Our poor ancestors realised that theirs was a sorry lot. Under the best of circumstances they might have been lucky enough to live under a benevolent ruler who was wise enough to share the riches of the land, or at least not tax and plunder his helpless subjects into total subjection and poverty. At worse, some rulers were despotic and almost homicidally so, slaughtering their own subjects, forcing them into forms of debt bondage and slavery, taxing their meagre earnings and grinding down the few bright sparks and independent-minded individuals among them. The Hikayats of old are replete with such stories of wanton oppression at the hands of tyrants and egomaniacs, and the poor people of the Indonesian-Malay archipelago were left with little in the form of effective resistance.