Southeast Asia in world history by Craig A. Lockard

CRAIG A. LOCKARD

Southeast Asia in world history

New York:  Oxford University Press, 2009

270 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-533811-9, 

pb £10.99

Reviewed by Robert H. Taylor, City University of Hong Kong

Any author who undertakes to write a history of more than two millennia of what we now think of as Southeast Asia in a little over 200 pages is either brave or foolhardy.  Few have done so since D.G.E. Hall’s pioneering, and much longer, history of the region.  Some authors have tried collaborative histories, bringing together various specialists to paint many miniatures in an attempt to create larger patterns.  Any one scribe or group of scribes that undertakes to write a history of Southeast Asia today faces obstacles that earlier authors did not.  Much more is now known as Southeast Asia as an area of study has developed from its post-World War II roots.  The world of Southeast Asia has been largely transformed since Hall set out to trace the origins of today’s Southeast Asian nation-states.  Publishing has changed too, as have readers.  Publishers don’t like large books because students don’t like to read lengthy tomes with no illustrations, ‘amusing’ sidebars, and scant light touches. Big words are out, for heaven forbid an undergraduate should have to refer to a dictionary. Borrowing from foreign tongues is to be eschewed for fear of making people think that there is another beyond pigeon English.

Craig Lockard, a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, is one such brave individual and he has produced a volume of which he should be proud. While not all readers will be satisfied with the choices he has made as to what to include and what to ignore, what to highlight and what to downplay, he had to make them.  On balance, the result is a highly readable volume that undergraduates and other novices in Southeast Asian studies can use as an introduction to the much broader literature that now exists.  Southeast Asia in World History is a delectable appetiser. It is tastefully illustrated and contains useful maps and a brief but very useful bibliography and guide to further reading.

The author has chosen a number of apt quotations and proverbs from Southeast Asian sources to illustrate the volume. This enhances both the readability of the book and the sense that it is actually about a fascinating part of the world unlike that of the expected Western reader.  He clearly knows a great deal about the literary world of Southeast Asia.  Being a book written in the 21^st century, certain themes not emphasised so greatly in earlier eras, get significant attention in this volume, particularly that of gender.  Curiously, the very helpful index refers to this subject as ‘gender equality’ cross referenced to a rather 19^th century ‘women’s place’.  Presumably, ‘gender inequality’ does not get a look in, but what about ‘men’s place’ and ‘the place of transsexuals’?  Class formation and the politics of the left in both the nationalist movements of the pre-World War II era and after independence in a number of countries in the region get less attention than perhaps is deserved by their historical importance.        

Specialists on different countries may find things to get picky about as they read through the volume.  The choice of the little known Ma Thein May, who was elected a vice president of the Rangoon University Students Union in 1927, to illustrate the role of women in colonial Burma seems peculiar to me.  The example of Ma Mya Sein, the first Burmese woman to gain an Oxford postgraduate degree, the author of The administration of Burma, delegate to the Burma Round Table Conference in London, and sole representative of the women of British India at the League of Nations first conference on women in 1930, would strike me as more apt.  Thakin Nu did not translate Karl Marx, that was Thakin Soe.  Nu translated the American uplift author Dale Carnegie and his How to win friends and influence people.  The 1936 Rangoon university students strike was not about ‘scholarships and exam[ination]s’, but about revealing the author of an essay in the student union paper exposing a British faculty member’s sexual misconduct.  But to dwell on such matters is to detract from the value of this book.

Southeast Asia in world history is strong on historical narrative and cultural understanding.  It is less strong on economic development and social change.  The dynamics of international politics, particularly the role of the Cold War and related bloody wars in Southeast Asia, and their implications for the economic transformation of the region in recent years is not as clearly enunciated as some might prefer.  But in such a small book, one cannot have everything.  If you need to point a novice to one book on Southeast Asian history, you would not go far wrong by recommending Craig Lockard’s fine book.