The crux of the problem facing anyone working on the history of the archipelago before c.1500: https://twitter.com/SEA_historian/status/1258667329086316544

This is partly why I put so many ethnohistoric sources (i.e. foreigners' accounts) and references to commodities in medieval texts from Europe and elsewhere on the blog. Seeing the archipelago's medieval presence is difficult to do using strictly local sources.

And it's understandable - if in my view regrettable - that people who work on Southeast Asian history and literature don't focus too much on periodisation. You often find scholars who will work relatively indiscriminately on 9th- and 19th-century material.

The way SE Asia is popularly perceived is as a constant and unchanging place. In museum exhibitions on other parts of the world it would be odd to put 19thC material in the same case as 14thC stuff, but that's totally normal in exhibitions on Java and SE Asia more generally.

Obviously island SE Asia has gone through some pretty significant changes affecting every sphere of life in the last six centuries, including widespread conversion to Islam, the introduction of new foodstuffs & narcotics from the Americas, and centuries of European colonisation.

An average Indonesian person today is a Muslim who smokes cigarettes and eats chilli, is literate in Malay in the Roman alphabet, and pays taxes to an archipelago-spanning post-colonial nation-state whose government is based in western Java.

All pretty unimaginable in c.1350.

That's partly why I use the term 'medieval Indonesia'. I think it's a handy way to refer to the period anyway - but perhaps the best thing about it is that it jolts people out of a complacent view of the archipelago's history as all much of a muchness.

Compare those changes to England, a place widely considered 'modern' and which has a well-defined and extremely well-studied medieval history.

England's capital is still London. Its language is still English in the same alphabet. Many public offices can trace themselves back to medieval precedents. It still has a monarch descended from medieval kings and queens. There are loads of surviving medieval buildings.

Quite a few medieval buildings in England are still used for their original purposes (with some modifications) - including a lot of churches and cathedrals. Some medieval laws are still on the books over there.

And yet, which one of these places is most likely to be described in books and articles in the popular media as 'ancient' or 'traditional'?

I do wonder/worry sometimes whether my explicit rejection of more modern things - repeatedly and at length on Twitter and elsewhere - will make it harder for me to get an academic job. But the job market's crap anyway, so who cares?

And if I do end up with an academic position somewhere I'll also end up having to supervise theses (etc.) on more modern things whatever happens. There are no 'medieval SE Asia' positions in the world.

So I might as well pump out a load of fun blogposts on topics I actually like while I still can. I might as well take the time now to show that there's some value in my views and approach.