New Turning Points in Southeast Asian History: Re-writing Southeast Asian Chronologies from Within

Abstract

As historians, we live under the tyranny of periodisation. Our profession compartmentalises into variations of the conventional quartet of ancient, medieval, early modern and modern history. Within those subdivisions are even smaller pigeonholes, such as nineteenth-century history, pre-war history, interwar history, post-war history, and preor post-colonial history. The titles of major professional journals enshrine this conventional periodisation, it determines the assignment of university chairs, and it structures the tables of contents of leading textbooks and anthologies. Moreover, each era’s specialists tend to focus on diverse analytical concepts and use different methodological tools (Henley and Schulte Nordholt 2015: 2). Of course, it is only natural for historians to construct their narratives of the past through periodisation and attempt to identify turning points in which fundamental changes occur. The problem is that, as historians, we have focused for too long on a small number of seemingly fixed periodisations, with equally ossified conventional benchmarks determining the transition from one period to the next. This traditional periodisation obstructs alternative ways of interpreting and structuring the past, for instance, in the form of alternative turning points, and other periodisations. This problem affects all historians. But, as we argue in this special issue, it is all the more damaging for those of us thinking about non-Western histories. The canonical periodisation reifies a Euroor Western-centric chronology: classic caesurae that organise our profession include such years as 1492, 1789 and 1815, 1914–1918, 1939–1945, and 1989. For non-Western regions, and especially for formerly colonised nations, a consequence is that we end up trying to squeeze our topic into these frames, thus exaggerating the actions of Western actors (and states) as causes of historical change whilst dismissing or neglecting the agency of non-Western actors. Ironically, as Anthony Reid has rightly noted, in Southeast Asia nationalist histories conceived after independence have all too frequently reinforced this conventional periodisation: