# [[History Machines in the Margins]] *October 31, 2025* ##### What I learned from three hours at Singapore airport and a book about 12th century Java In the beginning of the year, I spent a few hours at Singapore airport on a layover flight from Australia back to Germany. It was my first time setting foot in Singapore and only my second visit to the Southeast Asia region in general. A short layover is usually a necessity, not an important stop on a journey. But despite severe lack of sleep, I was impressed by this weird, huge airport. In the middle of the night, it was crowded by a vast variety of people from all nations, Europeans were clearly in the minority. Returning from a 4-week trip in Australia where I slept in a tent most of the time, I felt like a Western bumpkin between sophisticated and eloquent people from all over Asia, strolling through large hallways plastered with worn but luxurious carpets. Between Dubai chocolate, high-end headphones from brands I never heard of, electrical trolleys and overtired toddlers in Batik I found a quiet corner to contemplate my continental identity. Some months later, I joined a book club. Run by Venkatesh Rao, this year's edition focuses on a simple idea that goes a long way: Maybe grand historical paradigms like modernity and postmodernity are not suddenly emerging monoliths. Instead we might see them as "history machines" consisting of components that developed on their own for a long time, before all of a sudden, things fall into place together, causing shock and awe.[^1] Therefore, modernity may have started much earlier than usually assumed, not in the 15th century, but maybe around the 12th century.[^2] Hence it makes sense to read about pre-modern civilizations. I joined the October episode of Rao's book club, reading "Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia's Greatest Empire" by Herald Van Der Linde. The book covers the rise and fall of the Empire of Majapahit, an early naval empire located around the islands of Java, Sumatra and Bali. Despite vanishing quickly and being forgotten for several centuries, Majapahit now has become the main source of national identity for today's state of Indonesia, the 4th largest population in the world and the largest muslim country. I enjoyed the book quite a bit. One chapter described a stroll around the port of Canggu power by a Chinese ambassador during the peak of the Majapahit empire.[^3] The traveller was impressed by a culture that was foreign yet advanced in many ways: pan-religious weeklong parties,[^4] low-born consuls viciously running state affairs,[^5] a strong queen fixing infrastructure, navytechnology so powerful the Portuguese tried to destroy the evidence for it.[^6] Somehow I could relate to his colorful descriptions of a bustling, mighty cultural hub for people and knowledge. It reminded me of the time I spent at the Singapore airport, which is not exactly in the area of the former Majapahit Empire, but close enough for me to feel equally reminded of my provinciality. Eventually, in the 15th century, Majapahit disappeared quickly despite many quite modern "components" driving the empire since its beginnings. But despite its sudden disappearance from the stage of history, Majapahit's afterlife was quite rich. Its structural leftovers became material for Dutch colonialists. Its royal legacy legitimized later kingdoms and nations, including the state of Indonesia. And last but not least, the Majapahit royal class fled its crumbling kingdom towards Bali,[^7] laying the vibe foundation for today's digital nomad haven running on rice paddies and reportedly super fast WiFi. Majapahit's lifecycle made the idea of history machines a bit more graspable to me. It is not always singularly great men driving the course of history. Instead there are lots of independent ideas, concepts and theories developing at the same time but distributed across continents, forming an increasingly powerful apparatus that eventually will start moving, rattling everybody suddenly awake to a new paradigm. I can imagine the daily life in 12th century Majapahit because back then an oddball court official was documenting what was happening around him. His observations were considered irrelevant when he published them, but today his book is the primary resource for the long story of Majapahit. When future historians will study the 2020s, what will they be interested in? I like the idea that the future is already around, barely recognized if not for some dull notes in the margins. [^1]: *"**World as machine**: In keeping with theme of this newsletter, we’re adopting a mechanistic, engineering perspective. We’re trying to do our reading with an eye to reverse engineering how the world works (and how it came to work that way) in a machinic rather than humanist idiom. So we deliberately go looking for machine metaphors, decenterings of the human, centerings of non-human things, and so forth. For example, I picked the February read because it centers horses rather than humans in telling the story of steppe nomads."* https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-modernity-machine-ii [^2]: *"Ever since I read Barbara Tuchman’s book about the Black Death, A Distant Mirror, in 2020 (my notes [here](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/07/06/notes-a-distant-mirror-by-barbara-tuchman/)), I’ve been enamored of the idea that modernity began not in the 16th century, with the Age of Exploration, as in conventional accounts, but in the 13th (which was also an age of exploration (...) Moving the birth of modernity this way locates it temporally in the Islamic and Mongol phases of globalization, rather than the Western phase, and constructs it primarily in political and socio-economic terms rather than philosophical, artistic, scientific, or technological terms. It identifies modernity with the rise of a particular cognitive mode that appeared globally and independently at multiple loci, driven by a few shared causes like the Black Death and the Mongol expansion. It reframes the European experience of 1400- as a specifically European experience of modernization, rather than a prototype for a global one that spread mimetically through a pre-modern world. (...) it reframes the philosophical-cultural strand of the European experience — comprising the (artistic) Renaissance and (philosophical) Enlightenment, which predated the scientific-technological strand, but came after the global birth of modernity — as a making of the specifically European mind, which did not in fact go global at all, and has remained restricted to the West."* https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-modernity-machine [^3]: *"Ma Huan soon felt very much part of this warm, welcoming and diverse community. He was struck by the variety of people walking the streets, from proud Brahmins with their partly shaven heads and recluses with matted hair, to widowed women dressed all in white, and Chinese and Arab traders. He saw how babies had their heads shaved and looked on as an elderly lady coached young female dancers ahead of the next religious festival."* [Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia’s Greatest Empire (Herald Van Der Linde)](https://www.amazon.de/Majapahit-Intrigue-Betrayal-Indonesias-Greatest/dp/1915310288) [^4]: *"Ma Huan mused that there was great tolerance for different religious beliefs in Majapahit. The majority of the people were clearly either Buddhists, the religion he followed back home, or Hindus, who he had first come across in India. There also were a few Muslims among the foreign trading community – he had seen several in the market at Tuban – and he had encountered many more followers of Allah on previous maritime expeditions. But there were also other small groups of men and women who he couldn’t place. They had a wild-eyed, mildly deranged look about them, with long tangled hair and a minimum of clothing, if any at all. He had heard stories of ancient animist spirits and gods but in his mind it was more likely that they were involved in some sort of devil worship."* [Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia’s Greatest Empire (Herald Van Der Linde)](https://www.amazon.de/Majapahit-Intrigue-Betrayal-Indonesias-Greatest/dp/1915310288) [^5]: *"But instead of receiving plaudits and respect, he was mocked by the old Patih Arya Tadah, the embittered Kembar, and several noblemen. His plans were laughable, ridiculous even. ‘Commoners should not have too much ambition,’ they said. Gajah Mada remained calm and kept his own counsel. He knew what to do next. He visited Queen Gayatri the next morning and told her what had happened. Kembar did not share their ambitions and was dividing the nobles at a time when unity was of the utmost importance. Something needed to be done. She agreed.  A few days later, screams were heard coming from Kembar’s compound. Soon the whole town knew – Kembar was dead."* [Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia’s Greatest Empire (Herald Van Der Linde)](https://www.amazon.de/Majapahit-Intrigue-Betrayal-Indonesias-Greatest/dp/1915310288) [^6]: *"The Majapahit nine-decked ‘jong’ ships were larger than the Portuguese ship of the 15th century, but as no shipwrecks have been discovered their exact size is unknown. It is believed they carried up to 1,000 people. See Averoes 2022. Javanese cartography must have been well developed by the time. But many old Javanese charts have disappeared through sheer neglect. Others may have been deliberately destroyed by the Portuguese by Royal Decree of 13th November 1504 with respect to all maps, charts and logbooks connected with navigation south of the equator. Not a single indigenous specimen is known to have been preserved, which presumably explains why pre-Portuguese Indonesian cartography has never been the subject of any specific study."* [Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia’s Greatest Empire (Herald Van Der Linde)](https://www.amazon.de/Majapahit-Intrigue-Betrayal-Indonesias-Greatest/dp/1915310288) [^7]: *"Majapahit didn’t disappear, it simply moved to the next island. By the time the final blow was struck, the elite had long fled to Bali. Knowing the end was nigh, scribes had loaded the contents of the royal library, ceremonial costumes, drums and bronze bells onto bull carts and carried them to the coast for the short crossing by boat. It changed the small island forever. Soon, statues of the Hindu god Ganesha adorned Balinese roads, familiar-looking temples appeared, and priests wandered the roads and villages. Bali became the reincarnation of Majapahit."* [Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia’s Greatest Empire (Herald Van Der Linde)](https://www.amazon.de/Majapahit-Intrigue-Betrayal-Indonesias-Greatest/dp/1915310288)