Forty-odd years ago, when I became involved in the study of Southeast Asia, it appeared to be a new region, struggling to assert itself in the political world from the lingering ties of colonialism and in the academic world from those who would absorb it in the empires of Further India or the Far East. The centre of this new field of study was indisputably the United States, where in the 1950s and early 1960s Southeast Asia programmes were set up as part of the great expansion of regional studies funded by the US government and foundations. Their guiding assumption was that the interests of America and what would become known as the Third World were compatible and that sympathetic knowledge would aid in bringing about progress towards modernity as envisioned in the American dream.

It is truly not easy to write a “well integrated” history of Southeast Asia. If today, anybody feels such a necessity, the procedure is far from obvious, and thus the utility of using a special issue such as the present one to take stock of the situation is quite evident. The main difficulty is in fact to transcend the heaviness of regional, colonial and then nationalistic histories which have strongly partitioned off the historical space.

Earlier than in the Anglo-Saxon world, Weber's sociological studies attracted attention among social scientists in the Netherlands. It was particularly in connection with the Southeast A sian world that parallels were suggested with the rise of capitalism in the West.

While Southeast Asia revolves around its cities, scholarship spins off into disciplines that ignore this fact. In a region that has known cities for two millennia, where even remote peoples have shaped themselves to or against urban rule, research goes on as if the city were an alien entity, easily factored out and best forgotten. So village studies represent these city-centred nations, and few wonder if the entrepreneurs and middle class who now explain so much might themselves be explained as urban. Our disciplines divide so deeply that no one addresses how the city organizes society and shapes the region.

In the late 1960s, archaeological theory underwent a period of rapid and significant change. A group of scholars became known as progenitors of an approach termed New Archaeology. Some of these changes have been critized as lacking in substance, but it cannot be denied that much archaeological research and analysis performed during the 1970s and 1980s followed a new and more constructive agenda.

My essay in celebration of the Journal's anniversary sketches what may be the concluding chapter in a study of Vietnam in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when the Tran dynasty reigned (1226–1400). In 1225 the Tran family overthrew the last emperor of the previous dynasty, the Ly (1009–1225) and hitherto the only long lived one. The Ly imperial line, in fact, lasted nearly fifty years longer than its successor. Nevertheless, the Tran is unquestionably the most renowned of all Vietnamese dynasties on account of its victories when Kubilai Khan's armies attacked three times in the thirteenth century. Yet one has to ask what kind of dynasty it was and how the country it ruled should be defined. Should one look to China, the source of the dynastic institution, for guidance or should one look elsewhere? An event in 1237 suggests ambiguity. That year officials were required to offer betel and tea to the emperor when he was departing from the Eastern Pier near the capital. “Betel and tea” bring Southeast Asia as well as China into the picture.

When historians refer to the “classical” period in Southeast Asia, they usually mean the era roughly between the ninth and fourteenth centuries A.d. When they speak of the “classical” states, they are referring most often to the region's first great kingdoms — Pagan, Sukhothai, Angkor, Dai Viet, Srivijaya, and Majapahit — the civilizations that gave birth to many of the nations in Southeast Asia today. Yet, the very idea of a “classical” Southeast Asia has not been debated sufficiently in the literature.

The identity of “Southeast Asia” has been debated since the 1950s, when the region began to develop as an area of academic viability around which courses could be constructed, programmes built, and research published. Much less controversy has accompanied the growing use of “early modern”, a term which seems set to displace “precolonial” in periodizing Southeast Asian history. The phrase, of course, comes from scholarship on Europe, where it was popularized as a result of efforts to find shared “periods” that would facilitate the writing of a general history. It would be surprising if questions as to the applicability of “early modern” in Southeast Asia do not spark off some debate, especially in light of subaltern writings that reject the notion of modernity as a universal. For such historians the very invocation of the word implicitly sets a “modern Europe” against a “yet to be modernized non-Europe”. But whatever decision is made regarding terminology, scholarship on Southeast Asia is increasingly viewing a period that stretches from about the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century as rather different from those traditionally described as “classical” and “colonial/modern”. The term “early modern” itself is at present a convenient tool for historical reference, and only time will tell whether it will find general acceptance.

Historical studies in Thailand have been closely related to the formation of the nation since the late nineteenth century, and until recently the pattern of the past in this elitist craft changed but little. It presented a royal/national chronicle, a historiography modern in character but based upon traditional perceptions of the past and traditional materials. It was a collection of stories by and for the national elite celebrating their successful mission of building and protecting the country despite great difficulties, and promising a prosperous future. The plot and meaning of this melodramatic past have become a paradigm of historical discourse, making history an ideological weapon and a source of legitimation of the state.

The communist take-over of South Vietnam in 1975 presents a certain resemblance to what happened two hundred years before, when the Trinh lords in the North overran the Nguyen's polity in the South by 1775, seizing the territories that had been separate from their control for over two centuries. The similitude of the two situations did seem highly symbolic to the Institute of Historical Studies in Hanoi, which on the pretext of publishing a complete collection of the eighteenth-century scholar Le Quy Don's works, reprinted a former translation of his “Miscellaneous chronicles of the government of the frontiers” as the first volume of this collection. This work was originally composed in 1776, after its author had been ordered south, as a member of the Trinh lords’ bureaucracy, to help restore civil government in the “recovered” areas, and facilitate their reincorporation into the north-centred political system. In its detailed description of the different aspects of southern administration, economy and society, it is tantamount to a survey of the affairs of what the author considered as an irrevocably defeated Vietnamese enemy government. This account of the southern regions at that very moment of national reunification seems also, to some extent, appropriate for the justification of the Tightness of the ideology of a North Vietnam that has just then triumphed over its adversaries.

Western historiography assumes a chronological linear unfolding of progress, and early Western commentators on Asian societies tended to see them as stagnant variants of earlier phases in European history, as feudal despotisms and passive, unchanging village communities. In assessing levels of “development” or “progress” such observers looked for recognizable specialist institutions in politics and the economy; finding few such institutions, they saw only “backwardness”. To most Europeans, trying to make sense of unknown societies and cultures, the alien could only be made comprehensible by identifying it with the familiar. It was then all too easy to proceed as if the unknown was simply a mutant or primitive version of the known. Ideas, social relationships and values which were literally beyond their ken, were often simply not seen at all. In their observations of both political and economic systems, they saw decline, corruption and confusion because they failed to recognize the patterns which structured society. So it seemed natural that the West should dominate such societies and guide them on the correct path.

Humane literacy? An essay on undergraduate education? Isn't it a solecism to broach such concerns in this special issue of The Journal of Southeast Asian Studies where contributors are invited to take stock of the current state of scholarship in various fields of study? My response is simply if not now, then when? I am writing from North America where Southeast Asian studies has gained only a precarious beach-head in the academy and nowhere is this more evident than in the very limited undergraduate investment in our field. Despite the fact that any expansion of academic appointments for specialists on the region will be spurred by evidence of general student interest, a concern with that issue, on our occasions of collective self scrutiny, has been subordinated to questions of research direction, funding strategies, and the prevailing degree of accord between the various disciplines and area studies. But, however ancillary the general education mission of the undergraduate college may seem to professional scholars eager to get on both with their research and the training of graduate students, it is nevertheless a principal responsibility of those deans who control academic appointments. We differ from our colleagues within Southeast Asia where an interest in the region can be either assumed, or expected eventually to develop. While American universities place globalization high on their agendas today, it is not at all evident that their students will wish to study about Southeast Asia rather than, say, Africa or Latin America. So we do need to focus on how we may demonstrate the centrality of what we do to the process of self-discovery and the integration of learning that is at the heart of general education.

New winds are blowing in the writing of the economic history of Southeast Asia. The traditional Eurocentric perspective of the colonial economy is gradually giving way to a more Asian perspective stressing similarities and mutual links within the region itself. The issue of Western expansion now appears less vital than long-run economic developments in the Asian economies. Political power struggles in colonial relationships are squeezed aside and replaced by a more quantification and an increasing appreciation of dynamic change that does not readily fit into the model of Westernstyle modernization. The aim of this article is to discuss some positions and directions that have come to the fore in the economic history of Southeast Asia in recent years. Without claiming to offer a full coverage of the field, it is believed that trends thus identified may suggest, at least in part, the future course of Southeast Asian economic history.

In 1961 I published in this Journal a paper on the Islamization of peninsular and insular Southeast Asia. It was a paper I had presented to the first meeting of the conference of historians of Southeast Asia organized in January of that year at the University of Malaya in Singapore by the then Raffles Professor of History, K.G. Tregonning. It was a paper often referred to in discussions concerning the coming of Islam to the Malay world, and attracted its share of approbation and criticism.

The decade of the 1960s was one of growing concern among demographers with the acceleration of the world's population growth, resulting largely from the sharp decline in mortality rates in the early post-World War II period. The concern has become more selective in recent times, with the prospects for population stabilization becoming clearer in some countries and regions as a result of sharp declines in fertility, but with population growth rates continuing to cause great disquiet in others. Southeast Asia as a whole gives grounds for a somewhat sanguine assessment; its population growth rate is slowing as a result of quite spectacular declines in fertility in a number of major countries. But the situation is quite variable, and some countries maintain high rates of fertility and of population growth.

This paper examines the major trends since the 1950s in social science writing on forest management in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is simultaneously rich in and dependent on natural resources, both for local and national use or sale. Among renewable resources, forest products have played critical roles in the region's national, provincial, and local economies before, during, and after colonialism — for as long as two millennia. Their importance in international trade illustrates that Southeast Asia's forests linked the region to other parts of the world for quite some time, dispelling myths that parts of the region such as Borneo were “remote”, “primitive”, or “pristine”.