The late introduction of family names to Southeast Asia

What is it about?

inherited family names came very late to Southeast Asia (except for Sinified Viet Nam), and still today play a very marginal role if any in Indonesia and Burma. In the high colonial era, however, it was common to believe that modernity and capitalism required the imitation of Europe (and China) which had earlier adopted a patriachal naming system. The Philippines imposed surnames in 1850, Japan in 1975, Thailand in 1913, Tunisia in 1925, Turkey in 1926 and Iran in 1932. This paper discusses especially the Philippine and Thai cases, and suggests that the novel surnames represented much more than a superficial change. In both cases the change facilitated the emergence of powerful Sino-Southeast Asian patriarchal families, which continued to be important through to our times.

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Why is it important?

The switch to family names encourages envisaging the patriarchal descent group as a corporation across the generations. This in turn is a critical issue in the success and nature of capitalist transition.