Malay world
[1] The term remains highly controversial in Indonesia and outside the Malay-speaking areas, because it is considered politically charged and irredentist rather than purely cultural.
The concept in its broadest territorial stretch may apply to a region synonymous with Austronesia, homeland to the Austronesian peoples, that extends from Easter Island in the east to Madagascar in the west.
[2] Such description has its origin in the introduction of the term Malay race in the late 18th century that has been popularised by orientalists to describe the Austronesian peoples.
The term only developed after 1930, with the first recorded examples coming from Majalah Guru, a Malay states monthly magazine, and the newspaper Saudara, which was published in Penang and circulated throughout the Straits Settlements.
Various foreign and local records show that Melayu (Malay) and its similar sounding variants appear to apply as an old toponym to the ancient Straits of Malacca region in general.
[37] Another term, Malayos or the 'Sea of Malayu' was espoused by the Portuguese historian, Manuel Godinho de Erédia to describe areas under Malaccan dominance.
[40] An identical term, Tanah Melayu (literally 'Malay land') is found in various Malay texts, of which the oldest are dating back to the early 17th century.
[41] It is frequently mentioned in the Hikayat Hang Tuah, a well known classical work that began as oral tales associated with the legendary heroes of Melaka Sultanate.
[42] In the early 16th century, Tomé Pires coins an almost similar term, Terra de Tana Malaio for the southeastern part of Sumatra, where the deposed Sultan of Melaka, Mahmud Shah established his exiled government.
He should probably be regarded as the most important voice in projecting the idea of a 'Malay' race or nation, not limited to the traditional Raja-Raja Melayu or even their supporters, but embracing a large if unspecified part of the Archipelago.
In the same period, the term negeri was increasingly being used as a word equivalent to "state", in contrast to its earlier use in court texts more in the sense of a 'settlement' than of a political entity.
All states in the peninsula, the main islands and areas of the Netherlands East Indies and all of the Philippines are systematically discussed through the common topics of overview, districts and towns, products, inhabitants and history.
[52] Although the extended notions of Malay world still gained widespread currency, such conceptualisation is sometimes described in other terms, perceived as more 'neutral', like Nusantara, Indonesian archipelago, and Maritime Southeast Asia.
New approaches have also been taken by modern authors to redefine the 'Malay world', by taking into account the historic political pattern of the region, in addition to the existing racial-linguistic spread model.
In this context, modern authors in Malay studies like Anthony Milner, Geoffrey Benjamin, and Vivienne Wee provide a narrower definition, reducing the concept into a political and cultural area.
Benjamin for example, describes the concept in an historically responsive manner to refer to the areas currently or formerly falling under Kerajaan Melayu ('Malay kingdoms'), the rule of a Malay king.
She added further, that the concept is a spatial configuration that resulted from the serial patterning of political alliances, unified by Sejarah Melayu, that is a particular genealogical tree of kingship.
For example, Aceh is located on the northern tip of the Sumatran mainland, yet the rulers evidently did not claim to belong to the Malay genealogical tree.
