This book is the overdue successor to the major historical work on South-East Asia, D.G.E. Hall's History of Southeast Asia. Though updated on several occasions, Hall's work has become outdated in more than one respect, but as Merle Ricklefs points out in his introduction, writing a completely new version simply exceeded the capacities of a single scholar. However, with historians from Singapore's National University joining the project, the burden could be shared between several pairs of shoulders. The way this New History of Southeast Asia was produced thus follows the example of the project started by David Steinberg and most recently continued by Norman Owen and their Search for Modern Southeast Asia, but has a much broader scope than its American forerunners which focus solely on the modern period.
The New History begins with a chapter on the ethnic and social background of the whole region, before early forms of state formation are introduced. The third chapter is dedicated to the classical states, a term quite useful for Pagan Burma and Angkor Cambodia, but less so for regions like the Philippines or Vietnam. In the fourteenth century, these classical states fell into decline, while South-East Asia was exposed to a new set of external influence posed by Islam and (later) Christianity. The changes are tackled in chapters 4 (religion), 5 (political developments) and 6 (groups of foreigners) respectively. In chapter 4, the reader is given a basic introduction to these religions, including a few remarks on the Lutheran Reformation in Europe. This is not a common theme in a book on South-East Asian history, but appears to be a concession to students whose knowledge of major historical events and their substance appears to be wanting, no matter which part of the world they come from.
Chapter 7 continues with the rise of the early modern states between c. 1500 and 1800, a period marked by attempts to reorganize them internally, to continue with traditional warfare against neighbouring states and at the same time resist the military and economic expansion of European and other external powers. The ultimate failure to retain independence is the subject of the subsequent part, which deals with the emergence and stabilization of the colonial empires. The twentieth century is split into four chapters that address the period of reform to the Great Depression, the Second World War (in which South-East Asia was one of the major theatres of war), the formation of the independent states and, lastly, their development until the 1990s. The final two chapters bring the story to the present, highlighting the economic crisis in the 1990s as an event sufficiently important in South-East Asia to warrant a separate chapter.
Within this broadly chronological organization, the book identifies broader topics which are dealt with country-by-country and bracketed together by a general introduction and a conclusion. This provides for a clear structure of the work, though it makes reading occasionally tedious as similar topics and general events are repeated with sometimes only minor, country-specific differences. Especially for the modern period, this dissection becomes increasingly detailed, reflecting both the availability of data on certain developments or areas and the fact that modern states have finally emerged. What this approach produces, however, is an image of South-East Asia that is little more than a total of its political segments that lack inner coherence. Overall, the contributions are concise and generally well written, though not always similar in their form. The items on the Philippines, for instance, are usually much broader in scope and richer in information than the corresponding sections for Thailand or Burma.
There is little to be criticized in terms of factual errors save for a superfluous “for teachers” (p. 270), and the missing entry for Bronson's “upstream-downstream model” (pp. 39 and 61) in the bibliography. Other instances that could be mentioned here are matters of wording or interpretation rather than factual mistakes. For example, there is ample evidence (rather than mere likelihood) that Buddhist monks travelled between Sri Lanka and South-East Asia from around 1000 ce onwards (p. 45), and had there been a chapter on Buddhist literature, it would have been at least as long as that on “Islamic period literature”. A look at the Buddhist historiography of mainland South-East Asia may have put the “innovativeness” of Islamic history writing (p. 83) in proper perspective. Another clumsy expression (p. 165) claims that “rubber and petroleum […] developed in Southeast Asia and became vital by the late 19th century”. One wonders how petroleum could have been “developed”, the more so since earth oil had been extracted and exported from Burma since the beginning of the nineteenth century (in fact, Burma was the world's leading petroleum producer around 1800). The first rubber plantations of Malaya, in contrast, were established only at the very end of this century, about two decades after the first trees were imported in the 1870s. Finally, the depiction of events surrounding the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Burmese War seems to make a case on behalf of the arrested British ship captains, where the role of Commodore Lambert, who had been sent to Rangoon to investigate the charges but began hostilities without much hesitation or consideration, deserved more emphasis (p. 170). Readers may also find the single paragraph on the Democratic Kampuchea period inadequate to examine both the nature and size of the atrocities and killings committed by the Khmer Rouge, who were responsible for one of the major genocides of the twentieth century. Calling it the “the most tragic and violent period in Cambodia's history” is not enough (p. 398).
The literature list reveals a slight bias towards American and, more broadly, Anglophone scholarship, though a few scholars from the region itself did break into their ranks, as did a few European authors writing in Dutch and French (a single German work also made it into the list). There is a set of maps for selected periods, which occasionally lack accuracy, especially Map 4, which gives a rather distorted picture of areas, cities and rivers in Burma. These quibbles apart, however, the work provides a readable, concise and comprehensive introduction to South-East Asian history from the beginning to the twenty-first century in a single volume. As such, the work is a well-executed replacement for the book to which it owes its making and will be a helpful item on reading lists not only for South-East Asian or Asian history classes, but also for the many undergraduate courses in world history.
