The purpose of this essay is to suggest some major and pertinent questions regarding the nature, structure and problems of Southeast Asian history, rather than to provide ready-made answers to them. I am well aware that the very positing of such questions may appear premature in view of the youthfullness — not to say the woefully underdeveloped nature — of Southeast Asian historiography, particularly in the United States. Yet in a sense this innocence of youth may be an appropriate excuse for asking whither we are bound in our search; another, more pragmatic rationalization can be found in the undeniable fact that the teaching of ‘Southeast Asian history’, in which we are willy-nilly engaged, demands that such questions be asked, if not authoritatively answered.
The history of Indonesia in the last two or three decades of Dutch colonial rule still has to be written, and it can only be written when the abundant archival materials for this period, both in Indonesia and in the Netherlands, come to be opened up for scholarly investigation. Scholars who, since the Second World War, have turned their attention to modern Indonesian history have tended to focus on the development of Indonesian nationalism, and for understandable reasons. The Indonesian Revolution, crowned by the attainment of Indonesian independence in 1949, rendered an understanding of the Indonesian nationalist movement in colonial times imperative not only to Indonesian historians attempting to come to grips with their country's recent past but also to an ever-increasing number of foreign students. Welcome as this ongoing re-examination of Indonesian nationalism is, it, too, must remain incomplete until documentary evidence, whether archival or (auto)-biographical, can substantially enrich it.
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