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 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 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 that ushered the dawn of nationalism and post–colonial 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, through the politics of nationalistic and religious discourses, to absorb the inspiration and spiritual appeal of the Middle East, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal. 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 Asia Pacific powers like China, Japan and US, could not adequately handle at home and abroad. This book takes you to the micro and macro dynamics that had intersected, only to always open a vista of new and powerful regional biographies that formed the discourse on Southeast Asia.
Thus the works of DGE Hall, Malcom 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, sought to find their own ascendance in the global system, a contemporary system that strangely enough is falling back to the old imperial redux, where US and 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.