The history of Southeast Asia
has been characterized as interaction between regional players and
foreign powers. Each country is intertwined with all the others. For
instance, the Malay empires of Srivijaya and Malacca covered modern day Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore while the Burmese, Thai, and Khmer peoples governed much of Indochina.
At the same time, opportunities and threats from the east and the west
shaped the direction of Southeast Asia. The history of the countries
within the region only started to develop independently of each other
after European colonialization was at full steam between the 17th and the 20th century.
The aboriginal populations of Southeast Asia are generally considered to have been members of the Negrito and broadly defined Austro-Melanesian groups, and may have arrived as part of the hypothesized Great Coastal Migration from Africa via coastal India. These groups now make up only a small minority of the Southeast Asian population.
Evidences suggest that the earliest non-aboriginal Southeast Asians came from southern China and were Austronesian speakers.
Contemporary research by anthropologists, linguists (Blust, Reid, Ross,
Pawley), and archaeologists (Bellwood) suggests that the inhabitants of
the Maritime Southeast Asia
migrated from southern China to islands of the Philippines around 2500
BCE and later spread to modern day Malaysia and Indonesia.
The earliest population of Southeast Asia was animist before Hinduism and Buddhism were exported from the Indian subcontinent. Islam arrived mostly through Indian Muslims and later dominated much of the archipelago around the 13th century while Christianity came along when European colonization started around the 16th century.
During the classical age, the existence of Southeast Asia had been known to the Greeks. The Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy in his Geographia named the Malay Peninsula as Aurea Chersonesus (Golden Peninsula) while Java was called Labadius. Labadius was probably a corruption of Sanskrit Yavadvipa which refers to the same island. An ancient Hindu text may have earlier referred to mainland Southeast Asia as Suvarnabhumi which means land of gold and insular Southeast Asia as Suvarnadvipa which means island or peninsular of gold.
The region has been an important source of spices and this was one of the reasons European explorers were attracted to the Far East. During the colonization period, states of the region became important assets to the British, the Dutch and the French. British Malaya for instance was the world's largest producer of tin and rubber while the Dutch East Indies was the source of Holland's wealth.
During the 1990s, Southeast Asia emerged as the fastest growing
economy in the world. Its successes have caused some to call Southeast
Asia an economic miracle and Singapore one of the "Four Asian Tigers". Though the Asian Financial Crisis
struck in the late 1990s and left many crippled, the economy of the
region has started to pick up again at a more sustainable rate as demand
from the United States and People's Republic of China soar.
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