Leeds East Asia Papers: New Series No.3

Authors: Victor T. King

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For those of us who have spent our academic career in a multidisciplinary area studies programme the issue of defining and delimiting a region takes on added significance, although some of us more than others seem to be constantly exercised in pondering whether or not our region makes any conceptual, analytical or substantive sense (see King, 2005, 2006). What I want to do in this paper is firstly to trace the origins of the making of Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian Studies in the United Kingdom  (with some reference to continental European activities) and what both promoted and stood in the way of this realisation, to indicate the main moments and persons in this process of construction and then to consider the contribution that some British scholars have made to the field of studies. What is very clear is that having eventually identified Southeast Asia as a region which deserved at least some coordinated and focused attention, the British government and its agencies had neither a clear idea how best to fund the study of it and at what level, nor a consistent and sustained national policy of support and monitoring. Yet in the first two decades after the Second World War, British strategic and commercial interests in Southeast Asia were substantial: in the port city of Singapore and its military facilities, in the vitally important rubber and tin production of the Malay States and in the oil reserves of Brunei.  Not only were these  matters of  vital concern to  Britain, but the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea, which at the high point of European imperialism in the nineteenth century had been turned into ‘a British lake’, also provided the British with their gateway to Hong Kong and East Asia.