Riverine and Island Polities
Many polities rose and fell in southeast Asia before 1500. The most
impressive of these were empires that continued to influence regional
traditions long after they had fallen. These empires were built on distinctive
regional economic structures and created cultural and political foundations
for their successors. The major polities of this period can be loosely
Used by permission for Bridging World History, 2
The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004
categorized into two types: those of the mainland, based on intensive
irrigated rice agriculture on river plains, and those of the islands, based on
control of the river network and sea trade. Each economic system alone could
support a strong regional polity. Only the two systems together, however,
could provide sufficiently diversified material and human resources to
maintain an empire. Here we will look at two empires of this period that
achieved such a linkage, Funan and Srivijaya. We will also consider one
example of a strong regional polity, the mainland Khmer state, which
controlled and organized the redistribution of resources produced by wet-rice
agriculture on the Mekong River delta through a network of Buddhist
temples.