WI Srivijayan Colonies of Madagascar become independent

Is this plausible?

  • Plausible

    Votes: 6 28.6%
  • Implausible

    Votes: 9 42.9%
  • I don't Care

    Votes: 6 28.6%

  • Total voters
    21
What if Srivijaya's colonies on Madagascar became independent before the decline of the Srivijayan Empire and developed their own power and established themselves? In OTL Srivijaya was destroyed after turning back the Chola Empire forces, Malays, and suffering the isolation of their capital (river filled in). And the colonies disappeared with it.
 
How the hell would Srivijaya have colonies on Madagascar?

I remember you asking this in another thread. It isn't clear if you actually believe there were colonies or if this is your ATL.

If the former, I explained in the previous thread how Madagascar was settled. If the latter, why would Srivijaya have colonies. Colonies aren't established for fun- they're part of a resource extraction programme. There's no reason for Srivijaya to establish colonies a far away as madagascar, even if they had the central organisation capable of establishing a colony at that distance. Srivijaya wasn't a centralised state, it was a hegemon using over vassals which doesn't really lend itself to that sort of colonial activity. Secondly, SE Asia is incredibly resource rich- there's no incentive to establish colonies- European powers did because in ore industrial terms, Europe is extremely resource poor. They had sufficient incentive to risk their lives to seek spices and suchlike.
 
Srivijaya already had colonies on Madagascar in OTL. To this day the Austronesian language "Malagasy" is dominant.

Nice try. The link you gave says nothing about Srivijayan colonies because there weren't any.

The Malagasy language is indeed Austronesian. It's a massively widespread lanugage family. The languages of the Malay Archipelago, Fiji, New Zealand, Easter Island, Hawaii, Taiwan and so forth are all Austronesian. That doesn't mean that Srivijaya colonised them. It just means that the Austronesians (Malays, Polynesians etc.) were very much maritime seafaring cultures. If we're going by your logic, all the following were part of Srivijaya.

800px-Langues-autronesiennes.png

Which they weren't because language distribution does not necessarily indicate political control.

Furthermore the Malagasy language is closely related to the dialect of Sulawesi, not that of Sumatra, which is what you would expect if they were somehow descended from nonexistent Srivijayan colonies.

I explained all this in the other thread you posted.
 
Srivijaya already had colonies on Madagascar in OTL. To this day the Austronesian language "Malagasy" is dominant.

You seem to be misinterprating migration as colonization. Migration is just large movement of people for whatever reason (famine, war, poverty, etc), colonization on the other hand is the organized annexation and settling of land with the specific purpose of exploiting the resources of said land. What you are talking about is an example of migration.
 
The empires of SEA don't colonize nor annex much territory, they're mainly states that enforce vassalage to receive tribute. This is why those empires are very fragile and the Srivijayan empire was lost in history until the last century.

So yeah, like what everyone else said. Any 'colony' is already nominally independent anyway.
 
The empires of SEA don't colonize nor annex much territory, they're mainly states that enforce vassalage to receive tribute. This is why those empires are very fragile and the Srivijayan empire was lost in history until the last century.

So yeah, like what everyone else said. Any 'colony' is already nominally independent anyway.
Sorry to bump this thread that mainly shows my own ignorance but I didn't want people to think this was the second thread I had done on this and that I was some sort of Srivijaya-wank freak (as could be interpreted from:
I explained all this in the other thread you posted. (quote from Flocculencio) which is not true at least not posting a thread devoted to this).
 
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