This paper returns to one of the questions posed in earlier seminars ― why was use of the written contract so weak in the indigenous commerce of Southeast Asia, given the region’s long connections with China, India and the Islamic world? The first section of the paper briefly reviews these connections, giving particular attention to evidence of how merchants from outside Southeast Asia used mercantile organizations and documentation to facilitate long distant trade between people who were not kin.

In turning to Southeast Asia, the second section of the paper draws primarily from Malay-Indonesian societies to suggest that the concepts of debt, agreement, and binding commitment all have deep roots in indigenous cultures. In island Southeast Asia the rise of Islamic port cities from the fifteenth century saw the widespread adoption of commercial law codes that drew heavily from Muslim legal concepts, and that gave particular attention to documents and contractual obligations. Yet despite reiterated exhortation from rulers and officials, written documentation in support of commercial transactions did not become a feature of pre-modern Southeast Asia. In the largely agrarian societies of the mainland and Java the state took a stronger hand in enforcing agreements concerning land transactions, but disputes related to indebtedness remained a continuing problem. Local chronicles demonstrate the kinds of difficulties that could arise when more “documented-minded” creditors attempted to enforce repayment of debts owed by people who operated in a totally oral environment.

While we must recognize the continuing orality of the so-called “contract societies”, the use of documents in exchanges between individuals was even less evident in Southeast Asia. The next section of the paper reviews possible reasons for this difference. The first is the continuing low level of literacy, especially among those who supplied the products from the jungles and oceans for which Southeast Asia was famous. The presence of women as traders, noted by all foreign observers, would also have been a factor here, since they had far less access to literacy than did men. A second reason is the continuing preference for trade with relatives (so foreign traders tended to marry local women); the assumption of trust made written documentation unnecessary. In translating commercial dealings into a kinship association, the Southeast Asian environment was strongly resistant to the commoditization of service roles and to the contractualization of an “employer-employee” relationship. As examples, the paper briefly considers (a) wet-nurses, which raises questions about ownership and sale, and (b) the “purchase” of local wives by foreign traders, who used them as agents. Finally, the acceptance of written documentation as a basis for commerce is associated with urban centers, where we are more likely to find a functioning judicial system and state agents with the desire and capacity to uphold the law. In Southeast Asia this type of environment, though certainly not unknown, was far less common than in China, India or the Middle East.

In conclusion, the paper argues that for centuries Southeast Asian societies had operated successfully on the basis of oral agreement legitimized by kinship relations. These indigenous patterns were fundamentally challenged by the expansion of world commerce from the fifteenth century, and the promotion of a new domination by more literate males whose cultural origins lay outside the region.