Given heritage is about collective pasts, all heritage is shared heritage. We have become most familiar with the nation as the category around which these collective pasts are understood and produced. This is particularly evident in Southeast Asia, a region where the language of cultural heritage has been extensively tied to the challenges of building national identities in the wake of colonisation and periods of conflict and war.

This then has involved linking historical events to particular boundaries and territories, and tying imaginaries of religion, culture, language and mobilities to bordered societies. It is a situation that presents significant challenges for reframing and reimagining heritage through the maritime. It requires moving beyond histories constructed around the geography of land-based nations states and their territorial waters.

Of course in recent years we have seen a shift towards writing history as a series of connections and flows. Here though the maritime continues to be seen as the space ‘connecting’ sovereign countries. From this perspective heritage is ‘shared’ between countries, in the sense that each still claims a particular maritime heritage as their own national patrimony, one that has ‘connections’ to elsewhere. 

Developing a more expansive maritime imagination involves looking beyond the terrestrial nation and their territorial waters, to create geography and history based on regions, flows and currents. 

It is common for scholars, museums and cultural sector institutions to approach maritime pasts in terms of the forms of trade, religion, culture, technology or people that move in and out of the country. To give some examples of the common narrative framings of past events: porcelain comes from China, how pepper arrived in Cambodia, how Islam travel to Indonesia, or how rubber was shipped from Sarawak. 

An alternative approach is to build a maritime imagination via themes that reveal and tell stories at the regional level, and of movements and flows among regions. 

The question then becomes, how do we tell the story of Maritime Southeast Asia?

In an attempt to answer that question, we have identified a series of themes that provide the basis for understanding maritime heritage at a regional scale. Listed below, these offer productive ways for building dialogues between museums and between countries. Some of the themes are very familiar. Others less so, and these help open up new ways of thinking about the histories and geographies of land and sea. 

• Spice

• Religion

• Ship Technology

• Fishing Culture

• Seafaring

• Port City Heritage

• Environment and Culture

• 20th Century Military History

One of the aims of this project was to create dialogue between museums in the region and simultaneously understand the different approaches and capacities each country has towards maritime heritage and museology. There are significant differences in the level of support given to maritime heritage by governments across the region, whether it be in the museum and gallery sector, the conservation of historic port cities, underwater archaeology, or maritime related intangible cultural heritage. Some countries see maritime heritage primarily in terms of UCH and maritime archaeology. Others have approached it more as a form of social or urban history. There are also significant technology inequalities among institutions across the region, for both the interpretation and presentation of maritime heritage. This poses significant challenges for collaboration.  

This unevenness represents challenges for finding common points of interest, around which discourses of shared heritage can be built. This also means we need to think carefully about we might build region-wide, inclusive ideas about the maritime as a form of shared heritage. 

Knowledge about sea based histories is incomplete, and there are significant gaps in the historical record. This means there is a limited amount of evidence and material culture to draw on for reconstructing those pasts for audiences. This leads to the inevitable situation of some groups and events being more represented than others. The challenge then is building narratives that are inclusive in multiple ways and reflect the cultural, linguistic and religious diversity of the region.