The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia: Volume II, Part II

By Phar Kim Beng

Founder/Chair

Strategic Pan Indo-Pacific Arena

Strategicpipa.com

Twitter: @indo_pan

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Southeast Asia, is not so much an academic and political category, as it is a proverbial sponge of world forces. In “The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia: Volume II, Part II” edited by Nicholas Tarling, the focus from World War II to the present read like a well-written script of how the global powers and forces, with their origins and permutations in Europe, the Pacific, and China, intersected with the local political and economic conditions in the region, to render history in perpetual motion.

Hence, the Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia was described with much clarity and flair, on how they formed an Axis power with Germany and Italy, and in turn, how their diplomats successfully persuaded the Russians to stay neutral to the Japanese ambitions on the whole of Southeast Asia. The Japanese conquest of Southeast Asia on December 7, 1941, was considered the signal event, which in turn ushered the dawn of nationalism and postcolonial movements, having seen how the Japanese easily, almost single-handedly, pushed aside a quintet of Asiatic and European powers, namely America, Britain, China, the Dutch and France (ABCDF).

The collapse and corrosion of the ABCDF condominium, in turn, allowed Southeast Asia, to directly experience the politics of nationalistic and religious discourses, some even to absorb the inspiration and spiritual appeal of the Middle East, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal.

In turn, the ready templates of Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and other religions all provided much succor and relief to a region that was deeply enmeshed with the benevolent and malevolent effects of modernization, which Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific powers like China, Japan, and the United States, could not adequately handle at home and abroad. This book takes one to the micro and macro dynamics of all things that had intersected then in South East Asia, only to open a vista of new and powerful regional visions that formed the discourse on Southeast Asia.

Thus the works of DGE Hall, Malcolm Turnbull, and various Japanese scholars, were given immense prominence, both lending to their first world bias, as well as enriching Southeast Asia’s own voices and versions of how they accommodated, adjusted, and eventually, sough to find their own ascendance in the global system; a contemporary system that strangely enough is falling back to the old imperial redux. In the latter, the United States, China and Japan are once again the prime actors in the region, with European powers making a beeline to be in on the act again. The history of Southeast Asia is, therefore, as open-ended in the past, as it is today. The dawn of the Indo-Pacific age is about to intensify the great powers conflict again, albeit arrayed against China, the emergent power of the region. Thus, notwithstanding the pandemic and the cascade of the Great Economic Depression, the Indo-Pacific region, where Southeast Asia is nestled, will witness some turbulent events for the decades to come. This book is helpful in connecting the past with the future.