this point. If one looked back from the age of high imperialism it was also obvious that the expansion of European empire in Asia began with Vasco da Gama and the discovery of a sea route from Europe to India. If we take our viewpoint from Southeast Asia, on the other hand, it is clear that the rapid social changes transforming the region were already in full flight before 1500, with the upsurge in international commerce of which the arrival of the Portuguese was a consequence, not a cause. The explosion of energy from the new Ming dynasty in China a century earlier is a more appropriate starting point for this new era of economic expansion, since it had some causal relation with a new dynasty in Vietnam, the decline of the ‘classical’ empires of Angkor and Majapahit, and their replacement by a string of new maritime city-states. Although most evidence about economic and social matters comes from a later period, we will therefore have to go back to 1400 in tracing the reasons for many of the changes.

POPULATION

To understand the impact of the major economic trends in the period it is necessary to have some impression of population levels. Contemporary estimates of population are extremely unreliable, but a combination of the more plausible of them with backward projection from somewhat more reliable and abundant nineteenth-century estimates yields roughly the order of population in 1600 shown in the table on page 463.