The long history of states has played a large role, larger than is acknowledged in the literature, in the making of political identities. Those identities were fluid and multiple in equatorial Southeast Asia precisely because states had always held such limited leverage in that forest-and-water world. Modernity, however, cannot do without states. State-like formations and ideologies were brought to this region by successive waves of outsider traders. Prior to the years around 1900 these trade-based polities gradually became more like states, though the nineteenth century acknowledged only those ruled by Europeans (and eventually the Siamese with European advisors) as ‘civilised’ members of the globalising world order. In the twentieth century there was no further toleration of ambiguity or statelessness. World order required that all boundaries were demarcated, ‘slavery’, ‘piracy’ and an arms-bearing populace eliminated, and the status of all within those boundaries rendered unambiguous as subjects (Klein 1993; Tagliacozzo 2005).

Only the Siamese monarchy in Southeast Asia had been able to satisfy the demands of world powers sufficiently to survive this trauma. Kingdoms such as Aceh, Lombok and Sulu were incorporated into imperial states through wars short or long, while stateless peoples like the Batak and Kadazandusun for the first time confronted the standard package of state monopoly of force and law, finding the experience liberating as well as threatening. Malay sultans on the Peninsula and in Sumatra and Borneo continued their age-old roles of mediating between external powers and indigenous peoples, though their true powerlessness grew increasingly obvious to the dynamic worlds of identity formation in the cities.