I am mostly interested in the local leadership and their understanding of the general ongoing process.
We often discuss the "intent" of the colonizators and how they understood or rationalize their role in a colonial system; but what about the colonized? How did they envision their future role in a system where they were no longer fully in charge? Did they seek support for their own "progressive" programs and independence ideas in the same way various European nations looked at France and Britain as models of administrative advancement and ideas of national identity (here I am thinking especially to the relations between the various European independentist movements and the British - and to a lesser degree French - society)? Did they see the colonial rule as a moment in their own future development?
E: Shameful brain fart, ignored the Philippines entirely. I unfortunately don't know the history of that country very well, though, so I'll just amend it and say this is from an Indonesian perspective.
My answer here will focus on how Southeast Asians perceived foreign conquest prior to the high imperialism of the nineteenth century. Things were radically different between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, not only in how European imperialism proceeded but also in how Southeast Asians viewed their own position. Unfortunately, my knowledge of the nineteenth-century history anywhere is rather shaky.
To answer your question in a single paragraph:
Nowhere in Asia were Europeans more powerful in the year 1700 than in the Southeast Asian Archipelago. Yet Southeast Asians did not perceive of the European presence as something intrinsically different from all that had come before and rarely thought it so significant that it was worth seeing as a fundamental "moment in their own future development." Indeed, Southeast Asians as a rule did not imagine history as a system of progressive development heading far into the future. Europeans were but another race of people in the seas, dangerous but fully comprehensible in the local perception of the world.
This is the case with the very beginning of European involvement in Southeast Asia, with the fall of the opulent Malay port of Melaka to Portuguese invaders in 1511. Our principal local source for the events, the Malay Annals, do note how the Europeans were special in that they brought firearms of a caliber never seen before:
On arrival at Melaka the [Portuguese] ships forthwith opened fire with their cannon. And the people of Melaka were astonished at the sound of the cannon, and they said, "What sound is this, like thunder?" When the cannon balls began to arrive and struck the people of Melaka, some had their heads shot away, some their arms and some their legs. The people of Melaka were more and more amazed to see how these guns were made, and they said, "What is this weapon called that is round, yet is sharp enough to kill?"
If the Annals had simply ended at this point and explained the reason for Melaka's fall as due to advanced Portuguese technology, it might suggest that the Malays saw the Portuguese as something novel, bearers of particularly deadly technology whose sheer presence could overwhelm stout Malay resistance.
But no. The Annals account would have two separate Portuguese attacks on Melaka. The first attack, from which this account of Portuguese bombardment comes from, was a failure. It was only in the second attack that Melaka fell. We know from contemporaneous Portuguese accounts that there was almost certainly only one big battle during which Melaka fell, so the Malays must have had some reason to divide what was one fight into two. Why?
Here's the Malay account. When the first Portuguese adventurers arrive at Melaka, they see "that the city of Melaka was magnificent, and its port was exceedingly crowded." Upon hearing the news, the governor of the Portuguese Indies sends a fleet to conquer Melaka. This is the first attack, which, as aforementioned, fails. The governor wants to immediately send another fleet, but his admiral says:
Melaka will not fall if Bendahara Seri [sic, usual spelling is "Sri"] Maharaja is still there; no matter how great the force sent against Melaka, it will not fall.
This Bendahara Sri Maharaja (bendahara means "prime minister"), Tun Muhatir, is the chief mandarin of the sultan and the richest man in the city of Melaka. In between the two Portuguese attacks, an incident of slander makes Raja Mendeliar, a rich Indian merchant, mistakenly worry that Tun Muhatir is about to kill him. Mendeliar bribes the admiral to tell the sultan that the bendahara is plotting treason. The sultan, who already had a grudge against Tun Muhatir, orders his execution. The bendahara's guards draw their swords. He orders them to drop their arms, thus displaying the Malay virtue of absolute loyalty to the sovereign. The innocent Tun Muhatir is killed with all his family.
This is particularly significant because the last words of the sultan's father had been to tell his son:
As for the Malays, however grievously they may offend, be not hasty in putting them to death... If you put them to death when they have done no wrong, your kingdom will be brought to nought. Remember, my son, these my last injunctions to you and act upon them.
The Portuguese then arrive soon after with a powerful fleet and take Melaka by storm.
This brings on the downfall of the kingdom of Melaka: not Portuguese technology, but the tyrannical sultan of Melaka's failure to rule properly and thus guarantee the legitimacy of and supernatural sanction for his rule. There was nothing to worry about what this might mean for their "future development." For the time being, the Malays could concentrate on adopting admittedly superior Portuguese technology. And eventually, when the Malays had a virtuous ruler and God's support on their side, they would surely retake Melaka, just as they had resisted superior Portuguese artillery when the bendahara still lived.
In 1800, nowhere in Southeast Asia was European power greater than in the island of Java. The majority of Java's land, and around half of its millions of people, was under direct Dutch control. The Dutch also wielded significant economic power over even those parts of the island controlled by three native principalities by virtue of controlling every notable port on the island. Worse, the situation was completely new to the Javanese. Before the Dutch, no external empire had ever controlled the area within Javanese historical memory.
How did the eighteenth-century Javanese justify this deplorable situation?
Again, this provoked no apparent desire to fundamentally reform the Javanese worldview. The Javanese elite resolved the challenge of explaining this violent foreign presence within their borders by assigning the Dutchmen a role in the mythologized history of the island, thus justifying their existence in Java and explaining why the Javanese princes retained their full sovereignty.
In the fourteenth century, seen by both eighteenth-century Javanese and modern historians as the height of Javanese power, the island was divided into two. The central and eastern two-thirds were ruled by the ethnically Javanese kingdom of Majapahit, while the western third was under the control of Pajajaran, a kingdom whose dominant ethnicity was Sundanese -- close cousins to the Javanese, but still ethnically distinct. Pajajaran and the Sundanese were both geographically on the island of Java. But the Javanese majority of the island saw the Sundanese as non-Javanese and Pajajaran as a foreign kingdom, to the point that early Portuguese maps, misinterpreting Javanese testimonies, mark Pajajaran as being a separate island from the rest of Java.
This precedent was useful for Javanese rulers to explain away the Dutch. If the Dutch could somehow be shown to be successors of Pajajaran and Pajajaran alone, there were two benefits: 1) their presence would make sense since the Dutch colonial capital of Batavia was in Pajajaran territory and, until the mid-eighteenth century, the majority of Dutch Java was in what used to be Pajajaran land, and 2) it would guarantee the sovereignty of Javanese princes, the successors of Majapahit, and explain how the Dutch and the Javanese kingdoms could coexist; it was just like under Pajajaran and Majapahit!
Many late eighteenth-century Javanese histories, following in the vein of the island's tradition of mythologized verse-histories, explain how the Dutch were actually descendants of the Pajajaran ruling dynasty. Here's the most popular one:
One Pajajaran princess is so sacred that when any mortal man tries to have sex with her, fires come out from her vagina. This is a common motif in Javanese mythology and would mean that she is ardhanariciwari, a sacred woman whose husband (the man who can successfully sleep with her) would have the right to royal power. She is ultimately exiled by the lord of Jayakarta, the later Dutch colonial capital of Batavia, to an offshore island.
She is found by two Dutchmen, the Baron Sakender and the Baron Sukmul. They are able to suppress her genital fires, thus marking them as wielding great political authority, and the latter marries her. The Baron Sukmul and the princess have a son named Jan Coen (Mur Jang Kung).
Meanwhile, the older of the two, the Baron Sakender, helps the King of Spain defend himself from a most peculiar global coalition including Persia, England, France, China, and Arabs. Thanks to Sakender's intervention, Spain is saved and its throne offered to Sakender. Sakender refuses and instead gives Spain to his twelve brothers, including Sukmul. He tells them to found a kingdom called Kumpeni (i.e. "Company," as in "Dutch East India Company"), then gives some more advice:
Suffer no misfortune in what you desire,
Even though it comes to thievery...
But to be consulted over by [you] twelve are all of its affairs,
Commerce, war, the destroying of cities...
But omit not to calculate,
Write up precisely
The profits and losses.
Later, when Jan Coen grows up, he learns that the lord of Jayakarta exiled his mother when she could not have sex with him. Enraged, he brings down the power of the empire of Kumpeni down on Jayakarta. Kumpeni's cannons, though, fire coins and not cannonballs; the defenders are so distracted by money falling from the sky that they are easily killed.
There, Coen establishes the Dutch colonial capital of Batavia. The Dutch are truly successors of the royal dynasty of Pajajaran.
(The historical Jan Coen really did found Batavia.)
[Continued]
Not really an expert on this topic, but I studied history of our country as part of my curriculum for 10 years so I know quite a bit.
The Philippines was colonized for 333 years there was a couple of battles during the start between Spaniards and natives. They contained this by introducing Catholicism to the natives and baptizing them. (Catholicism is now the major religion in the country) There really wasn't really any major uprising in the middle. Religion was a really effective way to control people. There were some revolts but the punishment given was so severe that it would deter anybody else from trying to instigate another one(Garote is one of the most common capital punishment during these times. It involves putting a veil on the person and slowly choking them with a cranking device on their necks. A slow and painful death that left people bleeding from their eyes.) During the last year's of the colony there were three groups who I would attribute to the end of 333 years of spa ish rule. These groups are the KKK (a brotherhood not to be confused with the klan), la solaridaridad, the Americans.
The KKK was a group of revolutionaries who wants independence from Spain. They were composed of farmers who were sick of being abused by their colonizers. Some of the leaders were persons from wealthy families and were very influential. The KKK would go on to form the Philippine revolutionary government that would in the future fight against the Americans after Spain transfers it's sovereignty of the Philippines to the USA.
The la solidaridad was more of a propaganda organization composed of the illustrados. The illustrados was a class of people that studied in Europe. They were comprised mostly of individulas from a middle class or wealthy family. Some of them were what you would call meztisos or a person with mixed Spanish blood. These group wrote novels that simulated the colony. The group mostly wanted the country to be a province of Spain. They just wanted more control over it instead of a total independence. It is important to know that they all did not share the same views. Some members of the group were also members of the KKK, such as the likes of Antonio Luna. Antonio Luna was a writer for the organization as well as a general for the KKK.
As for the Americans they had a "deal" with some revolutionaries wherein they would help them liberate themselves from the Spaniards. What happened in reality is Spain sold the colony to the US for $20 million. They even staged a mock navy battle to make it believable. This was the end of 333 years of colonial rule by Spain in the Philippines, and started the rule of Americans, and the slow transition of the Philippines into am independent country, but it was suspended because of the 3 year Japanese occupation.