| Book Review | The American Historical Review, .

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Book Review

Asia

Jane Drakard. A Kingdom of Words: Language and Power in Sumatra. (South-East Asian Historical Monographs.) New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. xxi, 322. $45.00.

Southeast Asia has proven to be fertile ground for those seeking to show the cultural variability of the state. Scholars who know the literature on the state in Southeast Asia will find the argument of this book thoroughly familiar. The setting is the Minangkabau world (Alam Minangkabau), a matrilineal society well covered by anthropological research. About Minangkabau kingship and statecraft, however, little had been written until now. 1

Jane Drakard draws her analysis from three sources: almost a score of royal letters from the nineteenth century that had not been previously analyzed as a genre; royal letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries written to the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC); and European observations, also from the latter period and gleaned from published reports and archival sources. Drakard shows not only how Minangkabau rulers exercised influence over their subjects but also how the Dutch misunderstood this influence, at times overestimating it and at other times underestimating it, but in any case presuming that kingly power and statecraft there could be understood and measured in the same terms as those used to gauge European states. . . .

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