(Malaya). As late as 1958, when I began studying in the Cornell department of government, the small faculty was dominated by Americanists. One professor handled the Soviet Union, another Western Europe. George Kahin was responsible for the whole of Asia. No one taught Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa or the Middle East.
The Second World War changed everything in a very dramatic fashion. The US suddenly became the world hegemon. Germany and Japan were completely defeated, and Britain and France, though on the winning side, were so drained by the costs of their participation that their position as world imperialist powers rapidly declined. By the 1960s, their colonial empires had largely disappeared. Only the Soviet Union remained, and it was still a regional rather than global power. Where America had stayed out of the League of Nations, it now became the central organizer of the United Nations, symbolized by the location of its headquarters in New York. Under these new conditions, the more powerful American elites became acutely aware of how little they knew about many parts of the world in whose politics they now expected to play a key role. All the more so since decolonization was happening at a furious pace in both Asia and, a little later, in Africa.
The rise of area studies in the postwar United States directly reflected the country’s new hegemonic position. The state began to put a lot of financial and other resources into the study of contemporary politics and economics in countries outside Western Europe, much less into studies of history, anthropology, sociology, literature and the arts. As the Cold War set in, there was a growing interest in policy studies, particularly with regard to the threat, real or imagined, of what was still understood as ‘world communism’. In this expansion of scholarship the driving forces were the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon. But very large private institutions, especially the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, also played an important role, partly offsetting the ‘policy’ focus of the state.
Senior officials in these foundations, often highly educated people who had grown up under the long reign of President Franklin Roosevelt, were more liberal in their outlook than state functionaries, and somewhat less obsessed with combating ‘world communism’. Many of them believed in the importance of deeper, historically based scholarship, which was more likely to develop healthily in open universities than in state-related agencies. They were also much more aware of the need for long-term planning, and the urgency of developing adequate research libraries and the efficient teaching of languages which, before the war, had barely been studied.
How was ‘Southeast Asia’ seen by Western eyes? The Chinese written language had long contained the word nan-yang, a vague geographical term meaning something like ‘southern region’ but also connoting ‘water’. It thus signified the southern region oriented from Beijing and reachable via waterway or seaway. At various times it could refer to China’s own southeastern coastal provinces, the Philippine and Indonesian archipelagos, and the Malay peninsula – but not land-accessible Burma and Laos. In Japanese, its cognate, nampo, acquired in the Meiji period a clearer and more political meaning, covering Southeast Asia as we know it today, but also a large part of the Western Pacific over which Japan was to rule as a mandate after the First World War.
The first Western scholar to use the term ‘Southeast Asia’ in a fully modern sense was the great Burma expert John Furnivall, who published his Welfare and Progress in Southeast Asia in 1941, just before the outbreak of the Pacific War. But the decisive change came during the war, with the creation of Louis Mountbatten’s Southeast Asia Command, an Allied force designed to ‘liberate’ all of Southeast Asia except the American Philippines – which was left to Washington. The SEAC not only (briefly) restored British colonialism in Burma, Malaya and Singapore, but played a major role in aiding similar efforts by the Dutch in today’s Indonesia, and the French in Indochina. Still, the Command was abolished soon after the war came to an end.
‘Southeast Asia’ initially came into permanent general use via the United States, which, like Japan before it, had ambitions to dominate the entire region between India and China. The European empires had been content to divide the region among themselves, and focused their concerns on their own colonies. This big political change inevitably had a fundamental impact on scholarship.
Before the war, almost all the best studies concerning different parts of Southeast Asia were the work of scholarly colonial bureaucrats, not professors in metropolitan universities. These bureaucrats lived in particular colonies for many years, often knew some of the local contemporary or classical languages, and sometimes married or had affairs with native women. (A small minority were homosexuals, but had to hide this as much as possible.) They usually regarded their scholarly work as a kind of hobby, and were mainly interested in archaeology, music, ancient literatures and history. On the whole, these were fields in which they could say what they wanted. Undertaking political or economic studies was less popular because the authors usually had to toe the line of the colonial regime.
Most importantly, they normally studied only one colony – the one to which they were assigned – and had little interest in, or knowledge of, the others. The one major scholar who wrote a systematic comparative work, John Furnivall (Colonial Policy and Practice, dealing with British Burma and Dutch Indonesia), did so only after leaving the bureaucracy. Thus by the 1950s and early 1960s, fine American work on Southeast Asia was still so scarce that my generation had to depend a lot on the scholar-bureaucrats, and learn to read French or Dutch to do so. We all read Furnivall and Luce on Burma, Mus and Coedès on Indochina, Winstedt and Wilkinson on Malaya, and Schrieke, Pigeaud and van Leur on Indonesia.
This pattern was almost completely reversed in postwar America. From then on, virtually all the scholarship on the region was conducted by professors and graduate students, with little or no bureaucratic experience behind them. Their occupation and busy schedules meant that they could rarely spend any real length of time in the field. Many of the first generation never acquired a solid mastery of languages such as Burmese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Tagalog, or even Thai and Malay-Indonesian. A number did marry Southeast Asian women, but they usually took their wives back to the United States.
There was also a major shift in disciplinary foci, reflecting the priorities of the US state. Political science became very important, followed by economics, then anthropology (Washington was interested in tribal and minority rebellions) and modern history. Serious interest in literature and the arts was rare.
One other feature of the American scene is also worth a brief mention. Except in the case of the Philippines, the US possessed almost no colonial archives from which scholars could work, which naturally encouraged a focus on the contemporary. In the UK, the Netherlands and France, the vast imperial-colonial archives were a major resource, so that for a long time, even after decolonization, young Dutch scholars worked mostly on Indonesia, French on Indochina, and British on Malaya, Singapore and Burma, and on historical rather than contemporary questions. It took more than a generation for European scholars to become accustomed, intellectually and institutionally, to what the Americans were pioneering.
‘Southeast Asian studies’ in America began with initiatives by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations to create the necessary institutional space for specialist academic work. At the end of the 1940s and in the early 1950s, two universities, Yale (1947) and Cornell (1950), were given substantial funds as well as institutional backup to found multidisciplinary Southeast Asia programs, establishing new professorships, developing libraries, setting up professional language-training courses, and awarding grants and fellowships for fieldwork.
These two universities were selected primarily because of the leadership talent available in the difficult early years. The first director of Cornell’s program was the anthropologist Lauriston Sharp, who had studied the Australian aborigines in the 1930s, but during the war had been temporarily recruited to the State Department and assigned to work on Southeast Asia. He developed a special interest in ‘uncolonized Thailand’ and, after returning to Cornell, founded the subsidiary Cornell Modern Thai Project.
Sharp recruited two crucial figures. John
