Technology in Southeast Asian History

Explores the role of technology in the larger political and economic fabric of Southeast Asia.

In Technology in Southeast Asian History, Suzanne Moon explores the profound entanglement of technology with Southeast Asian politics, social life, economics, and culture over its long history. Moon offers a unique framework for understanding the place of technology in this region and its pivotal role in the emergence of the modern technological world.

Synthesizing scholarship from the fields of history, archaeology, and anthropology, Moon examines and links technological stories from prehistory to the mid-twentieth century. She uses analytics in the history of technology--such as circulation, coproduction, and assemblage--to highlight the processes and evolving patterns of technological dynamism that characterize the region. Drawing on research focused on specific technologies, including temple construction, rice agriculture, weaving, and shipbuilding, Moon investigates the interconnectedness of these technologies within the larger political and economic fabric of Southeast Asian history.

In contrast with portrayals of Southeast Asia as technologically deficient, Moon demonstrates the richness of this region's technological cultures. She rejects polarizing binaries such as traditional and modern or indigenous and foreign, instead underscoring Southeast Asia's role as a dynamic cocreator of the modern technological world. Technology has contributed to the creation and disruption of social and political orders; shaped engagements across barriers of distance, culture, and language; and produced and reproduced diverse cultures in this region. This narrative of technological change offers students, scholars, and readers critical new perspectives on both technological history and Southeast Asian history.

Suzanne Moon is an associate professor of the history of science, technology, and medicine at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Technology and Ethical Idealism: A History of Development in the Netherlands East Indies.