Introduction : Why Race Mattered: Racial Difference, Racialized Colonial Capitalism and the Racialized Wars of Nineteenth-Century Colonial Southeast Asia

Abstract

This collection of essays revisits the colonial wars that were fought across Southeast Asia throughout the nineteenth century and studies them through the lenses of racial difference as it was understood at the time. The authors have chosen to bring to the fore the manner in which understandings of racial identity and difference were instrumental in the way in which the colonial powers viewed their local adversaries, and argue that the wars that were fought during that century need to be understood as race wars as well. In the course of these conflicts – some small and some on a much larger scale – essentialised and reductive racial identities were also being constructed; and in some instances borrowed and internalised by the native Southeast Asian communities as well.